Beyond Belief
Page 4
But don’t the other gospels also say that Jesus is God? Don’t Matthew and Mark, for example, call Jesus “son of God,” and doesn’t this mean that Jesus is virtually—almost genetically—the same as God? Like most people who grow up familiar with Christian tradition, I assumed that all the gospels say the same thing or, at most, offer variations on a single theme. Because Matthew, Mark, and Luke share a similar perspective, scholars call these gospels synoptic (literally, “seeing together”). Only in graduate school, when I investigated each gospel, so far as possible, in its historical context, did I see how radical is John’s claim that Jesus is God manifest in human form.
Although Mark and the other evangelists use titles that Christians today often take as indicating Jesus’ divinity, such as “son of God” and “messiah,” in Mark’s own time these titles designated human roles.20 The Christians who translated these titles into English fifteen centuries later believed they showed that Jesus was uniquely related to God, and so they capitalized them—a linguistic convention that does not occur in Greek. But Mark’s contemporaries would most likely have seen Jesus as a man—although one gifted, as Mark says, with the power of the holy spirit, and divinely appointed to rule in the coming kingdom of God.
Yet as we shall see, after the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke were joined with John’s gospel and Paul’s letters to become the “New Testament”—a process that took place over some two hundred years (c. 160 to 360 C.E.)—most Christians came to read these earlier gospels through John’s lens, and thus to find in all of them evidence of John’s conviction that Jesus is “Lord and God.”21 The gospels discovered in 1945 in Upper Egypt, however, offer different perspectives. For if Matthew, Mark, and Luke had been joined with the Gospel of Thomas instead of with John, for example, or had both John and Thomas been included in the New Testament canon, Christians probably would have read the first three gospels quite differently. The gospels of Thomas and John speak for different groups of Jesus’ followers engaged in discussion, even argument, toward the end of the first century. What they debated is this: Who is Jesus, and what is the “good news” (in Greek euangellion, “gospel”) about him?
The Gospel of Thomas contains teaching venerated by “Thomas Christians,” apparently an early group that, like those devoted to Luke, Matthew, and John, thrived during the first century. What astonished scholars when they first read Thomas, in the 1940s, was that, although it contains many sayings of Jesus that Luke and Matthew also include in their gospels, it contains other sayings that apparently derive from a tradition different from that of the synoptic gospels.22 Although we do not know where the Gospel of Thomas was written, many scholars, noting names associated with Syria, think that it originated there. The Acts of Thomas (c. 200 C.E.), probably written in Syriac, claims that Thomas himself evangelized India,23 and to this day there are Thomas Christians in India who call Thomas the founder of their faith. Although Mark, Matthew, and Luke mention him among “the twelve” apostles, Thomas is not a proper name but means “twin” in Aramaic, the language that Jesus would have spoken. As Professor Helmut Koester shows, although this disciple was called by his Aramaic nickname, the gospel itself explains that his given name was Judas (but, his admirers specify, “not Iscariot”). Since this disciple was known by the name of Thomas, both the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John also translate Thomas into Greek, explaining to their Greek readers that this disciple is “the one called ‘Didymus,’ ” the Greek term for “twin.”24
As we shall see, John probably knew what the Gospel of Thomas taught—if not its actual text. Many of the teachings in the Gospel of John that differ from those in Matthew and Luke sound much like sayings in the Gospel of Thomas: in fact, what first impressed scholars who compared these two gospels is how similar they are. Both John and Thomas, for example, apparently assume that the reader already knows the basic story Mark and the others tell, and each claims to go beyond that story and reveal what Jesus taught his disciples in private. When, for example, John tells what happened on the night that Judas betrayed Jesus, he inserts into his account nearly five chapters of teaching unique to his gospel—the so-called farewell discourses of John 13 through 18, which consist of intimate dialogue between the disciples and Jesus, as well as a great deal of monologue. Similarly, the Gospel of Thomas, as we noted, claims to offer “secret sayings, which the living Jesus spoke,” and adds that “Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.”25
John and Thomas give similar accounts of what Jesus taught privately. Unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who say that Jesus warned of the coming “end of time,” both John and Thomas say that he directed his disciples instead toward the beginning of time—to the creation account of Genesis 1—and identify Jesus with the divine light that came into being “in the beginning.”26 Thomas and John both say that this primordial light connects Jesus with the entire universe, since, as John says, “all things were made through the word [logos; or, the light].”27 Professor Koester has noted such similarities in detail, and concludes that these two authors drew upon common sources.28 While Mark, Matthew, and Luke identify Jesus as God’s human agent, John and Thomas characterize him instead as God’s own light in human form.
Yet, despite these similarities, the authors of John and Thomas take Jesus’ private teaching in sharply different directions. For John, identifying Jesus with the light that came into being “in the beginning” is what makes him unique—God’s “only begotten son.” John calls him the “light of all humanity,”29 and believes that Jesus alone brings divine light to a world otherwise sunk into darkness. John says that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus. But certain passages in Thomas’s gospel draw a quite different conclusion: that the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made “in the image of God.”30 Thus Thomas expresses what would become a central theme of Jewish—and later Christian—mysticism a thousand years later: that the “image of God” is hidden within everyone, although most people remain unaware of its presence.
What might have been complementary interpretations of God’s presence on earth became, instead, rival ones; for by claiming that Jesus alone embodies the divine light, John challenges Thomas’s claim that this light may be present in everyone. John’s views, of course, prevailed, and have shaped Christian thought ever since. For after John’s teaching was collected along with three other gospels into the New Testament, his view of Jesus came to dominate and even to define what we mean by Christian teaching. Some Christians who championed the “fourfold gospel”31—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—of the New Testament denounced the kind of teaching found in the Gospel of Thomas (along with many other writings that they called “secret and illegitimate”)32 and called upon believers to cast out such teaching as heresy. How this happened, and what it means for the history of Christian tradition, is what this work will explore.
To appreciate the tremendous leap that John—and Thomas—took, let us recall how the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke characterize Jesus. The earliest of these gospels, Mark, written about forty years after Jesus’ death (c. 70 C.E.), presents, as its central mystery, the question of who Jesus is. Mark tells how Jesus’ disciples discussed—and discovered—the secret of his identity:
And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the messiah.”33
Then Mark immediately shows how Peter, although rightly seeing Jesus as God’s messiah, literally “anointed one”—the man designated to be Israel’s future king—does not understand what is going to happen. When Jesus explains that he must suffer and die, Peter protests in shock, since he expects God’s “anointed one” not to die but to be crowned and enthroned in Jerusalem.
At the desolate scene of the
crucifixion, Mark tells how Jesus cried out that God had abandoned him, uttered a final, inar-ticulate cry, and died; yet a Roman centurion who watched him die declared, “Truly, this man was a son of God.”34 Although to a non-Jew like the centurion, “son of God” might have indicated a divine being, Jesus’ earliest followers, like Mark, were Jewish and understood that “son of God,” like “messiah,” designated Israel’s human king. During Israel’s ancient coronation ceremonies, the future king was anointed with oil to show God’s favor while a chorus singing one of the ceremonial psalms proclaimed that when the king is crowned he becomes God’s representative, his human “son.”35 Thus when Mark opens his gospel saying that “this is the gospel of Jesus, the messiah, the son of God,”36 he is announcing that God has chosen Jesus to be the future king of Israel. Since Mark writes in Greek, he translates the Hebrew term messiah as christos (“anointed one” in Greek), which later becomes, in English, “Jesus [the] christ.”
In Mark, Jesus also characterizes himself as “son of man,” the meaning of which is ambiguous. Often in the Hebrew Bible, “son of man” means nothing more than “human being” (in Hebrew, ben adam means “son of Adam”). The prophet Ezekiel, for example, says that the Lord repeatedly addressed him as “son of man,” often translated “mortal”;37 thus when Mark’s Jesus calls himself “son of man,” he too may simply mean “human being.” Yet Mark’s contemporaries who were familiar with the Hebrew Bible may also have recognized “son of man” as referring to the mysterious person whom the prophet Daniel saw in a vision appearing before God’s throne to be invested with power:
I saw in the night visions, and behold, coming with the clouds of heaven was one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory, and kingdom, so that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him . . . an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away.38
Mark says that when the high priest interrogated Jesus at his trial, and asked, “Are you the messiah, the son of God?” Jesus answered, “I am; and you will see the son of man . . . ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’ ”39 According to Mark, then, Jesus not only claimed the royal titles of Israel’s king (“messiah,” “son of God”) but actually quoted Daniel’s vision to suggest that he—or perhaps someone else whose coming he foresaw—was the “son of man” whom the prophet saw appearing before God’s throne in heaven. Matthew and Luke follow Mark in describing Jesus both as a future king (“messiah,” “son of God”) and as a mortal invested with divine power (“son of man”).
None of these titles, however, explains precisely who Jesus is. Instead, the gospel writers invoke a cluster of traditional terms to express their radical conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was a man raised to unique—even supernatural—status. Luke suggests, however, that it was only after Jesus’ death that God, in an unprecedented act of favor, restored him to life, and thus promoted Jesus, so to speak, not only to “messiah” but also to “Lord”—a name that Jewish tradition ordinarily reserves strictly for the divine Lord himself. According to Luke’s account, written ten to twenty years after Mark's, Peter dares announce to the “men of Jerusalem” that Jesus alone, of the entire human race, returned alive after death, and that this proves that “God has made him both Lord and messiah—this Jesus whom you crucified.”40
Yet John, who wrote about a decade after Luke, opens his gospel with a poem which suggests that Jesus is not human at all but the divine, eternal Word of God in human form (“in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God”).41 The author whom we call John probably knew that he was not the first—and certainly not the only—Christian to believe that Jesus was somehow divine. Some fifty years earlier, the apostle Paul, probably quoting an early hymn, had said of Jesus that although he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being found in the likeness of a human being.42
Unlike Luke, who depicts Jesus as a man raised to divine status, John, as does the hymn Paul quotes, pictures him instead as a divine being who descended to earth—temporarily—to take on human form. Elsewhere, Paul declares that it is the holy spirit who inspires those who believe that “Jesus is Lord!”43 Sixty years later, one of Paul’s admirers, the Syrian bishop Ignatius of Antioch, anticipating his impending martyrdom, wrote that he passionately longed to “imitate the suffering of my God”44—that is, of Jesus. So Pliny, the Roman governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, probably was right when, after investigating suspicious persons in his province, he wrote to the emperor Trajan (c. 115) that these Christians “sing a hymn to Jesus as to a god”45—perhaps it was the same hymn that Paul knew.
This is why some historians, having compared the Gospel of Mark (written 68 to 70 C.E.) with the gospels of Matthew and Luke (c. 80 to 90), and then with that of John (c. 90 to 100), have thought that John’s gospel represents a transition from a lower to a higher Christology—an increasingly elevated view of Jesus. These historians point out that such views developed from the first century on and culminated in phrases like those enshrined in the Nicene Creed, which proclaim Jesus to be “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”
Yet Christian teaching about Jesus does not follow a simple evolutionary pattern. Although John’s formulations have virtually defined orthodox Christian doctrine for nearly two thousand years, they were not universally accepted in his own time. And while the claims of Jesus’ divinity by Paul and John surpass those of Mark, Luke, and Matthew, Thomas’s gospel, written perhaps around the same time as John's, takes similar language to mean something quite different. Because the Gospel of Thomas diverges from the more familiar pattern found in John, let us look at it first.
We should note that, although I am using here the traditional names, Thomas and John, and the traditional term author, no one knows who actually wrote either gospel. Some scholars have observed that whoever assembled the sayings that constitute the Gospel of Thomas may have been less an author than a compiler—or several compilers—who, rather than composing these sayings, simply collected traditional sayings and wrote them down.46 In Thomas’s gospel, then, as in John, Matthew, and Luke, we sometimes find sayings that seem to contradict each other. For example, both John and Thomas include some sayings suggesting that those who come to know God are very few—a chosen few. Such sayings echo traditional teaching about divine election, and teach that God chooses those who are able to know him;47 while the cluster of sayings I take as the key to interpreting Thomas suggest instead that everyone, in creation, receives an innate capacity to know God. We know almost nothing about the person we call Thomas, except that, like the evangelists who wrote the gospels of the New Testament, he wrote in the name of a disciple, apparently intending to convey “the gospel” as this disciple taught it. As we noted, then, Thomas apparently assumes that his hearers are already familiar with Mark’s story of how Peter discovered the secret of Jesus’ identity, that “you are the messiah.” When Matthew repeats this story, he adds that Jesus blessed Peter for the accuracy of his recognition: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonas; it was not a human being who revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”48
Thomas tells the same story differently. According to Thomas, when Jesus asks, “Who am I?” he receives not one but three responses from various disciples. Peter first gives, in effect, the same answer as he does in the gospels of Mark and Matthew: “You are like a righteous messenger,” a phrase that may interpret the Hebrew term messiah (“anointed one”) for the Greek-speaking audience whom Thomas addresses. The disciple Matthew answers next: “You are like a wise philosopher”—a phrase perhaps intended to convey the Hebrew term rabbi (“teacher”) in language any Gentile could understand. (This disciple is the one traditionally believed to have written the Gospel of Matthew, which, more than any other, depicts Jesus as a rabbi.) But when a third disciple, Thomas himself, answers Jesus’ question, his respons
e confounds the other two: “Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like.” Jesus replies, “I am not your master, because you have drunk, and have become drunk from the same stream which I measured out.”49 Jesus does not deny what Peter and Matthew have said but implies that their answers represent inferior levels of understanding. Then he takes Thomas aside and reveals to him alone three sayings so secret that they cannot be written down, even in this gospel filled with “secret sayings”:
Jesus took Thomas and withdrew, and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, “What did Jesus say to you?” Thomas said, “If I tell you even one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; and a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.”50
Though Thomas does not reveal here what these “secret words” are for which the others might stone him to death for blasphemy, he does imply that these secrets reveal more about Jesus and his message than either Peter or Matthew understands.
What then is the gospel—the “good news”—according to Thomas, and how does it differ from what is told in the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke? Mark opens his gospel when Jesus announces “the good news of the kingdom of God,” and Mark tells how Jesus, baptized by John, sees “the heavens torn apart” and God’s spirit descending upon him.51 Immediately afterward, having been driven by God’s spirit into the wilderness to contend against Satan, Jesus returns triumphantly to announce his first, urgent message: “The kingdom of God is coming near: repent, and believe in the gospel.”52 According to Mark, Jesus teaches that this kingdom will come during the lifetime of his disciples: “There are some of you standing here who will not taste death until you see the kingdom of God come in power!”53 Later, in Jerusalem, where his disciples admire the gleaming walls of the great Temple, Jesus asks, “Do you see these great stones? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be torn down.”54