In the second episode, Jesus, anticipating his death, urges his disciples to trust in God and in himself, and promises to “prepare a place for you,” and to show them the way to God, since, as he says, “you know where I am going, and you know the way.’ ”142 Thomas alone, of all the disciples, objects that he knows nothing of the kind: “Thomas said to him, ‘. . . We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ ” In answer, John’s Jesus proclaims to this ignorant and obtuse disciple what I believe John wants to say to everyone who fails to understand how unique Jesus is: “Jesus said to [Thomas], ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, except through me.’ ”143
In the third episode Jesus even returns after his death to rebuke Thomas. Luke specifies that, after the crucifixion, the risen Jesus appeared to “the eleven,”144 and Matthew agrees that he appeared to “the eleven disciples”145—all but Judas Iscariot—and conferred the power of the holy spirit upon “the eleven.” But John’s account differs. John says instead that “Thomas, called ‘the twin’ . . . was not with them when Jesus came.”146
According to John, the meeting Thomas missed was crucial; for after Jesus greeted the ten disciples with a blessing, he formally designated them his apostles: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Then he “breathed upon them” to convey the power of the holy spirit; and finally he delegated to them his authority to forgive sins, or to retain them.147 The implication of the story is clear: Thomas, having missed this meeting, is not an apostle, has not received the holy spirit, and lacks the power to forgive sins, which the others received directly from the risen Christ. Furthermore, when they tell Thomas about their encounter with Jesus, he answers in the words that mark him forever—in John’s characterization—as Doubting Thomas: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails, and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” A week later, the risen Jesus reappears and, in this climactic scene, John’s Jesus rebukes Thomas for lacking faith and tells him to believe: “Do not be faithless, but believe.” Finally Thomas, overwhelmed, capitulates and stammers out the confession, “My Lord and my God!”148
For John, this scene is the coup de grâce: finally Thomas understands, and Jesus warns the rest of the chastened disciples: “Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.”149 Thus John warns all his readers that they must believe what they cannot verify for themselves—namely, the gospel message to which he declares himself a witness150—or face God’s wrath. John may have felt some satisfaction writing this scene; for here he shows Thomas giving up his search for experiential truth—his “unbelief”—to confess what John sees as the truth of his gospel: the message would not be lost on Thomas Christians.
Addressing those who see Jesus differently, John urges his uncompromising conviction: belief in Jesus alone offers salvation. To those who heed, John promises great reward: forgiveness of sins, solidarity with God’s people, and the power to overcome death. In place of Thomas’s cryptic sayings, John offers a simple formula, revealed through the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection: “God loves you; believe, and be saved.” John adds to his narrative scenes that Christians have loved and retold for millennia: the wedding at Cana; Nicodemus’s nighttime encounter with Jesus; Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well and asking her for water; Pilate asking his prisoner, “What is truth?”; the crucified Jesus telling his “beloved disciple” to care for his mother; the encounter with “Doubting Thomas,” and Mary Magdalene mistaking the risen Jesus for the gardener.
John, of course, prevailed. Toward the end of the second century, as we shall see in the next chapter, the church leader Irenaeus, as well as certain Christians in Asia Minor and Rome, championed his gospel and declared that it bore the authority of “John the apostle, the son of Zebedee,” whom Irenaeus, like most Christians after him, identified with “the beloved disciple.”151 From that time to the present, Christians threatened by persecution, or met with hostility or misunderstanding, often have found consolation in John’s declaration that, although hated by “the world,” they are uniquely loved by God. And, even apart from persecution, the boundaries John’s gospel draws between “the world” and those whom Jesus calls “his own” have offered innumerable Christians a basis of group solidarity grounded in the assurance of salvation.
But the discovery of Thomas’s gospel shows us that other early Christians held quite different understandings of “the gospel.” For what John rejects as religiously inadequate—the conviction that the divine dwells as “light” within all beings—is much like the hidden “good news” that Thomas’s gospel proclaims.152 Many Christians today who read the Gospel of Thomas assume at first that it is simply wrong, and deservedly called heretical. Yet what Christians have disparagingly called gnostic and heretical sometimes turn out to be forms of Christian teaching that are merely unfamiliar to us—unfamiliar precisely because of the active and successful opposition of Christians such as John.
How, then, did John prevail? To answer this question, let us look at the challenges that confronted the first generations of his readers.
CHAPTER THREE
GOD'S WORD OR HUMAN WORDS?
About a year after I had written The Gnostic Gospels, I was sitting at tea one brilliant October afternoon at the Zen Center in San Francisco, a guest of the Roshi, along with Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk. The Roshi, an American whose name is Richard Baker, told us how he, as a young man, had gone from Boston to Kyoto, where he entered a Buddhist monastery and became a disciple of the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. “But”—he laughed—“had I known the Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn’t have had to become a Buddhist!” Brother David, who that morning had offered to the Zen students a succinct and incisive exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, shook his head. Thomas and some other unorthodox gospels, he acknowledged, may be Christian mystical writings, but, he insisted, they are essentially no different from what the church offers: “There’s nothing in those texts that you can’t find in the writings of the great mystics of the church, like Saint Teresa, or Saint John of the Cross.”
I said that I did not agree. In the first place, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross—to say nothing of Jacob Boehme, the German mystic of the fourteenth century, and others like him, who were condemned and excommunicated as heretics—were intensely aware that whatever “revelations” they confided to their monastic superiors would have to conform—or seem to conform—to orthodox teaching. Christian mystics, like their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, have always been careful not to identify themselves with God. But the Gospel of Thomas teaches that recognizing one’s affinity with God is the key to the kingdom of God. The remarkable modern scholar Theodor Gaster, the thirteenth son of the chief rabbi of London, observed that Jewish mystics are careful to speak of relationship with God but not of identification: “The Jewish mystic can say, with Martin Buber, ‘I and Thou,’ but can never say ‘I am Thou,’ which is permissible in Hindi religious teaching, for example, as in the phrase, tat thvam asi [literally, “Thou art that”].”1
Orthodox Jews and Christians, of course, have never wholly denied affinity between God and ourselves. But their leaders have tended to discourage or, at least, to circumscribe the process through which people may seek God on their own. This may be why some people raised as Christians and Jews today are looking elsewhere to supplement what they have not found in Western tradition. Even Father Thomas Keating, the former abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, who has been a Cistercian monk for over fifty years, has sought through dialogue with the Buddhist and other wisdom traditions, as well as with contemporary science, to deepen the ancient practice he calls Centering Prayer. Fr. Keating finds that certain elements of Buddhist meditative practice complement Christian tradition by offering other experiential ways to discover divine truth. Thomas Merton, the famous monk who wrote the bestseller of the 1940s The Seve
n Storey Mountain, a Trappist like Keating, had similarly investigated Buddhist tradition. Thus even some devoted Christians have found that the impulse to seek God overflows the banks of a single tradition.
But as we have seen, within a century of Jesus’ death, some of his most loyal followers had determined to exclude a wide range of Christian sources, to say nothing of borrowing from other religious traditions, although, as we have also seen, this often happened. But why, and in what circumstances, did these early church leaders believe that this was necessary for the movement to survive? And why did those who proclaimed Jesus the “only begotten son of God,” as the Gospel of John declares, dominate later tradition, while other Christian visions, like that of Thomas, which encourages disciples to recognize themselves, as well as Jesus, as “children of God,” were suppressed?
Traditionally, Christian theologians have declared that “the Holy Spirit guides the church into all truth”—a statement often taken to mean that what has survived must be right. Some historians of religion have rationalized this conviction by implying that in Christian history, as in the history of science, weak, false ideas die off early, while the strong and valid ones survive. The late Raymond Brown, a prominent New Testament scholar and Roman Catholic Sulpician priest, stated this perspective baldly: What orthodox Christians rejected was only “the rubbish of the second century”—and, he added, “it’s still rubbish.”2 But such polemics tell us nothing about how and why early church leaders laid down the fundamental principles of Christian teaching. To understand what happened we need to look at the specific challenges—and dangers—that confronted believers during the critical years around 100 to 200 C.E., and how those who became the architects of Christian tradition dealt with these challenges.
The African convert Tertullian, living in the port city of Carthage in North Africa about eighty years after the Gospels of John and Thomas were written, around the year 190 (or, as Tertullian and his contemporaries might have said, during the reign of Emperor Commodus), acknowledged that the Christian movement was attracting crowds of new members—and that outsiders were alarmed:
The outcry is that the State is filled with Christians—that they are in the fields, in the cities, in the islands; and [outsiders] lament, as if for some calamity, that both men and women, of every age and condition, even high rank, are going over to profess Christian faith.3
Tertullian ridiculed the non-Christian majority for their wild suspicions and denounced the magistrates for believing them:
[We are called] monsters of evil, and accused of practicing a sacred ritual in which we kill a little child and eat it; in which, after the feast, we practice incest, while the dogs, our pimps, overturn the lights and give us the shameless darkness to gratify our lusts. This is what people constantly charge, yet you take no trouble to find out the truth. . . . Well, you think the Christian is capable of every crime—an enemy of the gods, of the emperor, of the laws, of good morals, of all nature.4
Tertullian was distressed that throughout the empire, from his native city in Africa to Italy, Spain, Egypt, and Asia Minor, and in the provinces from Germany to Gaul, Christians had become targets of sporadic outbreaks of violence. Roman magistrates often ignored these incidents and sometimes participated in them. In the city of Smyrna on the coast of Asia Minor, for example, crowds shouting “Get the atheists!” lynched the convert Germanicus and demanded—successfully—that the authorities arrest and immediately kill Polycarp, a prominent bishop.5
What outsiders saw depended considerably on which Christian groups they happened to encounter. Pliny, governor of Bithynia, in modern Turkey, trying to prevent groups from sheltering subversives, ordered his soldiers to arrest people accused as Christians. To gather information, his soldiers tortured two Christian women, both slaves, who revealed that members of this peculiar cult “met regularly before dawn on a certain day to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god.” Though it had been rumored that they were eating human flesh and blood, Pliny found that they were actually eating only “ordinary, harmless food.” He reported to the emperor Trajan that, although he found no evidence of actual crime, “I ordered them to be taken away and executed; for, whatever they admit to, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakable obstinacy should not go unpunished.”6 But twenty years later in Rome, Rusticus, the city prefect, interrogated a group of five Christians who looked to him less like members of a cult than like a philosophy seminar. Justin Martyr the philosopher, arraigned along with his students, admitted to the prefect that he met with like-minded believers in his Roman apartment “above the baths of Timothy” to discuss “Christian philosophy.”7 Nevertheless Rusticus, like Pliny, suspected treason. When Justin and his pupils refused his order to sacrifice to the gods, he had them beaten, then beheaded.
Thirty years after Justin’s death, another philosopher, named Celsus, who detested Christians, wrote a book called The True Word, which exposed their movement and accused some of them of acting like wild-eyed devotees of foreign gods such as Attis and Cybele, possessed by spirits. Others, Celsus charged, practiced incantations and spells, like magicians; still others followed what many Greeks and Romans saw as the barbaric, Oriental customs of the Jews. Celsus reported, too, that on large estates throughout the countryside Christian woolworkers, cobblers, and washerwomen, people who, he said, “ordinarily are afraid to speak in the presence of their superiors,” nevertheless gathered the gullible—slaves, children, and “stupid women”—from the great houses into their workshops to hear how Jesus worked miracles and, after he died, rose from the grave.8 Among respectable citizens, Christians aroused the same suspicions of violence, promiscuity, and political extremism with which secretive cults are still regarded, especially by those who fear that their friends or relatives may be lured into them.
Despite the diverse forms of early Christianity—and perhaps because of them—the movement spread rapidly, so that by the end of the second century Christian groups were proliferating throughout the empire, despite attempts to stop them. Tertullian boasted to outsiders that “the more we are mown down by you, the more we multiply; the blood of Christians is seed!”9 Defiant rhetoric, however, could not solve the problem that he and other Christian leaders faced: How could they strengthen and unify this enormously diverse and widespread movement, so it could survive its enemies?
Tertullian’s younger contemporary Irenaeus, often identified as bishop of Lyons, himself had experienced the hostility Tertullian was talking about, first in his native town of Smyrna (Izmir, in today’s Turkey) and then in the rough provincial town of Lyons, in Gaul (now France). Irenaeus also witnessed the fractiousness that divided Christian groups. As a boy he had lived in the household of his teacher Polycarp, the venerable bishop of Smyrna, whom even his enemies called the teacher of Asia Minor.10 Although he knew that they were scattered in many small groups throughout the world, Irenaeus shared Polycarp’s hope that Christians everywhere would come to see themselves as members of a single church they called catholic, which means “universal.”11 To unify this worldwide community, Polycarp urged its members to reject all deviants. According to Irenaeus, Polycarp liked to tell how his own mentor, “John, the disciple of the Lord”—the same person whom tradition reveres as the author of the Gospel of John—once went to the public baths in Ephesus, but, seeing Cerinthus, whom he regarded as a heretic, John “ran out of the bath house without bathing, exclaiming, ‘Let us flee, lest the bath house fall down; because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside.’ ” When Irenaeus repeated this story, he added another to show how Polycarp himself treated heretics. When the influential but controversial Christian teacher Marcion confronted the bishop and asked him, “Do you recognize me?” Polycarp replied, “Yes, I recognize you—firstborn of Satan!”12
Irenaeus says that he tells these stories to show “the horror that the apostles and their disciples had against even speaking with those who corrupt the truth.”13 But his stories also show what troubled Irenaeus: that even two
generations after the author of the Gospel of John qualified the claims of Peter Christians and confronted Thomas Christians, the movement remained contentious and divided. Polycarp himself denounced people who, he charged, “bear the [Christian] name with evil deceit”14 because what they teach often differs from what he had learned from his own teachers. Irenaeus, in turn, believed that he practiced true Christianity, for he could link himself directly to the time of Jesus through Polycarp, who personally had heard Jesus’ teaching from John himself, “the disciple of the Lord.”15 Convinced that this disciple wrote the Gospel of John, Irenaeus was among the first to champion this gospel and link it forever to Mark, Matthew, and Luke. His contemporary Tatian, a brilliant Syrian student of Justin Martyr the philosopher, killed by Rusticus, took a different approach: he tried to unify the various gospels by rewriting all of them into a single text.16 Irenaeus left the texts intact but declared that only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John collectively—and only these gospels exclusively—constitute the whole gospel, which he called the “four formed gospel.”17 Only these four gospels, Irenaeus believed, were written by eyewitnesses to events through which God has sent salvation to humankind.18 This four gospel canon was to become a powerful weapon in Irenaeus’s campaign to unify and consolidate the Christian movement during his lifetime, and it has remained a basis of orthodox teaching ever since.
While he supervised and taught his fellow believers in Smyrna, Polycarp sent one of his associates, Pothinus, to organize and unify a group of Greek-speaking Christians from the same region who had settled in the western hinterlands of Celtic Gaul. Later he sent his protégé, Irenaeus, then sixteen or seventeen years old, to work with Pothinus. In the winter of 167, however, when public hostility against Christians broke out in Smyrna, Roman police arrested Polycarp, whom they found hiding in a friend’s country estate. Accused of atheism, and ordered by the governor to swear an oath to the emperor’s genius (the spirit of his family), to curse Christ, and to say “Away with the atheists” (the Christians), Polycarp refused. Marched into the public stadium, the eighty-six-year-old bishop shook his fist at the hostile, noisy crowd and defiantly shouted, “Away with the atheists!” He was then stripped naked, bound to a stake, and burned alive.19 Irenaeus, visiting in Rome at the time, says that on that very afternoon, of February 23, 167 C.E., he heard a voice “like a trumpet call” revealing to him what was happening to his beloved teacher. From accounts of eyewitnesses, he (or another of Polycarp’s students) later wrote a moving report of his teacher’s arrest, interrogation, and death.
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