Challenging the Gospels' Truth

...CAUTIOUS TEMPORIZING is a basic problem of The Gnostic Gospels Pagels spends approximately a hundred pages criticizing the Church for being thickheaded in spiritual matters and intolerant of diversity Yet in her final pages praises these very qualities "I believe that we owe the survival of Christian tradition to the organizational and theological structure that the emerging Church developed Anyone as powerfully attracted to Christianity as I am will regard that as a major achievement " That said, Pagels turns around to identify with the gnostics, who, she claims, offer an alternative today to those unable to "rest solely on the authority of the Scriptures, the Apostles, the Church " She warns the confused reader against concluding "that I advocate going back to gnosticism-much less that I 'side' with it against orthodox Christianity," but that is clearly her inclination To her, the second century gnostics anticipated Jungian psychology, sharing "certain affinities with contemporary methods of exploring the self through psychotherapeutic techniques " Even an amateur student of history will wonder whether this is a fair interpretation of the ancient writings, or rather an effort to encourage a non-scholarly audience to read its own concerns into them...

...Pagels contends that this theology was not necessarily inevitable As early as the second century (and perhaps before that) a group of gnostic Christians sprang up to challenge the accepted interpretations Had the gnostics prevailed, Pagels argues, Christianity would have assumed a radically different shape It would have accepted the Resurrection as merely a spiritual event, worshipped a God who was subdivided into many parts-male and female, good and evil, and relied on self-knowledge rather than Apostolic authority The gnostics, however, were not as well-equipped as their militant clerical rivals "Adapting for its own purposes the model of Roman political and military organization, and gaining, in the fourth century, imperial support, orthodox Christianity grew increasingly stable and enduring The process of establishing orthodoxy ruled out every other option To the impoverishment of Christian tradition, gnosticism, which offered alternatives was thrust outside ". Until the late 19th century, no gnostic writings were known to have survived the Roman and Medieval purges The scant information scholars possessed was drawn from the polemics of the early Church Fathers The first great Catholic theologian, Irenaeus, for example, writing circa 180, indignantly mentions "heretics [who] claim to possess more gospels than there really are", others made extravagant claims about their contents But there was no independent verification prior to the 1880s, when tantalizing fragments of gnostic manuscripts began to show up The most startling of these-the Gospel of Mary-portrayed the Magdalen as spiritually more intimate with Jesus than His male disciples were...

...For instance, in a chapter entitled "The Controversy over Christ's Resurrection Historical Event or Symbol''" Pagels points out that the New Testament supports both the contention that Jesus rose in the flesh (Luke 24 39-49, John 20 25-29) and that He reappeared in the spirit only (Mark 16 12, Luke 24 13-32, John 20 11-17) She maintains that the orthodox stuck to their belief m literal Resurrection, flesh and spirit, because it affirmed that the Risen Christ had touched His Apostles, establishing a physical link that could be passed on (this is the idea of the Apostolic Succession-a basic doctrine in the ordination of priests in Roman Catholic, Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches to this day) The gnostics found this tradition, in the words of The Gospel of Philip, "extremely revolting, repugnant and impossible," an opinion shared by the pagan world at large They felt that anyone who had undergone an inner experience of Jesus did not require the Church's sacraments to confirm spiritual election Moreover, they doubted the power of priests to confirm the reception of Grace at all It thus became vital for the orthodox to drive out these dissenters...

...The major find, though, came in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt's upper desert, where an Arab peasant dug up a jar containing complete codices of a gnostic library Included were a number of important lost gospels, stories of Christ's life and teaching, that differed sharply from those of the New Testament canon Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, they raised problems scholars continue to debate While no one seriously believes any of them to spring from the same tradition as the works of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, a few could conceivably be contemporary, certainly several were around to annoy the early Church Fathers...

...Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Barnard, confronts this conflict head-on in her study of early Christianity, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 182 pp , $10 00) Christians have always claimed that the True Church the Apostles established after Christ's Ascension was at one with the intentions of its Divine founder, and that only later was this "seamless garment" rent by heresy and schism Even today, despite a bewildering plurality of rites and dogmas, the Christian religion rests on certain shared assumptions that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead, that God is One in Trinity of Persons-father, Son and Holy Spirit, that the Church, since it preserves the mandate handed down from the Apostles to all time, is Christ's earthly representative and the channel of salvation...

...Writers & Writing CHALLENGING THE GOSPELS' TRUTH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL VIRTUALLY ALL religions experience a tension between organized and mystical practice The first embraces the community of believers and approaches the Divine through ritual acts of corporate worship, it preaches ethical standards and good works to reinforce solidarity among its members The second, eschewing intermediaries, takes a different path to God The individual believer turns inward for self-knowledge-what the Greeks called gnosis-to commune with the Almighty Although two kinds of religious involvement can coexist (sometimes within the same person), the mystic most often suspects that the organized church is more interested in self-preservation than in God, he, in turn, is suspected of an inhumane solipsism As a result, the potential for Holy War is ever-present...

...Unfortunately, in trying to be fair to both sides, Pagels is really fair to neither She runs back and forth, distributing little raps of disapproval and pats of approbation to these implacable enemies Having portrayed the orthodox as heavies, seething with worldly motives in the persecution of the libertarian gnostics, she suddenly changes her perspective from the sphere of politics to the sphere of ideas From a philosophical standpoint, she tells us, the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Flesh expresses "the conviction that human life is inseparable from bodily experience Even if a man comes back to life from the dead, he must come back physically " Such a doctrine requires its adherents to "take seriously the ethical convictions of their own actions,' since there is no dichotomy between the fate of body and soul But to many gnostics the demiurge who created matter was essentially evil, they were puritans who condemned sexual activity, for procreation was irrelevant to the spiritual life After this clear explanation of the conflict between the two philosophies, it is easy to see why the orthodox, who had preserved a unified perspective inherited from Judaism, might find the elitist ascetics abominable And the author's attempt to return to her political thesis proves weak...

...Pagels' study is not the first to attempt to stimulate general public interest m this important material In 1960, Robert Grant published a book for laymen, The Secret Sayings of Jesus, containing the text of the Gospel of Thomas But to my knowledge the latest work is the only one to claim that the 1945 discoveries seriously challenge our picture of the formation of Christianity The author's central thesis is that whereas the early Church Fathers considered gnosticism a pagan movement that had infiltrated Christianity and borrowed some of its imagery, the gnostics actually were as Christian as anybody in the second century when Christianity was still decentralized It was only after the orthodox party became intent upon making itself the Church that the suppression of gnosticism became a necessity, because their opposition to clerical control was considered particularly dangerous Pagels sees a "political" rather than an ideological motivation for the development of orthodox theology -which, she believes, favored Biblical interpretations that confirmed its own temporal authority-and hence for the warfare between the two parties...

...so then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot I will spew thee out of thy mouth...

...In claiming that it suppressed gnosticism for primarily political motives, Pagels has raised a serious charge against Christian orthodoxy But the conflict between the organized religious community and the mystic is not rooted in the desire to shore up power It is born of an essential and unshakeable difference of thought, so that what is life to one is often death to the other Before we can discuss fairly the effect of such philosophical differences on the evolution of religious beliefs, we must be clear whether we are studying the practices of creatures foreign to us, or seeking to find in their struggle a metaphor for our own condition The former demands scientific detachment, the latter religious commitment Pagels could have written an objective, popular account of the discoveries at Nag Hammadi Or she could have written an impassioned plea for the gnostic vision, as many poets and philosophers have done (Blake and Emerson among them, though they knew little of historical gnosticism) Instead, she wavers between the two-and to be uncertain in one's allegiance serves neither scholarship nor clarity What did Jesus say to vacillators...