The Gibson God
Dinovella, Elizabeth
Books The Gibson God Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels Random House. 257 pages. $24.95. The Enemy Is Here!: A Reorganized Synthesis of The War Is Now!, January 1977-August 1994 by Hutton...
...Pagels looks at these hidden texts in her previous book The Gnostic Gospels...
...a collection of caustic writings on the Catholic Church and its sins of the last century...
...I attended Catholic schools, just like my parents, siblings, and cousins...
...She begins to ponder what draws people to mass-and what drives them away...
...Mel is also a Traditionalist Catholic and built a Traditionalist Church near his home to make it easier to attend a Latin Tridentine Mass...
...By Elizabeth DiNovella I never know what to say when people ask me if I am still Catholic...
...Those bishops who opposed this measure emphasized that such a declaration occurs neither in Scripture nor in Christian tradition...
...Woe to Gibson's enemies, who include "all who promote the current deviation...
...Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor for The Progressive...
...Gibson belongs to a sect called Traditionalism, which demands a return to the Catholicism of the early twentieth century...
...To them, he writes, "we most heartily wish the end they have chosen...
...What interests Pagels is not simply the authorship, but what it meant for Christianity...
...Fight habitually...
...We do not know who actually wrote these gospels," she writes...
...Pagels begins her book in search of religious truth...
...What is it about Christian tradition that we love- and what is it that we cannot love...
...I even starred in several grade-school productions of "The Stations of the Cross" (a version of the passion play...
...Pagels argues that the Gospel of John may have been written in response to another gospel of the time, the Gospel of Thomas...
...Despite the Nicene Creed, Christians still clung to their various beliefs and their sacred texts...
...This sentence is not included in the book...
...John alone characterizes Jesus as the same as God...
...Despite the warnings of the Gibsons, I am not that concerned about my own salvation...
...One example: Pope John Paul II said that Jews could be considered "our oldest brothers...
...Judging by Traditionalist Catholic standards, no Catholic I know is worthy of salvation...
...There surely is a place for Elaine Pagels in Gibson's inferno...
...It is likely that Mark, Matthew, and Luke were written by anonymous authors but given the names of the apostles to add legitimacy...
...And the Vatican II supposition that fellow Christians such as Lutherans can find salvation is nothing short of heresy...
...Peter asks Jesus who is letting these people in...
...My whole family is Catholic...
...She returns to the texts of the earliest Christian writings, looking for clarity...
...Hit often...
...Do not hesitate...
...Thanks to the secret act of fourth-century monks who so loved their sacred texts they hid them from destruction, she encounters a wealth of ideas that suggest new and often personal, experiential ways of thinking about Christ...
...Pagels posits that religion is much more than a set of standardized beliefs...
...I can't even remember the last time I confessed my sins to a priest, but the idea of absolution still appeals to me...
...He insisted that people should not read the Scriptures subjectively or intuitively and that they could gain access to God only through the Church...
...Pagels examines how early Christian texts became codified as canon...
...After intense argument, the bishops voted on a system of beliefs that declared Jesus was "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God...
...At this time, Roman emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity and called for a bishops' council in Nicea to arbitrate this and other conflicts and to formulate a statement of belief for a universal church...
...This was a drastic divergence from prevalent belief at the time...
...There is no room to move in Hutton Gibson's conception of God, and his son shares this conviction...
...This much is known: The Gospel of Mark was written 68-70 A.D., the gospels of Matthew and Luke a few years later (c...
...Hutton Gibson's response: "Abel had an older brother...
...I is for "Intestinal Fortitude...
...All we know is that all of these 'gospels' are attributed to disciples of Jesus...
...John was in, and Thomas was out...
...In the spring of 367, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, wrote in his annual Easter Letter detailed guidelines defining which texts were divine, and which were not...
...The Gospel of John stands out, not only for its prose and unique stories, but for its elevation of who Jesus was...
...This stands in stark opposition to John's belief that Jesus is God, and elevated above humanity...
...he wanted to codify the correct belief system of the books that remained...
...He even writes "an alphabet of militant Catholicism," where A is for "Aggression: The war is now...
...His original newsletter continues with a condemnation: MAY THEY ROAST ETERNALLY IN THE DEEPEST PIT OF HELL...
...Mel's idea of God is also troubling to me...
...Images of the Virgin Mary hang in my home, but I have disliked the pope ever since I had to get up at three in the morning in 1979 to see John Paul II preach in a church parking lot at a Southside parish in Chicago...
...She writes: "Many tend to assume that only one side can speak the truth, while others speak only lies-or evil...
...I take heart in a joke I've heard about the passage into heaven...
...He dismisses Pope John Paul II as "Garrulous Karolus Wojtyla, Koran Kisser...
...But, perhaps more importantly, Pagels points out that since the second century, most Christians have assumed that the author was John, the brother of James, and the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve disciples...
...She's letting them in the back door...
...Hit first...
...It's my mom," Jesus tells Peter...
...Never fear, if necessary, to appear stupid, bigoted, or foolish...
...Mark, Matthew, and Luke all depict Jesus as divine but human...
...Pagels begins her book with an assessment of her own Protestant faith...
...But, unlike the majority of my kin, I do not attend mass weekly, though I go with my family on holy days...
...He emphatically states that only through the Catholic Church can one find salvation...
...He is the editor of a newsletter entitled "The War Is Now...
...Gibson wants to go back to pre-Vatican II days and to have every Catholic celebrate mass in Latin...
...Although the existence of God can be known by the exercise of human reason alone, the God of the Covenant can be known only by those who believe in the One Whom He has sent, Jesus Christ," he writes...
...My all-girls Catholic high school, Queen of Peace, defined for me the world that I want to live in-a world where we seek to build God's kingdom on Earth, a world where social justice reigns...
...According to the Gospel of Thomas, it is possible to find Jesus, the divine light, in each human being...
...Pagels is the award-winning historian whose latest book, Beyond Belief, takes on the delicate subject of religious truth...
...13.95...
...Create chances...
...Hutton Gibson, Mel's dad, shares my antipathy for the pope, albeit for different reasons...
...Never miss a chance...
...Into the fourth century, Christians debated the divine nature of Jesus...
...The Enemy Is Still Here!: A Reorganized Synthesis of The War Is Now!, November 1994-March 2003 by Hutton Gibson Faith & Freedom Publishing...
...Part of me wants to say yes...
...Scholars have not provided a definitive answer to the question of who wrote the Gospel of John, the most mystical and poetic of all the gospels...
...The church he longs for is a church I cannot imagine, much less get excited about...
...But listing the New Testament wasn't enough for Athanasius...
...She finds herself going back to church after her young son is diagnosed with a terminal illness...
...But instead she finds diversity...
...In a New Yorker profile, Mel says that even his own wife, an Episcopalian whom Gibson describes as a better person than he, will not be saved...
...Without mass, the Church has no purpose...
...Afterward, Pagels notes, "anyone who challenged this radical belief would be seen as questioning the orthodoxy of the emperor himself...
...Gibson is at war with a church that has betrayed not just him but "tradition" itself...
...After refusing entry to some people, Peter was astounded to see those same persons in paradise...
...The Church is in chaos-the peculiar product of evil, the trademark of Satan," he writes in his first newsletter...
...While it is unknown whether Hutton Gibson's writings had any effect on the script, it is undeniable that the father's work is full of screeds against the Jews, who practice a religion that "has no foundation or validity...
...And she explains how certain gospels-there were more than four in the first centuries after Christ's death-became the Christian canon...
...It is a fascinating story...
...He sees the Catholic Church as falling down into decrepitude...
...This newsletter calls for holy war...
...The Enemy Is Here!: A Reorganized Synthesis of The War Is Now!, January 1977-August 1994 by Hutton Gibson Christian Book Club of America...
...Pagels paints a picture of the gospels that would surprise many Catholics- including Gibson-who believe that the gospels are eyewitness accounts...
...What is Christianity and what is religion, I wondered, and why do so many of us still find it compelling, whether or not we belong to a church, and despite difficulties we may have with particular beliefs or practices...
...It never made it into the New Testament...
...80-90 A.D...
...It is likely that one or more of the monks who heard his letter read at their monastery near the town of Nag Hammadi decided to defy Athanasius's order and removed more than fifty books from the monastery library, hid them in a jar to preserve them, and buried them near the cliff where [villager] Muhammad 'Ali would find them sixteen hundred years later," writes Pagels...
...498 pages...
...This conviction branded him a radical among his fellow Jews-and even, apparently, among many of Jesus's followers," she writes...
...Pagels notes that those who see Christianity offering a complete belief system have a hard time acknowledging that diverse viewpoints exist...
...and John at the end of the first century (90-100 A.D...
...And it is this idea-that Jesus was God-that became, two centuries later, the foundation of Christian belief...
...Much has been made of the anti-Semitism in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ...
...The council that met eventually created the Nicene Creed, which is still recited at mass today...
...391 pages...
...The Gospel of Thomas, along with fifty other sacred texts, was found in a jar in 1965 by an Egyptian villager in the hills of Nag Hammadi, Egypt...
...This became the earliest listing of the books of the New Testament...
Vol. 68 • May 2004 • No. 5
