The Gnostic Gospels
The Rector explains the truth
about the Gnostic Gospels, ancient writings brought to prominence in the novel The Da
Vinci code.
People love
a good conspiracy, especially when it has to do with religion and spirituality. The interest in the last few years in Dan Brown’s
novel “The Da Vinci Code” is a case in point. ‘Though
it is a novel,
and therefore a work of fiction, people have warmed to the idea that the powerful in church and state
have suppressed documents that would otherwise give a completely new slant on
early Christianity or the person of Jesus. As has been amply demonstrated, the
truth is rather different, but that hasn’t stopped the success of what is a
very well-written story.
Chief
amongst these suppressed documents that Dan Brown and many others appeal to are
the so-called “Gnostic Gospels”, which are mainly fragmentary documents,
dating from the fourth century in the form in which we have them, and most of
them found at Nag Hammadi in
century. They have
been accessible to scholars, and in more popular forms, for over fifty
years. Most of them are late documents,
written much later than the four Gospels, and dependent upon them, though also
adding a great deal of extra material. One
of them, the Gospel of Thomas, is in part earlier (perhaps 2nd
century), but still dependent on the Gospels, although a small number of
scholars maintain that there is some original material there, parallel to what
we find in the Gospels. Thomas is in any case the most “mainstream” of these
documents.
It is true,
in a sense, that they were suppressed, but not in any clandestine way as far as
we can tell. The early Church had to decide what were appropriate texts to read
in worship (hence what we call the “Canon” of Scripture – the books which were
included in the Bible) and decided that these Gnostic Gospels were not.
Why was this ? It is
important to know something about these documents so that we can give an
account of the Christian hope, and help those who have heard of them, and the
claims made for them, to discover authentic, living Christian faith.
The name
“Gnostic” may give a clue: Gnosticism
was a many-faceted religious movement both within the church and well outside
it in the first five hundred years or so of the Christian Era.
At its heart was a conviction that salvation was a matter of inner knowledge
(“Gnostic” means literally “one who knows”) passed on by a teacher. There is a lot
of talk about “knowing oneself”, which appeals rather superficially to our own
culture, but which is really about knowing the divine spark within a person,
which at death will be liberated from the prison of the body and return to God. Not everyone, the Gnostics thought, had this
spark – and salvation and liberation were only for those who did
. The Gnostic Gospels were indeed hidden documents, because they were
only for the initiates. The Jesus of the Gnostic Gospels bears little resemblance
to the Jesus of the Christian Gospels – he is an ethereal teacher dispensing
“enlightenment” to the spiritual aristocracy.
Contrast
that with the Christian faith, which offers salvation, the knowledge of God, to all, to the weak and broken, the
fallible and the failing, to those whom the Gnostic elite would think
irrelevant and “unspiritual” The Jesus of the four Gospels is one who
scandalises the supposedly righteous and the holy by his fellowship with the
lost and rejected, and who declares God’s favour to them.
The Gnostic
Jesus in fact does nothing like this – he does very little, and simply
dispenses wisdom. He is not rooted in
the physical world, since Gnostics to a man (or woman) rejected the physical as
irrelevant or even evil – what mattered was the inner and spiritual. Small
wonder then that Gnosticism had little sense of the goodness of the created
world, or of practical compassion.
Above all we
see this when we come to the Cross. In fact the Gnostic Gospels generally have
no story of the cross or passion, or claim it was all an illusion. Orthodox
Christianity however celebrates and proclaims an Incarnate God, who has shared
our flesh, and has entered into human death. For the Christian the Cross is a
picture of God himself, one who is Emmanuel, God with us, in the depths
as in the heights, and one who reconciles us to himself, not though our effort
or knowledge or ability, but by his act and his grace. For the Gnostic the
Cross remained an embarrassment, a scandal, or an irrelevance. For the Gospel
Christian it is a celebration and a glory.
The Reformer
Martin Luther wrote that “The Cross tests all things” – which
revelation of God in Jesus do we prefer – the ethereal teacher untouched by the
pains of this world or the One who has entered it and borne its griefs and sorrows with you and me and for you and me
? As they say, “No contest”.
Roger Clarke
September
2007