Here is what I wrote to my sister way back when I read this book.
Right now I’m reading The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (she’s at Barnard I think). It’s really interesting. 1600 years ago, around 370 when Christianity started to get the backing of the Imperial administration and military, a monk in Egypt put thirteen books in this huge jar and hid them deep in some caves. They became the time capsule. They have the gospels and epistles that didn’t make it into the New Testament, the ones the Church wanted to burn or get rid of and stunt milleniums of Christian imagination.
What these “gnostic” gospels show is an alternative vision of Christianity that didn’t make it, one where God is male and female, where there is no dogma or hierarchy, where God is not an aloof master, but within in each person,where in the Garden of Eden the snake was right and “God” was wrong and an imposter besides (reread Genesis 2: who lies and tells the truth?), where its illusion vs enlightenment not sin vs repentance, where Jesus wasn’t resurrected on the third day, where the gospels tell what happened after the crucifixion, where Mary Magdelene, not Peter, is Christ’s favorite, etc. It was Buddhistic in certain ways (indeed trade routes to India were opening up then).
The reason Pagels gives why orthodox Christianity survived and gnostic Christianity didn’t isn’t because one had the Truth and the other didn’t. Gnostics are heretics only because they didn’t win. The reason they didn’t win, says Pagels, is because their beliefs didn’t reinforce political and institutional survival. Their Christianity wasn’t wrong or wicked, it’s just that it wasn’t dogmatic, hierarchical, and matyristic enough to survive. They thought Jesus’s divinity transcended the pain and suffering of the crucifixion, that he laughed during the crucifixion and danced the night before, so that gnostics didn’t take martyrdom seriously. They didn’t think Jesus was physically resurrected and wouldn’t be on tap again till the End, but instead thought that each believer had direct spiritual access (some Protestant sects believe this)and didn’t have to go through any church or cadre of priests to achieve salvation. Thus they weren’t as well organized and institutionalized as orthodox Christianity. Nor as dogmatic since each believer could find out the Truth himself and didn’t have to rely on the say-so of priests. They thought the violent, jealous God the Master of the Old Testament was an imposter, so their religion didn’t support hierarchy and dogmatism.
In the second century (Jesus was crucified in 30) the gnostics and the orthodox were about equal, but 200 years later the orthodox had gained the upper hand by their greater organization and cohesiveness and so stamped out the only significant rival vision of Christianity that there’s ever been.
What is most interesting is how Pagels shows there was a Darwinian natural selection of various interpretations of Christianity, how the mere fact of institutional survival warped Christianity: Jesus had to be human for any one to be willing to be a martyr, that he had to be physically resurrected so that the Church can be seen as preserving the only surviving link back to Jesus, that there can only be one God so you can have a monolithic hierarchy, etc. Subtract any of these and Christianity wouldn’t’ve had enough cohesiveness to survive.
But, . . . what is the truth?
Or are we left with only historical interpretation which is known to be biased?
LikeLike
Fascinating…
LikeLike
@ Abagond
This was written over eleven years ago.
Based on what you know and believe in 2017, what parts of this post would you delete, amend or append?
LikeLike
@ Afrofem
As it turns out, I rewrote this post in 2010:
It mainly just gives my understanding of Pagels’ book because I thought it was interesting, food for thought. It lays out her opinion, not mine.
What I believe to be fact I wrote about here:
As a Catholic I believe that God has made sure enough of the truth would be preserved that anyone who wants to can be saved. Not just in the way of writings but of teachings passed down by the Catholic Church.
I have read some of the gospels that did not make it into the Bible and did posts on two of them:
and on the Nag-Hammadi library, books discovered in 1945 that were hidden in a cave in Egypt from Catholic persecutors in the fourth century A.D.:
I have read about half of those.
In the main they seem kind of nuts. But I understand that the religion that made sense of them, Gnosticism, is long gone. I did a post on Gnosticism:
Had history gone the other way, I might be saying that as a Gnostic I believe God made sure the right books were preserved and that the Catholic books saved in a cave in Egypt from Gnostic persecutors of the fourth century seem kind of nuts – because there would be no Pauline church (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, etc) left to make sense of them.
So it pretty much comes down to Pascal’s wager: if there is no Christian god, then it does not matter. But if there is, then the right books were saved in the end.
Why I believe in the Christian god in the first place, I did a post on that too, as you might imagine:
LikeLike
@ Abagond
That is a lot of amending and appending. Also a lot of interesting posts buried in your archives.
Please consider hiring someone from fiverr:
https://www.fiverr.com/categories/programming-tech/wordpress-services?source=gallery-listing
to go through your archives and create category archive pages for you.
They would be a great companion to your index and chronological (monthly) archives. Being able to explore your posts by specific topics/categories would be a great boon to ordinary readers and reseachers who want to go in depth on the hundreds of topics you have covered.
Thanks for the links.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@ abagond
‘It was Buddhistic in certain ways (indeed trade routes to India were opening up then)’
Thanks a lot; I think I should read it, in this lifetime or later on.
LikeLike