“Beyond Belief” (2003) by Elaine Pagels tells of the rise and fall of the Gospel of Thomas, one of the dozens of gospels that did not make it into the Bible. The 16-page Gospel of Thomas itself is at the back of the book.
In the late 100s, as Pagels tells it, the two main gospels were those of Thomas and John:
- Gospel of Thomas: God is within each of us. Jesus is the starting point from which to make new spiritual discoveries.
- Gospel of John: Jesus was God made flesh, a one-time event. The only approach to God is through Jesus. The church sees itself as preserving and spreading his truth.
Irenaeus was then the bishop of Lugdunum (Lyons, France). He was trying to hold his church together in the face of Roman persecution. This was back when Christians were being torn apart by wild animals for the entertainment of fellow townspeople.
The trouble with Thomas for a Christian leader like Irenaeus is that it led to division. All those new spiritual discoveries did not always match up. And some Thomas Christians seemed to be con men.
To keep his church from being torn apart by division or taken over by flimflam artists, Irenaeus pushed a creed – a short statement of Christian belief – and four of the dozens of gospels then on offer: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He is the first to list just those four as the true gospels. Reading them in the light of the creed was the road to truth. Everything else was of the devil, pretty much.
Thomas Christians saw Irenaeus as dumbing down Christianity to the lowest common denominator, to a low spiritual level that featured only one baptism, not two, that worshipped a lowly creator-god not the higher Mother-Father god.
Irenaeus kicked out the Thomas Christians from his church as false teachers. They are now known as gnostics. His way of doing things spread to other churches, now known as catholic. (Pagels does not capitalize “gnostic” or “catholic”.)
By 312, when Constantine became emperor of the Roman Empire, half of all Christians were catholic. Constantine chose to back only catholics as the true Christians, in effect narrowing the range of Christian belief ever since. In 325 Irenaeus’s creed was updated as the Nicene Creed. In 367 Athanasius listed Irenaeus’s four gospels and 23 other Christian writings as Holy Scripture.
Nag Hammadi Library: The Gospel of Thomas did not make the cut. Neither did some 50 other books at the monastery near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. So one day in the late 300s a monk put those 50-odd books in a jar and hid them in a cave. There they sat till they were discovered in 1945, to be studied by scholars like Elaine Pagels in the late 1900s.
Overall “Beyond Belief” is an interesting book, but it seems to be a Protestant reading of history. After all, it is Protestants, not Catholics, who rest their authority on the Bible alone (sola scriptura). Rome was not an Anglo-Protestant print culture.
– Abagond, 2019.
See also:
- books – books I read in 2019
- Bible
- Jesus Christ
- Catholic
- New Testament canon – winners
- Gnostic
- Nag Hammadi Library – losers
- Protestant – note especially the doctrine of sola scriptura, which Pagels reads back into history
- gospel
- Irenaeus
554
Whether one leads others to follow the shoe or the holy gourd of Jerusalem, the ego they must have to believe themselves capable of understanding divine intent is mind boggling.
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@Abagond
The term “Catholic” is a proper noun, and should be capitalized. Please correct the error. Thanks.
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Most fundamentalist Christians would call this heresy. I remember reading about this being called Gnostic Gospels. Insightful post.
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Abagond, You have inspired me. Thank you.
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@ Abagond
“By 312, when Constantine became emperor of the Roman Empire, half of all Christians were catholic. Constantine chose to back only catholics as the true Christians, in effect narrowing the range of Christian belief ever since.”
In the 300s, this small “c” catholic would have included what later became the Eastern Orthodox, yes?
“it seems to be a Protestant reading of history. After all, it is Protestants, not Catholics, who rest their authority on the Bible alone (sola scriptura). Rome was not an Anglo-Protestant print culture.”
Could you expound a bit on this? I understand the distinction you’re drawing about scripture and authority, but where I get lost is trying to figure out what a Catholic reading of this same historical event would look like and how it would be different.
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@ Everett F. Pomare
I know it is capitalized, which why I explained why I did not capitalize it.
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@ Solitaire
Yes. They were officially the same church till 1054. That later split is why some historians avoid calling the Catholic Church “Catholic” in the 300s even though it is what it called itself. The Catholic Church also included what later became the Coptic Church in Egypt. It split away in 451.
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@ Solitaire
Pagels puts texts centre stage, particularly the gospels of John and Thomas. They mattered, of course, but far more important, as the Catholic Church tells it, is apostolic succession. The popes are the successors of St Peter and the bishops are the successors of the Apostles of Jesus. That is what the Catholic Church based its authority on. It used that authority to pick and choose which Christian writings to add to the Bible, giving us the New Testament. The Catholic Church did not grow out of the New Testament, the New Testament grew out of it. It chose writings that supported its teachings, not the other way round.
The Catholic Church did use creeds and the idea of true and false gospels to fight heretics, Pagels is right about that. But those two things alone (creed + approved gospels) would not have created a church as large as the Catholic Church was by 312. Instead it would have likely created a welter of small-time Bible-believing churches, like in the US.
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@ Abagond
Still kind of lost.
Protestants don’t accept the Gospel of Thomas, either. Are you saying if a Protestant approach had existed back in the early 300s, the Gospel of Thomas and the other ~50 books would have been included in the official New Testament because of the importance given to texts?
Also, I get this: “It chose writings that supported its teachings,”…
… but not sure what you mean by this: “not the other way round.”
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@ Solitaire
The Protestant approach is to assume that a given set of texts are the Word of God and derive one’s beliefs from them. This is what Pagels assumes Catholics did. That is not at all how they operate.
The Catholic approach is to approve books that fit Church beliefs and burn or suppress the rest as heretical or dangerous. They did that not just to the Gospel of Thomas and dozens of other gospels but even to stuff by Galileo and the Mayans.
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@ Solitaire
Catholics do not derive their beliefs from a set of texts but approve a set of texts based on their beliefs.
The Catholic Church came first and then came the New Testament. Protestantism presupposes the New Testament.
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@ Abagond
Ahh, okay, I think that clears it up. It gets a little confusing to me because the “given set of texts” that Protestants derive their beliefs from are — for the most part — the very same texts that the early Catholics chose to approve. But I think I see your distinction now, that the church fathers were choosing to approve the writings that fit what the Catholic Church already believed, the beliefs that had come down through the apostolic succession, if I have that right? And if the writings themselves had been more central to early Christians than the traditions of the apostolic succession, then the likely result, a “welter of small-time Bible-believing churches,” probably would have included some which were heavily gnostic?
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I enjoyed her Gnostic Gospels book.
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@ Abagond
Or maybe this is more to the point:
Pagels presents it as Irenaeus judging the texts on their own merits, free-standing, and that is how he decides to jettison the Gospel of Thomas, because it differs too much from the other gospels. But a scholar from a Catholic background would present Irenaeus as judging the merits of the Gospel of Thomas based on the teachings of the Church, not in comparison to other gospels. Is that closer?
I apologize if I seem dense here. I feel like there’s a distinction I’m having trouble grasping due to my own background of being raised in the Protestant tradition. I understand that the New Testament didn’t always exist, but it also seems like writing was an important part of the Church starting with the epistles.
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@ Solitaire
Right. Pagels is reading her own Protestant assumptions back onto Irenaeus, who was not Protestant.
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@ Abagond
Apparently I underestimate the weight given to oral tradition/teachings in the early church, which may also be part of where Pagels has a blind spot.
I read a little more about Irenaeus, and it seems like his claim to apostolic succession was rather, um, tenuous? I don’t know, I’m going to have to read more about it to try to grasp both how apostolic succession was understood to work back then and how it’s understood now.
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@ Abagond
So I’ve been reading up a little and discovered that, having been raised Methodist, I don’t come from a sola scriptura tradition but rather a prima scriptura tradition. The difference may seem like splitting hairs to a Catholic, but I thought you might find it interesting that even among the Protestants, not all denominations are sola scriptura. There are also several Protestant denominations that believe they have preserved apostolic succession, although of course the Catholic Church does not agree.
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