Has anybody not heard of the Gospel of Thomas? Or Q?
Q is for Quelle, the hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus from which Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew much of their common material. Maybe it was a document or set of documents, maybe a set of oral traditions, or maybe Q is one of the existing gospels (just my wild idea).
A warning first: I found Jenkins' writing style a bit heavy. The way he organizes material doesn't always make it clear who the speaker is: whether it is him or one of the various groups of scholars he references.
That said, this book is badly needed. Reporters and publishers are more interested in novelty and shock and the resulting sales than they are in boring old accuracy. The Jesus Seminar is quite good at getting press coverage, despite their tiny numbers and extreme positions. This book helps show up the lies.
An example of how the Jesus Seminar works: to find out which sayings of Jesus are authentic, first they chucked anything supernatural. Then they chucked anything Jewish, on the grounds that these were background material, and not new--and Jesus would only be saying new things. Never mind that Jesus was a Jew, and almost every one of his listeners were Jews, so you'd expect Jewish ideas and idioms. As a result, they deprecated everything Jesus said in the Gospel of John, and almost everything in the other gospels as well. But they love Thomas . . .
Early church writers commented at length on various heresies they disputed with, so scholars have known all along that there were numerous documents which purported to be alternative gospels, and even had quotations from some of them. Most of these were written by one faction or another of the Gnostic movements.
Gnosticism apparently derived from mystical traditions of the Greeks and Egyptians, which were blended with Christian ideas to form Christian Gnosticisms. Their common central notion is that the world is evil, the soul is at least potentially pure, and can be liberated from bondage to the evil world and illusion by secret and sacred knowledge (gnosis, hence the name). They concocted chains of created creators to explain how an evil world could be created, and corresponding realms of existence and secret passwords to enter them. Because the world is evil, sex and childbearing were deprecated. They insisted on mystical interpretations of Jesus' life and sayings, rejecting a real crucifixion. They appeared rather late, with Gnostic schools flourishing from about 135 AD and later. Some sects were more successful than others--Valentinus' followers were still around at about 300 AD. Because they insisted on mystical interpretations, they had no compunctions about writing their own gospels--which they meant to be mystically true, albeit not literally true.
Discoveries over the past 150 years have recovered many of these documents. The largest of these seems to be that at Nag Hammadi. Not all of the documents are necessarily from Christian Gnosticism--"some have no words or names even loosely associated with Christianity," and there's part of Plato's Republic as well. Other texts include a Gospel of Mary, Thunder Perfect Mind, a Gospel of Philip, Pista Sophia [found and published a hundred years ago], and so on. Twenty of these are collected in The Complete Gospels.
The most famous of these 'gospels' is the Gospel of Thomas, known by fragments until its discovery sixty years ago. The Gospel of Thomas opens with the words "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." The obvious implication of the very first sentence is that the reader already knows of public sayings and stories of Jesus. Hence Thomas cannot be earlier than Q (in whatever form Q may have been). Thomas is a "sayings" book, and contains no history. It combines versions of known statements by Jesus (presumed to be from Q), statements that Jesus could have made consistently with orthodoxy, and gnostic parables and philosophy that are not only distinctly non-orthodox, but are plainly quite late--dating from at least AD 135 and probably much later. It has dialogs including Mary Magdalen or Salome, characteristic of "Gnostic texts of the late second and third centuries."
Yet the Jesus Seminar folks want it dated 50-70 AD and treated as an independent source, equal to Q (which nobody has seen, by the way) and superior to the canonical gospels. Somebody has an agenda here. They profess to discern "levels" in Q, some earlier or perhaps due to different witnesses.
I'd like to see their methods for unraveling the contributions to a text made by different writers at different dates tested in a double blind experiment. The fact that they often disagree with each other is strong evidence that textual criticism at that level is better classified as amusement than either art or science, but I'm willing to give them another chance. I can well believe that Thomas had several writers tinker with it, but that's a pretty dramatic case.
The Jesus Seminar group try to shoehorn various hypothetical gospels (Gospel of Signs) and fictional gospels (Gospel of Peter) and Gnostic gospels (Gospel of Thomas) into the first century, and push back the canonical ones as far (and farther) than they can--to give their pet theories about Christianity priority. And the theories they like say that early Christianity was non-doctrinal, non-liturgical, non-hierarchical, and woman-affirming. All but the last are known to be quite false.
The Nag Hammadi texts that caused such a great stir turn out, as Jenkins points out, to convey nothing revolutionary at all--merely more documents of types and nature already known. The speculative claims dressed up as scholarship about "many Christianities" and "egalitarian Christianities" are the same ones trotted out at the beginning of the last century. The newspapers and magazines cheerfully publicize noisy claims, but have no skill (or apparent interest) in putting them into scholarly context, or reporting when the claims are refuted. Old knowledge isn't news--fresh lies are. And so we have popularizations (From Jesus to Christ, The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Search for Jesus), all professing to be the voice of scholarship discovering a woman-centered Christianity with no hierarchy and no difficult doctrines or rules; but these popularizations actually represent the far fringes.
A sample: It is difficult to convey just how arcane the Gnostic scriptures
are without quoting documents in full, particularly since they require knowledge of
a whole mythological vocabulary, but here is a typical example from one of the Nag
Hammadi texts, the Letter of Peter to Philip. The dialog begins when "the
apostles answered and said, 'Lord, we would like to know the deficiency of the aeons
and their pleroma.'" And: "How are we detained in this dwelling place?" Jesus
replies,
First of all concerning the deficiency of the aeons, this is the deficiency, when the disobedience and the foolishness of the mother appeared without the commandment of the majesty of the Father. She wanted to raise up aeons. And when she spoke, the Arrogant One followed. And when she left behind a part, the Arrogant One laid hold of it, and it became a deficiency. This is the deficiency of the aeons. Now when the Arrogant One had taken a part, he sowed it. And he placed powers over it and authorities. And he enclosed it in the aeons which are dead. And all the powers of the world rejoiced that they had been begotten.
Yes, I've read the Gospel of Thomas. I've read the canonical four. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are tied to places and times. Thomas sails off into fantasy land. It doesn't take a genius to tell which is more reliable.
If you've been looking at some of these "alternative" gospels, or have friends who have, then get ahold of Hidden Gospels and find out some of the facts around the hype. If not: the executive summary is that the latest finds tell us a little more about second and third century Gnosticism, but nothing about first century Christianity--claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
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