THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS: Are They Authentic? pt2
THOMAS ON TRIAL
The Nag Hammadi text that has provoked the most historical scrutiny is the Gospel of Thomas. Because of its reputation as the lost "fifth Gospel" and its frequently esoteric and mystical cast, it is frequently quoted in New Age circles. A recent book by Robert Winterhalter is entitled, The Fifth Gospel: A Verse-by-Verse New Age Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas. He claims Thomas knows "the Christ both as the Self, and the foundation of individual life."31 Some sayings in Thomas do seem to teach this. But is this what the historical Jesus taught?
The scholarly literature on Thomas is vast and controversial. Nevertheless, a few important considerations arise in assessing its veracity as history.
Because it is more of an anthology of mostly unrelated sayings than an ongoing story about Jesus' words and deeds, Thomas is outside the genre of "Gospel" in the New Testament. Yet, some of the 114 sayings closely parallel or roughly resemble statements in the Synoptics, either by adding to them, deleting from them, combining several references into one, or by changing the sense of a saying entirely.
This explanation uses the Synoptics as a reference point for comparison. But is it likely that Thomas is independent of these sources and gives authentic although "unorthodox" material about Jesus? To answer this, we must consider a diverse range of factors.
There certainly are sayings that harmonize with biblical material, and direct or indirect relationships can be found to all four canonical Gospels. In this sense, Thomas contains both orthodox and unorthodox material, if we use orthodox to mean the material in the extant New Testament. For instance, the Trinity and unforgivable sin are referred to in the context of blasphemy: "Jesus said, 'Whoever blasphemes against the father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.'"32
In another saying Jesus speaks of the "evil man" who "brings forth evil things from his evil storehouse, which is in his heart, and says evil things33 (see Luke 6:43-46). This can be read to harmonize with the New Testament Gospels' emphasis on human sin, not just ignorance of the divine spark within.
Although it is not directly related to a canonical Gospel text, the following statement seems to state the biblical theme of the urgency of finding Jesus while one can: "Jesus said, 'Take heed of the living one while you are alive, lest you die and seek to see him and be unable to do so'" (compare John 7:34; 13:33).34
At the same time we find texts of a clearly Gnostic slant, as noted earlier. How can we account for this?
The original writing of Thomas has been dated variously between A.D. 50 and 150 or even later, with most scholars opting for a second century date.35 Of course, an earlier date would lend more credibility to it, although its lack of narrative framework still makes it more difficult to understand than the canonical Gospels. While some argue that Thomas uses historical sources independent of those used by the New Testament, this is not a uniformly held view, and arguments are easily found which marshall evidence for Thomas's dependence (either partial or total) on the canonical Gospels.36
Blomberg claims that "where Thomas parallels the four gospels it is unlikely that any of the distinctive elements in Thomas predate the canonical versions."37 When Thomas gives a parable found in the four Gospels and adds details not found there, "they can almost always be explained as conscious, Gnostic redaction [editorial adaptation]."38
James Dunn elaborates on this theme by comparing Thomas with what is believed to be an earlier and partial version of the document found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, near the turn of the century.39 He notes that the Oxyrhynchus "papyri date from the end of the second or the first half of the third century, while the Gospel of Thomas...was probably written no earlier than the fourth century."40
Dunn then compares similar statements from Matthew, the Oxyrhynchus papyri, and the Nag Hammadi text version of Thomas:
Matthew 7:7-8 and 11:28 — "...Seek and you will find;...he who seeks finds...Come to me...and I will give you rest."
Pap. Ox. 654.5-9 — (Jesus says:)
'Let him who see(ks) not cease (seeking until) he finds;
and when he find (he will) be astonished,
and having (astoun)ded, he will reign;
an(d reigning), he will (re)st'
(Clement of Alexandria also knows the saying in this form.)
Gospel of Thomas 2 — 'Jesus said:
He who seeks should not stop seeking until he finds;
and when he finds, he will be bewildered (beside himself);
and when he is bewildered he will marvel,
and will reign over the All.'41
Dunn notes that the term "the All" (which the Gospel of Thomas adds to the earlier document) is "a regular Gnostic concept," and that "as the above comparisons suggest, the most obvious explanation is that it was one of the last elements to be added to the saying."42 Dunn further comments that the Nag Hammadi version of Thomas shows a definite "gnostic colouring" and gives no evidence of "the thesis of a form of Gnostic Christianity already existing in the first century." He continues: "Rather it confirms the counter thesis that the Gnostic element in Gnostic Christianity is a second century syncretistic outgrowth on the stock of the earlier Christianity. What we can see clearly in the case of this one saying is probably representative of the lengthy process of development and elaboration which resulted in the form of the Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi."43
Other authorities substantiate the notion that whatever authentic material Thomas may convey concerning Jesus, the text shows signs of Gnostic tampering. Marvin W. Meyer judges that Thomas "shows the hand of a gnosticizing editor."44 Winterhalter, who reveres Thomas enough to write a devotional guide on it, nevertheless says of it that "some sayings are spurious or greatly altered, but this is the work of a later Egyptian editor."45 He thinks, though, that the wheat can be successfully separated from the chaff.
Robert M. Grant has noted that "the religious realities which the Church proclaimed were ultimately perverted by the Gospel of Thomas. For this reason Thomas, along with other documents which purported to contain secret sayings of Jesus, was rejected by the Church."46
Here we find ourselves agreeing with the early Christian defenders of the faith who maintained that Gnosticism in the church was a corruption of original truth and not an independently legitimate source of information on Jesus or the rest of reality. Fitzmyer drives this home in criticizing Pagels's view that the Gnostics have an equal claim on Christian authenticity: "Throughout the book [Pagels] gives the unwary reader the impression that the difference between 'orthodox Christians' and 'gnostic Christians' was one related to the 'origins of Christianity'. Time and time again, she is blind to the fact that she is ignoring a good century of Christian existence in which those 'gnostic Christians' were simply not around."47
In this connection it is also telling that outside of the Gospel of Thomas, which doesn't overtly mention the Resurrection, other Gnostic documents claiming to impart new information about Jesus do so through spiritual, post-resurrection dialogues — often in the form of visions — which are not subject to the same historical rigor as claims made about the earthly life of Jesus. This leads Dunn to comment that "Christian Gnosticism usually attributed its secret [and unorthodox] teaching of Jesus to discourses delivered by him, so they maintained, in a lengthy ministry after his resurrection (as in Thomas the Contender and Pistis Sophia). The Gospel of Thomas is unusual therefore in attempting to use the Jesus-tradition as the vehicle for its teaching. . . . Perhaps Gnosticism abandoned the Gospel of Thomas format because it was to some extent subject to check and rebuttal from Jesus-tradition preserved elsewhere."48
Dunn thinks that the more thoroughly the Gnostics challenged the already established orthodox accounts of Jesus' earthly life, the less credible they became; but with post-resurrection accounts, no checks were forthcoming. They were claiming additional information vouchsafed only to the elite. He concludes that Gnosticism "was able to present its message in a sustained way as the teaching of Jesus only by separating the risen Christ from the earthly Jesus and by abandoning the attempts to show a continuity between the Jesus of the Jesus-tradition and the heavenly Christ of their faith."49
What is seen by some as a Gnostic challenge to historic, orthodox views of the life, teaching, and work of Jesus was actually in many cases a retreat from historical considerations entirely. Only so could the Gnostic documents attempt to establish their credibility.
GNOSTIC UNDERDOGS?
Although Pagels and others have provoked sympathy, if not enthusiasm, for the Gnostics as the underdogs who just happened to lose out to orthodoxy, the Gnostics' historical credentials concerning Jesus are less than compelling. It may be romantic to "root for the underdog," but the Gnostic underdogs show every sign of being heretical hangers-on who tried to harness Christian language for conceptions antithetical to early Christian teaching.
Many sympathetic with Gnosticism make much of the notion that the Gnostic writings were suppressed by the early Christian church. But this assertion does not, in itself, provide support one way or the other for the truth or falsity of Gnostic doctrine. If truth is not a matter of majority vote, neither is it a matter of minority dissent. It may be true, as Pagels says, that "the winners write history," but that doesn't necessarily make them bad or dishonest historians. If so, we should hunt down Nazi historians to give us the real picture of Hitler's Germany and relegate all opposing views to that of dogmatic apologists who just happened to be on the winning side.
In Against Heresies, Irenaeus went to great lengths to present the theologies of the various Gnostic schools in order to refute them biblically and logically. If suppression had been his concern, the book never would have been written as it was. Further, to argue cogently against the Gnostics, Irenaeus and the other anti-Gnostic apologists would presumably have had to be diligent to correctly represent their foes in order to avoid ridicule for misunderstanding them. Patrick Henry highlights this in reference to Nag Hammadi: "While the Nag Hammadi materials have made some corrections to the portrayal of Gnosticism in the anti-Gnostic writings of the church fathers, it is increasingly evident that the fathers did not fabricate their opponents' views; what distortion there is comes from selection, not from invention. It is still legitimate to use materials from the writings of the fathers to characterize Gnosticism."50
It is highly improbable that all of the Gnostic materials could have been systematically confiscated or destroyed by the early church. Dunn finds it unlikely that the reason we have no unambiguously first century documents from Christian Gnostics is because the early church eradicated them. He believes it more likely that we have none because there were none.51 But by archaeological virtue of Nag Hammadi, we now do have many primary source Gnostic documents available for detailed inspection. Yet they do not receive superior marks as historical documents about Jesus. In a review of The Gnostic Gospels, noted biblical scholar Raymond Brown affirmed that from the Nag Hammadi "works we learn not a single verifiable new fact about the historical Jesus' ministry, and only a few new sayings that might possibly have been his."52
Another factor foreign to the interests of Gnostic apologists is the proposition that Gnosticism expired largely because it lacked life from the beginning. F. F. Bruce notes that "Gnosticism was too much bound up with a popular but passing phase of thought to have the survival power of apostolic Christianity."53
Exactly why did apostolic Christianity survive and thrive? Robert Speer pulls no theological punches when he proclaims that "Christianity lived because it was true to the truth. Through all the centuries it has never been able to live otherwise. It can not live otherwise today."54
NOTES
1 Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), 119.
2 Harold W. Attridge and George W. MacRae, "Introduction: The Gospel of Truth," in James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 38.
3 Wesley W. Isenberg, "Introduction: The Gospel of Philip," Ibid., 139.
4 Joseph Fitzmyer, "The Gnostic Gospels According to Pagels," America, 16 Feb. 1980, 123.
5 F. F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 154.
6 Robinson, 434.
7 Ibid., 435.
8 Robinson, "Introduction," 2.
9 Ibid., 3.
10 Ibid., 2.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 See Ray Summers, The Secret Sayings of the Living Jesus (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1968), 14.
14 Michael Grosso, "Testing the Images of God," Gnosis, Winter 1989, 43.
15 Wesley W. Isenberg, "Introduction: The Gospel of Philip," in Robinson, 141.
16 Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1987), 208.
17 Ibid.
18 See Stephan Hoeller, "Valentinus: A Gnostic for All Seasons," Gnosis, Fall/Winter 1985, 25.
19 Ibid., 38.
20 Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1987), 251.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 C. M. Tuckett, "Synoptic Tradition in the Gospel of Truth and the Testimony of Truth," Journal of Theological Studies 35 (1984):145.
24 Blomberg, 213-14.
25 Andrew K. Hembold, The Nag Hammadi Texts and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1967), 88-89.
26 Christopher Tuckett, "Synoptic Tradition in Some Nag Hammadi and Related Texts," Vigiliae Christiane 36 (July 1982):184.
27 Robinson, 32.
28 Ibid.
29 Francis E. Williams, "Introduction: The Apocryphon of James," in Robinson, 30.
30 Blomberg, 213.
31 Robert Winterhalter, The Fifth Gospel (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 13.
32 Robinson, 131; See Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins, 130-31.
33 Robinson, 131.
34 Ibid., 132.
35 Layton, 377.
36 See Craig L. Blomberg, "Tradition and Redaction in the Parables of the Gospel of Thomas," Gospel Perspectives 5: 177-205.
37 Blomberg, Historical Reliability, 211.
38 Ibid., 212.
39 See Joseph A. Fitzmyer, "The Oxyrhynchus Logoie of Jesus and the Coptic Gospel According to Thomas," in Joseph Fitzmyer, Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1974), 355-433.
40 James D. G. Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1985), 101.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 102.
43 Ibid.
44 Marvin W. Meyer, "Jesus in the Nag Hammadi Library," Reformed Journal (June 1979):15.
45 Winterhalter, 4.
46 Robert M. Grant with David Noel Freedman, The Secret Sayings of Jesus (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1960), 115.
47 Fitzmyer, "The Gnostic Gospels According to Pagels," 123.
48 James Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), 287-88.
49 Ibid., 288; see also Blomberg, Historical Reliability, 219.
50 Patrick Henry, New Directions (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), 282.
51 Dunn, The Evidence, 97-98.
52 Raymond E. Brown, "The Gnostic Gospels," The New York Times Book Review, 20 Jan. 1980, 3.
53 F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 278.
54 Robert E. Speer, The Finality of Jesus Christ (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1933), 108.
GLOSSARY
aeons: Emanations of Being from the unknowable, ultimate metaphysical principle or pleroma (see pleroma).
Nag Hammadi collection: A group of ancient documents dating from approximately A.D. 350, predominantly Gnostic in character, which were discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945.
pleroma: The Greek word for "fulness" used by the Gnostics to mean the highest principle of Being where dwells the unknown and unknowable God. Used in the New Testament to refer to "fullness in Christ" (Col. 2:10) who is the known revelation of God in the flesh.
pseudepigrapha: Ancient documents which falsely claim authorship by noteworthy individuals for the sake of credibility; for instance, the Gospel of Thomas.
syncretism: The teaching that various religious truth-claims can be synthesized into one basic, underlying unity.
Valentinus: Influential early Gnostic of the Second Century A.D. who may have authorized the Nag Hammadi document, the Gospel of Truth.
This article first appeared in the Winter 1991 issue of the Christian Research Journal.
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