Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas

I have always read the Gospel of John with fascination, and often with devotion. When I was fourteen, and had joined an evangelical Christian church, I found in the enthusiastic and committed gatherings and in John's gospel, which my fellow Christians treasured, what I then craved—the assurance of belonging to the right group, the true "flock" that alone belonged to God. Like many people, I regarded John as the most spiritual of the four gospels, for in John, Jesus is not only a man but a mysterious, superhuman presence, and he tells his disciples to "love one another."^[1] At the time, I did not dwell on disturbing undercurrents—that John alternates his assurance of God's gracious love for those who "believe" with warnings that everyone who "does not believe is condemned already"^[2] to eternal death. Nor did I reflect on those scenes in which John says that Jesus (p.31) spoke of his own people ("The Jews") as if they were alien to him and the devil's offspring.^[3]

Before long, however, I learned what inclusion cost: the leaders of the church I attended directed their charges not to associate with outsiders, except to convert them. Then, after a close friend was killed in an automobile accident at the age of sixteen, my fellow evangelicals commiserated but declared that, since he was Jewish and not "born again," he was eternally damned. Distressed and disagreeing with their interpretation—and finding no room for discussion—I realized that I was no longer at home in their world and left that church. When I entered college, I decided to learn Greek in order to read the New Testament in its original language, hoping to discover the source of its power. Reading these terse, stark stories in Greek, I experienced the gospels in a new way, often turning the page to see what happened next, as if I had never read them before. Reading Greek also introduced me firsthand to the poems of Homer, the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, Pindar's hymns, and Sappho's invocations; and I began to see that many of these "pagan" writings are also religious literature, but of a different religious sensibility.

After college I studied dance at the Martha Graham School in New York. I loved dance but still wondered what it was about Christianity that I had found so compelling and at the same time so frustrating. I decided to look for the "real Christianity"—believing, as Christians traditionally have, that I might find it by immersing myself in the earliest Christian sources, composed soon after Jesus and his disciples had wandered in Galilee. When I entered the Harvard doctoral program, I was astonished to hear from the other students that Professors Helmut Koester and George MacRae, who taught the early history of Christianity, had file cabinets filled with "gospels" and "Apocrypha" written during the first centuries, many of them secret writings of which I'd never heard. These writings, containing sayings, rituals, and dialogues attributed to Jesus and his disciples, were found in 1945 among a cache of texts from the beginning of the Christian era, unearthed near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt.^[4] When my fellow students and I investigated these sources, we found that they revealed diversity within the Christian movement that later, "official" versions of Christian history had suppressed so effectively that only now, in the Harvard graduate school, did we hear about them. So we asked who wrote these alternative gospels, and when. And how do these relate to—and differ from—the gospels and other writings familiar from the New Testament?

These discoveries challenged us not only intellectually but—in my case at least—spiritually. I had come to respect the work of "church fathers" such as Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c.180), who had denounced such secret writings as "an abyss of madness, and blasphemy against Christ."^[5] Therefore I expected these recently discovered texts to be garbled, pretentious, and trivial. Instead I was surprised to find in some of them unexpected spiritual power—in sayings such as this from the Gospel of Thomas, translated by Professor MacRae:

The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves; and, with a shock of recognition, I realized that this perspective seemed to me self-evidently true.

Elaine Pagels and the Gospel of Thomas

Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton University, became famous—well, at least well known—with the publication of her book, The Gnostic Gospels, in 1979. She has written several other books as well on the history of Christianity, establishing her as the foremost popular scholar in the field.

Beyond Belief, published in 2003 by Random House, is a sort of sequel to The Gnostic Gospels, in that it incorporates the new scholarship that has come to light since that book was published. Since Ms. Pagels' infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, her pursuit of knowledge about who Jesus really was has become a question of personal urgency for her. This need is reflected in the text and transforms the book into much more than a scholarly treatise for the curious. She wants to know what Christ meant to his followers before doctrine and dogmas, in other words, before Christianity was invented by the Church.

The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, along with other early Christian texts, offers revealing clues. Pagels compares Thomas's gospel (which claims to give Jesus' secret teaching, and indicates an affinity with the Kabbalah) with the canonic texts to show how the early Church chose to include some gospels and exclude others from the collection we know as the New Testament—and why. During the time of persecution of Christians, the church fathers constructed the canon, creed and hierarchy, suppressing many of its spiritual resources in the process, in order to avoid conflict with Roman law and religion.

A prime example is the label of heresy attached to the Gospel of Thomas, and its subsequent suppression. If a copy hadn't been found by accident (or destiny?) in the caves of Nag Hammadi, along with many other documents during the middle of the twentieth century, we'd have never even known of its existence. Such secret writings had been denounced by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon (c.180) as "an abyss of madness, and blasphemy against Christ." Pagels had therefore expected to find madness and blasphemy in these texts, but when she first studied them in Harvard graduate school she found the contrary in sayings such as this from Thomas:

Pagels found that "the strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves; and, with a shock of recognition, I realized that this perspective seemed to me to be self-evidently true."

However, certain church leaders from the second through the fourth centuries rejected many of these sources of revelation and constructed instead the New Testament gospel canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which has defined Christianity to this day. The Gospel of John is of special importance in church dogma, and its basic tenets seem to be in direct opposition to Thomas. John says that he writes "so that you may believe, and believing may have life in [Jesus'] name." Thomas's gospel, however, encourages us not so much to believe in Jesus, as John demands, as to seek to know God through one's own, divinely given capacity, since all are created in the image of God. "For Christians of later generations, the Gospel of John helped provide a foundation for a unified church, which Thomas, with its emphasis on each person's search for God, did not."

According to Pagels, John is the only evangelist who actually states that Jesus is God incarnated. But not only Pagels says so. In one of his commentaries on John, Origen—a church father (c.240)—writes that while the other gospels describe Jesus as human, "none of them clearly spoke of his divinity, as John does." One may object that the other three, synoptic ("seeing together") gospels call Jesus "son of God", and this is virtually the same thing. But such titles (son of God, messiah) in Jesus' time designated human, not divine roles. When translated into English fifteen centuries later, these were capitalized—a linguistic convention that does not occur in the original Greek. When all four gospels, together with Paul's letters, were united in the New Testament (c. 160 to 360) most Christians had come to read all four through John's lens, that Jesus is "Lord and God."

Pagels feels that if the Gospel of Thomas were included in the New Testament instead of that of John, or even if it were included along with John, the development of Christianity would have been quite different. Whereas Mark, Matthew and Luke identify Jesus as God's human agent, John and Thomas characterize him as God's own light in human form. Both claim to reveal, at least to a certain extent, Jesus' "secret teachings", and assume that their readers are already familiar with the synoptic gospels.

Despite their similarities, John and Thomas point the secret teachings in sharply different directions. John claims that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus, while Thomas says that the divine light embodied in Jesus is already shared by humanity since we are all made "in the image of God." Thomas thus expresses what would become a central theme of Jewish, and later Christian, mysticism a thousand years later: that the "image of God" is hidden within everyone, and it is a question of recognizing this and finding it through one's own efforts.

(On the question of Jesus' divinity, Rudolf Steiner—not consulted by Pagels—offered an interesting solution: that Jesus was indeed a human being, but that "a god", Christ, incarnated in him at the moment of baptism in the Jordan.)

At one point in her description of the dispute among the early Christians about who Jesus really was, Pagels quotes Mark: "...he asked his disciples, 'Who do people say that I am?' And they told him, 'John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.' And he asked them, 'But who do you say that I am?' Peter answered him, 'You are the messiah.'" In view of this passage, it has always seemed contradictory to me the contention that Christianity—and Judaism—do not embrace the idea of reincarnation, even reject it, when these first Jewish Christians seem to act as though it were common knowledge.

The synoptic gospels claim that Jesus' teaching predicted the coming of the kingdom of God some time in the future, an interpretation still adhered to by many Christians. However, both John and Thomas say something different, the latter very specifically:

Though the Gospel of Luke includes an alternative version of the same idea ("...the kingdom of God is within you"), Luke later retreats from this position and concludes with the apocalyptic warning that the Son of Man is not a divine presence in us all but a terrifying judge.

A century ago Leo Tolstoy, in his monumental The Kingdom of God is within you, urged Christians to give up coercion and violence in order to realize God's kingdom here and now. Thomas Merton, the twentieth century writer and Trappist monk, agreed with Tolstoy but interpreted his kingdom mystically rather then practically. We are confronted here with the Catholic church's insistence that humanity is sinful, base and unworthy by nature and that salvation from the pangs of hell is only possible through faith in Jesus and, by obvious extension, his church, and his representative on earth, the pope. But the Gospel of Thomas leaves spiritual destiny up to each individual. There Jesus treats us as equals, or at least as struggling siblings.

Finally, after so many centuries, the heretics are having their say. Another most interesting document found at Nag Hammadi is the Gospel of Philip, who explains baptism. Sometimes the person who receives baptism "receives the holy spirit...this is what happens when one experiences a mystery." Divine grace, this implies, isn't sufficient; the initiate's capacity for spiritual understanding is also a factor. "Faith is our earth, in which we take root; hope is the water through which we are nourished; love is the air through which we grow; gnosis is the light through which we become fully grown."