The Books Banned From the Bible: What Are the Gnostic Gospels?

Ela pagels welcome to the show thank you I'm happy to be here I've recently been getting really interested in the Gnostic Gospels the so-called Gnostic Gospels and in my work as someone who's interested in philosophy and religion they've always sort of been on the sideline I've always been aware that there are these texts that didn't make it into the New Testament that have these weird and wacky stories about Jesus and a totally different idea about the origins of Christianity but I really want to go on a deep dive and so I'm going to be making some episodes discussing particular texts the famous texts the Gospel of Thomas the Gospel of Judas but what I wanted to do today was get an overview of this Library what it is where it comes from what it means for our studies of early Christianity so I suppose I can only Begin by asking what is a Gnostic Gospel ah well it's it's first of all a misnamed gospel and and it's I'm partly responsible for that because when I first wrote a book about them these are texts that uh surprisingly landed upon our group of graduate students and faculty when I was a graduate student at Harvard um in the 70s for example and we were astonished to hear about a discovery in 1945 of over 50 ancient writings ancient religious writings they're not all Christian by any means um they're a great it's almost a miscellaneous library in many ways so classifying them in that way is a misnomer and we I called them Gnostic Gospels because we didn't know what else to call them uh I would Now call them early Christian gospels uh they're ones that displeased some of the Bishops and did not make the New Testament Canon for very specific reasons but they opened up the ancient world to us and the understanding of how the beginning of Christianity emerged in a quite a different way than we ever knew before just as the Dead Sea Scrolls really transformed the way we think about Judaism in the first century yeah the Gnostic or or the I suppose the early Christian gospels I should I should begin calling them uh the thing that's so amazing about them is that though we've known about their existence since the beginning of Christianity really I mean you have uh the bishop irenaeus writing uh against heresies and talking about these gospels that that were circulating at the time that we didn't have access to but we knew that they existed through the writings of their opponents these texts are finally actually discovered for us to be able to read The Originals themselves in in what 1945 in 1945 and yes we had known them for 2,000 years as heretical abominable um deceitful and uh you know diabolical texts right through the writings of the church fathers including irenaeus whom I got to know pretty well on this journey second Cent Bishop he was a Syrian missionary uh studied with Bishop polycarp who was uh burn to death in the arena in Antioch in about the year 180 because he was a Christian and he had sent this young missionary irus to to the Hinterlands of Barbarian France um go right and he was there trying to convert people to Christianity and he was aware that some people were reading gospels that were not the most familiar that is the ones now in the New Testament they were reading others that ireneus decided were subversive and diabolical and so that's what how we knew about them these are awful that was what we knew and when suddenly we could read them for the first time I was overjoyed and all of us were delighted because they transformed what we had expected yeah I mean it's it's hard to to press just how incred inedible a discovery this is and and so relatively speaking recent in in biblical scholarship I mean if you think about the amount of time that people have had to pour over every single word in the Gospel of John thousands of years these gospels have only been in our possession for for for less than a hundred years and so it's it's a really exciting area of of scholarship and your book the Gnostic Gospels I I have a have a copy here um sort of a seminal text on on introductions to to to these texts I I I must say I was sort of Blown Away by a lot of what I was reading beginning with just the story of how these gospels are discovered yes and they were found as you know in a cave in Egypt that's actually within walking distance of one of the earliest monasteries in Egypt which was founded probably in 315 by a soldier named ponus and we I think there are many arguments about these texts as likely you know so I'll give you the version that we learned um yes I think it's most likely of the options with which I'm familiar that these had been treasured in the library the sacred library of the monastery of St pomus the head of the the the the chief Monastery the foundation Monastery of 12 or 13 that he created was a was within a as I said a walking distance of this cave and when I walk to the cave from the monastery ruins you walk in and you can see the beginning of the line of a Psalm written on the on the wall of the cave because the monks would go there to pray and meditate and they would have the first line of the psalm uh the Lord is my shepherd or you know from the from the Lord comes my help would be the first line and then they would pray that Psalm as they meditated in those caves and about 300 years after the death of Jesus when the bishop of Alexandria uh athanasius made a the first list of what we now call the New Testament Canon which means a standard it's a measurement to keep a wall straight um he said just read the the the gospels on my list there are only four of them don't read any of the others because even though they may have good things in them they will absolutely Lead You astray and he required the monks the bishop did when he finally had political power behind him because emperor Constantine had become a Christian by then and instead of being persecuted he was being flooded with Imperial money and funds he said get rid of all those secret gospels they are very bad they're all wrong the difference a primary difference as I see it is that the gospels of now in the New Testament as as you know are narratives they all tell stories Matthew Mark and Luke of course very similar because they're all based on Mark John is a an outlier actually later and completely different these texts don't tell stories and the gospels Matthew Mark and Luke are presumed to be the teach teaching of Jesus when he spoke to thousands of people on the Hills of Galilee right the public teaching but if he taught as other rabbis did in the first century and this is very much confirmed by um the Oxford scholar um who wrote about them I'll speak about him in a moment um The Secret the the Gospels found at nag which were in the library of the monastery were the secret teaching of Jesus not the public teaching and if he taught his other rabbis did he would have taught both ways rabbis still do that they talk one way to the congregation you know and then they will talk to their own personal disciples about advanced level teaching so these weren't meant to replace the other gospels they were meant to be supplemental devotional material for people on an advanced level and that's that's what they look like yes uh this idea of of secret knowledge that's different from the public knowledge that that Jesus professes is is a key uh throughout the Gnostic themes but before we jump into that you talked about how athanasius comes up with a a scriptural Cannon and says any other gospel shouldn't be read and so there are some theories that suggest that this is why these texts end up buried in this cave in Egypt in nakadi as you say and it's a few thousand years later that these texts are discovered essentially by accident if I'm not mistaken yes apparently so I mean people go into those go into those caves looking for uh burials and looking for things that were hidden there and the story we get from one of the earliest PRS who claims to have found it is that he was just digging around and he found this six foot which contained 13 bound leather bound books they're large they're about that big you know these large books and they would have been that's about that's about um it's about a foot or so just for our for our listeners it's about a foot wide and a and maybe uh two feet long and one one wide they would have been put on elran most likely and read by this by the reader that night since some of the monks didn't read during evening devotions but as I said this I was just reading the work of someone who very much dislikes the secret gospels and writes against them and there are many people in that group uh who says um that they contradict the New Testament actually as I said they don't they supplement it and he claimed that there's no historical evidence for Jesus teaching that way that is completely wrong if you read the gospel of Mark chapter 4 and ask did Jesus have a secret teaching Mark 4 says before Mark for Jesus is talking to crowds on on on the fields then he comes he's along with his disciples and he says to you alone is given the secret and the Greek word is Mysterion right the mystery of the kingdom of God but to people out there everything is in Parables all I'm telling them is Parables and at the end of chapter four of Mark he goes on telling Parables and saying I'm not telling them so people will understand my teaching I'm telling them so they will not understand I don't want them to understand what I'm telling you so so and this is in the gospel of Mark this is in the canonical gospel that Christians today believe in Mark 410 and 11 Jesus says only you I'm giving the secret teaching but Mark doesn't tell you what it is yeah the secret teaching is only included in these others and and um that's one reason why the Bishops didn't trust it they said well nobody heard it except one or two people how can you validate that well you can't really M um doesn't Paul say a similar thing in one of his letters about the idea of uh having discovered some secret knowledge that he can't relay to the readers of his Epistles oh absolutely you you have it in 1 Corinthians 2 he says among the mature you you know Greek at all among among the unfortunately not among the mature people the he calls them the the grown-ups we speak wisdom we Divine wisdom hidden before the ages for our Glory Secrets Divine wisdom that's 1 Corinthians 2 10- 16 but he says not I'm not telling you that I you you people in Corinth are just babies you're babies in Christ I'm not going to tell you any of that stuff so Paul keeps his secret wisdom to himself and so did Jesus except to certain disciples but that is if One Believes the New Testament gospel and I think Mark is as close as we get to the earliest Witnesses of these stories um Jesus did teach secretly but we don't have his secret teaching extent because it wasn't meant to be it was meant to be actually told orally because then you could judge to whom you were speaking and the level of maturity of that person we'll get back to elae pagels in just a moment but first a message I'm speaking at a conference in Atlanta Georgia this June the conference is called level up and it covers a wide range of topics including philosophy Society culture art and self-improvement it's taking place between the 19th and 22nd of June 2024 in Atlanta Georgia I'm going to be in conversation with Craig bidd about morality so if you're interested in the conversations about ethics is it objective as Craig thinks or is my emotivist framework a better a picture of what ethics is all about then this might be the event for you you can get your tickets at LevelUp conferences. org I'm excited not just to speak at this conference but also to be in attendance there are lots of other speakers including aan hery Ali for example who'll be discussing whether the future of liberalism should be religious or secular in light of her recent conversion to Christianity and if you go to LevelUp conferences. org then at checkout you'll be able to enter Alex 50 as a coupon code and get 50% off your registration fee so if you like these kinds of conversations and can make it to Atlanta and hopefully I'll see you there now back to Elaine pagels so you mentioned Mark a moment ago this passage I just wanted to quote it for our for our listeners so they can hear it in full uh this is Mark 4:1 when he was alone the TW and the others around him asked him about The Parables he told them the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you but to those on on the outside everything is said in Parables so that uh and then this is a quote of of the prophet desire they may be ever seeeing but not but never perceiving and ever hearing but never understanding otherwise they might turn and be forgiven so you're quite you're quite right it's it's very very strange Jesus seems to be saying that he is deliberately speaking in Parables so that people will not understand the true teaching of his message and if you go down to verse 31 of chapter four you'll see he'll he'll say again uh so that they will not understand I'm ministers will say oh he speaks in Parables to make it nice and simple for you and Mark says no he makes it that way so you don't understand yes verse verse 33- 34 with many similar Parables Jesus spoke the word to them as much as they could understand he did not say anything to them without using a parable but when he was alone with his own disciples he explained everything correct and what what we judge is that the Gospel of Thomas which is said to have been told to Thomas the disciple the Gospel of Mary Magdalene said to have been told to Mary Magdalene the gospel of Phillip allegedly reported by Phillip um many others uh are told and claim to be told by certain people many of the other texts found with the go and by the way I'm sorry you will cut a lot of this of the more than 50 texts that were found really only four or five of them should be called gospels because they have that title uh inscribed uh next to the text but others are Revelation texts in which people speak with Jesus and receive secret Revelation there are many other kinds of texts but they all claim to be secret teachings or many of them claim to be secret teachings except the texts in the collection which aren't Christian uh there are some that refer instead to the Greek gods some of them sound like they're written to Jewish writers or by Jewish writers some refer to Greek stories and myths there was a copy of or a partial copy of Plato's Republic I think found amongst the nakadi library yes there is there is so it's quite miscellaneous in a way but the primary find consists of what you call spiritual writings that you might find in a monastery Library today even yes and so these texts are then discovered by somebody who's digging in the desert hits into this jar and by some accounts is at first afraid to open it in case it contains a gin or like a demon uh and then finally thinks well maybe it's worth some money opens it up finds a bunch of Papyrus takes it home I think his mother is alleged to have used some of it as as fuel for her fire like she kept it by the fire to to feed the fire and these would have been these ancient uh sort of not non-canonical Christian manuscripts and it's only after Decades of people realizing their worth and then trying to smuggle them out of Egypt and trying to sell them back and forth that finally in again we're talking about the 20th century here that these texts are finally translated and and and we're able to listen to them uh we're able to read them ourselves what where can we begin with trying to understand I mean interestingly my idea of the Gnostic Gospels is that they sort of portray this different vision of Jesus in particular the physicality of Jesus whereas the canonical gospels seem to emphasize a a physical Resurrection in many points um the gnostics seem to believe in the non-ph physicality of Jesus and the the creation of the material world by a separate entity not the god of the universe this is really interesting stuff but I'm wondering if you can as well as explaining a bit about that tell us how that fits into your earlier supposition that these gospels are supposed to uh supposed to sort of complement the canonical gospels rather than contradict them well early on we heard all of those kinds of allegations um yeah the these will be full of garbled things full of passwords full of weird heretical teachings I was very struck that the Gospel of Thomas consists only as you know of of 110 sayings of Jesus uh these are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and and dimus Judas Thomas wrote them down and those sayings actually half of them in Thomas are identical virtually identical with what you find in Luke and Matthew um love your brother um blessed are the poor or the parable of the Mustard Seed there's half of it is identical the other half are like Zen Coons as I read them I stopped reading when I start found saying s days which as I translate it reads Jesus said if you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you if you do not bring forth what is within you what you do not bring forth will destroy you and I thought oh you don't have to believe that it just happens to be true and I took it psychologically as a powerful statement but I realized later it's a theological statement because it's it's about the divine presence in the universe from which you and I and all of us are created the Divine energy from which everything came forth is perceived in the Gospel of Thomas as light and what the Gospel of Thomas urges the advanced follower of Jesus to do is to look for The Light Within which is a metaphor for the energy that comes from being connected with the source of the universe and its energy I find it if anything I would say more pantheistic but the idea that the that the world was created by an evil demur is the imposition of a completely different heretical system onto this text which has nothing to do with it there's nothing like that in Thomas at all this is a text really which resembles nothing more than Jewish mysticism as as Gentiles did not know it until the 15th or 16th century when mystical texts from cabala were published I believe from Spain and and people in France and England and Holland began to read them and were fascinated by Jewish mystical text we call it kabala which has a very similar view that in the beginning God was a kind of divine source of Divine Light and energy pouring energy into the darkness of the universe and bringing forth the beauty of the world through which shines the Divine energy everywhere once you learn how to see it so it's as I understand it I've struggled to do that for 25 years it's a mystical text I I want to ask about this idea of the the Creator God of the of the material universe and the separation of Jesus I mean you're quite right the Gospel of Thomas being quite a short collection of just quotes of Jesus this is this is an imposed theology if you think that's what the text means perhaps okay but there are other non-canonical gospels which quite clearly point to the idea that Jesus is specifically sent to say save people from this material condition they find themselves in as being uh created by this this evil God that is the creator of the material world and Jesus is the sort of non-physical entity that comes to help us Break Free of that condition where where do we find that idea in in the Gnostic uh in the Gnostic collection you know where I find that idea in irus who can't stand these gospels he says don't touch them don't even read them don't think about that because they're just the same as as the false teacher marcian marcian was not a gnostic he was in a way a literal Christian a gentile from Asia Minor who became a Christian and is he he read the New Testament he said oh this is a message of love but then he read the Hebrew Bible and he said but that god is vengeful and judgmental and he created the world and it's full of terrible things like death and mosquitoes snakes he mentions those that was declared a heresy very early that as I read it has nothing to do with these texts but irenaeus wanted to condemn them and so he said oh this is nothing but that same old heresy I don't find that here there are some texts in the collection which are not well I say some of the sources in the collection Express the similar view that also you find in Jewish mysticism that the the Divine energy behind the universe is not the character you almost find in Genesis and exodus judging the world punishing people for touching the Ark by condemning them to death and so forth so it gets mixed up in the writings of the people who really are opposed to the idea that these secret Gospels have any value but I must add that only some of the texts from mamadi for me have this kind of spiritual power that Thomas does uh some of the others um the tretis on Resurrection for example and there you mentioned something important the tretis on Resurrection belongs to this small group of texts that I find very spiritually powerful because it's written by a teacher who was trying to explain to his pupil what does Paul mean by Resurrection do you have to believe that do you have to believe that that Jesus was dead and came back to life and the Treatise on Resurrection interprets 1 Corinthians 15 Paul's teaching on Resurrection but Paul did not see Jesus come out of the Grave Paul did not touch him Paul never talks that way about Jesus coming out of the Grave Paul says there I was you know traveling to Syria and suddenly I saw this brilliant light in the sky and and I I fell down and I was blind by it and and I heard Jesus speaking to me and saying Saul why are you doing this why are you persecuting me and I said who are you and he said I am Jesus whom you pers you know the story so he said I saw this light I heard this voice Jesus spoke to me that's how I saw and if you read Paul's views on Resurrection he talks about this physical body must be transformed into an invisible body this material must be transformed into imperishable we have to be transformed and the resurrection is a transformation not a resurrection of a physical body which is what the church doctrine becomes if you know you know the Creed of the church it talks about the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come that is not Paul's teaching it's the teaching of the synoptic gospels which do talk about Jesus was in that grave he came out of it we touched him we felt him there he was Mark says it well in the in the added ending of Mark yeah Luke more miracles Matthew adds even more miracles and say not only that when Jesus died people came out of the graves all over Jerusalem the ones that are up on the Mount of Olives it's all a graveyard today it was then so people came out of all those Graves and visited people in the city so the Jewish view of Resurrection is coming out of the Grave physically is what you find in the New Testament but in Paul you find Resurrection as transformation and in Orthodox Christian tradition those get smashed together into one you you wrote a book called the Gnostic pool and you've you've mentioned marcian uh who our listeners may or may not be familiar with Marian is is a very early Christian who compiles so they say the first Christian New Testament Cannon he it's the earliest uh that that we have of somebody putting together a group of texts and saying these are the authoritative texts and this text that that marcian produces is completely absent the Old Testament the old testament's gone uh it's got one gospel which is kind of like the Gospel of Luke but with some bits missing um usually thought to be a redacted version of Luke although some people believe in the marcian priority that Luke was based on Marian's gospel uh and then some of the letters of Paul but interestingly here marcian thought that Paul was the only Apostle of Jesus the only true Apostle and as far as I understand this this early Christian who compiles the first New Testament Cannon believed that Paul was the only true Apostle of Christ because the other Apostles the twel were actually sort of still worshiping this demiurgic material Creator God who's not the real God of the universe is is that an accurate representation it is very accurate and it is marcian whose view that the god of the Hebrew Bible who created the world did a terrible thing he created a kind of prison in which we live but the god of Jesus is a is a distant God far beyond that a spiritual God who rescues us from this world and that is exactly where you get the parody of the Gnostic Gospels in ireneus marcian is the author of that heresy and that's that's what they claim the secret gospels teach but they don't this one is about however there were mystically inclined Jews as well who said you cannot speak the name of God right because because the reality beyond that name is so much greater than we can imagine that we D not even speak the name but when you look at the picture of God in the Hebrew Bible you can't take that literally you have to take that as a some kind of a human construct so Marian's view was echoed before that but it is marcian who teaching is then projected onto the Gospel of Thomas completely in a mistaken way but there are uh these these early Gnostic teachers marcian valentinus Seth who do believe in this picture of the universe this picture of the evil material God and Jesus the sort of spiritual savior right and and so if that's projected onto the Gospel of Thomas we still have texts as part of our Gnostic collection that come from allegedly some from valentina's own hand but certainly by their their followers which which are explicitly condoning this view of the universe right I would like to separate these people because marcian is a literal-minded Christian very different and with a very limited theology I would say completely different from valentineus who was a poet and a Mystic a homelist a singer um and a Visionary and his teaching is much closer to Thomas it's also in the in the Treatise on Resurrection which talks about the resurrection as a spiritual transformation using Paul so valentinus loved Paul's teaching and because Paul was the only disciple who speaks about not only hearing the words of Jesus that he spoke in Galilee but also having visions and receiving secret teaching so valentineus understands a double path a public teaching of Jesus and a and a secret path which is Mystical and he is a mystical teacher and that group of that group of text valentines's beautiful poem summer Harvest or the tripartite tractate or the gospel of Phillip those are really much more like Jewish mystical teaching those are the ones I'm talking about and I guess those are the ones that interest me most because there's a powerful mystical tradition there which we find today in cabala when I went to the Orthodox uh Jewish seminary in Brooklyn to speak to the biblical Scholars about the Gospel of Thomas they immediately recognize its Affinity with the Hebrew Bible and also with Jewish mysticism so I guess those are the texts I favor and I tend to speak about those if you look among all the collection of 50 texts you can find some that are pretty weird I admit that yeah and and there are texts like uh for in instance the gospel of Judas which as far as I know wasn't part of the nakadi library uh but is another one of these non-canonical Christian gospels that focuses on Judas as the person with the the secret knowledge and it is this secret knowledge idea that sort of goes throughout these these texts and I mean I I I have the text here and when when you read it and it begins this Gospel of Judas with uh Jesus coming across his disciples praying they're praying over some bread he laughed the disciples said to him Master why are you laughing at our prayer what have we done this is what's right and Jesus answered them and says I'm not laughing at you you're not doing this because you want to but because through this your God will be praised and they said Master you are the Son of God and he says how do you how do you know me truly I say to you no generation of the people among you will know me so you've got this idea of Jesus saying hauh well you're praying to your God which is already quite strange and then famously he sort of pulls Judas aside and he he he takes Judas away from the the rest of the disciples and sort of says you know do you know do you know who I am and Judas says to him I know who you are and where you've come from you've come from The Immortal Realm of barbell and I'm not worthy to utter the name of the one who sent you and Jesus seems to condone this and essentially say that he's correct and because of this secret knowledge Judas is given this special task of of you know betraying Jesus at least in in the public eye but I mean reading that I'm like okay so you've got the disciples praying and Jesus saying oh you you're worshiping your god there Judas coming aside and saying oh I know you're from the realm of barbell which which stunned me when I first read it a text like this is is seemingly painting a totally different picture right I would actually myself I would prefer not to comment on on that I wrote a book about it with Karen King it's not I don't like the text I don't think it's worth very much it doesn't have the quality of the others it was found much later and probably written later um the secret gospels that are really interesting to me are those that have a lot more uh spiritual teaching that is worthwhile um for for example another difference so so let me go back to the Gospel of Thomas if I may one thing that's quite different is that in the New Testament gospel you'll find that the disciples are always the men and only the men the women cannot be disciples Luke says that explicitly in the beginning of the book of Acts uh women can't women may not qualify right they're not Apostles in the secret gospels you find women among the disciples salom is one of the people mentioned in Luke as a follower of Jesus not of course the one who for King Herod um Mary the mother of James uh and Mary Magdalene who are seen as followers of Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas they are disciples and they're understood as disciples and you find that in many of these secret gospels of this tradition that women were permitted to participate in whatever groups revered those texts which they were not allowed to do in the group at for formed around the the New Testament so that's a different but the idea of secret knowledge is is eliminated by the Orthodox because they they think you can be very easily misled that way I'd like to talk about this not just the concept of women in the Gnostic texts which as you say treated quite differently from the canonical text but also just the the influence of the feminine itself in the actual uh Theology of of these Gnostic texts I mean you have a chapter in in your in your book uh about God the mother versus God the Father what what's that all about well I think it's about language for one thing um if you talk about the Divine being uh with three what do we call it three um faces pardon me three persons in three persons I was thinking the word Persona is from the word the Greek word mask um and it comes from the stage you know that put on a different mask so so God is understood in what becomes Christian theology as having a manifested Divinity in terms of father the mother and the son I mean the Father the Son and the spirit right now if you're reading Hebrew or Aramaic or uh Arabic as I understand it the word for spirit is a feminine word but if you when you translate that into Greek and the New Testament of course is written in Greek and so is the Gospel of Thomas and all these texts are written in Greek originally so when you translate Spirit into Greek it becomes pnoa which is a neuter word when you translate it into and it becomes spiritist and it becomes a masculine word but in these texts for example the secret book of John Jesus appears to his disciples John as he does to Paul in Paul's Vision in a in a brilliant light in the sky and he speaks and he says he says John John I am the father I am the mother and I am the son because this if you understand Spirit as a feminine presence and you're using anthropomorphic language you would imagine father who would you expect with a father and the son it would be the mother right so it's a it's a human a human family is articulated there but you don't get that when you translate into these other languages so that connotation is lost but as you say in some of these texts one is called the triple formed Primal thought it has a feminine voice saying I am the triple formed Primal thought from the beginning of time I am the thought of everything that comes forth from creation and therefore the word thought is also a feminine word and so the idea that the Divine manifests in masculine and feminine forms is again synonymous with Jewish mystical teaching which speaks about the Divine being as a kind of energy that flows from a huge from an enormous Source in the universe in masculine and feminine ways they call it in Hebrew the seph so again that's why I find these connections with Jewish mystical tradition very interesting and I think we Lo we lost that tradition in what became Orthodox Christianity can you tell me about one of the texts that we haven't mentioned yet which I found particularly fascinating which is the so-called testimony of truth which involves the retelling of the uh of the story of Genesis and the creation of the world and the identification of of the serpent as well let's say something other than evil yes that that is it's some of these texts are really have a sort of animos an have a hostile view of Jewish tradition or set think that it's giving the wrong message and this text takes the Adam and Eve story and turns it upside down and say well you think Eve is the sinner but actually Eve is the illuminous intelligence that illuminated Adam Eve is the spiritual teacher and and it goes on to say that that um the serpent which was cursed by God is actually Christ that comes from the beginning of the Gospel of John do you know in the first chapter it says the serpent was lifted up in the wild wildness so must the son of man be lifted up on the cross and that image there is the is the physicians's staff right with a serpent around it with a snake around it which is a symbol of wisdom and the symbol of the god is cppy as the god of healing so here Jesus is identifi identified as the serpent who heals if when people look upon the staff um it it's an inversion of the story saying the serpent is actually teaching Adam and Eve wisdom he says eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is what you need to do it's only the limited God who doesn't want you to become wise so this is another text that has an idea of of the god of the Genesis story as an evil God as a as an inferior God at least you could say yes and there are quite a few of those yes I think a lot of Gentiles in the ancient world world found the Hebrew Bible a very strange text this God is a judge he's harsh um he's judgmental he he stays only with his own people um he does many striking and negative things if anyone touches the ark that is his dwelling he strikes them dead so there were many negative views about Judaism in the ancient world uh and some posit ones but you find some of those in these texts you're right so the these Gnostic texts which talk about Jesus as the serpent already had sort of a marvelous and and Incredibly subversive idea but then also this inferior God who trying to prevent Adam and Eve from attaining spiritual knowledge are we looking at a kind of polytheism here then or maybe a kind of henotheism that is multiple gods but one God is is better and above all others like how how should we interpret the Theology of these text well I I don't think there's a single way at all I mean some of them might fit into a kind of polytheistic mode but more often you find at least in the text that uh follow this kind of um model of Jewish mysticism you find different beings named as the Divine so so that's why I can't speak about these 50 some texts as if they spoke with a single voice because they really don't and as I said I do play favorites there are some that I think are much more worth our time than others of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene for example for example you know that the Gospel of John is always talking about Jesus coming into the world to die for the sin of the world right that's John's whole pitch is about the sin of the world that has to be expunged by Jesus dying on the cross um The Gospel of Mary somebody says to Mary Magdalene here seen as a Visionary what is the sin of the world and she says there is no sin of the world but sin is something you do when you do harm so there are Christians who absolutely discard John's View and they also encourage you to look at secret teaching and Visionary teaching and teaching that is symbolic in which the meaning is not always on the surface that's what esoteric teaching is about you know every tradition as you know whether it's Hindu Buddhist Muslim um what else they all have a secret teaching ESO iic teaching mystical teaching and public teaching Christianity in the beginning in the 4th Century the Bishops tried to eliminate mystical teaching because it meant that you could have a vision I could have a vision that would contradict what the church was setting up as pure true Dogma the nyine Creed the the arguments about Theology of the 4th Century which grandly proceed into the 21st right yeah one of the one of the really interesting things uh reading your book was was this idea that early gnostics believed that once you reach a level of spiritual maturity you can essentially just start teaching new information new theological insights not from some past down tradition that you've learned because you you know you spoke to Paul and Paul got this secret message from Jesus but just because you sort of uncover it yourself through your prayer and meditation and insight or just because the spirit reveals it to you if you look at again 1 Corinthians 2 uh and chapter 3 Paul says we he's including himself we who are taught by the spirit we learn all kinds of things that that we can't explain to people who aren't spiritual we're not talking about them to anyone who doesn't have the capacity it's not that you make them up or invent them he would say the spirit can teach you things and will if you're open to spiritual understanding the problem with that is people can say you know I was told by the spirit to Massacre my family I mean where do you stop there you know saying that anybody can receive the spirit can lead to Insanity I mean insane and cruel and horrifying results so Orthodoxy was created to to put a boundary on that but what it did is it limits spiritual understanding to what they claim is in the Bible which has the only spiritual truth and whoever wrote The Secret gospels did not accept that they were open to ongoing Revelation that you could have tonight so do you think that Paul can be described as a gnostic I think Paul is certainly a Visionary I wouldn't call him a gnostic I called him Paul the Gnostic just because the gnostics liked him so much but what they liked the word Gnostic is so overused there are two massive books you know about what is gnosticism ah the word is made up and the word is pical that's why I don't like it it means all the bad stuff you shouldn't believe hm but Paul was a Visionary and Paul what do you want to say was a Mystic he says he went up into the the third heaven and heard things that he wasn't allowed to speak uh he had Revelations he couldn't possibly tell you um that's the kind of secret teaching that Mystics claim to receive to this day and um Mystics in the Catholic church and the Protestant churches have always been red in by Orthodoxy blocking them at every point from saying anything that doesn't agree with what becomes fourth Century Theology of which as you can see I'm not a great fan because it did what was it did what it was meant to do which is suggest a control uh a kind of Monopoly on spiritual truth Within the Catholic Church which still claims that Monopoly um and deny it anywhere else I was quite stunned in in reading your your book again to find that Ignatius of Antioch of Antioch um writes in the early church that the leoty should Revere and honor and obey the bishop as if he were God yes it's this extraordinary letter where the the sort of absolute authority of the bishop is established and the again that phrase as if he were God seems to run so contrary to what you might expect a Christian to think about Earthly Dominion but this comes in your book as part of a chapter on this making heretical the the Gnostic tradition maybe having something to do with the consolidation of power in human Earthly Bishops what's well what's that all about well I think that is what happens that when Constantine becomes a Christian and puts the power of the state the military behind a group of Bishops um they claim that they have all knowledge of all truth and all of it is in the Canon of books that they prescribe and they limit and and these they don't want mystical teachings because mystical teachings are always open and always can be claim to be transcended and the Catholic Church to this day doesn't allow that uh and most Christians don't except pentecostalists except uh Quakers uh who who believe that the spirit in fact leads people into truth that's what Gospel of John says so that prohibition that's why I wrote about whose church is the true church because people who wanted to to claim not only public tradition but also private tradition secret tradition have always been excluded and have always stood outside of Orthodoxy which means you know straight thinking I always think of it as like orthodontia it's like straight teeth you think straight you think the way we think right yeah we'll tell you what to think and of course if if you allow for people to if you allow for people to have their own spiritual insights and authoritative teaching that just comes to them from the spirit that allows them to look at a bishop and say I don't need to follow you I have authority that comes from the spirit and if it contradicts what you're saying then your your power as as an Earthly Bishop isn't enough to overcome that and and that might have something to do it seems like you're suggesting in the in the chapter uh with this condemning of the Gnostic tradition you're absolutely right I mean irus Must Have Spent decades writing this massive Trea us against Heretics it's five huge volumes it's taken me decades to to get the coherence of it it ends with a curse on the Heretics consigning them all to hell um and say oh just follow the Bishops that is the way of truth that is safe but you must not you must not diverge from that and you must not think you know more than I do because I am ireneus and I am the bishop and those people are saying I don't understand something that they understand something higher that is unacceptable that is they deserve to be sent to Eternal fire and that's how the book ends the book against the Heretics as given the sort of political context of these texts and their condemnation as we begin to go through these texts like I say uh hopefully we're going to be doing some episodes soon where we we dig into individual text and look at their their history their theology with with a with a bunch of different uh bunch of different guests and different Scholars what should people be keeping in mind they sit down to read the Gospel of Thomas I mean for a start one thing we didn't speak about was the dating of these texts I think that the the age of the text is is disputed and across a wide range but the Gospel of Thomas for example some Scholars think it could be as early as like 70 AD and some believe it could be as late as 200 ad because the the gospel of Thomas that's discovered in Egypt is a Coptic translation so we know that that's already quite early but dating the original is is quite difficult but you know we're talking about maybe early texts here maybe later than the New Testament Canon maybe earlier maybe sort of developing in this political tradition or that political tradition as we begin to look at these texts what should we be thinking I've got the Gospel of Thomas on on my desk and I think what kind of texts am I about to read and what should I be keeping in mind first of all that's an important question because I don't think we know anything about the dating of the original text um my professor guessed it was the earliest text we had I don't see any reason that it would be that um it's might be a composite collection um we know it comes as early as the Gospel of John because we have fragments in Greek that are that are known long before we found a Coptic translation from the 4th Century some people now want to say it's a fourth Century text ah but usually people who tell you they know are telling you because they want to say it's early and authentic or it's late in derivative right uh Lon gatheral places it late in derivative because he really doesn't like it and he thinks it's a terrible influence that he spent more than 10 years of his life showing how terrible it is um and other Scholars like me uh tend to think we don't know but it it could be as early as John that's what the evidence of the text suggests but we don't know and I happen to be I like these texts I have a sort of protestant heretical streak as you can tell and um and a dislike of the kind of absolutist authority that Christian churches so often claim can I ask what you make given that you speak quite sort of fondly of of the Gospel of Thomas yes and and think that it seemingly contains some know important spiritual insights can I ask what you make and and I'm going to be diving into this again in in the episode that I'll do on the Gospel of Thomas but of this Famous Final passage from the Gospel of Thomas I'll read it out for the listeners who aren't familiar it's again an astonishing passage and and again this is just a collection of quotes and things that Jesus said um yes and this is the very last one in the Gospel of Thomas Simon Peter said to him to Jesus that is let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life now when you first hear that you think Jesus might be about to say something like of course women are worthy of life she can come with us but no Thomas reports that Jesus says this in response I myself shall lead her in order to make her male so that she may too she too may become a Living spirit resembling you males for every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven as somebody who seems to have a fondness for the for the Gospel of Thomas what do you make of this yes when when when I was at Harvard and then at Oxford I thought oh you know that's what these institutions are are doing they're trying to turn women into men um I saw hash made out of this in in text I was just reading about Thomas what it comes from is a Jewish interpretation of the Genesis story which we find in the work of Pho judeus Pho is a contemporary of Jesus he's certainly not a Christian an aristocrat educated Jew very devout who interprets the Book of Genesis and he says well what does it mean God made Adam In His Image in the image of God he created him male and female he created them Pho was trying to figure out what is the him that was created first and what was the them that was created subsequently and Pho being influenced by spiritual tradition in Plato said well when it says he created him it means the human being it means the the essence of the human right the spiritual essence of Being Human anthropos in Greek and when it says male and female he created them it's when the the essential human being was divided into male and female and so here this re and Pho says so then women and men must suppress their identification with gender in order to understand their essential Humanity so here Jesus is saying yes Mary is a this is just this is just Jewish tradition you're not supposed to teach Torah to a to a woman and and it was prohibited by many rabbis and so Jesus is speaking like any Rabbi saying yes I will take Mary and she will have to suppress her gender in order to recognize her greater Humanity um as as a human being and into the higher level of the first creation as a spiritual being now if you look at saying 61 for anyone you ask that question that is when Jesus is speaking to Mary I think it is to solom and and and um and he speaks would you read 61 to us yes Jesus said two will rest on a bed the one will die and the other will live so is it salom or Sal salomi salom disciples in the New Testament salom yeah salomi salomi one of the women disciples in the New Testament said who are you man that you have come up on my couch and eaten from my table Jesus said to her I am he who exists from the undivided I was given some of the things of my father I am your disciple and she says she says I am your disciple and then back to Jesus therefore I say if he is destroyed he will be filled with light but if he is divided he will be filled with Darkness I'm sorry that's a bad translation but at the end um salomi speaks to Jesus and she says who are you man you came up my couch and have eaten from my that's sounds pretty sexualized right do you have a I mean do you have a a better I've just sort of Googled the first who are you man you've come up on my couch and I mean she's saying I'm a woman you're a man what are you doing who are you and he says I am he he refuses that and says I have come from what is undivided that is from the spiritual Humanity that is prior to gender and then she says oh I get it I'm your disciple and he says yes because whoever sees himself as male or female is talking about a divided Humanity but whoever is undivided is full of light that is that first spiritual creation that was created in the image of God because Thomas is all about being created in the image of of God which is which is not a human image it's the image is light that we have within us the light of God and if you recognize that's who you are more than being male or female that is the the level at which Mary and salom are supposed to join Jesus in a in a sense of that other level of understanding what it means to be human can I say something else about Thomas it is I think a mystical text because at one point Jesus says I uh I am the one who is before all things I am all things uh he he is he says split a piece of wood and I am there lift up a rock and you will find me because he speaks not as a person so much as a manifestation of the Divine Light at the beginning of the universe and if you look at sayings 50 and 51 these are new baptisms Jesus says if people say to you who are you if you read that so I think it's uh sayings 50 and 51 here so 50 that's that's right 50 has Jesus said if they say to you where did you come from say to them we came from the light the place where light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image if they say to you is it you say we are its children we are the elect of the living father if they say to you what is the sign of the father in you say to them it is movement and Repose his disciples said to him that's this is an initiation if if Jesus says if they say to you who are you say or where do you come from you know you don't say California or London you say we not I we come from the light we come we're talking about spiritual identity now right we all come from the same place not different places and that place is the where the light originated in the beginning of time when God said let there be light this is all about Genesis as I read Thomas God said let there be light everything came forth from that we come from that original light and if they say who are you then say um we are children of the light we are children we're all of the same family we all come from the same father and other text would say and from the same mother the holy spirit so this is an acceptance of a new spiritual identity which is not individual at all but Collective for all beings because we're all created in the image of God in the image of the Divine Light and and it says uh that verse about it's been brought forth in their image it's about the image of God within us so that means that we're all part of the same when we recognize who we are spiritually and that's the same as the teaching that salomi receives you see and even at the end when Mary has to be taken out of the perception of being different because she's female and brought into the wholeness of spiritual Humanity which is the first creation the single one um that's how Pho judeus interprets it a Jewish Theologian and interpreter Jesus's contemporary who's not a Christian he's not a Mystic it's just the way a Jew would interpret it and this is I think a lot of Jewish teaching uh this this book um that Jesus might have did he have a secret teaching I don't know but Mark says he did and um and if so this this is a possible kind of teaching so I don't mean to be a missionary for this text but simply to say that these texts show a much wider range of views thatr Chans had in the early Century than were ever allowed after a Creed was formulated well as I say to our listeners we're going to be doing some more specific deep Dives on particular Gnostic text and I think we're going to be beginning with the Gospel of Thomas so we'll be getting into this into this much more uh but also for this this overview the book that I've been referring to is the Gnostic Gospels Elaine Pagel who joins us today as its author uh which I believe you wrote this in in the 70s is that right it was right after graduate school and I think I got to know it better when I wrote beyond belief 25 years later because it's about the Gospel of Thomas but it was a more mature approach to it this was a first take um and it was attacked in the New York Times um by a Catholic scholar very wellknown scholar and one I knew very well was a friend of mine actually and he said well these people really were the crazies of the first century your second century and that's the Judgment of many people to this day so I'm sure you'll have a lot of controversy well I I we we love a a controversial book and so I'll make sure that it's links down in the description as I say I I've been reading it recently and finding it absolutely fascinating as I've been finding everything about the Gnostic Gospels and and the context surrounding them incredibly fascinating so I'm I'm excited to jump in and I'm really glad that you could join us today for uh for this sort of first first shot at getting to grips with what these texts represent well thank you it's been a marvelous wide range of conversation I've really enjoyed it if you want to get access to these videos early and AD free as well as supporting the channel then go to patreon.com alexo watch more videos by clicking the link on your screen subscribe if you want to and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Alex O'Connor

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Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, within reason, podcast, within reason podcast, religion, debate, Alex J O'Connor

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Length: 69min 17sec (4157 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024