posted on January 1, 2007 in Features | Be the First to Comment | Print

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It is easy to blame author Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which has sold more than 61 million copies worldwide in 45 languages and is now the eighth-best-selling book of all time, for sparking a renewed interest in the Gnostic gospels and related texts. Instead, the novel's success can be seen as merely a symptom of a larger phenomenon, which seeks to find an alternative history of Christianity. Obscure academics and many populist authors have been pecking away at the authenticity of Christianity's roots for a very long time. Elaine Pagels has been writing about Gnostic texts for decades, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail laid out more than two decades ago much the same landscape that Dan Brown trod. (In fact, that book's authors sued Brown recently for fictionalizing their unsubstantiated facts.) Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ stated much of the same 55 years ago. The modern resurgence of Gnosticism and enduring questions about the identity of Jesus and the origins of Christianity all helped fuel the sales of Brown's novel.
And each time the debate flares, the Christian church has responded in much the same way: with apoplectic denial of Gnostic texts, calling them heresy. It is true that Brown's novel is filled with historical inaccuracies, including some modern ones. Much of these have been laid out in a steady stream of books by Christian scholars and also in the secular press. National Geographic, PBS and a host of other media outlets have featured documentaries refuting the historical details. And, yet, many Christians are once more startled to hear that their faith and the church's beliefs did not arise in the linear, straightforward way in which they have typically been portrayed. And with The Da Vinci Code prominently featuring texts other than the ones included in the New Testament, and The Gospel of Judas hitting the front page of national publications, Christians themselves feel undereducated by their own church. If there are so many gospels available, why has the church kept only four?
After Christ's departure, as the eyewitnesses of his life and ministry began to record in writing what they had seen and heard, some of them painted considerably different visions of Christ than those with which modern Christians are typically familiar. Modern Gnostics have long suggested that the early church silenced these differing perspectives by somehow engineering the disappearance of the texts that favoured other views of Christ. The movement received a strong impetus when a trove of documents discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 included several texts that seemed to give early credibility to Gnostic views about Christ and his mission.
Gnosticism is a belief system that predates Christ by about five centuries. There is much scholarly debate as to the origins and nature of Gnosticism; in today's context it is used to define a broad assortment of writers, thinkers and sects who believed in a dualistic god — a flawed god, the Demiurge, who created the flawed material world and a good god, who is the father of Jesus. And human beings were categorized into three levels of a hierarchy; the highest of which was, naturally, Gnosticism, or the acquiring of gnosis, or knowledge. Salvation came through gnosis, not through forgiveness or grace.

In the aftermath of Christ's death (and resurrection) many Gnostic texts claimed themselves as Christian. But, they interpreted Jesus' life and mission through their own lens. Gnostic beliefs did not include the virgin birth, a divine and resurrected Jesus or that salvation comes through Christ.
(Gnostics did, however, believe that human beings were essentially evil. This had a strong effect on Saint Augustine in the development of his concept of total depravity. He in turn, influenced John Calvin.)
Gnosticism spread from the Middle East to north Africa and was an influential movement for a few centuries — so powerful, in fact, that the texts now known as Gnostic Gospels were debated for inclusion in the New Testament. For a variety of reasons, the texts that survive as our gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would eventually be recognized as authoritative. For instance, they were written between 65 and 95, and predate the Gnostic gospels of Thomas, Peter and Mary, which were written between 110 and 150. By the time The Gospel of Judas, The Gospel of Truth and The Secret Book of John were written in 150, the four gospels were already beginning to gain unique acceptance.

Pages from the book of the Gospel of Thomas and a photograph of a page of the papyrus found in 1945.

When more than 300 bishops were convened to a meeting at Nicea at the invitation of the newly converted emperor Constantine in 325, their primary goal was to deal with questions about the nature of Christ. To what extent was he human and how much of his divinity did he keep when he walked the earth? Contrary to Dan Brown's assertion, neither this council of bishops, nor Constantine himself, nor anyone during his lifetime fixed the official accepted list of the books of the Bible.
The current list of 27 New Testament books was built very slowly. Marcion, in 140, published the first recorded list and it included only the Gospel of Luke and 10 of Paul's letters. Other writings in circulation were gradually accepted and by 180 Irenaeus made it a point to include the four gospels along with 13 letters of Paul, two letters of John, Jude, Revelation, Wisdom of Solomon and the contested Revelation of Peter. Though the Book of Hebrews was already widely read and used, Irenaeus did not include it because it was still being debated. By the time Eusebius published his list at the beginning of the fourth century, some theologians were still uncomfortable with including James, II Peter, II and III John, and Jude. The final list of 27 books as we have them today was first reflected in a list published in 367, and finally accepted by the church councils that met at Hippo in 393 and again at Carthage in 39.

So neither the suggestions of anti-Gnostic conspiracies made by Brown's fictional experts or the picture Christians often give about an official list of canonical books being quickly and unanimously decided are accurate. As the church developed its canon and its theology, there were spirited debates and often very lively and contentious votes at the end of councils.
Dr. Peter Jones, professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California, has studied and written extensively about the resurgence of Gnosticism. He co-authored Cracking Da Vinci's Code.

“That study of Gnosticism some 20 years ago suddenly started bouncing around in my head,” says Jones. “I began studying Gnosticism at Harvard, where at the time I was doing a theology major. Copies of the recently discovered Gnostic texts were being passed around amongst the masters and doctoral students there and I was under the impression that you studied this stuff to get a better understanding of the past. How do you understand ‘primitive Christianity,' as it is called, the original growth of Christianity, if you don't know the culture? Of course, Gnosticism was part of that early Christianity, so you studied it to understand. What I didn't realize was that some of those professors had really seen the discovery of these Gnostic texts as a way of transforming Christianity today.”
When the Gnostic texts were discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, a number of scholars began studying, translating and distributing the texts. James Robinson, a former Presbyterian minister, emerged as the director of the translation project. Though he grew up on the Westminster Confession in a conservative Presbyterian home and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister relatively young, he has since gone on to champion the cause of the Gnostic texts.

'The Incredulity of Saint Thomas' by Caravaggio.

Jones says the “significant claim that [Robinson] made was that American New Testament scholarship had managed to break the monopoly of those backward-thinking Europeans, who held onto these Gnostic texts that had been found, and had managed to get the texts out of there, and had translated them and given them to the whole world of scholarship. But the greater achievement, having done that, was to elevate The Gospel of Thomas to the level of the four canonical gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That is the contribution of American scholarship to the study of the Bible in our times, says James Robinson.”
Beginning with Robinson in academic circles, and then gradually through the secular media, the Gnostic texts have been disseminated, popularized and integrated into popular belief systems. The current selection of books on store shelves now includes bright orange Idiots' guides and yellow Dummies' books on Mary Magdalene, Thomas and a host of other Gnostic texts.
But the widespread distribution of the rediscovered Gnostic texts was not the only thing that fuelled the modern resurgence. In its second-century form, the Gnostic re-unification with nature was initially a jumble of Eastern philosophies, and its modern form keeps strong links with Eastern philosophy. Jones points out that the hippies from the 60s traded illicit substances for Eastern philosophies that they had embraced — things like oneness with nature and seeking higher plains of reality through inside knowledge and illumination; philosophies that tied right into the Gnostic beliefs.

Joel Coppieters is a freelance writer in Quebec.