By
James Bishop| The
Gnostic Gospels/texts, also known as the New Testament Apocrypha, consist of fifty-two texts discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, by an Arab, Muhammad ‘Alí al-Sammán, who came across jars while looking for a soft soil to fertilize his crops (1). These texts have excited many readers, including scholars and laypersons alike, for their depictions of Jesus Christ and his early disciples and followers.
This entry will briefly look at these texts and outline some of the reasons why most scholars have been hesitant to use the Gnostic sources as independent material for the life and ministry of the
historical Jesus.
Smashing the jar, Muhammad discovered the contents of thirteen papyrus books bound in leather. Evidently, not all of these papyri survived as Muhammad’s mother, ‘Umm-Ahmad, said that she burned some of them along with straw to kindle a fire. Later the extant papyri were sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo but soon attracted the attention of Egyptian officials. The officials purchased one papyri book (codex), confiscated the other ten and a half of the thirteen, and placed what they had in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
However, part of the thirteenth codex was smuggled out of Egypt and put on sale in the United States, which cultivated a strong interest in the Dutch scholar and historian of religion Gilles Quispel. Quispel later flew to Egypt in an attempt to find the other codices. Visiting the Coptic Museum he photographed some of the texts and deciphered them only to discover many startling words and deeds of Jesus Christ and his disciples.
Although these texts contained many sayings paralleled in the New Testament gospels they were placed in unfamiliar contexts. Some of them even criticized Christian beliefs in the virgin birth of Christ and the central tenet of
Christ’s bodily resurrection. These texts also purported to contain secret teachings from Christ given to his close disciples. The
Apocryphon of John claims to reveal “the mysteries [and the] things hidden in silence” which Christ taught to his disciple John.
The
Infancy Gospel of Thomas is constituted of the “stories of Thomas the Israelite” given to him by Christ. Many of these books are attributed to one of Christ’s followers, such as the
Apocalypse of Paul, the
Secret Book of James, the
Letter of Peter to Philip, and the
Apocalypse of Peter.
Philosophical and Theological Convictions
The Nag Hammadi texts, which we will henceforth simply call the Gnostic texts/writings (from the Greek word ‘
gnosis’, meaning knowledge), attempted to combine Greek Neoplatonism, which emphasized the value of ideas and the devaluing of matter, with Christian symbolism, to produce an expression of Christianity more compatible with Greco-Roman thought and culture (2).
The Gnostics were a religious sect within the Christian-Jewish milieu that probably emerged at the beginning of the second century CE and who later died out in 381 CE when it was outlawed under Theodosius I who declared the Catholic Church the state religion of the Roman Empire.
The devaluing of matter and the view that matter is evil is a common theme within the Gnostic texts. Contemporary philosopher and theologian
William Lane Craig explains that “Gnosticism was an ancient near eastern philosophy which held that the physical world is evil and the spiritual realm is good” (3).
As such, this worldview is best viewed as dualistic as it presents two opposing forces: the material and the spiritual, with the former being evil and the latter good. The Gnostics also placed emphasis on secret knowledge and teachings as the path to salvation. This is a perspective we find strongly presented in the
Gospel of Judas, for example. In
Judas (this text, despite its title, was certainly not authored by the original disciple and famed betrayer, Judas), there is the promise of secret teachings, the denigration of the physical body, and the elevation of a single disciple or apostle.
Salvation comes only through secret knowledge of the spiritual realm, as this was believed to liberate the soul from imprisonment within the physical, material world. As such, salvation comes not from Christ’s atonement and resurrection but from the secret knowledge that Christ imparted to a select group of his followers. This is why in
Judas it purports to be “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot.”
The Gnostics were also called docetists (docetism from the Greek
dokein, meaning “to seem”) as since they believed Christ to be a fully divine being he could not have been a flesh and blood human being. Essentially Christ is a deity who had come to the Earth but only in the appearance of human flesh. He did not have a physical body but one that only appeared so, hence the term docetism (4).
The early Christians were critical of such views as it became clear what their implications were. It taught that Christ was never actually
crucified for human sin as how could this be possible if he did not have a physical body? Similarly, Christ’s resurrection, a fundamental doctrine in Christianity from the religion’s earliest moments, was believed to be a physical event (the resurrection of Christ’s physical body from the dead), hence why the Gnostics rejected this.
The bishop
Ignatius of Antioch, famous for his desire to suffer and die for Christ (for which he did), condemned the Gnostics for their denial of “the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again.” Scholar of church history Ryan Reeves observes how many modern people essentially hold to the opposite view of the Gnostic docetists,
“But what forever reason a certain number of people within the early church struggled with reckoning with Christ as fully man. Now that strikes us as a bit odd today in the modern twenty-first century because in many ways we have, at least in popular culture, something of the opposite effect: Christ is just a man, he was a great teacher, he was a great leader some might say, but there is no way he was God” (5).