Jenkins - The many faces of Christ : the thousand-year story of the survival and influence of the lost gospels

THE MANY FACES OF CHRIST

Copyright 2015 by Philip Jenkins

Published by Basic Books

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jenkins, Philip, 1952 author.

The many faces of Christ: the thousand-year story of the survival and influence of the lost gospels / Philip Jenkins.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-06161-7 (e-book) 1. Apocryphal Gospels. 2. ChristianityOrigin. I. Title.

BS2851.J464 2015

229.8dc23

2015028753

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Byron Johnson

With thanks and appreciation

CONTENTS

H ISTORIANS VARY IN THEIR PRESENTATION OF DATES. The traditional system of BC/AD has a Christian bias, as it explicitly refers not just to Christ but the Lord, and many writers prefer the term Common Era, CE, instead of AD. Yet the basis for Common Era dating is still the supposed date for Christs birth. As it is still the most familiar usage, this book will use BC and AD.

Also problematic is the term Old Testament, the Christian term for what Jews call simply the Bible or the Tanakh. Although a neutral term should properly be used, none is easily available. Hebrew Bible is unsatisfactory because of the importance of some Greek versions of particular books. In this work, there are special reasons for using the Old Testament label, because I will often refer to alternative scriptures attributed to patriarchs and prophets such as Enoch and Ezra. Most modern scholars classify such works under the title Old Testament pseudepigrapha. With due awareness of the issues, then, I use Old Testament throughout.

There is one other unwieldy term for which it is difficult to find an alternative. Throughout Christian history, there have been multiple churches, some of which rejected the Christian credentials of others. I often mention the mainstream institution of the ancient and medieval world that was allied with the Roman Empire and had its great centers at Rome and Constantinople. When I refer to that church before the later split between the Eastern and Western traditions, I call it Orthodox/Catholic.

What all disciples of heresy and of the heretics and schismatics, whose names we have scarcely preserved, have taught or compiled, we acknowledge is to be not merely rejected but eliminated from the whole Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and with their authors, and the followers of its authors, to be damned in the inextricable shackles of anathema forever.

Gelasian Decree, sixth century

A ROUND THE YEAR 380 IN THE DESERT OF SOUTHERN EGYPT, A small party carried a collection of precious contraband to a secret hiding place. The group took at least thirteen large books, or codices, and packed them in clay jars for safekeeping before burying them. The contents included dozens of scriptures, gospels, and other sacred writings. After this collection was rediscovered in 1945, the so-called Nag Hammadi library would have an immense impact on popular conceptions of early Christian history. For a world used to speaking of gospel truth, what could be more enthralling than the rediscovery of ancient lost gospels?

But why were these texts concealed in the first place? Presumably, the works deviated so sharply from what was then defined as Christian orthodoxy that they had to be saved from destruction by angry fanatics. They were concealed until it was once again safe to explore such ideas. Just possibly, the people burying the documents were themselves members of a mystical or Gnostic sect that was now deemed heretical, the last pathetic adherents of a dying creed. More likely, they were Christian monks forced to come to terms with new restraints on what they could legitimately read and own. Whatever the reality, the fact that the texts remained hidden for 1,600 years means that the people who concealed them never felt that such a time of safety and tolerance arrived in their lifetimes.

INTERPRETATIONS OF FAITH were in flux in the centuries immediately following Jesuss lifetime, with different schools drawing on their own scriptures. Christians used and produced a great many texts that were loosely called gospelshundreds at least. Modern-day readers are fascinated by these alternative scriptures with their intoxicating and often bizarre ideas. They love to explore what a historian of esoteric thought once termed Fragments of a Faith Forgotten.

For some writers, these might-have-been texts have become an alternative canon that reflects the early Christian message at least as authentically as the real New Testament that we have known for centuries. They propose that these writings represent various roads not taken by the Christian movement, usually with the suggestion that those paths would have resulted in much better historical outcomes for the faith. We think of Elaine Pagelss influential 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels, and subsequent work by Karen King, Marvin Meyer, and others. To borrow the title of a book by Bart Ehrman, these lost gospels provided a foundation for various Lost Christianities. Millions who have no acquaintance with scholarly Christian history still know something about the concept from Dan Browns novel The Da Vinci Code.

Box 1.1 Some Lost Gospels

I present these texts in their very rough order of composition. Dating is difficult, especially as the individual texts have gone through multiple stages of composition and editing.

Gospel of the Hebrews (early second century?). Known from citations in ancient writers; full text still not available.

Not a Gnostic text, this gospel reflects the views of Jewish Christians who believed in observing the Mosaic Law. Other works in this tradition include the gospels of the Nazoreans and of the Ebionites.

Gospel of Thomas (c. 140?). Full text found at Nag Hammadi.

Presents Jesus as a mystical teacher who utters wise and perplexing sayings. The gospel offers no hint of the doctrines of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, or a Virgin Birth. For its advocates, Thomas may represent the closest approximation we are likely to find to Jesuss actual words and teachings.