Tag Archives: Church History

Dom Crossan and Paul the apostle

Former Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan is a co-founder and highly visible spokesman for the Jesus Seminar, a progressive group of New Testament scholars active in the last twenty years seeking to identify “the historical Jesus”.

Recently, he has turned his attention to Paul the apostle. A few years ago, he co-authored, with Marcus Borg, an excellent book entitled The First Paul (2009), which I reviewed in three separate posts. Here’s a link to the three posts in reverse order. The central thesis of the book is that the thirteen New Testament books traditionally ascribed to the pen of Paul the apostle may be broken into three groupings: a) the radical and authentic Paul who was a social visionary vis a vis the existing culture—an opponent of slavery and proponent of a strong role for women, b) the conservative Paul, three books that may have been written by Paul but probably weren’t and which evinced a retreat from his radical social views, and c) the reactionary Paul, the so-called pastoral epistles consisting of 1st & 2nd Timothy and Titus, which were definitely not written by Paul and indeed were written to correct Paul’s radicalism, to re-establish the Roman social order of slavery and patriarchy.

Crossan is again writing about these themes in a highly public forum, the Huffington Post. His article is not only on the religious section of the Huffpost, but appears on the main page under the banner The Search for the Historical Paul: Which Letters Did He Really Write? As I write this, there are over 200 comments to Crossan’s Huffpost article, and like many public cyberspace forums, the “trolls” dominate. Many are anti-Christian, and a few are conservative Christians who insist, even if the human authorship is not Paul, that the subsequent letters were “spirit-breathed” and thus all letters are consistent and true (the holy trinity of inerrant, infallible, and inspired).

Crossan’s article is brief and seems not to plough new ground but merely restates the conclusions voiced earlier in the collaboration with Borg. Here is the central thesis of the Huffpost article:

The problem is that those post-Pauline or Pseudo-Pauline letters are primarily counter-Pauline and anti-Pauline. What happens across those three sets of letters is that the radical Paul of the authentic seven letters (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) is slowly but steadily morphed into the conservative Paul of the probably inauthentic threesome (Ephesians Colossians, 2 Thessalonians) and finally into the reactionary Paul of those certainly inauthentic ones (1-2 Timothy, Titus).

Crossan’s article includes this recently rediscovered and cleaned up fresco of Paul dating to the 13th century. Note that Paul holds not one scroll and not thirteen scrolls but ten, signifying that the dubious authenticity of the pastoral epistles is not merely a recent understanding. Indeed, in 2nd century lists of authoritative books that served as precursors to the formalized New Testament canon, the pastoral epistles are generally not included.

By the time The First Paul was published in 2009, my own manuscript for A Wretched Man, a novel of Paul the apostle was already completed and in the hands of the publisher. Thus, my research did not include The First Paul, but my conclusions were similar–but I had a special authorial problem. In a novel about the life of Paul, how could I suggest that six books traditionally attributed to him were not actually his? Written after his death, such books were not part of his story in a strict sense. Additionally, how could I make the point that he held radical views regarding slavery and women to rebut the traditional stereotype of Paul derived from the NT letters to Timothy and Titus?

My solution was two-fold. First, the novel included the circumstances and the writing and the delivery of the seven “authentic” letters. The six “inauthentic” letters were not mentioned at all, an implicit but indirect statement that they were not part of Paul’s story. Second, Timothy and Titus were important characters in the novel, protégés of Paul. In a purely fictional device, I placed offensive words about women quoted from the NT book of Timothy in the mouth of Timothy the character and offensive words about slavery from the NT book of Titus in the mouth of Titus the character. In both instances, the novel offers a strong rebuke from the lips of Paul.

A book review from New Zealand

It’s a small world we live in. The latest scholarly review of A Wretched Man, a novel of Paul the apostle, comes from the opposite side of the globe—Dunedin, New Zealand. Dean of Studies at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, Dr. Jason Goroncy, offers his review which praises the attempt to reimagine theology through art. The following is an excerpt, but you can read the entire review at Dr. Goroncy’s blog, Per Crucem ad Lucem.

[T]he communication of divine truth demands the work of the very imagination it is determined to sanctify. So Jonathan Edwards: ‘Unless you use imagination, unless you take a truth and you image it – which of course is art – you don’t know what it means’. Or, citing John Henry Newman:

The ways in which we ‘see’ the world, its story and its destiny; the ways in which we ‘see’ what human beings are, and what they’re for, and how they are related to each other and the world around them; these things are shaped and structured by the stories that we tell, the cities we inhabit, the buildings in which we live, and work, and play; by how we handle – through drama, art and song – the things that give us pain and bring us joy. What does the world look like? What do we look like? What does God look like?

This is precisely why I welcomed reading Obie Holmen’s A Wretched Man: A Novel of Paul the Apostle. Holmen seeks to … situate Paul in his geographical, social, historical and psychological landscape, and gift us with a creative way of hearing afresh the letters that make up the bulk of the New Testament.

According to Holmen, prior to his fire-side conversion-encounter with Yeshua (Jesus), ‘Paulos (Paul), the defender of orthodoxy, had acquired a proud identity and a status; self-righteousness became the dressing for his wounds, masking his inner torment’ (p. 75). Indeed, ‘the wretched man wandered the streets of Tarsos, lost and alone, accursed and condemned’ (p. 54). Thereafter, Holmen paints Paulos as one who is seeking to carve out the implications – for Torah, for Jewish privilege, for our understanding of God, etc. – of this radical encounter with Yeshua. The entire story takes place, markedly, against Paul’s own conflict – the ‘inner torment’ – between his inherited (and then reconstituted) theology and his homosexuality, the latter manifest in his relationship with Gentile friend Arsenios. Augustine once suggested, to the shock of some of his fellow bishops, that St Paul may have been ‘greatly tainted by sexual desires’. In his portrait of the gay Apostle Paul, Holmen exploits this suggestion beyond what the old bishop of Hippo may have had in mind, and some readers may well lay the book down because of such. But such action would, in my view, represent a premature judgement.

… Holmen is a gifted writer, and his well-researched yarn is certain to encourage readers to read the Bible in a new light, with a deepened awareness of the groundedness of its message, with a new appreciation of the real humanity of its figures, and – I suspect most importantly for the author – a renewed wonderment of the magic of divine grace.

The bones of James the Just on trial

James, the brother of Jesus, sometimes known as James the Just, is in the news. A dealer in antiquities, Oded Golan, is on trial in Israel. It is alleged that he fabricated the evidence of the authenticity of an artifact possibly connected to James.

A bit of background is in order.

Many are surprised that Jesus had siblings, and some would deny it altogether, but the Bible contains several clear references. Here’s a partial list, which includes references in each of the four gospels, Acts, and Paul’s letter to the Galatians:

Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Mt 13:55-56
Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? Mk 6:3
Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd Lk 8:19
After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples Jn 2:12
All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers Acts 1:14
but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother. Gal 1:19

Acts and Paul’s letters make it quite clear that James became leader of the Jerusalem based, Jewish followers of Jesus after the crucifixion, and he remained in charge until his unlawful death over thirty years after the crucifixion, an event recorded by the contemporary historian, Josephus.

Finally, Acts and Paul’s letters also report the ongoing disagreement between James and the apostle Paul over the question of Gentile inclusion into the movement. James was reluctant to allow Gentiles unless they agreed to follow Torah, including circumcision, dietary rules, and calendar observances. This ongoing conflict between these two leaders forms the plotline of A Wretched Man novel.

Now to the current news of James.

It was the Jewish custom during the 1st century (among the Pharisees and others who believed in the resurrection of the dead) to rebury the bones of deceased family members a year or more after death. The bones would be carefully placed in a stone box, called an ossuary, and placed in the family tomb. Nearly a decade ago, an Israeli antiquities dealer claimed to possess an ossuary with the inscription, “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus”. No one questions that the ossuary and the bones date from the correct time period, and it also appears that the first part of the inscription is authentic. But, prosecutors claim that the defendant skillfully added the words, “brother of Jesus”.

It appears that the academic community is split over the authenticity issue. The judge in the case is now considering his verdict, but the scientific controversy will hardly be settled by his decision in the criminal trial of Oded Golan. In a later post, I will offer a book review of The Jesus Dynasty by James Tabor which considers the James ossuary controversy in depth.

Paul the apostle, the man from Tarsus

Although Paul never mentioned his city of origin, the Book of Acts reports that Tarsus, in modern day Turkey, was the home of the diaspora Jew. In the first century, Tarsus was a major city, home to a Greek University of the Stoic school of philosophy, and the capitol of the coastland and plains province of Cilicia. Churning out of the rugged mountain pass known as the Cilician Gates (Alexander’s army passed this way), the Cydnus River rushed toward Tarsus before slowing and ribboning the last ten miles to the sea.

In A Wretched Man novel, this city and the river provided the setting for many scenes (the names are in the Greek language of the times).

A caterpillar rafted down the river aboard a silvery olive leaf. The larvae had not yet become a moth, a butterfly, or whatever it was destined to be. Speeding through the ripples, slowing in a pool, and spinning in an eddy, the hairy pilgrim drifted with the current.

Perched on a rocky outcropping along the River Kydnos, the teen-aged boy named Paulos dangled his feet in the cool alpine waters, coursing toward the sea from the nearby mountains. Snow-capped peaks loomed over the Cilician plain and the city of Tarsos like white-haired eminences in vigil over their domain. Here was the young man’s sanctuary: a maze of rocks, pools, and small waterfalls just upriver from Tarsos, his home.

Much changes in two millennia. Tarsus is now a small city wedged between the greater burgs of Mersin to the west and Adana to the east. Rivers silt in, dams and levies altar God’s creation. Do modern day pictures of Cydnus river rapids depict the spot where Alexander bathed and nearly caught his death of a chill? Does the slow river beneath Tarsus where Cleopatra’s barge entertained Marc Anthony now follow a different course?

And the centuries spawn myths and legends—here is Cleopatra’s bridge and there is the church of St Paul, the site of his childhood home according to local tradition. Turkey is now Islamic, and St Paul’s church is merely a museum, but that may change if the head of the Religious Affairs Directorate gets his way:

Bardakoğlu called for the reopening of the Saint Paul Church in Tarsus, a district of the southern province of Mersin, comments he reiterated at the iftar. “I find it more correct if the Saint Paul Church in Tarsus serves as a church than in its current role as a museum,” he said.

Go there as a pilgrim and ponder; or join me in my wonderings as I imagined my way onto the shores of first century riverbanks, pricked my ears at hawkers in boisterous marketplaces, and meandered through back alleys as Roman legionaries lurked in the shadows. One reviewer said it this way:

a stupendous novel about Paul … the book is beautifully written full of descriptions of the Holy Land’s landscape and Agriculture … made me read further, stop reading, begin reading and so on throughout the book … I questioned, I discovered, I began to see with a better lighting … birthed in me a desire to know more.

Flattering reviews

Two new reviews of my novel, A Wretched Man, came in over the weekend. Both offered 5 star ratings. Here are snippets and links.

Leola Harris, aka “Tea”, offered this from “I Love to Read”:

a stupendous novel about Paul, The Apostle …The book is beautifully written full of descriptions of the Holy Land’s landscape and Agriculture … made me read further, stop reading, begin reading and so on throughout the book. My mind was being cleared for new knowledge vs. old knowledge …I questioned and examined myself … I questioned, I discovered, I began to see with a better lighting … birthed in me a desire to know more.

Jess, a student in New York, writes at Spine Creases. After first posting a teaser comment on Goodreads, calling the book “A phenomenal novel”, Jess wrote the following:

It is well-researched; Holmen clearly has a solid background in early Christianity and religious history. It is also well-written … I felt that I had a more personalized understanding of who Paul was … [Holmen] presents Paul as human. Paul is as subject to human desires, human complexities, and human experiences as the rest of us. The best kind of book, in my opinion, is one that prompts you to think more, to pursue more knowledge. This book definitely incited that curiosity in me. (emphasis added)

I found this book to actually be quite a good accompaniment to my studies of Jesus as a social revolutionary, upsetting the status quo. I felt like I gleaned a new understanding of the early Judeo-Christian world, which is pretty astounding after having taken four years of academic religion classes.

Thanks to the reviewers for their generous comments.

We get letters, we get stacks and stacks of letters

Is it a mixed metaphor to apply Perry Como’s jingle from the fifties to emails? Who is Perry Como you ask? Whatever.

My novel, A Wretched Man, has been out for four months, and I’m beginning to accumulate reader’s comments. One reader even called my cell phone one morning to suggest he had just finished the book at his lake cabin, and he wanted me to know how much he enjoyed it.

Here’s a sampling of email comments:

Anna said,

I am truly enjoying the novel! I think you did an outstanding job telling an interesting story. I am not done, but will keep you posted.

Bob said,

If this story is close to true, Paul surely was a crazy man! You did an excellent job of introducing the characters slowly, and repeated their relationships. I am a history/geography minor so appreciate the references to place names and historical characters. The maps are OK but a scale would have been helpful, especially to novice types. I am enjoying the plot development very much. Thank you for using Aramaic and Greek names interchangeably. It is helpful to me to solidify them in my wee brain.

Mary said,

My husband read your book in three days–he just couldn’t put it down–and enjoyed every minute of it … [a few weeks later she added] At this rate, I don’t know if I am ever going to get to finish reading your book. My husband was talking to his brother last week about the book and his brother said he would like to read it. So this past weekend he gave it to him to read… so now I am either going to have to buy my own copy or wait until my husband gets it back from his brother.

Donna said,

I have just finished the book and found it fascinating. Like many of your other readers, I have decided I need to get back to Paul’s writings in the New Testament. Your book has given me a deeper understanding of how the early Christian church grew – Paul’s role in it and the fierce conflict between Jew and Gentile during this time.
I will recommend this to friends. Thank you, I love historical novels and this was one worth reading.

Mike said,

I can only imagine the amount of time you had to have spent to gather the data not only on the historical, anthropological and archeological levels but on the climate and seasons and the types of farming, food, plants, insects, butterflies and birds at the various locations. Maybe being a farm boy, and more attuned to the weather, drew me into the realness of the story line and paralleling Acts which I have always felt is one of the more compelling books of the new testament made the story of Paul more honest at least to me. I had always thought of Paul as different from the norms of society and if Paul was gay or not doesn’t really change the bible and the good news from my point of view anyway. I found a great peace settle on me as I read and concluded the reading of this novel.

Nancy said,

I’ve finished reading your book and really enjoyed it! I’m going to suggest our weekly Pauline Epistles Bible study read this during the rest of the summer. It provides an interesting “review” of events, particularly the founding of the early churches, plus fills in the blanks with interesting possibilities! I really got a much deeper and clearer sense of the actual tensions within the early Church between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians.

Sylvia said,

I started reading the novel and love the short chapters. It reads so well. I put this book on our church book club for next year.

Yvonne said,

The premise that Paul was gay was extremely interesting, especially with what the church has been dealing in recent time. The story was extraordinarily well written and entertaining. Your development of the characters was remarkable. I loved your book. Thanks for writing it. I’m anxious to pass your book on to friends and get their opinions.

Add your comments here or send me an email obie (dot) holmen (at) gmail (dot) com.

What did Paul the Apostle look like? UPDATED

Last year an ancient watercolor of Paul was discovered in Rome, and last week it was announced that laser cleaning of the same 4th century catacomb revealed ancient icons of other disciples. On the left is the watercolor of Paul and on the right is the icon of Peter.

These discoveries raise the question, what did the apostle Paul look like? The answer, of course, is that we don’t know. Neither his own writings nor the Acts of the Apostles, the two canonical sources of information about the apostle to the Gentiles, contain any physical description. The first known description comes from a work of popular fiction dated to the end of the 2nd century entitled The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Although this work is obviously fictional and the description purely speculative, its influence persists. This is how Paul is described by the unknown author:

he was a man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large eyes and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long, and he was full of grace and mercy; at one time he seemed like a man, and at another time he seemed like an angel.

Walt Wangerin in his work Paul, a novel picks up on this ancient description:

Here was a small man sitting cross legged … his head a monument for hugeness … eyebrows thick and dark and joined in the middle; his nose both narrow and hooked; his eyes red-rimmed in that tremendous skull; a swift mouth, moist red lips … an orange worm of a scar at the hairline.

For my part in A Wretched Man, I deliberately shied away from the traditional image of the bow legged tiny man. Instead, I made him tall and gangly but the pointy nose remained, all the better to tug on for inspiration. With legs too long and a beak nose, his young friends teased him with the nickname “Stork” at the outset of the novel.

When it came time for the publisher to design the cover for A Wretched Man, we quickly narrowed our focus to a pair of Renaissance portraits. I liked Rembrandt’s Apostle Paul because it seemed to capture the angst of the man, and it fit the novel’s title. But, since the novel had already been written, and the long nose oft described, there was something about the man’s impudent, elongated nose—prying and eager to poke into matters that were not his concern (from the point of view of Paul’s nemesis, Ya’akov), we chose instead the portrait of Paul by another artist of the Renaissance, the Spaniard who went by the name of “The Greek”—El Greco.

The artist in each portrait painted pages or notes to signify Paul the writer of letters—an anachronism since Paul would have written his letters on papyrus scrolls rather than individual pages, but the Renaissance artists failed to note that historical detail. Obtaining the rights to use El Greco’s portrait of Paul was quite simple and not expensive. Turns out there is a New York brokerage that handles such issues simply and online.

UPDATE: July 5, 2011

Another ancient Fresco of Paul has been discovered in Naples, dating to the sixth century.

A photograph released by the Vatican shows the apostle … with a long neck, a slightly pink complexion, thinning hair, a beard and big eyes that give his face a “spiritual air.”

Paul the apostle: a view from down under

I happened upon a Catholic forum from Australia (Catholica—a global conversation) that appears to have pretty heady theological discussions. The post I found was written by Ian Elmer, and I note a lengthy list of contributions by this Pauline scholar.

The lengthy article summarized Paul’s personal history with a view toward understanding the source of his insight, especially since he was not an original follower of Jesus and only became so after the crucifixion. To what extent did Paul learn from conversations with or instruction from the first disciples? Paul denied any such influence, but was his denial colored by his later dispute with the Jerusalem leadership? What was revealed to Paul on the road to Damascus? In continuing revelation? From his theological reflections in the decades following the crucifixion but before he wrote his letters? Was Paul’s experience different in kind from other disciple’s Christophanies? Theophanies in general? Epiphanies? Meditations? Contemplation? General life experiences?

[Paul’s Galatians letter] is leaving out some very important aspects of his former life that have clearly shaped his understanding of his initial experience on the road to Damascus. Still, this does highlight the whole process of revelation and inspiration. Whatever the nature of Paul’s revelatory experience, he took a considerably long time for him to fully comprehend the import of the message for his new-found Christian faith, as well as its impact on his life.

To pursue this thought further, Paul’s later understanding of his Damascus Road experience came only as a result of a series of conflicts at Jerusalem, Antioch and then in Galatia. By the time of writing Galatians Paul had been both marginalised from the mainstream “church” and forced to embark on an independent mission — for which he was being criticised by the Galatian opponents.

Paul’s only recourse was to attribute both his gospel and his commission to his initial revelatory experience on the road to Damascus. This was not strictly a “lie”, but there is certainly a degree of expedient selectivity in the telling. Was it justified? Or is this simply an excellent example of God’s inspiration at work in the everyday experiences of one’s workaday life? How often do we find God amidst conflict and debate? Is it not in the midst of such debates that our understanding of God’s “call” can be clarified?

I commend the whole article which highlights the controversies between Paul and the Jerusalem establishment, which is also the conflict that drives the plotline of my novel, A Wretched Man.

Saint and sinner: Paul as human being

Paul is the protagonist of my novel, which is to say, he is the main character. He is neither hero nor villain but thoroughly human with flaws and foibles like the rest of us. He fights externally with James and the Jerusalem establishment and internally with his own perceived sinfulness. He can rise to the heroic in his defense of the outsider as a child of God, but he also descends to the despotic in cursing those who disagree with “his gospel”.

In the past couple of days, I have come across a pair of blog posts that touch upon themes raised in the novel. Gavin at Otagosh blog writes the following:

The Paul of Galatians famously comes across as an egotistical ranter. He simply doesn’t handle theological diversity well! It’s his way or the highway, no matter that senior figures in the early Christian movement (Peter, James) have quite a different take on things than he does.

Is Paul defending the “gospel of Christ”? We’ve got to concede that if he was, his opponents (fellow Christians) thought they were doing that too. No, he’s defending the gospel of Paul: “the gospel that was proclaimed by me.” Go through just chapter one of Galatians and notice all the ‘me’ and ‘I’ statements. It’s an eye-opening exercise.

Galatians is about a territorial dispute, and Paul is marking his territory. So does he mean to lay down a curse or not? It seems a no-brainer. It doesn’t much matter whether you want to understand accursed as hell-bound or excommunicated, it amounts to the same thing.

Here is a list of derogatory names used by Paul in his writings to label his enemies: “peddlers of God’s word”, “false apostles”, “deceitful workers”, “false brothers”, “dogs”, and “evil workers”. The victims of Pauline name-calling were not pagans, emperor worshipers, or mystery cultists; they were fellow followers of the man from Nazareth whose sin was disagreement with Paul’s interpretation of the Christ.

The second blog post was entitled, Who was Yeshua bar Maryam? The blogger, who goes by the name of Mothermary44, raises the question of the historical Jesus and wonders whether Pauline speculation set the Christian course away from the historical Jesus toward a mythical, divine “God in a man-suit”.

Paul knew virtually nothing about Yeshua bar Maryam, the real-life wandering teacher, healer, and sage, when he began proclaiming the gospel. The real, historical man simply wasn’t important to Paul — not compared to the divine being whose glory had stricken him blind. (Acts 9)

All my life, I wondered why the pre-resurrection Jesus — humble, loving, forgiving, funny, “a glutton and a drunkard” (Luke 7:34) — was so different from the humorless and judgmental post-resurrection Jesus Christ, Only-Begotten Son of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, God in a man-suit. Finally, it came to me: the difference was Paul of Tarsus. Who knew nothing about the real Yeshua bar Maryam when he began proclaiming the gospel of Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.

The novel is not quite so “in your face”, but portrays the ongoing struggle between James and Paul on several levels including James’ charge,

Who do you think you are, coming here with your Greek tongue, claiming to be a Pharisee, claiming to be a follower of my brother? You weren’t there!

You never heard him speak, you never mingled with the crowds, and you didn’t witness the stinking Romans murder him on the cross.

You’re like an uninvited stranger at a burial boasting that you knew the dead man well. How dare you share my grief! How dare you!

My novel tracks my own wonderings about Paul’s Damascus road experience and about the boundary-breaking apostle to the Gentiles who graced us with stirring words of inclusion—“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”—but whose pride also resulted in hyperbole and condemnation of his fellows.

For good and ill, Paul’s legacy continues in the church of the 21st century.

Book Review: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Published in 1979, The Gnostic Gospels has received the National Book Award and has become the leading work regarding the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in 1945, and Pagels is recognized as a preeminent authority on these Coptic language, gnostic flavored texts.

Although discovered in 1945, the texts remained outside public purview for many years due to scholarly and governmental squabbling over access. When western scholars finally obtained access to the discoveries, Pagels was entering graduate school at Harvard. Listen to her story:

I first learned of the Nag Hammadi discoveries in 1965, when I entered the graduate program at Harvard University … I was fascinated to hear of the find, and delighted in 1968 when [a Harvard professor] received mimeographed transcriptions … because the official publications had not yet appeared … Convinced that the discovery would revolutionize the traditional understanding of the origins of Christianity, I wrote my dissertation at Harvard and Oxford on the controversy between gnostic and orthodox Christianity.

After receiving her Harvard PhD, Pagels accepted a faculty position at Barnard College, Columbia University, and she continued her research into early Christian Gnosticism, publishing a couple of technical books in the process. In 1975, she traveled to Cairo and received access to the original documents, she delivered a paper to the First International Conference of the Nag Hammadi scholars, and “having joined the team of scholars, I participated in preparing the first complete edition in English, published in the United States in 1977.”

The story of finding the buried vase that contained the ancient texts is filled with blood revenge murder and sufficient intrigue for an Indiana Jones movie, but the speculation regarding the burying of the vase millennia ago is equally compelling. Nag Hammadi is a small city on the banks of the Nile River several hundred miles upstream from the Nile Delta. Based on dating the codices found in the jar, it is commonly believed that the vase was buried between 350 and 400 CE.

Who buried the vase? Why? Pagels borrows this explanation:

The scholar Frederik Wisse has suggested that the monks who lived at the monastery of St. Pachomius, within sight of the cliff where the texts were found, may have included the Nag Hammadi texts within their devotional library. But in 367, when Athanasius, the powerful Archbishop of Alexandria, sent an order to purge all “apocryphal books” with “heretical” tendencies, one (or several) of the monks may have hidden the precious manuscripts in the jar.

All this is merely background to the primary thrust of The Gnostic Gospels, which is to interpret and compare these gnostic texts with orthodox Christianity. Here are Pagel’s main theses:

Hierarchy threatened:

Because gnostic Christians stressed a direct relationship with God attained through self knowledge (gnosis) as revealed by Jesus, the authority of the deacons and bishops was threatened, and the hierarchy attacked the gnostics with a vigor befitting a life-death struggle. Even though the gnostics were fellow Christians, albeit with different views, the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy developed to smash the gnostics. Chief among the heresy hunters was Bishop Irenaeus whose monumental “Against Heresies”, c 180 CE, provides the greatest insight into the early battle over orthodoxy. He wrote:

Such persons are, to outward appearances, sheep, for they seem to be like us, from what they say in public, repeating the same words [of confession] that we do; but inwardly they are wolves.

[Gnostic teaching destroys them in] an abyss of madness and blasphemy.

[S]uch a person becomes so puffed up that … he walks with a strutting gait and a supercilious countenance, possessing all the pompous airs of a cock.

One must obey the priests who are in the church—that is … those who possess the succession from the apostles. For they receive simultaneously with the episcopal succession the sure gift of truth.

Significance of the Resurrection:

Since gnostics stressed interior knowledge initiated by the revelatory character of Jesus and under the guidance of the spirit, individual theological views varied–dogma was not important—interior enlightenment mattered, and this varied from one to another. Thus, gnostics held varying views on the resurrection of Jesus, but they tended to spiritualize the resurrection accounts and understand the resurrection symbolically while their opponents stressed the literal historicity of the resurrection, at least in part as self-serving claims for authority for the witnesses to the resurrection (Peter and the disciples) and their heirs (priests, bishops, and pope).

Pagels describes the resurrection view of the gnostics as follows:

Ordinary human existence is spiritual death, but the resurrection is the moment of enlightenment. “It is … the revealing of what truly exists … and a migration into newness.” Whoever grasps this is spiritually alive. This means that one can be “resurrected from the dead’ right now: “Are you—the real you—mere corruption? Why do you not examine your own self and see that you have arisen?”

The role of women:

Again, gnostic views are diverse and varied, but clearly the gnostics held a higher view of the role of women than did their orthodox opponents. Since the gnostics had no priests, anyone, including a woman, was free to speak at gnostic gatherings. Some gnostic sects had women in leadership roles.

Gnostic imagery also offered a heightened view of women. Pagels sketches three common motifs: the divine mother as part of an original couple, divine mother as holy spirit—the trinity becomes father, mother, and son, and divine mother as Wisdom.

Why did the orthodox church move to exclude women? Pagels speculates that part of the reason was because the gnostics did not; thus, excluding women became a mode of differentiation from the heretics.

We can see, then, two very different patterns of sexual attitudes emerging in orthodox and gnostic circles. In simplest form, many gnostic Christians correlate their description of God in both masculine and feminine terms with a complementary description of human nature … Gnostic Christians often take the principle of equality between men and women into the social and political structures of their communities. The orthodox pattern is strikingly different: it describes God in exclusively masculine terms [which] translates into social practice: by the late second century, the orthodox community came to accept the domination of men over women as the divinely ordained order, not only for social and family life, but also for the Christian churches.

Persecution of Christians:

While some gnostic Christians would have been victims of first and second century Roman persecutions, Pagels generalizes that it was mostly orthodox Christians who faced, and embraced death, while the gnostics mostly did not.

The examples of Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Perpetua and Felicity are illustrative. Each of these willingly and gladly accepted their deaths, repeatedly refusing the offer for leniency in exchange for demonstrating sacrificial allegiance to the emperor.

The True Church:

The gnostics and the orthodox drew differing boundaries that defined the true church in ways that excluded the other. For the orthodox, the church consisted of those who held fast to the creed, participated in the sacraments and worship, and obeyed the clergy—“Outside the church there is no salvation.” For the anti-authoritarian gnostics, the church consisted of seekers after esoteric wisdom–“the light within”–even if their search led them away from the established church. Truth was to be found in individual enlightenment rather than blind obeisance to the dogma of the bishops. The charge that gnostics claimed to be spiritual elites has merit.

Conclusion: Pagels offers a benign view of the gnostics, suggesting their suppression resulted in the impoverishment of Christian tradition, but she does not advocate or “side with” Gnosticism. Yet, the historical record reminds us that orthodoxy always belittles those on the fringes, those who dare wonder, those “restless, inquiring people who marked out a solitary path of self-discovery.” And, she suggests that current Christians again dare ask questions that orthodoxy would claim are settled:

How is one to understand the resurrection? What about women’s participation in priestly and episcopal office? Who was Christ, and how does he relate to the believer? What are the similarities between Christianity and other world religions? … What is the relation between the authority of one’s own experience and that claimed for the Scriptures, the ritual, and the clergy?

According to Pagels, if the ancient monks had not buried their library, those gnostic texts would surely have been burned and Christianity would have lost a great treasure.

Today we read them with different eyes, not merely as “madness and blasphemy” but as Christians in the first centuries experienced them—a powerful alternative to what we know as orthodox Christian tradition. Only now are we beginning to consider the questions with which they confront us.