Review of “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Pagels
Paperback 272 pages (May 2004)
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
ISBN: 0375703160
A Challenging comparison between Gnostic and orthodox gospels
The traditional orthodox response to the Gnostic gospels, or indeed those gospels that failed to be included in the Bible, is that there is a clear qualitative difference between the two groups of writings.
Gnostic gospels for example typically:
- introduce a special disciple who Jesus favoured above the others and to whom he imparted secret teachings
- promotes teachings different to the orthodox gospels
- has stories and sayings not found in the orthodox gospels
- changes stories and sayings found in the orthodox gospels
- portrays a different Jesus to that found in the orthodox gospels
What Elaine Pagels points out is that all these points characterise the gospel of John.
- there is the “disciple who Jesus loved” who clearly is favoured by Jesus
- prompts the idea of Jesus being God, which is not found in the other gospels
- stories such as Lazarus and the turning of water in wine are not found in the synoptic gospels
- there is no last supper in the gospel of John, the attack on the money changers in the temple happens at the start of Jesus’ ministry etc
- the character of Jesus in the gospel of John is very different to that in the synoptic gospels – his manner of speech, his attitude to the Jews, the very idea of who he is.
Pagels therefore shows that in terms of style the Gnostic gospels are not so far from the Bible after all, if we draw our comparisons with the gospel of John rather than Matthew, Mark and Luke. She argues that the gospels of Thomas and John show remarkable similarities, and that John may well have been written as an “answer” to Thomas. The primary difference between the two is that in Thomas the truth is found in the world, Jesus is just a teacher of truth, a bringer of enlightenment, but he himself is not the truth. He has found the truth within himself and we too can find the truth within ourselves.
In the gospel of John Jesus is God, he is the Truth, “no one comes to the Father but my me”. John therefore represents an exclusivist and hierarchical model of spiritual truth, one which the church developed into the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy. Pagels argues that in the first few centuries Christians held a variety of beliefs about God and Jesus, but when Constantine established the Christian church as the official church of Rome it became necessary to create a hierarchy of ecclesiastical power, and this was achieved through the creation of a single “truth” and therefore the exclusion of those who failed to obey the dogma decided by the orthodox church. This artificial division of believers is most clearly seen in the debates around the creation of the Nicene creed and the books included in the New Testament canon.
The early part of this book is excellent in its comparison between Thomas and John and what this says about the early traditions within Christianity. The book loses focus in the second half where Pagels finds it difficult to keep the complexity of church history in a single narrative, and eventually seems to say “well, you will just have to read some other books to understand what happened”.
Nevertheless the overall message of the book is that early Christianity had many powerful and complex traditions that were tragically destroyed when orthodox Christianity attained political power. This is essentially a retelling of the central theme of Pagels’ earlier book “The Gnostic Gospels” but from a different perspective, nevertheless it is an important message and one which creates a powerful and compelling framework in which to read the Gnostic gospels.