Q: What is the Gospel of Thomas?
A: The Gospel of Thomas claims to be the secret sayings of Jesus. There are 114 of them, so it says many things, but the central message is that Jesus is the one who reveals the divine light that brought the universe into being, and that you and I also reveal that light.
That image is in every tradition -- Buddhist, Christian, Jewish. But most Christian tradition speaks of Jesus as the divine light incarnate in the universe, and the rest of us [as] in darkness, needing to be enlightened from him alone.
Q: What do you think this quote from the Gospel of Thomas says to us: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you"?
A: That's a remarkable saying. It was because of that that I first wrote THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS. I took that psychologically. I took it to mean you bring forth what is potential within you. Or, if you suppress what is potential, this is damaging to the personality. I think that's true enough, as artists know, [as] anyone creative knows. But now I understand it's also a spiritual statement. It's about bringing forth what is within you. It's not just your natural potential, but it's that we are created in the image of God and, therefore, we have this divine energy that can be accessed or suppressed.
Q: How did Gnostics view Jesus?
A: I don't think there's a single way to answer that, and I'm not sure that I would even call the Gospel of Thomas "Gnostic" anymore. But the way they see Jesus is as a person who manifests the divine and who shows others how to find access to that source within themselves.
Q: He was more guide than God?
A: Yes. Perhaps more like a Buddhist kind of teaching -- that he is a man, but he is an enlightened one. He's not a god and you, too, can become enlightened in that way.
Q: How are the Gnostic Gospels different from the Synoptic Gospels?
A: We use the word "synoptic" to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means "seeing together," because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke -- whoever wrote those Gospels -- used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common.
What we call the Gnostic Gospels are a range of other Gospels, some of them recently discovered and previously unknown but probably very ancient. We simply had never known them. They weren't part of the New Testament. What's different about the Gospel of Thomas is that, instead of focusing entirely on who Jesus is and the wonderful works of Jesus, it focuses on how you and I can find the kingdom of God, or life in the presence of God.
Q: What is the argument between the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas?
A: The Gospel of John speaks of Jesus as the "light of the world," the divine one who comes into the world to rescue the human race from sin and darkness, and says if you believe in him, you can be saved; you can have everlasting life. If you don't believe in him, you go to everlasting death.
The Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand, speaks of Jesus as the divine light that comes from heaven, but says "and you, too, have access to that divine source within yourself," even apart from Jesus.
What we now realize -- and more clearly than ever because of the newly discovered Gospels -- is that, instead of one tradition about Jesus, there were in the early Christian movement ranges of traditions about Jesus, several traditions, and they were associated with different disciples. So you would have the gospel according to Matthew, who taught some of the teachings of Jesus, and the gospel according to John, which taught others, [and] the gospel according to Thomas.
When we look at Thomas and John together, we see that they have a lot in common. They used the same kind of language. But I can now see that John was written to say, "Well, yes, Thomas almost gets it right but misses the main point," which for John is that you must believe in Jesus in order to be saved and that he alone offers the only access.
Q: What is the historical background on this?
A: Everybody who wants to study the beginning of Christianity usually has the same motivation that I had. It was totally typical: if we go back to the beginning, we'll find what really happened, the original, the perfect, golden nugget. We'll find the words of Jesus.
What we actually find when we go back there is that the earliest evidence is very diverse. That's not the story we were told as Christians, because the Christian church chose to simplify it and give us a single version of the story and cut out, therefore, the kind of diversity that we can now see.
Q: Was it political?
A: It was certainly political. It was also religious. Those were not separate.
Q: Was Thomas's talking about each of us being seekers of God a difficult concept to organize an orthodox institution around?
A: Yes. If you're going to have a church that says, as one of the primary church leaders, Irenaeus, did, "Outside the church there is no salvation," there are certain things you might not want Jesus to have said, if he said them. For example: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you." That might suggest you don't need a church, or a priest, or an institution.
Q: Why was it important that an institution be established?
A: People who study the way religions develop have shown that if you have a charismatic teacher and you don't have an institution develop around that teacher within about a generation to transmit succession within the group, the movement just dies. So the survival of Christianity in the way that we know it probably depends on the development of institutions.
Q: If all of the Gospels that were found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi had been part of our Christian heritage, what would have changed?
A: It would have been harder to maintain the idea of a single, authoritative, doctrinal teaching. You could say, "These are the basic teachings of the church, and beyond that you can explore this, or this, or this." But what the church has often said is, "These are the authoritative teachings, and that's it."
Q: Are we impoverished because of that?
A: I think very much so, because the openness to discovery, the openness to different interpretations, which you do find in the early communities, was, in some cases, limited.
Q: Suppressed?
A: Deliberately suppressed, because the question of whose authority rules the church became of enormous importance in the fourth century, when the church became powerful and politically established and wealthy. And ruling the church was a matter of enormous prestige and power. Politics and religion are quite inseparable in this respect. If you have a strong religious conviction, it may well have political implications.
Q: And if the Gnostic Gospels had not been suppressed?
A: I think [Christianity] could've been much more open in its scope. What these Gospels offer, in fact, you find in some Eastern Orthodox churches -- a great deal of openness to revelation, to understanding the speculation. You find it also in Pentecostal churches -- the conviction that you can be inspired by the Holy Spirit. You find this in many churches. But it's not part of official teaching very often. So yes, I think it could've been very much more open-ended. But one would have sacrificed the claim to a kind of sacrosanct authority that certain Christian leaders have always liked to claim.
At the time, I think it was absolutely essential for the survival of the movement, because it was so much threatened by persecution and by complete scattering. It was necessary at that time, probably, to consolidate the church and try to make a simple message accessible and universal.
Q: Say more about the story of the discovery of the Gnostic texts.
A: A library of ancient Christian texts was found quite by accident when a villager in upper Egypt, Mohammad Ali al-Samman, went out of his village with his brothers to dig for birdlime to fertilize their crops. As they were digging near an ancient cliff, they found a six-foot jar, and in it were 13 books that were bound in tooled gazelle leather. What he discovered in these were over 50 ancient, early Christian texts and Gospels. It was an astonishing discovery, and it's completely changed the way we understand the history of Christianity. The texts were written originally in Greek, like all of the early Christian writings, [including] the New Testament. But they were found translated from Greek into Coptic, an ancient African language. We have to read Coptic and understand the Greek to try to read these texts.
Q: You say John says Jesus was the "son of God." Didn't they all say that?
A: All of the Gospels talk about Jesus as the "son of God." When I was growing up, I thought that meant some kind of divine, unique, special being unlike anyone else. When you study it historically, you see that this term "son of God" would be used for a king. So David, the king of Israel, was the "son of God." Or, the king of Egypt could be the son of the god Ra. That's just the way you talked about a king. Often the language about "son of God" is a language about kingly prerogative.
But what the Gospels don't all say is that Jesus is some kind of very different being. That's what we often think -- he's the son of God, and we're mere humans. The Gospel of John says, "He is not a human being like you and me. He began in heaven. He originated with God himself, and he became incarnate in a human body in which he dwelt." So he wasn't a human. In Paul's words, "He came in human form." But that doesn't mean he was a human as you and I are.
Of course, anyone who knows Christian theology will say, "Well, that's wrong. Jesus is truly human and truly divine." That becomes the orthodox teaching -- that Jesus is, in fact, truly human and truly divine. But that is quite different from what you see in the Gospel of John. If you just read John alone and you don't read all [the Gospels] as a collage the way we usually do, as if they all meant the same thing, it's as though Jesus is a being of light that comes into the world and speaks as if he were God walking on earth. That's what makes his speech so offensive and so strange in the Gospel of John: "Before Abraham was, I am." People pick up rocks to throw at him because they think he's making himself God -- which, in fact, he is. And the author of John will say, "Well, yes. But, you see, of course he was."
Q: Had the church gone with Thomas's version, would the church be radically different? Would it have existed at all?
A: The Christian church at the time the New Testament was shaped, at the time these Gospels were being considered, was under enormous pressure of persecution. It was, perhaps, in danger of being completely annihilated through the persecution and the execution of its members. That kind of church under siege needed a tremendous amount of close organization, and that was given to the church by the leaders who chose the Gospels that we have in the New Testament. It might have worked [with the Gospel of Thomas] had we had a number of Gospels the way we do now. I think it might've worked very well. But all we know is what really happened, and that is that some of the leaders said, "No, we don't want anything that invites speculation, anything that invites creative imagination, anything that invites inspiration. We just want to have a clear message and a clear community. We want to know who's in and who's out."
Q: What about those who might say that you have given John short shrift?
A: When I began to realize that the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas were part of an intense conversation or argument in the early Christian movement between different groups of followers of Jesus, each trying to understand the teachings and interpret them, I focused on the difference. However, I [also] talk about the enormous range of ways the Gospel of John can be interpreted. You think about the many poets, like St. John of the Cross in Catholic tradition or T. S. Eliot in Anglican tradition, who love the Gospel of John, [and] the many theologians who've interpreted it. The Gospel of John is very rich, as its tradition shows.
We also know there were people in the second and third century who could read all those Gospels together and find them completely congenial.
Q: You were raised in a family that was religiously nonobservant, and you joined an evangelical church for a while. Did that have a major impact on how you see religion?
A: Well, certainly. I think that most of us who study religion do so because we have some engagement in the matter, obviously. Why would we devote our life [to] studying this? I find some of these texts, as well as some of the texts of the New Testament, enormously spiritually powerful.
The kind of churches that I went to as a child -- liberal Christian churches -- don't have the kind of intensity and power that many evangelical churches do. When I encountered that, I realized there was something very powerful about the Christian tradition. One feels that also in Catholic churches and many other churches -- all kinds of churches. And when I realized that, I thought, "I was brought up to think that Christianity would just become obsolete. Why is it that here we are in the twenty-first century, and religion is enormously alive and well?"
Q: The more orthodox religion is, the more it grows?
A: In some cases, I think that's true, because it has the intensity that it may lack if you start adding too many things. However, many people who are engaged in evangelical Christianity have thought, "Well, if you're not an evangelical, what relevance could your faith possibly have when you're in need, when you're in distress, when you're really up against it one way or the other?" And yet, there are many of us for whom that kind of search is still an essential part of our lives.
Q: You begin your new book by describing how you walked into the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City after learning that your son had been diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension.
A: I went into that church not actually intending to go to a service. I found I was enormously moved by the worship, by the music, by the congregation assembled. And I realized there is much that I love about Christian tradition -- and much that I needed about Christian tradition.
What I also realized was that it wasn't primarily about a set of beliefs: "Do I believe in this and that and the other thing?" It was the congregation gathered together for worship, it was the music, it was the common values, it was what was felt and experienced and shared in that worship. It's not that I say beliefs don't matter -- by no means; but they were not the focus. For many Christians, [beliefs] have been right in the center: If people say, "Are you a Christian?" and you then say, "What do you mean by that?" the usual follow-up question is, "Well, do you believe that Jesus is the son of God?" or "Do you believe that such and such?"
Q: What does religion have to say in times of grief?
A: In times of grief, speaking for myself, one can't hear about belief very much, I think. In times of grief, people often go to churches. They go for the worship. They go for the funeral. They go for a way to cope with the unimaginable. We don't have many ways to do that. People most often go back to those powerful, simple, enormously compelling means of dealing with grief.
Q: You buried the two loves of your life, your son and your husband, within 15 months of each other. What did religion offer you?
A: It offered a very slender thread of a way to survive and to continue to hope. In times of grief, it's hard to hear what is being said about beliefs or about heaven or any of that. But one can find a path in that, nevertheless.
Q: And communion with other people?
A: Absolutely. That's, perhaps, the most important thing. What one can find in a time of grief has a lot to do with the sharing with other people, and also, I think, importantly, with a sense of a spiritual dimension in our lives.
