by Allen D. Callahan
Style, grace, lucidity and charm: traits seldom encountered in works of biblical scholarship and almost never encountered together. But those familiar with the work of Elaine Pagels -- and few are not, judging from her commercial success as an author (yet another trait rare among works of serious scholarship) -- have discovered that these unexpected pleasures are to be expected in everything she writes. And Pagels's most recent bestseller, BEYOND BELIEF: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF THOMAS (Random House, 2003), is more of the same. The combination of such an erudite mind and such engaging prose makes her arguments for the virtues of the Gospel of Thomas almost irresistible. Almost. Pagels's advocacy for Thomas as a source for early Christianity and a resource for contemporary spirituality is appealing. But the gap between her interpretation of Thomas as a guide to contemporary seekers and the text of the Gospel of Thomas itself requires too great a leap of faith based on what Thomas has to offer. We have good reasons for doubting Thomas.
Pagels sees the Gospel of Thomas and other apocryphal Christian literature as shut out of the ecclesiastical smoke-filled room that foisted the canon upon early Christianity. But the formation of the canon was a complex process that started long before the Council of Nicea in 325. The canon lists of the fourth century -- and there were several different though similar canon lists in existence by that time -- reflected to a great extent literature that had been on the reading list of churches throughout the Roman Empire for centuries. This was so even among the Gnostics; when they wrote commentaries, canonical scriptures were their texts of choice. The canon invariably provided the grist for their exceedingly fine-grinding exegetical mills. Apocryphal texts, Gnostic or otherwise, riff on the texts that we have come to call canonical and upon which all Christian literary cachet depends.
Biblical texts were the common ground of the Gnostics and the orthodox, even though the partisans often did not recognize them as such. The arch-orthodox Irenaeus claimed that the Gospel of John declares the divinity of Jesus. On this he agreed wholeheartedly with his Gnostic nemesis Valentinus. Together the two affirmed the importance of the Gospel of John, as did the apocalyptic Montanists, who were otherwise so different from both the orthodox and the Gnostics.
According to Pagels's reconstruction of the first four centuries of the Common Era, the bishops voted Thomas out and John in because the latter better served orthodoxy. That "official version" is represented in the Gospel of John which, on Pagels's reading, marshals a theology that intentionally contradicts the Gospel of Thomas: "what [the Gospel of] John opposed ... includes what the Gospel of Thomas teaches." Whereas "the Gospel of John helped provide a foundation for a unified church ... Thomas, with its emphasis on each person's search for God, did not."
But the Council of Nicea had little to do with the Bible, and the text of John was superfluous to the proceedings. Pagels herself reminds us that some of the bishops at Nicea were troubled because the proposed language of the Nicean Creed was not biblical. Even the Nicean definition of Jesus as "begotten not made" has no real relation to the description of him as "the only begotten" in the Gospel of John. (This latter phrase is a holdover from the Old Testament, where it means "beloved." God uses it in his conversation with Abraham to describe Isaac, who certainly was not Abraham's only son.) And as Pagels also points out, in several places the Gospel of John seems to flatly contradict the other three canonical gospels; it was apparently unknown to the early church fathers Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin Martyr, and John had been associated with heretics. Not a compelling pedigree for a text pressed into service as a rallying point for ancient orthodoxy.
But the ultimate purpose of the genealogy of Christian orthodoxy in BEYOND BELIEF is to buttress Pagels's claim that orthodox Christianity has stolen from us an authentic, first-century Christian spirituality to which the Gospel of Thomas bears witness. This alternative collection of sayings in effect gives us another Jesus, and Pagels says as much. The Nag Hammadi texts "revealed diversity within the Christian movement that later 'official' versions of Christianity had suppressed." Pagels writes of her surprise at finding "unexpected spiritual power" in the sayings from Thomas that call for a personal, inner-directed quest for the divine. The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas "does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves." "I realized," Pagels goes on to comment, "that this perspective seemed to me self-evidently true."
Pagels speculates that some Egyptian monks placed Thomas and the other Nag Hammadi texts in a six-foot cylindrical jar to save them from the wrath of the orthodox book burners. The jar served as an earthen time capsule for the ancient texts until an Egyptian shepherd discovered them almost sixteen centuries later.
Reading Thomas now, it is easy to see why it might have been a favorite in the monastery. Thomas is shot through with a curmudgeonly, monastic sensibility. Its sayings badmouth weddings, marriage and sex. The phrase "a single one" in Thomas translates from the original Coptic the Greek loan-word monachos -- "monk." The word appears in two other sayings in Thomas. One of them has Jesus say, "There are many standing at the door, but only those who are solitary (literally, "those who are monks") will enter the bridal chamber." A monk in the newlywed suite: the austerity here is almost morose, the imagery of a true libido wet blanket. Thomas's Jesus comes off as a Gnostic killjoy.
Thomas has a healthy monastic disdain for wealth and the wealthy. Those who are well dressed, i.e., well heeled, are incapable of knowing truth. Rich people are fools, and Thomas agrees with the book of Proverbs and Mario Puzo that fools die. Thomas forbids interest and speculation, detests merchants, and warns that businessmen will not enter "the Kingdom of the Father." Would-be Thomas Christians working on Wall Street? Don't even think about it.
