If orthodoxy was merely the theology of the imperial winners, why did ancient Christian traditions outside the Latin West including Ethiopia, preserve broader canons while still rejecting the Gnostic reversal of the Creator, creation, incarnation, and resurrection?
I agree; the fact that non-Western traditions like the Ethiopian Orthodox Church independently rejected Gnostic cosmology proves this wasn't just a political consensus dictated by Rome or Nicaea. The core theological divide ran much deeper than imperial politics. Where I think the "winners" dynamic still applies is in how those boundaries were state-enforced once Constantine stepped in, but your point is a great check against oversimplifying the theological consensus.
Thanks Dave. I don't discount the sayings at all, and Q is one of the better arguments in the whole field. The double-tradition material in Matthew and Luke that isn't in Mark lines up too nicely to be a coincidence, and the Gospel of Thomas proves sayings collections were a real genre in early Christianity, so a lost sayings source is entirely plausible.
My caution is about what we can claim from it. Nobody has ever seen Q. Every version of it is a reconstruction built backward out of Matthew and Luke, which means the text we're analyzing is one scholars produced, not one anybody dug up. Kloppenborg's layered reconstruction in Excavating Q is careful work, but it's still a hypothesis stacked on a hypothesis. And Mark Goodacre's The Case Against Q makes a serious argument that Luke just used Matthew directly, which removes the need for Q entirely. Ehrman accepts Q as probable, and I'd say the same, but probable isn't the same as documented.
So the sayings tradition likely does preserve some of the earliest material we have. I just won't treat a reconstructed text as evidence with the same weight as a manuscript we can actually read.
I have read Barts works and have discussed with him directly. He is very available. He demonstrated that parts of the Bible, the one without sin casts the first stone was added in Europe. By mapping out bibles all over the world and dating them and tracking them, he can show changes. Even the septuagints existents shows the impact of man on the five books of the law since Jews lost the ability to read and write Hebrew and need Greek.
What I love about Thomas that you mention is Thomas was an an apostle. Thomas knew Jesus. He speaks in his works from the first person. And Jesus said to me. Most do not know that Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were most likely not first person accounts of Jesus at the same level of Thomas or the other official apostles. John is debatable.
I am a Catholic and am raising my children as Catholics and I believe our book contains the voice of God. I am not a solo scriptura fanboy. I pray and question if it represents the totality of his message. It is still as good as we got.
Love this reflection, Dave! The tension between textual history and living faith is such a rich topic, and it’s great to see how deeply you engage with both Ehrman's research and your own Catholic tradition.
Interesting. I remember the Elaine Pagels book, and when I read it, it made sense to me. That there was more to it -- more "gospels," more to Gnosticism -- makes sense too. We know what we know until we know more.
As for the religious import, to me as a Greek Orthodox it matters not at all. We get baptized, married, and buried without the necessity of anyone's saying anything except for what's in the liturgy. We don't even get to say "I do."
As a rule, we don't ponder especially hard about God or Jesus. Even my grandmother, the most religious of all of us, did the sign of the cross every time she donned her black bathing costume for a dip in her middle daughter's saltwater swimming pool in Connecticut, in her later years went to church when someone took her, and was content with her family and her cooking. Good enough.
That's a lovely picture of your grandmother, and it says something about how faith works for most people. The doctrinal fights that scholars spend careers on barely touch the lived version, which is liturgy, family, and food.
Having had my first experience of a Russian orthodox funeral recently, the lack of participation really bothered me. It seems to me that the liturgies which require no participation and those that dictate the responses are more about control of others than about experience of the divine. Which kind of resonates with what Irenaeus was aiming for. If you are required to give set responses, or not respond at all and just listen, then there needs to be a Canon, as it essentially provides the answers to ‘frequently asked questions’. Or at least to most of them, and thought beyond that is discouraged.
Interestingly in the Celtic mythology, Taliesin fulminates against Christians making themselves vulnerable to invaders (likely Norse incursions) by being on their knees in a known place at set times, instead of following the rhythms of the solar and lunar cycles.
Fixed responses do indeed require fixed content, and a settled canon is what makes the responses fixed. Whether that's control or continuity probably depends on which end of it you're standing on.
I can understand your discomfort. But Orthodoxy is honest: The liturgy is what it is.
Has Catholicism ever really changed despite Vatican decrees and pronouncements? Well, folk masses, I suppose. I was always puzzled when my Catholic friends said they played their guitars in church. But it's still my way or the highway in terms of dogma.
Are responses during other, say, Protestant, church services really spontaneous or just canned responses, only in English? Maybe in some Pentecostal meetings.
In my old school, we had Chapel every morning, and I still have my hymnal. Loved it. And I attended a couple of Anglican services in England when I was there. Loved that too. But a Greek Orthodox church, while I hardly ever go, is home.
I think that's the strongest thing anyone can say for it. The liturgy doesn't pretend to be spontaneous, so nobody's being sold anything they aren't getting.
If the funeral was in Old Church Slavonic, you probably understood none of it . I am militant about English only in our Orthodox churches in countries where English is the language. 9th c Bulgarian (Slavonic), 3rd c Koine Greek, even modern foreign languages have NO place in the States, England or Australia, etc etc! Using foreign languages is rude and excluding.
If you actually heard what the hymnology said, you'd be very moved. It teaches what we believe about death and the world to come. As to "no participation", and "dictated responses", you obviously understand nothing about Orthodox Christianity. Every litany is supposed to be responded by those attending. Unfortunately, most congregations got lazy and let the choir do all that. That's not on the Church!
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. It was my first encounter with Orthodox Christianity! I’m not entirely sure anyone at the funeral other some members of immediate family and maybe a couple of friends of the older generation are actually members of the congregation. It would have been beautiful to understand the words being sung. I need to ask my friend if she chose to have the service in Russian because that was her late mother’s preference.
Depends on the jurisdiction. If it was ROCOR or under the Moscow Patriarchate they tend to be rather ethnocentric, which does nobody any good and parishes that are inward-looking like that tend to wither away. Plus, it was not in modern Russian. The Slavic churches, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian etc, use Old Church Slavonic, which is the language the Bulgarians were speaking in the 9th c when the Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius came to convert them to Christianity. They had no written language so Cyril invented one for them based on the Greek alphabet - thus the Cyrillic alphabet. Nobody speaks it anymore, just like 3rd c Koine Greek - it's an archaic liturgical language. If you're interested in hearing it in English, seek out a parish of the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) the 4 part harmonized music used there is quite beautiful if the choir has reasonable skills.
My family's Greek Orthodox Church in Brooklyn Heights has performed the liturgy in Greek for over a hundred years, when my maternal grandmother helped raise money for its establishment. Oh, over the years a little more English has been added to the sermon and to announcements and some prayers; but except for a changing of the guard in terms of priest, psalti, and choir, and of course parishioners, it's exactly as it was.
I don't know that anyone in our church is particularly militant. The church is what it is. When I attended its fair earlier this summer, I was transported back to its very first one. The faces have changed, the old timers are gone, but the new crop love the church, sweetly and devotedly.
Pagels notes that the saying of Jesus can be -- and were -- interpreted as gnostic. In her _The Gnostic Paul_, Pagels documents the extensive gnostic-sounding elements in the Epistles. She again hedges by saying it's understandable how they could appeal to gnostics, to avoid even considering the possibility that the author himself was gnostic and docetist.
Our Orthodox marriage ceremonies don't also require the father giving away his daughter as property to her husband. I didn't miss saying "I do" one damned bit.
Thanks, I never quite understood the public fascination with the gnostics. Their primary message of the inherent corruption of the material world, and therefore only the spiritual world matters, does not seem very attractive to me. You end up with a fatalistic world view - why fix what is wrong, when everything is corrupt?
I kind of see echoes of this in some flavors of Christianity. Why preserve the environment when it is all going to be swept away anyway?
Thanks Seth. That's my read too. A cosmology that treats matter as the problem struggles to produce any reason to repair it. And you're right that the echo survives in strands of Christianity that treat this world as a waiting room.
I know the Gnostics are a particular interest of yours, and you were on my mind while I was writing the piece.
Because the environment we experiences the only environment we have to experience and we might as well make the best of it. More to the point, possibility exists that we can make this experiential reality better.
This experiential reality runs off of collective belief. If you don't believe that, ask yourself why so much time and money has been invested to make people believe the endless litany of lies that is right out in front of us? Clearly our history is not what they say it is. The system we currently live in is based upon seperation, predation and extraction. How much effort has been pushed into making us believe we are single solitary accidental beings on an accidental world in an accidental universe? All of it standing in opposition of everything religion around the world says, actually.
Think very deeply about that for a moment. Or perhaps a few years.
I would consider myself a gnostic because of direct experience. The first time it happened when I died, which is very interesting itself, and had a near-death experience. That was the first time I touched the source and realized that it is always inside me and always has been.
We are not what we think we are and think again about how much effort has been put into making us believe?
I hear what you're saying, and the historical pattern backs part of it. What survives tends to be what the ruling class found useful, and until fairly recently entire nations held a particular flavor of a particular religion because their rulers picked it. Clovis converts and the Franks convert. Vladimir converts and the Rus convert. Constantine, Ethelbert, and Mieszko all work the same way.
That said, I don't think it's all a conspiracy. I'm convinced most clergy in most religions believe what they're selling, and that's a harder problem than cynicism, because sincere people building an institution can produce the same outcome as calculating ones without anybody lying.
I see the work of the Gnostics as unfinished. It got aborted by the people in power at that time. It has only recently been revisited in any kind of meaningful way. And I believe what we have learned is that the Gnostics were onto something. The spiritual world DOES matter much more than we give it credit for. And one reason it does is that only through it can we learn the truth about the origin of all things material. In other words, Spirit came first. And that is what the Powers of those times - and of these times - don't want us to realize.
Well, actually it has lasted until today in the Roman Catholic Church. Which in many ways is some vestige of Roman government, just with more an emphasis on winning through expansion of religion, versus conquering land. Though they have plenty of land as well.
Christian Science is modern Gnosticism. Their interpretation of the Genesis myth is that Adam fell into a deep sleep - "the Adam dream", and therefore this world is only a dream, therefore their rejection of medicine. They're all nuts!
Thank you for writing such a clear and accurate analysis of the Gnostic Gospels. I did my Ph.D. at the school which did the original scholarship on Nag Hammadi and the impression that many who were doing the scholarly analysis on it that "all truths are equal" was the exact reason that I chose to make my emphasis on the History of Christianity (orthodoxy & heresy) instead of New Testament studies. I also wrote a non-peer reviewed response to the publication of the Gospel of Judas in 2006 for the faith-based university where I was teaching.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that if it is really old, it must also be as valuable as the canonical scriptures. This isn't helped by the fact that some of the authors listed in your bibliography and in parts of your article give the impression that the gnostic gospels are truth that was purposely suppressed from the canon. People can also accidentally assume that the reason the canonical scriptures are viewed as authoritative is because of Nicaea, but that fails to recognize that Constantine asked for a Bible at Nicaea because he was willing to pay for it but we don't get our first draft of the books to be included in the canon until 367 AD (Athanasius's Festal Letter written more than 30 years after Constantine's death & 42 years after Nicaea).
For me, your most important statement about the shortcomings of Gnosticism and the reason that gnostic writings should not be viewed as authoritative is:
"What holds most of this together is a conviction that salvation comes through knowledge rather than through a death and a resurrection, that the material world is a mistake, and that a divine spark is stuck inside you waiting to hear its own name."
As your statement suggests, the very reason that Gnosticism was rejected by the church is that it was based on the human acquisition of knowledge rather than the victorious death of Christ over death and hell (Christus Victor).
Thank you for such a well written and clear exposition of the difference between writings based on the human acquisition of knowledge, and the Christian understanding of the effective work of Christ.
Thanks. Coming from a professor of church history and theology, your kind words mean a lot.
Your point about Nicaea is the one I keep having to hammer, since it's the single most common thing people get wrong. Constantine asked for copies, Athanasius gave us the first list matching our twenty-seven books in 367, and those are separate events forty-two years apart. Same with age and value: old means old, and nothing more.
Because I didn't want to make my original response too long, there were a few interesting points that I would add:
1. Not only did the finalization of the Canon take so many years, but if you read Eusebius of Caesarea's list, which is similar, he makes a distinction between writings which are authoritative, i. e., the Canon, and the positive value that can still be gained from the other writings. The point is the Catholic Bible contains not only the Canon but it contains other writings which were considered for the Canon but were just viewed as being valuable without being fully authoritative to create the "yardstick" of faith.
2. Although Nicaea was where the issue of the canon was first officially raised, the recognition of a need for an antidote to the rise of heresy goes all the way back to Irenaeus and the other proto-orthodox writers that you mentioned. The reason so many of these late 2nd century/ early 3rd century Church fathers wrote against heresy was that the primary constituency of the Christian church had shifted to being almost completely Greco-Roman rather than Jewish in its constituency. By then, the Bar-Kochba revolt had occurred and the complete split between Jews and Christians had occurred. The reason this matters is that it also coincided with a strong rise of Neoplatonism. Therefore arguments based on knowledge and other Greco-Roman understandings, including the rejection of resurrection, appeared to be much more authoritative to the average GR Christian. Also, the habit of Gnostic writers to name their works after the "hero" of their writing gave the false impression that it might be the writing of that respected person or at least that their thoughts aligned with that "hero."
3. Finally, as you are aware I'm sure, the second antidote to heresy that Irenaeus provided long before the formal discussion of canon is the apostolic succession. In this, the Catholic church of the time was attempting to say that the authoritative line of the eyewitnesses of the Christian faith could be drawn from the pope at the time of Irenaeus' writings back to St. Peter. So the answer to heresy for the West was the truth as proclaimed through the Pope and the canon. The canon would be equally important to the Eastern Orthodox Church but it did not draw the apostolic succession through St Peter. In fact, if you look at the formation of churches in different areas, they will quite often have a story that links a specific apostle or eyewitness to that area, such as linking St. Thomas to India or Joseph of Arimathea to Armenia.
Once again, thank you for such excellent scholarship. And contrary to one of your negative commenters, the fact that you cite the primary sources and the critical secondary sources is really helpful because it allows other people to compare the arguments and recognize the nuanced but important distinctions that you are making. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for adding these extra points. They bring such crucial differences to how the development of the canon is understood, particularly around the cultural shift away from Jewish roots and toward the Greco-Roman, Neoplatonic world. I really appreciate you taking the time to share these insights!
Regarding the Gospel of Thomas, would a gnostic author have included logion 12, which is Jesus's endorsement of James the Just, first bishop of the Ebionite church in Jerusalem? The Ebionites don't appear to be gnostic, since they didn't see Jesus as God and were Torah observant.
And does this endorsement suggest that it was recorded when Jesus and James the Just were both alive?
If the Gospel of Thomas contains authentic sayings of Jesus, it was likely originally written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Given that the Copts were Christianized while James the Just was still alive, it makes sense that the sayings of Jesus would be translated at that time. Especially since there was no Canon at that time.
Thanks Chris. This is a good catch, and it's one reason Thomas resists the Gnostic label.
Logion 12 hands authority to James, which points to a Jewish-Christian Jerusalem tradition rather than anything Sethian or Valentinian. Most scholars treat Thomas as composite, with early sayings material sitting alongside later material, so the James saying can be old even if the collection we have is second century. The Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. 1, 654, 655) date to around 200, and a Semitic original behind some of it is plausible, though we don't have one to point at.
Stephen Patterson's work on Thomas is the best place to follow this up.
Exactly! "Village of Hammadi"—a quiet agricultural spot in Upper Egypt that accidentally gave us one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century. History has a funny way of hiding in plain sight!
Cristian Knopke, a German author, has published not long ago the first comprehensive modern interpretation of the ancient Vedic scripts.
In a nutshell they deliver (already delivered back then !) what the modern scientific community has called the (nowadays missing) „Theory of Everything“.
Including a physical explanation what „God“ is and which role „it“ plays in this reality as well as we humans.
So, basically an intertwining of physical and metaphysical (spiritual) theories.
With a clear match and no missing links left or even incompatibilities as between quantum and classic physics / Einstein‘s general relativity theory still as of today.
He then went on to analyse the gospel of Thomas against these scripts and these interpretations - et voilà: you can literally attribute Thomas (or Jesus’) sayings one-to-one to the scientific sayings in the ancient Vedic scripts, and particularly in the form of the so called (but nowadays mostly lost) Mahayana Buddhismus..
(Source: Jesus in Nirvana, by Cristian Knopke, p. 23 ff.)
Thanks for sharing this! While I tend to analyze Thomas through its 1st/2nd-century Jewish wisdom and early apocalyptic contexts, the parallels between early wisdom literature and Eastern traditions are always fascinating to explore.
Well , there are universal themes that repeat in mystic traditions because they draw from the same well. Most scholars do not think Thomas was influenced by Eastern sources, but tapped into our origins as light and oneness and the idea each is responsible for their own "salvation." The following sounds pretty original.
(13) Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I resemble." Simon Peter said to him, "A just angel is what you resemble." Matthew said to him, "An intelligent philosopher is what you resemble." Thomas said to him, "Teacher, my mouth utterly will not let me say what you resemble." Jesus said, "I am not your (sing.) teacher, for you have drunk and become intoxicated from the bubbling wellspring that I have personally measured out."
Whoever wrote the Gospel of john REALLY did not like that and made sure in polemicizing against Thomas who the one was the last to get it. One of the worst defamations in human history and John got away with it. (John got away with a lot of stuff. The big winner in all of this, until now.)
Couldn't agree more. Saying 13 is one of the most intriguing passages in Thomas. That shift from standard discipleship to direct spiritual experience is striking.
Thanks, Dean! The short answer, based on scholarly consensus, is that Szekely’s Essene Gospel of Peace is a 20th-century forgery. He claimed to translate it from secret Vatican and Coptic archives, but no ancient manuscript or text has ever been produced. It's a fascinating piece of modern esoteric history, but definitely not ancient!
I keep coming back to the essential teachings of Jesus and find them perfectly valid and relevant. The historical analysis is fascinating but absent a Time Machine we will never know the full truth and context of His Life.
That’s the exact tension, isn't it? Without a time machine, history gives us fragments and arguments rather than neat wrap-ups. Focusing on the core human teachings is often the most grounded place to land. Really glad you enjoyed the piece!
The true traditions of Jesus bear comparison with the true traditions of Socrates . Neither of them wrote anything down , so we have to make the best of St Paul or Plato . The views of both Jesus and Socrates caused the "authorities" to ensure their "departure" for the sake of good order .
You have a point. The parallel even extends to the awkwardness of the sources: just as we can't fully separate Socrates from Plato's philosophical agenda, we can't fully separate Jesus from the theological work Paul and the evangelists were doing. Both men come to us refracted through devoted followers with their own ideas.
If one is looking for consistency with more mature Eastern Theistic thought, especially Vedanta, Thomas is much closer in theology than anything in the canonical gospels, especially John, which Vedanta would deeply oppose, as does Thomas. Which is probably why John polemicizes against Thomas by making him the doubter.
Whether this gets one closer to the historical Jesus is another story. One would like to think so because Thomas' Jesus is both illumined and sane and Jesus in many places in the canonical is neither. (See Mathew 27:31-46 for starters.)
I will agree with Irenaeus on two positions he had. He rejected the demiurge idea and the demonization of Earth and the physical as not consistent with Jesus' teachings
I am sympathetic to Thomas as an "is it possible to find better evidence ?" enqirer , being myself an amateur student of the philosphy of science .
At the physical level the Royal Socety (originating under King Charles II) had the motto "Nothing on Authority" (particularly Aristotle or the Scriptures) .
Excellent. More to folloe on the nine Pachomian monasteries in a network and their Cenobitic beliefs on redemption and salvation. Gnosticism as a modern umbrella labell for many very different beliefs and constructs. The Pachomian Monks in Tabennesi made up the core nucleus of five of nine monasteries near the modern-day town of Nag Hammadi complete with an extensive library. These nine Pachomian monasteries formed a network or federation of monasteries known as the Koinonia.
With references, Britannica offers this:
"... Consensus on a definition of gnosticism has proved difficult. The groups conventionally classified as gnostic did not constitute a single movement with relatively
homogeneous organization, teachings, and rituals. Even the self-designation
gnostic is problematic, since it is attested for only some of the traditions conventionally treated as gnostic, and its connotations are ambiguous. ...
Whereas some researchers argue that the term gnostic should be restricted to the sects or schools that called themselves by that name, others extend the category to include additional religious movements that allegedly shared various distinctive features. Still others treat gnosticism as a world religion that existed from antiquity to early modern times. ... in contrast, the traditional Christian emphasis is on redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus
The Pachomian monastic context gives us one of the best grounded theories for why those jars were buried when they were. And you're entirely right about the Britannica excerpt—"Gnosticism" is largely a modern blanket term for a wildly diverse set of groups that often disagreed with each other as much as they did with orthodoxy!
T.A. Tanner your sources appear to conflict with other sources. Tim O’Neill published a piece entitled “The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicaea and the Bible”, dated May 5, 2017 in which he wrote:
“The key purpose of the Council, however, was the resolution of the Arian Controversy over the status of Jesus as “God the Son” in relation to “God the Father” in the doctrine of the Trinity. The statement of the Council on this matter formed the Nicene Creed which became the basis of future Christological formulations (and the subject of later disputes on the matter).
What the Council did NOT vote on or even discuss was the Biblical canon – i.e. which Christian books and texts could be considered divinely inspired and therefore “Scripture”, which were useful but not scriptural and which were actually “heretical”. Despite this, the idea that the “Bible was created by a vote at the Council of Nicaea” is a pseudo historical myth that has been kicking around for centuries and forms part of several key pieces of pseudo scholarship and pop culture, which reveals the apparently “shocking” but actually rather obvious idea that the Bible was put together by a consensus of human beings. It certainly formed a key plot element in the schlock pseudo historical thriller The Da Vinci Code (2003) and in its film adaptation in 2006.”
O'Neill and I are saying the same thing. From the piece:
QUOTE
"The council fought about the relationship between the Father and the Son, produced a creed against Arius, and settled a scheduling dispute over Easter. The canon didn't come up. We have the creed, we have canons on clerical discipline and readmitting lapsed Christians, and we have contemporary accounts. Nobody at Nicaea took a show of hands on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."
UNQUOTE
The paragraph just above that one is the popular version I'm setting up to knock down: Constantine convening in 325, bishops voting on gospels, the losers going on a bonfire. My line "in our universe, though, one of those things happened" is doing too much work in too few words, since the one thing that happened is the council itself. Fair catch on the wording, and I'll tighten it.
The rest of the section makes the same case O'Neill does, from a different angle. The four-gospel core was old news well before 325, with Irenaeus defending it around 180 on the grounds that there are four winds and four zones of the world, which is the reasoning of a man who's already decided. The first surviving list matching our twenty-seven books exactly is Athanasius in his Festal Letter of 367, forty-two years after Nicaea. That's the year that matters for Nag Hammadi, because Athanasius told Egyptian Christians to purge everything else and somebody a few miles from a Pachomian monastery put a library in the ground shortly after.
Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament has the long version if you want it.
What makes this account so valuable is its refusal of the consoling symmetry by which one orthodoxy is merely replaced with another. The canonical tradition was neither selected at Nicaea nor self-evidently complete from the beginning; yet the suppressed texts do not therefore become a purer Christianity or a secret biography of Jesus. They reveal something historically more important: before doctrine became inheritance, it was conflict, and before “heresy” described an error, it named the position that lost the institutional struggle to define the terms. The survival of Nag Hammadi does not tell us which community possessed the truth. It allows us to hear, however partially, voices that power had nearly succeeded in making known only through their enemies.
Thank you, this is a generous read. I completely agree that "heresy" describing the position that lost the institutional fight is the whole argument in one line, and it's why the popular version bothers me. Swapping one set of winners for another set of winners doesn't get you any closer to what happened. What Nag Hammadi gives us is the chance to hear these people in something other than Irenaeus's paraphrase, and that's worth plenty on its own.
Exactly. Historical recovery should restore suppressed voices to the record, not manufacture a retrospective victory for them. Being heard in one’s own language is already a profound correction when power had arranged for one’s existence to survive only as accusation. Thank you for such a carefully researched and intellectually honest piece.
If orthodoxy was merely the theology of the imperial winners, why did ancient Christian traditions outside the Latin West including Ethiopia, preserve broader canons while still rejecting the Gnostic reversal of the Creator, creation, incarnation, and resurrection?
I agree; the fact that non-Western traditions like the Ethiopian Orthodox Church independently rejected Gnostic cosmology proves this wasn't just a political consensus dictated by Rome or Nicaea. The core theological divide ran much deeper than imperial politics. Where I think the "winners" dynamic still applies is in how those boundaries were state-enforced once Constantine stepped in, but your point is a great check against oversimplifying the theological consensus.
love that you include Bart. How about the theory of a Q Gospel that is "mostly sayings of Jesus". You seem to discount sayings
Thanks Dave. I don't discount the sayings at all, and Q is one of the better arguments in the whole field. The double-tradition material in Matthew and Luke that isn't in Mark lines up too nicely to be a coincidence, and the Gospel of Thomas proves sayings collections were a real genre in early Christianity, so a lost sayings source is entirely plausible.
My caution is about what we can claim from it. Nobody has ever seen Q. Every version of it is a reconstruction built backward out of Matthew and Luke, which means the text we're analyzing is one scholars produced, not one anybody dug up. Kloppenborg's layered reconstruction in Excavating Q is careful work, but it's still a hypothesis stacked on a hypothesis. And Mark Goodacre's The Case Against Q makes a serious argument that Luke just used Matthew directly, which removes the need for Q entirely. Ehrman accepts Q as probable, and I'd say the same, but probable isn't the same as documented.
So the sayings tradition likely does preserve some of the earliest material we have. I just won't treat a reconstructed text as evidence with the same weight as a manuscript we can actually read.
I have read Barts works and have discussed with him directly. He is very available. He demonstrated that parts of the Bible, the one without sin casts the first stone was added in Europe. By mapping out bibles all over the world and dating them and tracking them, he can show changes. Even the septuagints existents shows the impact of man on the five books of the law since Jews lost the ability to read and write Hebrew and need Greek.
What I love about Thomas that you mention is Thomas was an an apostle. Thomas knew Jesus. He speaks in his works from the first person. And Jesus said to me. Most do not know that Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were most likely not first person accounts of Jesus at the same level of Thomas or the other official apostles. John is debatable.
I am a Catholic and am raising my children as Catholics and I believe our book contains the voice of God. I am not a solo scriptura fanboy. I pray and question if it represents the totality of his message. It is still as good as we got.
Love this reflection, Dave! The tension between textual history and living faith is such a rich topic, and it’s great to see how deeply you engage with both Ehrman's research and your own Catholic tradition.
I enjoy reading your insights—keep them coming!
The history is there. It’s not pretty. This was very well written.
Thank you, John.
Interesting. I remember the Elaine Pagels book, and when I read it, it made sense to me. That there was more to it -- more "gospels," more to Gnosticism -- makes sense too. We know what we know until we know more.
As for the religious import, to me as a Greek Orthodox it matters not at all. We get baptized, married, and buried without the necessity of anyone's saying anything except for what's in the liturgy. We don't even get to say "I do."
As a rule, we don't ponder especially hard about God or Jesus. Even my grandmother, the most religious of all of us, did the sign of the cross every time she donned her black bathing costume for a dip in her middle daughter's saltwater swimming pool in Connecticut, in her later years went to church when someone took her, and was content with her family and her cooking. Good enough.
That's a lovely picture of your grandmother, and it says something about how faith works for most people. The doctrinal fights that scholars spend careers on barely touch the lived version, which is liturgy, family, and food.
Having had my first experience of a Russian orthodox funeral recently, the lack of participation really bothered me. It seems to me that the liturgies which require no participation and those that dictate the responses are more about control of others than about experience of the divine. Which kind of resonates with what Irenaeus was aiming for. If you are required to give set responses, or not respond at all and just listen, then there needs to be a Canon, as it essentially provides the answers to ‘frequently asked questions’. Or at least to most of them, and thought beyond that is discouraged.
Interestingly in the Celtic mythology, Taliesin fulminates against Christians making themselves vulnerable to invaders (likely Norse incursions) by being on their knees in a known place at set times, instead of following the rhythms of the solar and lunar cycles.
Fixed responses do indeed require fixed content, and a settled canon is what makes the responses fixed. Whether that's control or continuity probably depends on which end of it you're standing on.
I can understand your discomfort. But Orthodoxy is honest: The liturgy is what it is.
Has Catholicism ever really changed despite Vatican decrees and pronouncements? Well, folk masses, I suppose. I was always puzzled when my Catholic friends said they played their guitars in church. But it's still my way or the highway in terms of dogma.
Are responses during other, say, Protestant, church services really spontaneous or just canned responses, only in English? Maybe in some Pentecostal meetings.
In my old school, we had Chapel every morning, and I still have my hymnal. Loved it. And I attended a couple of Anglican services in England when I was there. Loved that too. But a Greek Orthodox church, while I hardly ever go, is home.
I think that's the strongest thing anyone can say for it. The liturgy doesn't pretend to be spontaneous, so nobody's being sold anything they aren't getting.
If the funeral was in Old Church Slavonic, you probably understood none of it . I am militant about English only in our Orthodox churches in countries where English is the language. 9th c Bulgarian (Slavonic), 3rd c Koine Greek, even modern foreign languages have NO place in the States, England or Australia, etc etc! Using foreign languages is rude and excluding.
If you actually heard what the hymnology said, you'd be very moved. It teaches what we believe about death and the world to come. As to "no participation", and "dictated responses", you obviously understand nothing about Orthodox Christianity. Every litany is supposed to be responded by those attending. Unfortunately, most congregations got lazy and let the choir do all that. That's not on the Church!
Shrug. I like my Greek liturgy when I go to church. To each his own.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. It was my first encounter with Orthodox Christianity! I’m not entirely sure anyone at the funeral other some members of immediate family and maybe a couple of friends of the older generation are actually members of the congregation. It would have been beautiful to understand the words being sung. I need to ask my friend if she chose to have the service in Russian because that was her late mother’s preference.
Depends on the jurisdiction. If it was ROCOR or under the Moscow Patriarchate they tend to be rather ethnocentric, which does nobody any good and parishes that are inward-looking like that tend to wither away. Plus, it was not in modern Russian. The Slavic churches, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian etc, use Old Church Slavonic, which is the language the Bulgarians were speaking in the 9th c when the Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius came to convert them to Christianity. They had no written language so Cyril invented one for them based on the Greek alphabet - thus the Cyrillic alphabet. Nobody speaks it anymore, just like 3rd c Koine Greek - it's an archaic liturgical language. If you're interested in hearing it in English, seek out a parish of the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) the 4 part harmonized music used there is quite beautiful if the choir has reasonable skills.
My family's Greek Orthodox Church in Brooklyn Heights has performed the liturgy in Greek for over a hundred years, when my maternal grandmother helped raise money for its establishment. Oh, over the years a little more English has been added to the sermon and to announcements and some prayers; but except for a changing of the guard in terms of priest, psalti, and choir, and of course parishioners, it's exactly as it was.
I don't know that anyone in our church is particularly militant. The church is what it is. When I attended its fair earlier this summer, I was transported back to its very first one. The faces have changed, the old timers are gone, but the new crop love the church, sweetly and devotedly.
A hearty yassou! to all.
Pagels notes that the saying of Jesus can be -- and were -- interpreted as gnostic. In her _The Gnostic Paul_, Pagels documents the extensive gnostic-sounding elements in the Epistles. She again hedges by saying it's understandable how they could appeal to gnostics, to avoid even considering the possibility that the author himself was gnostic and docetist.
Our Orthodox marriage ceremonies don't also require the father giving away his daughter as property to her husband. I didn't miss saying "I do" one damned bit.
Thanks, I never quite understood the public fascination with the gnostics. Their primary message of the inherent corruption of the material world, and therefore only the spiritual world matters, does not seem very attractive to me. You end up with a fatalistic world view - why fix what is wrong, when everything is corrupt?
I kind of see echoes of this in some flavors of Christianity. Why preserve the environment when it is all going to be swept away anyway?
Thanks Seth. That's my read too. A cosmology that treats matter as the problem struggles to produce any reason to repair it. And you're right that the echo survives in strands of Christianity that treat this world as a waiting room.
I know the Gnostics are a particular interest of yours, and you were on my mind while I was writing the piece.
Because the environment we experiences the only environment we have to experience and we might as well make the best of it. More to the point, possibility exists that we can make this experiential reality better.
This experiential reality runs off of collective belief. If you don't believe that, ask yourself why so much time and money has been invested to make people believe the endless litany of lies that is right out in front of us? Clearly our history is not what they say it is. The system we currently live in is based upon seperation, predation and extraction. How much effort has been pushed into making us believe we are single solitary accidental beings on an accidental world in an accidental universe? All of it standing in opposition of everything religion around the world says, actually.
Think very deeply about that for a moment. Or perhaps a few years.
I would consider myself a gnostic because of direct experience. The first time it happened when I died, which is very interesting itself, and had a near-death experience. That was the first time I touched the source and realized that it is always inside me and always has been.
We are not what we think we are and think again about how much effort has been put into making us believe?
I hear what you're saying, and the historical pattern backs part of it. What survives tends to be what the ruling class found useful, and until fairly recently entire nations held a particular flavor of a particular religion because their rulers picked it. Clovis converts and the Franks convert. Vladimir converts and the Rus convert. Constantine, Ethelbert, and Mieszko all work the same way.
That said, I don't think it's all a conspiracy. I'm convinced most clergy in most religions believe what they're selling, and that's a harder problem than cynicism, because sincere people building an institution can produce the same outcome as calculating ones without anybody lying.
Well put.
I see the work of the Gnostics as unfinished. It got aborted by the people in power at that time. It has only recently been revisited in any kind of meaningful way. And I believe what we have learned is that the Gnostics were onto something. The spiritual world DOES matter much more than we give it credit for. And one reason it does is that only through it can we learn the truth about the origin of all things material. In other words, Spirit came first. And that is what the Powers of those times - and of these times - don't want us to realize.
The Romans agreed that made for a bad state religion. Yet its general appeal, among people suffering in a cruel world, lasted until the 5th century.
Well, actually it has lasted until today in the Roman Catholic Church. Which in many ways is some vestige of Roman government, just with more an emphasis on winning through expansion of religion, versus conquering land. Though they have plenty of land as well.
Christian Science is modern Gnosticism. Their interpretation of the Genesis myth is that Adam fell into a deep sleep - "the Adam dream", and therefore this world is only a dream, therefore their rejection of medicine. They're all nuts!
Otherworldlyism, in all possible flavors incl. naval-gazing Jungism & social media “debates”, rabbitholes, …
= Look Over There! (not right here, right now, as the plunder is under way)
Fair enough. The plaster does need doing.
Thank you for writing such a clear and accurate analysis of the Gnostic Gospels. I did my Ph.D. at the school which did the original scholarship on Nag Hammadi and the impression that many who were doing the scholarly analysis on it that "all truths are equal" was the exact reason that I chose to make my emphasis on the History of Christianity (orthodoxy & heresy) instead of New Testament studies. I also wrote a non-peer reviewed response to the publication of the Gospel of Judas in 2006 for the faith-based university where I was teaching.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that if it is really old, it must also be as valuable as the canonical scriptures. This isn't helped by the fact that some of the authors listed in your bibliography and in parts of your article give the impression that the gnostic gospels are truth that was purposely suppressed from the canon. People can also accidentally assume that the reason the canonical scriptures are viewed as authoritative is because of Nicaea, but that fails to recognize that Constantine asked for a Bible at Nicaea because he was willing to pay for it but we don't get our first draft of the books to be included in the canon until 367 AD (Athanasius's Festal Letter written more than 30 years after Constantine's death & 42 years after Nicaea).
For me, your most important statement about the shortcomings of Gnosticism and the reason that gnostic writings should not be viewed as authoritative is:
"What holds most of this together is a conviction that salvation comes through knowledge rather than through a death and a resurrection, that the material world is a mistake, and that a divine spark is stuck inside you waiting to hear its own name."
As your statement suggests, the very reason that Gnosticism was rejected by the church is that it was based on the human acquisition of knowledge rather than the victorious death of Christ over death and hell (Christus Victor).
Thank you for such a well written and clear exposition of the difference between writings based on the human acquisition of knowledge, and the Christian understanding of the effective work of Christ.
Thanks. Coming from a professor of church history and theology, your kind words mean a lot.
Your point about Nicaea is the one I keep having to hammer, since it's the single most common thing people get wrong. Constantine asked for copies, Athanasius gave us the first list matching our twenty-seven books in 367, and those are separate events forty-two years apart. Same with age and value: old means old, and nothing more.
Because I didn't want to make my original response too long, there were a few interesting points that I would add:
1. Not only did the finalization of the Canon take so many years, but if you read Eusebius of Caesarea's list, which is similar, he makes a distinction between writings which are authoritative, i. e., the Canon, and the positive value that can still be gained from the other writings. The point is the Catholic Bible contains not only the Canon but it contains other writings which were considered for the Canon but were just viewed as being valuable without being fully authoritative to create the "yardstick" of faith.
2. Although Nicaea was where the issue of the canon was first officially raised, the recognition of a need for an antidote to the rise of heresy goes all the way back to Irenaeus and the other proto-orthodox writers that you mentioned. The reason so many of these late 2nd century/ early 3rd century Church fathers wrote against heresy was that the primary constituency of the Christian church had shifted to being almost completely Greco-Roman rather than Jewish in its constituency. By then, the Bar-Kochba revolt had occurred and the complete split between Jews and Christians had occurred. The reason this matters is that it also coincided with a strong rise of Neoplatonism. Therefore arguments based on knowledge and other Greco-Roman understandings, including the rejection of resurrection, appeared to be much more authoritative to the average GR Christian. Also, the habit of Gnostic writers to name their works after the "hero" of their writing gave the false impression that it might be the writing of that respected person or at least that their thoughts aligned with that "hero."
3. Finally, as you are aware I'm sure, the second antidote to heresy that Irenaeus provided long before the formal discussion of canon is the apostolic succession. In this, the Catholic church of the time was attempting to say that the authoritative line of the eyewitnesses of the Christian faith could be drawn from the pope at the time of Irenaeus' writings back to St. Peter. So the answer to heresy for the West was the truth as proclaimed through the Pope and the canon. The canon would be equally important to the Eastern Orthodox Church but it did not draw the apostolic succession through St Peter. In fact, if you look at the formation of churches in different areas, they will quite often have a story that links a specific apostle or eyewitness to that area, such as linking St. Thomas to India or Joseph of Arimathea to Armenia.
Once again, thank you for such excellent scholarship. And contrary to one of your negative commenters, the fact that you cite the primary sources and the critical secondary sources is really helpful because it allows other people to compare the arguments and recognize the nuanced but important distinctions that you are making. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for adding these extra points. They bring such crucial differences to how the development of the canon is understood, particularly around the cultural shift away from Jewish roots and toward the Greco-Roman, Neoplatonic world. I really appreciate you taking the time to share these insights!
Regarding the Gospel of Thomas, would a gnostic author have included logion 12, which is Jesus's endorsement of James the Just, first bishop of the Ebionite church in Jerusalem? The Ebionites don't appear to be gnostic, since they didn't see Jesus as God and were Torah observant.
And does this endorsement suggest that it was recorded when Jesus and James the Just were both alive?
If the Gospel of Thomas contains authentic sayings of Jesus, it was likely originally written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Given that the Copts were Christianized while James the Just was still alive, it makes sense that the sayings of Jesus would be translated at that time. Especially since there was no Canon at that time.
Thanks Chris. This is a good catch, and it's one reason Thomas resists the Gnostic label.
Logion 12 hands authority to James, which points to a Jewish-Christian Jerusalem tradition rather than anything Sethian or Valentinian. Most scholars treat Thomas as composite, with early sayings material sitting alongside later material, so the James saying can be old even if the collection we have is second century. The Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. 1, 654, 655) date to around 200, and a Semitic original behind some of it is plausible, though we don't have one to point at.
Stephen Patterson's work on Thomas is the best place to follow this up.
Nag Hammadi
City of little Mohammed
Exactly! "Village of Hammadi"—a quiet agricultural spot in Upper Egypt that accidentally gave us one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century. History has a funny way of hiding in plain sight!
@Lloyd De Jongh had a lot of good videos on gnosticism on youtube
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out
Well, the rabbit hole goes even deeper:
Cristian Knopke, a German author, has published not long ago the first comprehensive modern interpretation of the ancient Vedic scripts.
In a nutshell they deliver (already delivered back then !) what the modern scientific community has called the (nowadays missing) „Theory of Everything“.
Including a physical explanation what „God“ is and which role „it“ plays in this reality as well as we humans.
So, basically an intertwining of physical and metaphysical (spiritual) theories.
With a clear match and no missing links left or even incompatibilities as between quantum and classic physics / Einstein‘s general relativity theory still as of today.
He then went on to analyse the gospel of Thomas against these scripts and these interpretations - et voilà: you can literally attribute Thomas (or Jesus’) sayings one-to-one to the scientific sayings in the ancient Vedic scripts, and particularly in the form of the so called (but nowadays mostly lost) Mahayana Buddhismus..
(Source: Jesus in Nirvana, by Cristian Knopke, p. 23 ff.)
Thanks for sharing this! While I tend to analyze Thomas through its 1st/2nd-century Jewish wisdom and early apocalyptic contexts, the parallels between early wisdom literature and Eastern traditions are always fascinating to explore.
I pointed that out as well.
Thanks for jumping in, Ken! Always great to see readers spotting those cross-traditional threads and shared ideas in the comments.
Well , there are universal themes that repeat in mystic traditions because they draw from the same well. Most scholars do not think Thomas was influenced by Eastern sources, but tapped into our origins as light and oneness and the idea each is responsible for their own "salvation." The following sounds pretty original.
(13) Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I resemble." Simon Peter said to him, "A just angel is what you resemble." Matthew said to him, "An intelligent philosopher is what you resemble." Thomas said to him, "Teacher, my mouth utterly will not let me say what you resemble." Jesus said, "I am not your (sing.) teacher, for you have drunk and become intoxicated from the bubbling wellspring that I have personally measured out."
Whoever wrote the Gospel of john REALLY did not like that and made sure in polemicizing against Thomas who the one was the last to get it. One of the worst defamations in human history and John got away with it. (John got away with a lot of stuff. The big winner in all of this, until now.)
Couldn't agree more. Saying 13 is one of the most intriguing passages in Thomas. That shift from standard discipleship to direct spiritual experience is striking.
Agreed - „one well“
I just do admire „his/her/it‘s“ endless patience in hammering it home to us over and over again for such a long time.. 😀
And yes, John got away with many things - hmm..
I think we now live in a time when we no longer "see though a glass, darkly".
2,000 years is not even the blink of an eye in eternity. We were there, shift, here we are.
If one elides the intervening Olivet material, Mark 8:29 + 33 exposes Peter's misconception of Jesus as the traditional Jewish Moshiach.
Thanks! What's your take on the "Essene Gospel of Peace" by Edmund Szekley?
Thanks, Dean! The short answer, based on scholarly consensus, is that Szekely’s Essene Gospel of Peace is a 20th-century forgery. He claimed to translate it from secret Vatican and Coptic archives, but no ancient manuscript or text has ever been produced. It's a fascinating piece of modern esoteric history, but definitely not ancient!
Thanks for reply!
Excellent. More to follow. 🙏🔥
Thanks, Jeff! Glad you enjoyed it..
Lots of questions raised, no conclusive answers.
I keep coming back to the essential teachings of Jesus and find them perfectly valid and relevant. The historical analysis is fascinating but absent a Time Machine we will never know the full truth and context of His Life.
However, I did enjoy reading your piece.
That’s the exact tension, isn't it? Without a time machine, history gives us fragments and arguments rather than neat wrap-ups. Focusing on the core human teachings is often the most grounded place to land. Really glad you enjoyed the piece!
The true traditions of Jesus bear comparison with the true traditions of Socrates . Neither of them wrote anything down , so we have to make the best of St Paul or Plato . The views of both Jesus and Socrates caused the "authorities" to ensure their "departure" for the sake of good order .
You have a point. The parallel even extends to the awkwardness of the sources: just as we can't fully separate Socrates from Plato's philosophical agenda, we can't fully separate Jesus from the theological work Paul and the evangelists were doing. Both men come to us refracted through devoted followers with their own ideas.
If one is looking for consistency with more mature Eastern Theistic thought, especially Vedanta, Thomas is much closer in theology than anything in the canonical gospels, especially John, which Vedanta would deeply oppose, as does Thomas. Which is probably why John polemicizes against Thomas by making him the doubter.
Whether this gets one closer to the historical Jesus is another story. One would like to think so because Thomas' Jesus is both illumined and sane and Jesus in many places in the canonical is neither. (See Mathew 27:31-46 for starters.)
I will agree with Irenaeus on two positions he had. He rejected the demiurge idea and the demonization of Earth and the physical as not consistent with Jesus' teachings
This is a great addition. Thanks, Ken.
You are welcome.
I am sympathetic to Thomas as an "is it possible to find better evidence ?" enqirer , being myself an amateur student of the philosphy of science .
At the physical level the Royal Socety (originating under King Charles II) had the motto "Nothing on Authority" (particularly Aristotle or the Scriptures) .
"...the boast of an idiot who has never looked up. That “I am God and there is no other”. Sounds familiar today.
Certain human (and divine) archetypes really don't change over the millennia, do they? Hubris is as ancient as the texts!
Excellent. More to folloe on the nine Pachomian monasteries in a network and their Cenobitic beliefs on redemption and salvation. Gnosticism as a modern umbrella labell for many very different beliefs and constructs. The Pachomian Monks in Tabennesi made up the core nucleus of five of nine monasteries near the modern-day town of Nag Hammadi complete with an extensive library. These nine Pachomian monasteries formed a network or federation of monasteries known as the Koinonia.
With references, Britannica offers this:
"... Consensus on a definition of gnosticism has proved difficult. The groups conventionally classified as gnostic did not constitute a single movement with relatively
homogeneous organization, teachings, and rituals. Even the self-designation
gnostic is problematic, since it is attested for only some of the traditions conventionally treated as gnostic, and its connotations are ambiguous. ...
Whereas some researchers argue that the term gnostic should be restricted to the sects or schools that called themselves by that name, others extend the category to include additional religious movements that allegedly shared various distinctive features. Still others treat gnosticism as a world religion that existed from antiquity to early modern times. ... in contrast, the traditional Christian emphasis is on redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. ... "
https://www.britannica.com/topic/gnosticism
The Pachomian monastic context gives us one of the best grounded theories for why those jars were buried when they were. And you're entirely right about the Britannica excerpt—"Gnosticism" is largely a modern blanket term for a wildly diverse set of groups that often disagreed with each other as much as they did with orthodoxy!
T.A. Tanner your sources appear to conflict with other sources. Tim O’Neill published a piece entitled “The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicaea and the Bible”, dated May 5, 2017 in which he wrote:
“The key purpose of the Council, however, was the resolution of the Arian Controversy over the status of Jesus as “God the Son” in relation to “God the Father” in the doctrine of the Trinity. The statement of the Council on this matter formed the Nicene Creed which became the basis of future Christological formulations (and the subject of later disputes on the matter).
What the Council did NOT vote on or even discuss was the Biblical canon – i.e. which Christian books and texts could be considered divinely inspired and therefore “Scripture”, which were useful but not scriptural and which were actually “heretical”. Despite this, the idea that the “Bible was created by a vote at the Council of Nicaea” is a pseudo historical myth that has been kicking around for centuries and forms part of several key pieces of pseudo scholarship and pop culture, which reveals the apparently “shocking” but actually rather obvious idea that the Bible was put together by a consensus of human beings. It certainly formed a key plot element in the schlock pseudo historical thriller The Da Vinci Code (2003) and in its film adaptation in 2006.”
Hi Jesse! Thanks for your feedback!
O'Neill and I are saying the same thing. From the piece:
QUOTE
"The council fought about the relationship between the Father and the Son, produced a creed against Arius, and settled a scheduling dispute over Easter. The canon didn't come up. We have the creed, we have canons on clerical discipline and readmitting lapsed Christians, and we have contemporary accounts. Nobody at Nicaea took a show of hands on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."
UNQUOTE
The paragraph just above that one is the popular version I'm setting up to knock down: Constantine convening in 325, bishops voting on gospels, the losers going on a bonfire. My line "in our universe, though, one of those things happened" is doing too much work in too few words, since the one thing that happened is the council itself. Fair catch on the wording, and I'll tighten it.
The rest of the section makes the same case O'Neill does, from a different angle. The four-gospel core was old news well before 325, with Irenaeus defending it around 180 on the grounds that there are four winds and four zones of the world, which is the reasoning of a man who's already decided. The first surviving list matching our twenty-seven books exactly is Athanasius in his Festal Letter of 367, forty-two years after Nicaea. That's the year that matters for Nag Hammadi, because Athanasius told Egyptian Christians to purge everything else and somebody a few miles from a Pachomian monastery put a library in the ground shortly after.
Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament has the long version if you want it.
What makes this account so valuable is its refusal of the consoling symmetry by which one orthodoxy is merely replaced with another. The canonical tradition was neither selected at Nicaea nor self-evidently complete from the beginning; yet the suppressed texts do not therefore become a purer Christianity or a secret biography of Jesus. They reveal something historically more important: before doctrine became inheritance, it was conflict, and before “heresy” described an error, it named the position that lost the institutional struggle to define the terms. The survival of Nag Hammadi does not tell us which community possessed the truth. It allows us to hear, however partially, voices that power had nearly succeeded in making known only through their enemies.
Thank you, this is a generous read. I completely agree that "heresy" describing the position that lost the institutional fight is the whole argument in one line, and it's why the popular version bothers me. Swapping one set of winners for another set of winners doesn't get you any closer to what happened. What Nag Hammadi gives us is the chance to hear these people in something other than Irenaeus's paraphrase, and that's worth plenty on its own.
Exactly. Historical recovery should restore suppressed voices to the record, not manufacture a retrospective victory for them. Being heard in one’s own language is already a profound correction when power had arranged for one’s existence to survive only as accusation. Thank you for such a carefully researched and intellectually honest piece.