Within Reason - #67 Elaine Pagels | What Are The Gnostic Gospels?

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Elaine Pagels is an American historian of religion. She is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels has conducted extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism. See me speak at Level Up in Atlanta this June: http://levelupconferences.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elaine Pagels, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. I've recently been getting really interested in the Gnostic Gospels, the so-called Gnostic Gospels. And in my work, as someone who's interested in philosophy and religion, they've always sort of been on the sideline. I've always been aware that there are these texts that didn't make it into the New Testament that have these weird and wacky stories about Jesus and a totally different idea about the origins of Christianity. But I really want to go on a deep dive. And so I'm going to be making some episodes discussing particular texts, the famous texts, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas. But what I wanted to do today was get an overview of this library, what it is, where it comes from, what it means for our studies of early Christianity.

So I suppose I can only begin by asking, what is a Gnostic Gospel? Ah, well, it's first of all a misnamed gospel, and it's, I'm partly responsible for that because when I first wrote a book about them, these are texts that surprisingly landed upon our group of graduate students and faculty when I was a graduate student at Harvard in the 70s, for example, and we were astonished to hear about a discovery. in 1945 of over 50 ancient writings, ancient religious writings, they're not all Christian, by any means. It's almost a miscellaneous library in many ways. So classifying them in that way is a misnomer. And I call them Gnostic Gospels because we didn't know what else to call them. I would now call them early Christian Gospels. They're ones that displeased some of the bishops and did not make the New Testament canon for very specific reasons.

But they opened up the ancient world to us and the understanding of how the beginning of Christianity emerged in quite a different way than we ever knew before. Just as the Dead Sea Scrolls really transformed the way we think about Judaism in the first century. Yeah, the Gnostic, or I suppose, the early Christian Gospels, I should begin calling them. The thing that's so amazing about them is that though we've known about their existence since the beginning of Christianity, really, I mean, you have the Bishop Ironaeus writing against heresies and talking about these Gospels that, that were circulating at the time that we didn't have access to, but we knew that they existed through the writings of their opponents. These texts are finally actually discovered for us to be

able to read the originals themselves in, what, 1945? In 1945. And yes, we had known them for 2,000 years as heretical, abominable, deceitful, and diabolical texts, right, through the writings of the church fathers, including I Irenaeus, whom I got to know pretty well on this journey. Second, Bishop, he was a Syrian missionary, studied with Bishop Polycarp, who was burned to death in the arena in Antioch in about the year 180 because he was a Christian, and he had sent this young missionary, Ironaeus, to the hinterlands of Barbarian France, Gaul, right? And he was there trying to convert people to Christianity. And he was aware that some people were reading

gospels that were not the most familiar, that is, the ones now in the New Testament. They were reading others that Irenaeus decided were subversive and diabolical. And so that's how we knew about them. These are awful. That was what we knew. And when suddenly we could read them for the first time, I was overjoyed and all of us were delighted because they transformed what we had expected. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to press just how incredible a discovery this is, and so relatively speaking, recent in biblical scholarship. I mean, if you think about the amount of time that people have had to pour over every single word in the Gospel of John, thousands of years. These Gospels have only been in our possession for less than a hundred years. And so it's a

really exciting area of scholarship. And your book, The Gnostic Gospels, I have a copy here, sort of a seminal text on introductions to these texts. I must say I was sort of blown away by a lot of what I was reading, beginning with just the story of how these Gospels are discovered. Yes, and they were found, as you know, in a cave in Egypt that's actually within walking distance of one of the earliest monasteries in Egypt, which was founded probably in 315 by a soldier named Pecomius. And I think there are many arguments about these texts, as likely you know. So I'll give you the version that we learned. I think it's most likely of the option with which I'm familiar, that these had been treasured in the library,

the sacred library of the monastery of St. Bacomius, the head of the chief monastery, the foundation monastery of 12 or 13 that he created, was within a, as I said, a walking distance of this cave. And when I walked to the cave from the monastery ruins, you walk in and you can see the beginning of the line of a psalm written on the wall of the cave because the monks would go there to pray and meditate. And they would have the first line of the psalm, the Lord is my shepherd, or from the Lord comes my help, would be the first line,

and then they would pray that psalm as they meditated in those caves. And about 300 years after the death of Jesus, when the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, made the first list of what we now call the New Testament canon, which means a standard, it's a measurement to keep a wall straight. He said, just read the Gospels on my list. There are only four of them. Don't read any of the others, because even though they may have good things in them, they will absolutely lead you astray.

and he required the monks the bishop did when he finally had political power behind him because Emperor Constantine had become a Christian by then and instead of being persecuted he was being flooded with imperial money and funds he said get rid of all those secret Gospels they are very bad they're all wrong the difference a primary difference as I see it is that the Gospels of now in the New Testament as you know, are narratives. They all tell stories.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, of course, very similar because they're all based on Mark. John is an outlier, actually, later and completely different. These texts don't tell stories. And the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are presumed to be the teaching of Jesus when he spoke to thousands of people

on the hills of Galilee. Right? The public teaching. But if he taught, as other rabbis did, in the first century, and this is very much confirmed by the Oxford scholar who wrote about them, I'll speak about him in a moment, the secret, the gospels found at Nag Hammadi, which were in the library of the monastery, were the secret. teaching of Jesus, not the public teaching. And if he taught as other rabbis did, he would have taught both ways. Rabbis still do that. They talk one way to the congregation, you know, and then they will talk to their own personal disciples about advanced level teaching. So these weren't meant to replace the other Gospels. They were meant to be supplemental, devotional material for people on an advanced

level. And that's what they look like. Yes, this idea of secret knowledge that's different from the public knowledge that Jesus professes is a key throughout the Gnostic themes. But before we jump into that, you talked about how Athanasius comes up with a scriptural canon and says any other gospel shouldn't be read. And so there are some theories that suggest that this is why these texts end up buried in this cave in Egypt, in Nakamadi, as you say. And it's a few thousand years later that these texts are discovered essentially by accident, if I'm not mistaken? Yes, apparently so. I mean, people go into those caves looking for burials and looking for things that were hidden there. And the story we get from one of the earliest persons who claims to have found it is that he was just digging around and he found this six-foot jar,

which contained 13 leather-bound books. They're large. They're about that big, these large books. And they would have been put on... That's about a foot or so just for our listeners.

It's about a foot wide and a foot high. Maybe two feet long and one wide. They would have been put on a lectern, most likely, and read by the reader that night, since some of the monks didn't read, during evening devotions but as I said I was

just reading the work of someone who very much dislikes the secret gospels and writes against them and there are many people in that group who says that they contradict the New Testament actually as I said they don't they supplement it

and he claimed that there's no historical evidence for Jesus teaching that way. That is completely wrong. If you read the Gospel of Mark chapter 4 and ask, do Jesus have a secret teaching? Mark 4 says, before Mark 4, Jesus is talking to crowds on the fields,

then he comes, he's alone with his disciples, and he says, to you alone, is given the secret, and the Greek word is Mysterion, right? The mystery of the kingdom of God. But to people out there, everything is in parables. All I'm telling them is parables. And at the end of chapter 4 of Mark, he goes on telling parables and saying, I'm not telling them so people will understand my teaching. I'm telling them so they will not understand. I don't want to want them to understand what I'm telling you. And this is in the Gospel of Mark.

This is in the canonical gospel that Christians today believe in. Mark 4, 10, and 11. Jesus says, only you, I'm giving the secret teaching. But Mark doesn't tell you what it is. Yeah. The secret teaching is only included in these others. And that's one reason why the bishops didn't trust it. They said, well, nobody heard it except one or two people.

How can you validate that? Well, you can't, really. Doesn't Paul say a similar thing in one of his letters about the idea of having discovered some secret knowledge that he can't relate to the readers of his epistles? Oh, absolutely. You have it in 1st Corinthians, too. He says, among the mature, you know Greek at all. Unfortunately not. Among the mature people, he calls them the grown-ups, we speak wisdom.

Divine wisdom, hidden before the ages for our glory. Secrets, divine wisdom. That's 1st Corinthians 2, 10 to 16. But he says, I'm not telling you that. You people in Corinth are just babies. your baby's in Christ. I'm not going to tell you any of that stuff. So Paul keeps his secret wisdom to himself. And so did Jesus, except to certain disciples. But that is, if one believes the New Testament gospel, then I think Mark is as close as we get to the earliest witnesses of these

stories. Jesus did teach secretly, but we don't have his secret teaching. extant because it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be actually told orally because then you could judge to whom you were speaking and the level of maturity of that person. We'll get back to Elaine Pagels in just a moment, but first, a message. I'm speaking at a conference in Atlanta, Georgia this June. The conference is called Level Up and it covers a wide range of topics including philosophy, society, culture, art and self-improvement. It's taking place between the 19th and 22nd of June 24 in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm going to be in conversation with Craig Biddle about morality. So if you're interested in the conversations about ethics, is it objective, as Craig

thinks, or is my emotivist framework a better picture of what ethics is all about, then this might be the event for you. You can get your tickets at level upconferences.org. I'm excited not just to speak at this conference, but also to be in attendance. There are lots of other speakers, including Iyan Herssey Ali, for example, who'll be discussing whether the future of liberalism should be religious or secular in light of her recent conversion to Christianity. And if you go to level upconferences.org, then at checkout, you'll be able to enter Alex 50 as a coupon code and get 50% off your registration fee. So if you like these kinds of conversations and can make it to Atlanta, and hopefully,

I'll see you there. Now back to Elaine Pagels. So you mentioned Mark a moment ago, this passage. I just wanted to quote it for our listeners so they can hear it in full. This is Mark, chapter 4 verse 10. When he was alone, the 12 and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside, everything is said in parables, so that, and then this is a quote of the prophet Isaiah, they may be ever seeing but not, but never perceiving and ever hearing, but never understanding.

Otherwise, they might turn and be forgiven. So you're quite, you're quite right. And it's very, very strange. Jesus seems to be saying that he is deliberately speaking in parables so that people will not understand the true teaching of his message. And if you go down to verse 31 of chapter 4, you'll see he'll say again, so that they will not understand. Ministers will say, oh, he speaks in parables to make it nice and simple for you.

And Mark says, no, he makes it that way so you don't understand. Yes, verse 33 to 34. similar parables, Jesus spoke the word to them as much as they could understand. He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything. Correct. And what we judge is that the Gospel of Thomas, which is said to have been told to Thomas the disciple, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene said to been told to Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip, allegedly reported by Philip, many others are told and claimed to be told by certain people. Many of the other texts found with the, and by

the way, I'm sorry, a real cut in a lot of this. Of the 50, more than 50 texts that were found, really only four or five of them should be called gospels. because they have that title inscribed next to the text. But others are revelation books in which people speak with Jesus and receive secret revelation. There are many other kinds of texts, but they all claim to be secret teachings. Many of them claim to be secret teachings, except the texts in the collection which aren't Christian. There are some that refer instead to the Greek gods. Some of them sound like they're written to Jewish writers or by Jewish writers.

Some refer to Greek stories and myths. There was a partial copy of Plato's Republic, I think, found amongst the Nakamadi Library. Yes, there is. There is. So it's quite miscellaneous in a way. But the primary find consists of what you call spiritual writings that you might find in a monastery library, today even. Yes. And so these texts are then discovered by some.

who's digging in the desert, hits into this jar, and by some accounts is at first afraid to open it in case it contains a gin or like a demon, and then finally thinks, well, maybe it's worth some money, opens it up, finds a bunch of papyrus, takes it home. I think his mother is alleged to have used some of it as fuel for her fire, like she kept it by the fire to feed the fire. And these would have been these ancient, sort of non-canonical Christian manuscripts. And it's only after a decade, of people realizing their worth and then trying to smuggle them out of Egypt and trying to sell them back and forth, that finally, again, we're talking about the 20th century here that these texts are finally translated and we're able to listen to them, we're able to read them ourselves. Where can we begin with trying to understand? I mean, interestingly, my idea of the Gnostic Gospels is that they sort of portray this different vision of Jesus, in particular the physicality of Jesus, whereas the canonical Gospels seem to emphasize, a physical resurrection in many points. The Gnostics seem to believe in the non-physicality of Jesus and the creation of the material world by a separate entity, not the God of the universe. This is really interesting stuff, but I'm wondering if you can, as well as explaining a bit about that, tell us how that fits into your earlier supposition that these Gospels are supposed to complement the canonical Gospels rather than contradict them. Well, early on, we, We heard all of those kinds of allegations.

These will be full of garbled things, full of passwords, full of weird heretical teachings. I was very struck that the Gospel of Thomas consists only, as you know, of 110 sayings of Jesus. These are the secret sayings which the Living Jesus spoke. And did as Judas Thomas wrote them down. And those sayings, actually half of them in Thomas, are identical, virtually identical, with what you find in Luke and Matthew, love your brother, blessed or the poor, or the parable of the mustard seeds, half of it is identical.

The other half are like Zen koans as I read them. I stopped reading when I found saying 70, which as I translate it, reads, Jesus said, 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. And I thought, oh, you don't have to believe that. It just happens to be true. And I took it psychologically as a powerful statement. But I realized later it's a theological statement because it's about the divine presence, in the universe, from which you and I and all of us are created, the divine energy from which

everything came forth is perceived in the Gospel of Thomas as light. And what the Gospel of Thomas urges the advanced follower of Jesus to do is to look for the light within, which is a metaphor for the energy that comes from being connected with the source of the universe and its energy. I find it, if anything, I would say more pantheist, but the idea that the world was created by an evil demiurge is the imposition of a completely different heretical system onto this text, which has nothing to do with it. There's nothing like that in Thomas at all. This is a text really, which resembles nothing more than Jewish mysticism, as Gentiles did not know it until the 15th or 16th century, when mystical texts from Kabbalah were published, I believe, from Spain.

And people in France and England and Holland began to read them and were fascinated. by Jewish mystical texts, we call it Kabbalah, which has a very similar view that in the beginning God was a kind of divine source of divine light and energy, pouring energy into the darkness of the universe and bringing forth the beauty of the world through which shines the divine energy everywhere once you learn how to see it. So it's, as I understand it, I've struggled to do that for 25 years. It's a mystical text. I want to ask about this idea of the creator god of the of the material universe and the separation of Jesus. I mean, you're quite right. The Gospel of Thomas being quite a short collection of just quotes of Jesus. This is an imposed theology, if you think

that's what the text means, perhaps, okay. But there are other non-canonical gospels which quite clearly point to the idea that Jesus is specifically sent to save people from this material condition they find themselves in as being created by this evil God that is the creator of the material world and Jesus is the sort of non-physical entity that comes to help us break free of that condition. Where do we find that idea in the Gnostic collection? I find that idea in Irenaeus, who can't stand these Gospels. He says, don't touch them, don't even read them, don't think about it. Because they're just the same as the false teacher Marcian.

Marcian was not a Gnostic. He was in a way a literal Christian, a Gentile from Asia Minor, who became a Christian, and he read the New Testament. He said, oh, this is a message of love. but then he read the Hebrew Bible and he said but that God is vengeful and judgmental and he created the world and it's full of terrible things like death and mosquitoes snakes he mentions those that was declared a heresy very early that as I read it has nothing to do with these texts but Ironaeus wanted to condemn them and so he said oh this is nothing but that same old heresy

I don't find that here. There are some texts in the collection which are not, well, I'd say some of the sources in the collection express a similar view that also you find in Jewish mysticism, that the divine energy behind the universe is not the character you almost find in Genesis and exibis, judging the world, punishing people for touching the ark, condemning them to death and so forth. So it gets mixed up in the writings of the people who really are opposed to the idea that these secret gospels have any value. But I must add that only some of the texts from Nag Hammadi

for me have this kind of spiritual power that Thomas does, some of the others, the treatise on resurrection, for example. And there you mentioned something important, The treatise on resurrection belongs to this small group of texts that I find very spiritually powerful. Because it's written by a teacher who's trying to explain to his pupil, what does Paul mean by resurrection? Do you have to believe that? Do you have to believe that that Jesus was dead and came back to life? And the treatise on resurrection interprets

1 Corinthians 15, Paul's teaching on resurrection. But Paul did not say, see Jesus come out of the grave. Paul did not touch him. Paul never talks that way about Jesus coming out of the grave. Paul says, there I was, you know, traveling to Syria. And suddenly I saw this brilliant light in the sky. And I fell down and I was blind by it. And I heard Jesus speaking to me and saying, Saul, why are you doing this? Why are you persecuting me? And I said, who are you? And he said, I am Jesus, whom you're persecuting.

You know the story. So he said, I saw this light. I heard this voice. Jesus spoke to me. That's how I saw him. And if you read Paul's view on resurrection, he talks about this physical body must be transformed into an invisible body.

This material must be transformed into imperishable. We have to be transformed. And the resurrection is a transformation, not a resurrection of a physical body, which is what the church doctrine becomes. If you know, you know, the creed of the church, it talks about the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. That is not Paul's teaching. It's the teaching of the synoptic gospels, which do talk about. Jesus was in that grave, he came out of it, we touched him, we felt him, there he was, Mark says it, well, in the added ending of Mark, Luke had more miracles, Matthew adds even more

miracles and say, not only that when Jesus died, people came out of the graves all over Jerusalem, the ones that are up on the mat of olives, it's all a graveyard today, was then. He said people came out of all those graves and visited people in the city. So the Jewish view of resurrection is coming out of the grave physically is what you find in the New Testament. But in Paul, you find resurrection as transformation. And in Orthodox Christian tradition, those get smashed together into want. You wrote a book called The Gnostic Pool. And you've mentioned Marcian, who our listeners may or may not be familiar with.

Marcian is a very early Christian who compiles, so they say, the first Christian New Testament canon. It's the earliest that we have of somebody putting together a group of texts and saying these are the authoritative texts. And this text that Marcian produces is completely absent the Old Testament. The Old Testament's gone. It's got one gospel, which is kind of like the Gospel of Luke, but with some bits missing, usually thought. thought to be a redacted version of Luke, although some people believe in the Marcian priority that Luke was based on Marcian's gospel. And then some of the letters of Poole. But interestingly here, Marcian thought that Poole was the only apostle of Jesus, the only true apostle.

And as far as I understand, this early Christian who compiles the first New Testament canon, believed that Poole was the only true apostle of Christ because the other apostles, the 12, we're actually sort of still worshipping this demiurgic material creator god who's not the real god of the universe. Is that an accurate representation? It is very accurate and it is Marcian whose view that the god of the Hebrew Bible who created the world did a terrible thing. He created a kind of prison in which we live. But the God of Jesus is a distant God far beyond that, especially. spiritual God, who rescues us from this world. And that is exactly where you get the parody of the Gnostic Gospels in Iranes. Marcian is the author of that heresy. And that's what they claim the secret Gospels teach, but they don't. This one is about, however, there were

mystically inclined Jews as well who said, you cannot speak the name of God, right? Because the reality beyond that name is so much greater than we can imagine that we do not even speak the name. But when you look at the picture of God in the Hebrew Bible, you can't take that literally. You have to take that as some kind of a human construct. So Marcian's view was echoed before that.

But it is Marcian whose teaching is then projected onto the Gospel of Thomas completely in a mistaken way. But there are these early Gnostic teachers, Marcian, Valentinus, Seth, who do believe in this picture of the universe, this picture of the evil material God and Jesus, the sort of spiritual savior, right? And so if that's projected onto the Gospel of Thomas, we still have texts as part of our Gnostic collection that come from, allegedly some from Valentinus's own hand, but certainly by their followers, which are explicitly condoning this view of the universe, right? I would like to separate these people because Marcion is a literal-minded Christian very different and with a very limited theology. said, completely different from Valentinus, who was a poet and a mystic, a homilist, a singer, and a visionary. And his teaching is much closer to Thomas. It's also in the treatise on resurrection, which talks about the resurrection as a spiritual transformation using Paul. So Valentinus loved Paul's teaching. And because Paul was the only

disciple who speaks about not only hearing the words of Jesus that he spoke in Galilee, but also having visions and receiving secret teaching. So Valentinus understands a double path, a public teaching of Jesus, and a secret path, which is mystical. And he is a mystical teacher. And that group of texts, Valentine's is, beautiful poem, Summer Harvest, or the tripartite tractate, or the Gospel of Philip, those are really much more like Jewish mystical teaching. Those are the ones I'm talking about.

And I guess those are the ones that interest me most, because there's a powerful mystical tradition there, which we find today in Kabbalah. When I went to the Orthodox Jewish Semmelah, in Brooklyn to speak to the biblical scholars about the Gospel of Thomas. They immediately recognize its affinity with the Hebrew Bible and also with Jewish mysticism. So I guess those are the texts I favor, and I tend to speak about those. If you look among all the collection of 50 texts, you can find some that are pretty weird, I admit that. Yeah, and there are texts like, for instance, the Gospel of Judas, which as far as I know, wasn't part of the Nakamardi Library, but is another one of these non-canonical Christian Gospels that focuses on Judas as the person with the secret

knowledge. And it is this secret knowledge idea that sort of goes throughout these texts. And I mean, I have the text here. And when you read it and it begins this Gospel of Judas with Jesus coming across his disciples praying, they're praying over some bread, he laughed. The disciples said, to him, master, why are you laughing at our prayer? What have we done? This is what's right. And Jesus answered them and says, I'm not laughing at you. You're not doing this because you want to, but because through this, your God will be praised. And they said, master, you are the son of God. And he says, how do you, how do you know me? Truly, I say to you, no generation of the people among you will know me. So you've got this idea of Jesus saying, ha, well, you're praying to your God, which is already

quite strange. And then famously, he sort of pulls Judas aside. And he takes Judas away from the rest of the disciples and sort of says, you know, do you know who I am? And Judas says to him, I know who you are and where you've come from. You've come from the immortal realm of Barbello, and I'm not worthy to utter the name of the one who sent you. And Jesus seems to condone this and essentially say that he's correct. And because of this secret knowledge, Judas has given this special task of, of, you know, betraying Jesus, at least in the public eye. But I mean, reading that, I'm like, okay, so you've got the disciples praying and Jesus saying, oh, you're worshipping your God there. Judas coming aside and saying, oh, I know you're from the realm

of Barbello, which stunned me when I first read it. A text like this is seemingly painting a totally different picture, right? I would actually, myself, I would prefer not to comment on that. I wrote a book about it with Kieran King. It's not, I don't like the text. I don't think it's worth very much. It doesn't have the quality of the others. It was found much later and probably written later. The secret gospels that are really interesting to me are those that have a lot more spiritual teaching that is worthwhile.

For example, another difference. So let me go back to the Gospel of Thomas, if I may. One thing that's quite different is that in the New Testament Gospels, you'll find that the disciples are always the men and only the men. The women cannot be disciples. Luke says that explicitly in the beginning of the Book of Acts. Women may not qualify. They're not apostles.

In the secret gospels, you find women among the disciples. Salome is one of the people mentioned in Luke as a follower of Jesus, not, of course, the one who danced for King Herod. Mary the mother of James and Mary Magdalene, who are seen as followers of Jesus. In the Gospel of Thomas, they are disciples, and they're understood as disciples. And you find that in many of these secret gospels of this tradition, that women were permitted to participate, in whatever groups revered those texts, which they were not allowed to do in the groups that formed around the New Testament. So that's a different, but the idea of secret knowledge is eliminated by the Orthodox

because they think you can be very easily misled that way. I'd like to talk about this, not just the concept of women in the Gnostic text, which, as you say, are treated quite differently from the canonical text, but also just the influence of the feminine itself in the actual theology of these Gnostic texts. I mean, you have a chapter in your book about God the mother versus God to the Father. What's that all about? Well, I think it's about language, for one thing. if you talk about the divine being with three what do we call it

three faces pardon me three persons in three persons I was thinking the word persona is from the Greek word mask and it comes from the stage you know that put on a different mask so so God is

understood in what becomes Christian theology as having a manifested divinity in terms of father, the mother, and the son. I mean, the father, the son, and the spirit. Now, if you're reading Hebrew or Aramaic, or Arabic, as I understand it, the word for spirit is a feminine word. But if you, when you translate that into Greek, and the New Testament, of course, is written in Greek, and so is the Gospel of Thomas and all these texts are written in Greek originally. So when you translate spirit into Greek, it becomes Pnoima, which is a neuter word. When you translate it into Latin, it becomes spiritous, and it becomes a masculine word. But in these texts, for example, the secret book of John, Jesus appears to his disciples, John, as he does to Paul, in Paul's vision, in a brilliant light in the sky. And he speaks. And he says, John, I am the father. I am the mother and I am the son. Because if you understand spirit as a feminine presence and you're using anthropomorphic language, You would imagine father, who would you expect with the father and the son?

It would be the mother, right? So it's a human, a human family is articulated there. But you don't get that when you translate into these other languages. So that connotation is lost. But as you say, in some of these texts, one is called the triple-formed primal thought. It has a feminine voice saying, I am the triple-formed, primal thought from the beginning of time. I am the thought of everything that comes forth from creation. And therefore, the word thought is also a feminine word. And so the idea that the

divine manifests in masculine and feminine forms is again synonymous with Jewish mystical teaching, which speaks about the divine being as a kind of energy that flows from a huge, from an enormous a source in the universe in masculine and feminine ways. We call it in Hebrew the Sephardot. So again, that's why I find these connections with Jewish mystical tradition very interesting. And I think we lost that tradition in what became Orthodox Christianity. Can you tell me about one of the texts that we haven't mentioned yet, which I found particularly fascinating, which is the so-called testimony of truth, which involves. the retelling of the story of Genesis and the creation of the world and the identification of the serpent as, well, let's say, something other than evil?

Yes, that is, that is, it's, some of these texts are really, have a sort of animosity, and have a hostile view of Jewish tradition, or think that it's giving the wrong message. And this text takes the Adam and Eve story and turns it upside down and say, Well, you think Eve is the sinner, but actually Eve is the luminous intelligence that illuminated Adam. Eve is the spiritual teacher. And it goes on to say that the serpent, which was cursed by God, is actually Christ. That comes from the beginning of the Gospel of John. Do you know in the first chapter it says, the serpent was left. up in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up on the cross. And that image there

is the physician's staff, right? The serpent around it, with a snake around it, which is a symbol of wisdom, and the symbol of the goddess Flias, the God of healing. So here, Jesus is identified as the serpent who heals if when people look upon the staff, it's an inversion of the story, saying the serpent is actually teaching Adam and Eve wisdom. He says, eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That is what you need to do. It's only the limited God who doesn't want you to become wise. So this is another text that has an idea of the god of the Genesis story as an evil god.

As an inferior god, at least you could say, yes. And there are quite a few of those, yes. I think a lot of Gentiles in the ancient world found the Hebrew Bible a very strange text. This God is a judge. He's harsh. He's judgmental. He stays only with his own people. He does many striking and negative things.

If anyone touches the ark that is his dwelling, he strikes them dead. So there were many negative views about Judaism in the ancient world and some positive ones, but you find some of those in these texts. So these Gnostic texts which talk about Jesus as the serpent already a sort of a marvelous and incredibly subversive idea, but then also this inferior God who's trying to prevent Adam and Eve from attaining spiritual knowledge. Are we looking at a kind of polytheism here then, or maybe a kind of Hino-theism? That is multiple gods, but one god is better and above all others. How should we interpret the theology of these texts? Well, I don't think there's a single way at all. I mean, some of them might fit into a kind of polytheistic mode,

but more often you find, at least in the texts that follow this kind of model of Jewish mysticism, You find different beings named as the divine. So that's why I can't speak about these 50-some texts as if they spoke with a single voice because they really don't. And as I said, I do play favorites. There are some that I think are much more worth our time than others. Of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, for example. For example, you know that the Gospel of John is always talking

about Jesus coming into the world to die for the sin of the world, right? That's John's whole pitch is about the sin of the world that has to be expunged by Jesus dying on the cross. The Gospel of Mary, somebody says to Mary Magdalene, here seen as a visionary, what is the sin of the world? And she says, there is no sin of the world. But sin is something you do when you do harm. So there are Christians who absolutely discard John's view, and they also encourage you to look at secret teaching and visionary teaching and teaching that is symbolic in which the meaning is not always on the surface. That's what esoteric teaching is about. You know, every tradition, as you know, whether it's Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, what else, they all have a secret teaching, esoteric teaching, mystical teaching, and public teaching.

Christianity in the beginning, in the 4th century, the bishops tried to eliminate mystical teaching because it meant that you could have a vision, I could have a vision, that would contradict what the church was. setting up as pure, true dogma. The Nicene Creed, the arguments about theology of the 4th century, which grandly proceed into the 21st, right? Yeah, one of the really interesting things reading your book was this idea that early Gnostics believed that once you reach a level of spiritual maturity, you can essentially just start teaching new information, new theological insights, not from some passed down tradition

that you've learned because you, you know, you spoke to Paul and Paul got this secret message from Jesus, but just because you sort of uncover it yourself through your prayer and meditation and insight. Or just because the Spirit reveals it to you. If you look at, again, 1st Corinthians 2. And chapter 3, Paul says, we, he's including himself, we who are taught by the spirit, we learn all kinds of things that we can't explain to people who aren't spiritual. We're not talking about them to anyone who doesn't have the capacity. It's not that you make them up or invent them, he would say. The spirit can teach you things and will. if you're open to spiritual understanding.

The problem with that is people can say, you know, I was told by the spirit to massacre my family. I mean, where do you stop? You know, saying that anybody can receive the spirit can lead to insanity. I mean, insane and cruel and horrifying results. So orthodoxy was created to put a boundary on that. But what it did is it limits spiritual understanding to what they claim is in the Bible,

which has the only spiritual truth. And whoever wrote the secret gospels did not accept that. They were open to ongoing revelation that you could have tonight. So do you think that Paul can be described as a Gnostic? I think Paul is certainly a visionary. I wouldn't call him a Gnostic. I called him Paul the Gnostic just because the Gnostics liked him so much. But what they liked it, the word Gnostic is so overused.

There are two massive books, you know, about what is Gnosticism? Ah, the word is made up, and the word is polemical. That's why I don't like it. It means all the bad stuff you shouldn't believe. But Paul was a visionary, and Paul, what do you want to say, was a mystic. He says he went up into the third heaven and heard things that he wasn't allowed to speak. He had revelations he couldn't possibly tell you. That's the kind of secret teaching that mystics claim to receive to this day.

And mystics in the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches have always been reigned in by orthodoxy, locking them at every point. from saying anything that doesn't agree with what becomes fourth-century theology, of which, as you can see, I'm not a great fan, because it did what it was meant to do, which is suggest to control a kind of monopoly on spiritual truth within the Catholic Church, which still claims that monopoly. and deny it anywhere else. I was quite stunned in reading your book again to find that Ignatius of Antioch

writes in the early church that the laity should revere and honor and obey the bishop as if he were God. Yes. it's this extraordinary letter where the sort of absolute authority of the bishop is established and again that phrase as if he were God seems to run so contrary to what you might expect a Christian to think about earthly dominion but this comes in your book as part of a chapter on this making heretical the the Gnostic tradition maybe having something to do with the consolidation of power in human, earthly bishops, what's, well, what's that all about?

Well, I think that is what happens, that when Constantine becomes a Christian and puts the power of the state, the military, behind a group of bishops, they claim that they have all knowledge, of all truth, and all of it is in the Canada, of books that they prescribe and they limit, and these, they don't want mystical teachings because mystical teachings are always open and always can be claimed to be transcended.

And the Catholic Church of this day doesn't allow it, and most Christians don't, except Pentecostalists, except Quakers, who believe that the Spirit, in fact, leads to people into truth. That's what Gospel of John says. So that prohibition, that's why I wrote about whose church is the true church, because people who wanted to claim not only public tradition, but also private tradition, secret tradition, have always been excluded and have always stood outside of orthodoxy, which means, you know, straight thinking. I always think of it as like orthodontia. It's like straight teeth.

You think straight. You think the way we think, right? Yeah. We'll tell you what to think. And of course, if you allow for people to have their own spiritual insights and authoritative teaching that just comes to them from the spirit, that allows them to look at a bishop and say, I don't need to follow you.

I have authority that comes from the spirit and if it contradicts what you're saying then your power as an earthly bishop isn't enough to overcome that and that might have something to do it seems like you're suggesting in the chapter with this condemning of the Gnostic tradition.

You're absolutely right. I mean, Irinaeus must have spent decades writing this massive treatise against heretics. It's five huge funds. It's taken me decades. to get the coherence of it. It ends with a curse on the heretics, consigning them all to hell and say,

just follow the bishops. That is the way of truth. That is safe. But you must not, you must not diverge from that, and you must not think you know more than I do because I am I am I am the bishop. And those people are saying, I don't understand.

something that they understand something higher. That is unacceptable. That is, they deserve to be sent to eternal fire. And that's how the book ends, the book against the heretics. As given the sort of political context of these texts and their condemnation, as we begin to go through these texts, like I say, hopefully we're going to be doing some episodes soon where we dig into individual texts and look at their history, their theology, with a bunch of different guests and different scholars. What should people be keeping in mind? They sit down to read the Gospel of Thomas. I mean, for a start, one thing we didn't speak about was the dating of these texts.

I think that the age of the text is disputed and across a wide range. But the Gospel of Thomas, for example, some scholars think it could be as early as 70 AD, and some believe it could be as late as 200 AD. because the gospel of Thomas that's discovered in Egypt is a Coptic translation. So we know that that's already quite early, but dating the original is quite difficult. But, you know, we're talking about maybe early texts here, maybe later than the New Testament can, and maybe earlier, maybe sort of developing in this political tradition or that political tradition. As we begin to look at these texts, what should we be thinking? I've got the Gospel of Thomas on my desk, and I think, what kind of text am I about to read,

and what should I be keeping in mind? First of all, that's an important question, because I don't think we know anything about the dating of the original text. My professor guessed it was the earliest text we had. I don't see any reason that it would be that. It might be a composite collection. We know it comes as early as the Gospel of John because we have fragments in Greek that are known long before we found a Coptic translation from the Fourth. century. Some people know what to say it's a fourth century text. But usually people who tell you they know are telling you because they want to say it's early and authentic or it's late in

derivative. Right. Lemon Gather Cole places it late in derivative because he really doesn't like it and he thinks it's a terrible influence and he spent more than 10 years of his life showing how terrible it is. And other scholars like me, 10, to think, we don't know, but it could be as early as John. That's what the evidence of the text suggests. But we don't know. And I happen to be, I like these texts. I have a sort of Protestant heretical streak, as you can tell. And a dislike of the kind of absolutist authority that Christian Church has so often claimed. Can I ask what you make, given that you speak quite sort of fondly, of the Gospel of Thomas

and think that it seemingly contains some important spiritual insights. Can I ask what you make, and I'm going to be diving into this again in the episode that I'll do on the Gospel of Thomas, but of this famous final passage from the Gospel of Thomas. I'll read it out for the listeners who aren't familiar. It's, again, an astonishing passage.

And again, this is just a collection of quotes and things that Jesus said. Yes. And this is the very last one in the Gospel of Thomas. Simon Peter said to him, to Jesus, that is. Let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life. Now, when you first hear that, you think Jesus might be about to say something like, of course women are worthy of life. She can come with us. But no, Thomas reports that Jesus says this in response, I myself shall lead her

in order to make her male so that she may too, she too may become a living spirit resembling new males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. As somebody who seems to have a fondness for the gospel of Thomas, what do you make of this? Yes, when I was at Harvard and then at Oxford, I thought, oh, you know, that's what these institutions are doing. They're trying to turn women into men. I saw hash made out of this in text I was just reading about Thomas. What it comes from is a Jewish interpretation of the Genesis story, which we find in the work of Fylo Judeus. Fylo is a contemporary of Jesus. He's certainly not a Christian. He's an aristocrat, educated Jew, very devout, who interprets the book of Genesis.

And he says, well, what does it mean God made Adam in his image? In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. Fylo was trying to figure out what is the hymn that was created first, and what was the them that was created subsequently? And Philo, being influenced by spiritual tradition in Plato, said, well, when it says he created him, it means the human being. It means the essence of the human, right? The spiritual essence of being human, Anthropos in Greek. And when it says male and female, he created them, it's when the essential human

being was divided into male and female. And so here, this, and Philo says, so then women and men must suppress their identification with gender in order to understand their essential humanity. So here Jesus is saying, yes, Mary is a, this is just, this is just Jewish tradition. You're not supposed to teach Torah to a woman. and it was prohibited by many rabbis. And so Jesus is speaking like any rabbi saying, yes, I will take Mary and she will have to suppress her gender

in order to recognize her greater humanity as a human being into the higher level of the first creation as a spiritual being. Now, if you look at saying 61, anyone you ask that question, that is when Jesus is speaking, to marry, I think it is to Salome, and he speaks, would you read 61 to us? Yes, Jesus said, two will rest on a bed, the one will die and the other will live. Is it Salome or Salome? Salome. Salome? Yeah. She's children of disciples in the New Testament. Salome. Yeah, Salome.

Salome. Salome, one of the women disciples in the New Testament, said, who are you, man, that you have come up on my couch and eaten from my table? Jesus said to her, I am he who exists from the undivided. I was given some of the things of my father. I am your disciple. She says. She says, I am your disciple. And then back to Jesus.

Therefore, I say, if he is destroyed, he will be filled with light. But if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness. I'm sorry, that's a bad translation, but at the end. Salome speaks to Jesus, and she says, who are you, man? You came up on my couch and have eaten from my, that sounds pretty sexualized, right? Do you have a, I mean, do you have a better, I've just sort of Googled the first translation that came up. Who are you, man? You've come up on my couch and eaten.

I mean, she's saying, I'm a woman, you're a man. What are you doing? Who are you? And he says, I am, he refuses that. and says, I come from what is undivided, that is from the spiritual humanity that is prior to gender. And then she says, oh, I get it. I'm your disciple. And he says, yes, because whoever sees himself as male or female is talking about a divided humanity, but whoever is undivided is full of light. That is that first spiritual creation that was created in the image of God.

Because Thomas is all about being created in the image of God, which is not a human image. It's the image is light. That we have within us the light of God. And if you recognize that's who you are, more than being male or female, that is the level at which Mary and Salome are supposed to join Jesus in a sense of that other level of understanding what it means to be human. Can I say something else about Thomas? It is, I think, a mystical text, because at one point Jesus says, I am the one who is before all things. I am all things. He says, split a piece of wood. And I am there. Lift up a rock and you will find me. Because he speaks not as a person so much as a manifestation of the divine light at the beginning of the universe. And if you look at

sayings 50 and 51, these are new baptism. Jesus says, if people say to you, who are you? if you read that so i think it's uh saying's 50 and 51 here so 50 that's right 50 has jesus said if they say to you where did you come from say to them we came from the light the place where light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image if they say to you is it you say we are its children we are the elect of the living father If they say to you, what is the sign of the father in you, say to them, it is movement and repose? His disciple said to him, this is an initiation.

Jesus says, if they say to you, who are you? Say, or where do you come from? You know, you don't say California or London, you say, we, not I, we come from the light. we come, we're talking about spiritual identity now, right? We all come from the same place, not different places. And that place is where the light originated in the beginning of time when God said, let there be light. This is all about Genesis, as I read Thomas.

God said, let there be light. Everything came forth from that. We come from that original light. And if they say, who are you then? say we are children of the light. We are children. We're all of the same family. We all come from the same father. And other texts would say, and from the same mother, the Holy Spirit. So this is an acceptance of a new spiritual identity, which is not individual at all, but collective for all beings, because we're all created in the image of God, in the image of the divine light. And it says,

that verse about, it's being brought forth in their image, it's about the image of God within us. So that means that we're all part of the same when we recognize who we are spiritual. And that's the same as the teaching that Salami receives, you see? And even at the end, when Mary has to be taken out of the perception of being different because she's female and brought into the wholeness of spiritual humanity, which is the first creation, the single one. That's how Philo-Judaeus interprets it. A Jewish theologian and interpreter,

Jesus is contemporary, who's not a Christian, he's not a mystic, it's just the way a Jew would interpret it. And this is, I think, a lot of Jewish teaching. this book, that Jesus might have, did he have a secret teaching? I don't know. But Mark says he did. And if so, this is a possible kind of teaching. So I don't mean to be a missionary for this text, but simply to say that these texts show a much wider range of views that Christians had in the early century than were ever allowed after a creed was formulated. Well, as I say to our listeners, we're going to be doing some more specific deep dives on

particular Gnostic texts, and I think we're going to be beginning with the Gospel of Thomas. So we'll be getting into this much more. But also for this overview, the book that I've been referring to is the Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, who joins us today as its author, which I believe you wrote this in the 70s, is that right? It was right after graduate school. And I think I got to know it better when I wrote Beyond Belief 25 years later because it's about the gospel of Thomas, but it was a more mature approach to it. This was a first take.

And it was attacked in the New York Times by a Catholic scholar, a very well-known scholar. And one I knew very well, it was a friend of mine, actually. And he said, well, these people really were the crazies of the first century, a second century. And that's the judgment of many people to this day. So I'm sure you'll have a lot of controversy. Well, we love a controversial book. And so I'll make sure that it's linked down in the description. As I say, I've been reading it recently and finding it absolutely fascinating,

as I've been finding everything about the Gnostic Gospels and the context surrounding them, incredibly fascinating. So I'm excited to jump in, and I'm really glad that you could join us today for this. sort of first shot at getting to grips with what these texts represent. Well, thank you. It's been a marvelous, wide-rangey conversation. I've really enjoyed it.