Elaine Pagels: Re-discovering Thomas

Active interest in the Thomas Gospel dates from the 1890's, pursuant to the discovery of the first Greek fragments of it in the Oxyrrhynchus papyri, and started to seep into popular culture ever since translations of fragments became part of major collections of apocryphal NT literature in the early 20th century. In protestant Northern Europe these found mass circulation in the early 20th cetury, apparently less so in English speaking markets, though it was available around the same time. After the discoveries at Nag Hammadi this interest went into overdrive. Translations of the Coptic Thomas Gospel started appearing in the late 50's, and seem to have grown to a steady stream.
I experienced some of the early excitement as a child, when my parents attended a presentation from Prof. Gilles Quispel in the 1960's - finally Jesus in his own words! and no longer through the filter of Paul and the church... Somehow it seems that with Elaine Pagels' book, Beyond Belief the afterburners kicked in at least in the Anglo-Saxon market, and the Thomas Gospel truly began to enter the mainstream. Why was it that, when Elaine Pagels published this book it seemed as if, at least in the English speaking markets, interest in the Gospel of Thomas suddenly took flight? I don't know. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as well as Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, both of which were published at the same time, seemed likewise to take completely unexpected flight, playing in part into the same material in different ways. So the time was right for Thomas, and these three authors caught the wave.

Pagels writes from the vantage point of a "recovering" Christian - the opening line of her book is about her visit to the (Episcopalian) Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan - and that approach brings with it some limitations in appreciating Thomas, but also some unique qualifications to open the field, since this is where most of her readership starts from. As a first exploration of Thomas this book has a lot to recommend it for many readers who are curious, the last word it is not. Dan Brown's book does its job with chutzpah and the flights of fancy of a suspense thriller even if sometimes with a regrettable pretense of historicity bordering on a hoax, which plays into a juvenile sentiment that the church is holding out on us (which is historically accurate in a deeper sense of course). Gary Renard's work brings up the rear with what may arguably be the most logical and appealing presentation, though for a general reader some of his story may seem utterly fantastic at first, except that the result is easily the most logical, coherent and consistent approach to the phenomenon of Thomas. Old Occam would be pleased. But back to Pagels for now.

Pagels starts out with sharing a personal existential crisis, the death of her young son (age six), and how she found herself going back to church during some years of struggling with his health crisis ever since he was born. This experience brings back into awareness what she likes about the church (community), and what she dislikes about it (dogma, and exclusivity). She uses these personal ruminations to introduce us to the Thomas Gospel, which she thereby positions as another tradition which to her mind shattered the closed-minded world of churchianity, and opened up the consideration that early Christianity (which did not get its identity till 300 years later anyway), was a much more mixed and varied phenomenon than what the canonical tradition holds it out to be. This personal approach makes it easy for other Christians, who are interested in widening their horizons to appreciate the sense of wonder Pagels seems to have about the Thomas Gospel, and clearly there is a large readership with those qualifications. The title Beyond Belief is therefore well chosen, and mention of Thomas appropriately is only in the subtitle, since it is hardly the main topic. I'm not sure if this is doing Thomas any favors, as I don't believe Christianity was his concern, the teachings of Jesus were, but that's because I do believe Thomas dates from 45-50, and thus he would the influence of Paul who was the real revisionist here, and the actual founder of Christianity. It is really after the year 60AD with the influence of Paul that the institutionalization of Jesus gets seriously under way. "Bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world," he says of himself in the Course (ACIM:C-5.5:7).

The first chapter uses these personal issues to qualify Pagels' approach to the task of discussing the Thomas Gospel, which she then develops in the lengthy second chapter by juxtaposing it with the Gospel according to John, going so far as to assume - without adducing any supporting research or evidence - that the Thomas Gospel dates from ca. 60-100 AD, and therefore may have been almost contemporaneous with John's Gospel (ca. 90 AD).  All of this frames the subject matter in a way that makes Jesus a sort of proto-Christian, and treats all Gospels as if they are alike. More specifically, it sets up the Thomas Gospel as if it is like the Gospel of John a theological product from several generations after Jesus, involved in a theological argument with the community of John. Most of this happens by implicit assumption, without reference to critical scholarship of Thomas - which might suggest otherwise.

It is true of course that in John there are several comments that indicate disagreement with the Thomas tradition, and I can see why for a doubting Christian this evidence of disunity in the early years is an interesting discovery. However bringing these personal issues to the subject without a critical accounting of them limits the treatment. As we can see here, how we look at the Thomas Gospel critically depends on how we place it historically in the tradition. If we conclude that like Q, it dates from the period of the first generation after Jesus, and that "sayings" gospels indeed constitute a more primitive literary form, which was more reporting than theologizing and interpreting, and which was only partially copied in the later narrative Gospels (synoptics) this would make the treatment of this book impossible. If, like Pagels does here, we assume that Thomas is of a later date, and 2 to 3, or even 4 generations after Jesus, like the Gospel of John, that means we do not assume it to be more original or authoritative, but rather a later interpretation, the differences with John and the synoptics come in a very different light.

In short, Pagels frames her argument in terms of her personal crisis of faith, and her primary audience therefore is by definition the millions of Christians who are having comparable doubts that the homogeneity of Christianity is not what it's cracked up to be. Thomas research has suffered from this sort of fog and obfuscation since the early days, and where Jean-Yves Leloup and others use this framework for a wide ranging speculative exploration of Thomas in a more New Age sort of way, Pagels frames it in the context of challenging her Christian standpoint, and her treatment in that sense is on a par with Bart D. Ehrman, a recovering fundamentalist like Pagels, except that Pagels remains more positive to Thomas than Ehrman does. While noting these limitations, I also want to emphasize, as I've argued elsewhere, that dropping the pretend-homogeneity of Christianity, and seeing it for the revisionist history that it is, is the first step towards attempting to listen to Jesus on his own terms, underneath or behind the beliefs about him which cloud our vision, just like the throngs of the crowds in the Markan stories often make it hard to get to him. There's no reason to listen to him as long as we are ourselves telling him what he should say. We need to first be curious about what he does say.

Along these lines Beyond Belief happily meanders on about early Christian history, and we might note that for the Johannine community to have a difference of opinion with the Thomas community their Gospels did not logically have to be contemporaneous. For the Gospel of John in the late first century to criticize the Thomas Gospel, the latter needs to preexist the former, that is hardly a tight argument however, for someone could say the comments aren't about the Gospel, but about the Thomasine community. In all however, the absence of Christian concepts in Thomas, the form of the Gospel itself, and the very reasonable reconstruction of the historical order of NT quotes, which makes it highly probable that Thomas predated the synoptics, are all short-circuited by this book's assumption of a date in the 60-100 AD range. And thus the bulk of the book does not explore why Jesus comes across so differently in Thomas, but again simply assumes Jesus is a proto-Christian and then thus it continues with explorations of the early Christian communities in an anachronistic fashion which makes all conversations of the first 300 years seem to happen in parallel within the framework of a Christianity that does not yet exist at that time.

In the course of tracking some of the more interesting ideas extant in the literature from those first few centuries Pagels does turn up some interesting ideas, some of which at least might be connected with Thomas material in a positive way, but she does not explore those possibilities, so the book on that level is more exposé than explanation, and the connecting tissue is Pagels' personal interest, not the Thomas Gospel. In a list of interesting highlights I would put her quote of a Westerner turned Buddhist, who says if he'd known the Thomas Gospel, he might not have been a Buddhist. Now that comment makes sense, but it is not developed at all. The book remains preoccupied with the wild growth of ideas in the centuries just after Jesus, and in the process it leads us up to the formation of the the NT canon by bishop Athanasius in 367. It explores how the canon was established, and what was left out, along the way connecting the time of the likely burial of the Nag Hammadi treasure trove with the time of the establishment of this canon of the then emergent Christian orthodoxy, ensuring that at least these books escaped the subsequent destruction that was to be the fate of most copies.

Other worthwhile themes that are highlighted are the notion that the Resurrection is a spiritual, not a physical event, as well as the related idea of the laughing Jesus on the cross, from the Apocalypse of Peter, and also a notion from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene that the Son of Man is within, not to mention the seeming prominence of Mary Magdalene in some of this literature. Different spiritual explanations of the virgin birth are listed, and amidst all this wild growth of spiritual exploration, we find bishop Irenaeus laboring away on his theory of the four-formed Gospel all of which is to lead up to the council of Nicea, the Nicene creed, and later the NT canon.  With a light brush stroke meanwhile the implication is raised that the Thomas Gospel was not written by Thomas at all but merely ascribed to him, which is a necessary assumption if Thomas was in India or dead at the time when Pagels has his Gospel being written. What is not clear is that while such practices were common in antiquity, why is it necessarily the case here, except to suit the theory of her counter-intuitive dating of the manuscript? And all the while bishop Irenaeus is still at it, whipping up his concepts of Christian orthodoxy.

By chapter 4 the book takes us on a fascinating exploration of Valentinus, who promoted an allegorical view of the literature, surely blasphemy for followers of a teacher who constantly repeated that he taught in parables, or at least so in the eyes of bishop Irenaeus. The world as a (bad) dream is a central feature in the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, and so is our responsibility for sight. There is a brief discussion of the Round Dance of the Cross, which brings out a parallel to the Buddhist teaching that by becoming aware of suffering we find release from it, a notion that to Course students would not sound unlike the notion that the miracle "looks on devastation," and "reminds the mind that what it sees is false." (ACIM:W.pII.13.1:3) Another very important topic is the discussion among the apostles in the Acts of John, where they all see Jesus differently. And so the exposé of heretical teachings continues, along with an account of Irenaeus' writings that seek to dismiss them and establish a proper orthodoxy. From him she quotes another fascinating report about a second "spiritual" baptism practiced among some gnostic groups: "Others performed apoloutrosis as a kind of spirtual marriage, which joins a person in union with one's "life hid with Christ in God," that is, the previously unknown part of ones'being which connects one with the divine." (p. 159) This practice was associated with acquiring true gnosis, and makes an interesting pre-cursor of the Course's notion of the Holy Relationship.

The final chapter of the book covers the exploits of the Emperor Constantine, lending his force to the establishment of a state religion which embodied the romantic notion of the Catholic Church, and the account seemingly naively reports that contrary to some reports Constantine left the Bishops collected at the Council of Nicea relatively free in their deliberations. One wonders if perhaps we need to be reminded who picked up the tab for that gathering? By the end of the book we have an interesting picture of many of the divergent issues of the first 400 years of pre-Christianity, up until the time when in 367 heretical books like Thomas were thrown out, and most of the discussion seems to be organized most directly by Pagels' own crisis of belief, which many doubting Christians might identify with. Little of the book really deals directly with the Gospel of Thomas, but the translation in the appendix reads nicely. It is based on Marvin Meyer's with some slight polish borrowed from the Scholar's Version of the Jesus seminar. What escapes notice is the idea that Christianity in the service of Caesar is pretty much the opposite of what Jesus taught, and a re-reading of Prof. G. J. Heering's The Fall of Christianity, might be in order. If we finally would understand such ideas, then we would also start to see the logic of why Thomas really is an early book, and its Jesus is not at all like the Jesus of Christianity, and some of those gnostic dudes might have made some sense. On the whole the book touches on so much that it probably serves to make the reader hungry for more specific information. And somehow or other it seemed to open the floodgates for an interest in Thomas.