2020-0222

The Gnostic Gospels

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The Gnostic Gospels, by Eileen Pagels; review by Frank Thomas Smith

In December 1945 an Arab peasant was digging around a massive boulder in Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt looking for sabakh, a soil for fertilizing crops, when he found an large earthen jar almost a meter high. He hesitated to break it for fear an evil spirit might be inside, but the thought that it could contain gold overcame his fear and he smashed it. Inside were 13 papyrus books bound in leather. Disappointed, he brought them home and dumped them on the floor. His mother subsequently used much of the material for fuel.

How the books came to be recognized is an interesting story in itself, how a local history teacher suspected their value and sent them on to a friend, how they were sold on the black market through antique dealers in Cairo, then confiscated by the Egyptian government, except for one codice, which was smuggled to the United States. Finally, thirty years after their discovery, they were deciphered and eventually published.

Mohammed Alí could not have imagined the enormous implications of his accidental find. If they had been found 1,000 years earlier, the Gnostic texts within would surely have been burned for their heresy. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon c. 180, wrote five volumes entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge. By the time of the Emperor Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century, possession of books denounced as heretical became a criminal offense. Copies of Gnostic books were confiscated and burned. But someone in Upper Egypt, possibly a monk from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years. Today we read them differently — as a powerful alternative to orthodox, organized Christianity.

Until then, our knowledge of the early Christian Gnostics had been limited to what their adversaries wrote about them, which has been exclusively negative. In fact, by 300 A.D. both the Gnostics and their writings had been effectively eliminated. Now we have a good idea of what these early Christians thought and why the church found them heretical and dangerous. Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s foremost experts in historical Christianity, has written a non-technical book about these Gospels which is accessible to everyone — a real eye-opener.

The volumes found at Nag Hammadi are in the Coptic language and were written 350-400 A.D. They are, however, translations of earlier Greek documents, which cannot be later that 180 A.D. Gnosis is usually translated as knowledge. But the Greek language differentiates between scientific and reflective knowledge. As the Gnostics used the term, it could be translated as insight, for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. According to the Gnostic teacher Theodosius (c.140-160), the Gnostic is one who understands:

who we were, where we were … whither we are hastening; from what we are being released, and what is rebirth.

The living Jesus of the Gnostic gospels says things which are similar to those related in the four “official” gospels, but with other dimensions of meaning, often reminiscent of Zen koans. From the Gospel of Thomas:

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.”

Bound in the same volume with the above is the Gospel of Philip, which attributes to Jesus sayings quite different from those in the New Testament:

 … the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended … they said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you as I love her?”

Other sayings in this volume describe common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection as naive misunderstandings. Also bound together with these volumes is the Apocryphon (secret book) of John, which offers to reveal “the mysteries and the things hidden in silence” which Jesus taught to his disciple John.

The living Jesus of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment instead of sin and repentance as does the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who provides access to spiritual understanding. The similarity to certain Buddhist teachings is obvious and it is not impossible that these exerted influence on Gnostic thinking, as Buddhist missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria for generations when Gnosticism flourished.

The Resurrection

One of the main points of diversion between orthodox catholic and Gnostic thinking involved Jesus’ resurrection. Tertullian, a brilliant writer (c. A.D. 190) violently opposed to Gnosticism, wrote:

What is raised is “this flesh, suffused with blood, built up with bones, interwoven with nerves, entwined with veins, a flesh which … was born, and … dies, undoubtedly human.” He declares that anyone who denies the resurrection of the flesh is a heretic.

Gnostic Christians interpreted the resurrection differently. Some said that the person who experiences the risen Christ does not meet him physically raised back to life; rather, he encounters him on a spiritual level. This seems to be verified even in the New Testament gospels. When the resurrected Jesus appears to the apostles, they don’t even recognize him at first. And Mary Magdalene, when the risen Christ appears to her near his tomb, thinks he is the gardener, and when she does recognize him he tells her not to touch him. Even Paul, in his illumination on the road to Damascus, sees a “light from heaven” and only hears Jesus’ voice. Paul describes the resurrection as a “mystery”, the transformation from physical to spiritual existence. Yet the church condemned all such interpretations.

Gnostics were more interested in the possibility of meeting the risen Christ in the present than the past events attributed to the historical Jesus. A passage in the Gospel of Mary illustrates this:

Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene … She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.

Peter especially doubts.

Mary wept and said to Peter: ” … Do you think I am lying about the savior?” Levi said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered … if the savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her?”

Peter, apparently representing the orthodox position, looks to past events, suspicious of those who ‘see the Lord’ in visions, Mary, representing the Gnostic, claims to experience his continuing presence.

This had political connotations, for the church based its authority on the succession from “the twelve” (after Judas was replaced), whereas Mary Magdalene, though not one of the twelve, is shown by the Gnostics to be at least equal to them. Furthermore , while the church relied on Jesus’ public teaching, the Gnostics claimed to be in possession of Jesus’ secret teaching about the “mysteries”. Valentinus, one of the leading Gnostics, argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate truth, taking precedence over second-hand testimony and tradition. Therefore, the structure of authority can never be fixed in an institution; it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open. Gnostic teaching was obviously subversive of a hierarchic order. It claimed to offer every initiate direct access to God, an access of which the priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant.

Within 170 years after Jesus’ death, the church had developed into a three-tiered organization of bishops, priests and deacons with authority over the laity. This authority was based on two sayings in the New Testament: the giving of the “keys of the kingdom” to Peter as founder of the church, and the claim that Peter was the first to witness the risen Christ; this despite the fact that both Mark and John state that Mary Magdalene was the first to see him. They claimed that Christ, who had authority over heaven and earth, gave temporal authority to “the eleven” disciples, especially Peter, as their spokesman. The Gnostics denied the church’s authority and its interpretation of events, so it was felt necessary to silence them. More »

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2019-1222

A Tale of Love and Darkness

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A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz; Review by Frank Thomas Smith

This is a memoir, an autobiography written by a novelist who admits his disdain for footnotes, so they are few and far between. This, however, is not the book’s only virtue. Love and darkness as the two powerful forces running through his extraordinary, moving story which begins in Poland and Russia where his ancestors lived and died before and during the holocaust. But his parents and other relatives and friends were zealous Zionists and escaped to Palestine while there was still time. Amos Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and lived through and participated in the history of Israel from its (modern) beginning to date. The characters here are not the historian’s bloodless footnotes, but real people, most of whom we wish we knew.

Rather than run on about the book’s contents and virtues, I prefer to lift an excerpt which particularly interested me – although there are many others. This book is required reading for anyone who loves literature and is interested in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Frank Thomas Smith

 

“After my military service, in 1961, the Committee of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to Jerusalem to study for two years at the Hebrew University. I studied literature because the kibbutz needed a literature teacher urgently, and I, studied philosophy because I insisted on it. Every Sunday, from four to six p.m., a hundred students gathered in the large hall in the ‘Meiser’ Building to hear Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman lecture on ‘Dialogical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber’. My mother, Fania, also studied philosophy with Professor Bergman in the nineteen thirties, when the University was still on Mount Scopus, before she married my father, and she had fond memories of him. By 1961 Bergman was already retired, he was an emeritus professor, but we were fascinated by his lucid, fierce wisdom. I was thrilled to think that the man standing in front of us had been at school with Kafka in Prague, and, as he once told us, had actually shared a bench with him for two years, until Max Brod turned up and took his place next to Kafka.

“That winter Bergman invited five or six of his favourite or most interesting pupils to come to his house for a couple of hours after the lectures. Every Sunday, at eight o’clock, I took the number 5 bus from the new campus on Givat Ram to Professor Bergman’s modest flat in Rehavia. A pleasant faint smell of old books, fresh bread and geraniums always filled the room. We sat down on the sofa or on the floor at the feet our great master, the childhood friend of Kafka and Martin Buber and She author of the books from which we learnt the history of epistemology and the principles of logic. We waited in silence for him to pronounce. “Samuel Hugo Bergman was a stout man even in old age. With his shock of white hair, the ironic, amused lines round his eyes, a piercing glance that looked skeptical yet as innocent as that of a curious child, Bergman bore a striking resemblance to pictures of Albert Einstein as an old man. With his Central European accent, he walked in the Hebrew language not  with a natural stride, as though he were at home in it, but with a sort of elation, like a suitor happy that his beloved has finally accepted him and determined to rise above himself and prove to her that she has not made a mistake. More »

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2019-0922

Encounter in Rendlesham Forest

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Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, The Inside Story of the World’s Best-Documented UFO Incident, by Nick Pope, with John Burroughs, USAF (Ret.), and Jim Penniston, USAF (Ret.). Published by Thomas Dunne Books, An Imprint of St. Martin’s Press, 2014.

The first encounter, in the early hours of December 26, 1980, was an actual landing of the UFO craft. The second encounter, on the night of December 26, involved the sighting by personnel of D-Flight of a fiery red/orange object that descended slowly into the forest. It was surrounded by an eerie blue/white corona. The third encounter took place from the evening of the 27th through the next morning, and several challenging UFOs with beaming lights were witnessed.

On December 26, the strange intense lights of the first encounter were seen in the forest outside the East Gate of the Woodbridge US Air Force base. At that time the Bentwaters and Woodbridge NATO bases, on British soil, were staffed by Americans. The twin bases were in “the sleepy county of Suffolk on the cold, exposed coast of the East of England,” an area described as “creepy” and “weird” by service personnel. The Rendlesham Forest was between the two bases. The red and blue lights were spotted by Airman First Class John Burroughs, who had been patrolling Woodbridge near the East Gate. He contacted his supervisor, Staff Sergeant Bud Steffens, and both drove out to a small track that led into the forest. An odd white light had also become visible. They returned to the base to inform others, including the on-duty flight chief at Woodbridge, Staff Sergeant and NCO James (Jim) W. Penniston, who thought there might have been an aircraft crash. As it turned out it was not a crash, it was a landing. “In the clearing was a small, metallic craft. It was about three meters high and maybe three meters across at the base. The craft was roughly triangular in shape … It had a bank of blue lights on its side and a bright white light on the top. There was no sound whatsoever. Penniston “had the presence of mind to take a number of photographs.” Unfortunately, the photography failed, probably due to high radiation levels. But Penniston managed to sketch both the craft and its symbols in his police notebook.

He also “plucked up the courage to touch the object. It felt hard and smooth, like a smooth, opaque glass.” However, when he touched the symbols, “they were rough, like running my hands over sandpaper.” The craft responded to Penniston’s touch with a white light at the top that “flared up and became so intense that Penniston was fear struck and temporarily blinded …” After a time, the craft rose above the trees, taking two or three minutes, and then “accelerated away in an instant.” It was noticed that three indentations were left on the hard, frozen ground, and that the line between them formed a near-perfect equilateral triangle. Later, plaster molds were made of the indentations. More »

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2019-0822

México Profundo, Reclaiming A Civilization

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Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization

Buy this Book.

México Profundo, Reclaiming A Civilization, by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1935-1991), is translated by Philip A. Dennis and was published by the University of Texas Press in 1996, with eight paperback printings through 2009. From the back cover, Mexican studies; anthropology: “For Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, the remaining Indian communities, the ‘de-Indianized’ rural mestizo communities, and vast sectors of the poor urban population constitute the México profundo. Their lives and ways of understanding the world continue to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilization… Since the Conquest [Hernan Cortés, 1519-1521] Bonfil argues, the peoples of the México profundo have been dominated by an ‘imaginary México’ imposed by the West.”

Philip A. Dennis is a Professor of Anthropology at Texas Tech University. The book opens with his Foreword of 1995: “Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s book México profundo: una civilización negada seems prophetic in retrospect. He predicted the collapse of what he called the imaginary Mexico and hoped that the strengths of the “México profundo” would serve as a basis for building a new Mexico. According to Bonfil Batalla, Mexico is not a mestizo country. Rather, it is a country whose majority population continues to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilization and whose way of life reflects cultural patterns and values with thousands of years of history … The México profundo erupted into national consciousness on January 1, 1994, when the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de la Liberación Nacional – EZLN) took over four towns in the southeastern state of Chiapas. Their struggle provoked a still-unresolved confrontation with the Mexican government. Most of the EZLN fighters are Maya Indians from a poor state whose population includes more than a million Maya people. Their rebellion responds to years of injustice and oppression. In recent years in Chiapas, large cattle ranchers have continued to usurp Indian land, with the support of paid gunmen and the judicial police. Land and wealth and political power in Chiapas are highly concentrated in the hands of the local elite, while the Indian and peasant majority live in extreme poverty.”

“Guillermo Bonfil Batalla had a distinguished career in Mexican anthropology, cut tragically short by his death in an automobile accident in July 1991 … Bonfil Batalla began his career as one of the early critics of indigenismo, a continent-wide movement concerned with Indian welfare, but directed by non-Indians. He and other Mexican anthropologists of the early 1970s concluded that the paternalistic stance of indigenismo obscured the truly multicultural nature of Mexico, and they supported, instead, Indian efforts at self-determination.”

The book is divided into three parts (each with two to five subheadings): Part I, A Civilization Denied; Part II, How We Came to Be Where We Are; and Part III, The National Program and the Civilizational Project. From Bonfil Batalla’s summary that precedes Part I: “What unifies them [the México profundo] and distinguishes them from the rest of Mexican society is that they are bearers of ways of understanding the world and of organizing human life that have their origins in Mesoamerican civilization and that have been forged here in Mexico through a long and historical process … The civilization of Mesoamerica has been denied but it is essential to recognize its continuing presence.” Later in Part I, under the subheading Cultural Schism, he writes: “Cultural diversity is not a problem in itself … The problem lies in the dual, asymmetrical structure that underlies the plurality. At this point it is indispensable to return to the origin of this problem, which is none other than the colonial situation from which current Mexican society is derived. This is a past whose basic, antagonistic duality has not yet been superseded. To the contrary, it is expressed in every facet of national life. It is an original sin that has not yet been redeemed.” More »

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2019-0722

The Stones Cry Out

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Buy this Book.

The Stones Cry Out, What Archaeology Reveals About the Truth of the Bible, by Dr. J. Randall Price. The book is Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon; Copyright 1997 by World of the Bible Ministries, Inc.

The author received his Master of Theology degree in Old Testament and Semitic Language from Dallas Theological Seminary, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has participated in field excavations at Tel Yin’am in the Galilee, as well as at Qumran, the site of the community that discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the Preface of his book, under the subheading The Popularity of Biblical Archaeology, the author writes (from Jerusalem, Shavuot, 1997): “It is for the popular audience that I have written this book … My purpose, however, is not to ‘prove’ the Bible, which as an archaeological document is proof itself. Rather, it is to show from the stones that the Scriptures are reliable and reveal to us the Scriptures in such a way impossible without them …”

Regarding the title, The Stones Cry Out, two Biblical quotes are given:  

Habakkuk 2:11: Surely the stone will cry out from the wall, and the rafter will answer it from the framework.

Luke 19:40: When leaders sought to silence those praising Jesus’ Messianic entry into the rock walls of Jerusalem, he answered and said, “I tell you, if these become silent, the stones will cry out!”

This 346-page book is presented in three Parts: What Can Archaeology Prove, New Discoveries in Archaeology, and Listening to the Stones Today. Throughout the entire book the author never loses his enthusiasm – at times his contagious joy – for the fact that the Old and New Testaments have both been confirmed by today’s science of archaeology to be historically accurate. In the first chapter, he writes: “Archaeology has revealed the cities, palaces, temples and houses of those who lived shoulder to shoulder with the individuals whose names appear in scripture. Such discoveries make possible for us what the Apostle John once voiced to authenticate his message: What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life, these things we write. – John 1:1-4.” In the same chapter the author also quotes a foremost authority in archaeology, the dean of the old school of biblical archaeology, Professor William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971): “Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details and has brought increased recognition of the value of the Bible as a source of history.”

Part I – What Can Archaeology Prove? – has four chapters in which the author details the basics of the science of archaeology. He defines a tel as an unnatural mound created by the repeated destruction and rebuilding of ancient cities and villages on the same site. Excavation areas are called digs. The archaeological finds of greatest value are inscriptions or written words (So Shall it be Written … So Shall it be Found) on papyrus, parchment, clay, metal, stone, and pottery fragments called ostraca. An example of a Stratigraphy of a Tel shows thirteen layers of the ground, from the present ground level to the Early Bronze IV period (2300-2100), beneath which is the original level of virgin soil. In addition, the book offers scientific charts of Major Inscriptions and Major Tablets of Old Testament Significance, and maps, graphs, models, and many photographs of ancient sites, such as the Great Hall of Columns, Karnak, the Rosetta Stone, and the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (which is located in the ancient Assyrian city of Calah, modern Nimrud). Pictures or paintings from the past also offer proof. For example, the remarkable Beni-Hasan Mural, on the walls of a tomb that is south of Cairo on the east bank of the Nile. It is 8 feet long and 10 feet high and pictures Semites in Egypt, from about 1890 BC, as a “parade of foreigners, eight men, four women, three children, and donkeys (one of which carries the two smaller children) and other animals, all being led by Egyptian officials.” The author writes that “the importance of the painting lies in its visual depiction of what people looked like in the time of the patriarchs.” More »

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