Contemplatives in the World: Lecture Six: Other Gospels

Other Gospels

Contrasting Portrayals of Jesus

Besides the four canonical Gospels, early Christian writers produced numerous other Gospels, each with a distinctive perspective on Jesus’ teachings and theological significance.

The noncanonical Gospels reflect the wide range of viewpoints about Jesus that prevailed in the early churches.

The only work to survive complete, the Gospel of Thomas contains many sayings thought to derive from the historical Jesus, as well as later Gnostic interpolations.

Fragmental works, such as the Gospel of Judas, Secret Mark, and the Gospel of Peter, explore, respectively, the mysteries of Jesus’ private discourse and his resurrection.

While the “pre-Gospel” account ascribed to James preserves legendary material about Jesus’ family, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas imaginatively records legends about Jesus’ childhood.

The Gospel of Thomas

“Unlike the canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas contains no narrative of Jesus’ miracles or other deeds; it consists solely of 114 sayings.”

“According to the opening statement, ‘These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.’”

“The sayings are ‘secret’ because their true meaning is evident only to those who can understand them correctly, a life-giving ‘interpretation’ that saves spiritually aware persons from ‘tasting death.’”

“John’s Gospel, which shares several themes with the Gospel of Thomas, makes similar connections between knowing Jesus’ message and achieving immortality.”

The Author

“The ‘Didymos Judas Thomas’ credited with compiling Jesus’ words is commonly identified with the Thomas who appears prominently in John’s Gospel.”

“Because both ‘Didymos’ (a Greek term) and ‘Thomas’ (an Aramaic word) mean ‘twin,’ it seems significant that John’s Thomas is repeatedly identified as ‘the Twin.’”

However, “according to the non-canonical Acts of Thomas, ‘Judas Thomas’ is the same Judas (Jude) whom Mark names as one of Jesus’ ‘brothers’ (Mark 6:3), and thus the twin of Jesus himself!”

“Because this claim of Thomas’s unique connection to Jesus appears nowhere in the New Testament or in any other credible source, scholars do not take it seriously.”

“The Gospel of Thomas reserves its highest praise, not for Thomas, but for another of Jesus’ brothers, James.”

“When the disciples ask Jesus who their leader will be after Jesus’ departure, he replies that wherever the disciples are they must consult ‘James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’”

Contents

“There are approximately 79 statements (out of the 114 into which scholars have divided the text) that resemble passages in the Synoptics, as well as some imagery and themes that otherwise appear only in John.”

Examples of easy-to-understand quotes which resemble the Synoptic sayings:

“No prophet is welcome on his home turf.”

“One who seeks will find, and for [one who knocks] it will be opened.”

“If you have money, don’t lend it at interest. Rather, give [it] to someone from whom you won’t get it back.”

Examples of confusing quotes unlike anything found in the canonical Gospels:

“When the disciples ask Jesus how their ‘end’ will come, Jesus replies:

“Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is. Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning; that one will know the end and will not taste death.”

When the disciples ask about Jesus’ Second Coming, Jesus answers:

“When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid.”

In Thomas, Jesus is not a savior, however, in one rare statement Jesus appears to associate himself with the source of divine light:

“I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

In the Synoptics, when Jesus asks, “Who do people say I am?” his followers offer a variety of suggestions, culminating in Peter’s recognition that he is the Messiah. Thomas’s Jesus phrases the question differently, asking them, in effect, to make a parable of him: “Compare me to something and tell me what I am like.”

The disciples’ responses also vary, with Peter comparing Jesus to a ‘just angel” and Matthew comparing him to a “wise philosopher.” But when Thomas confesses that he is “utterly unable to say what [Jesus] is like,” Jesus is apparently pleased, observing that he is no longer Thomas’s “teacher,” because Thomas has already drunk from “the bubbling spring that [Jesus] has tended,” successfully internalizing the Master’s teaching.

Jesus then speaks privately with Thomas, confiding “three sayings” that Thomas later tells his fellow disciples are so offensive that they would stone him if he repeated them.

One of the most problematic sayings in Thomas is the last. It has no parallel in the canonical Gospels and is almost certainly not from the historical Jesus, yet it likely reflects a controversial issue affecting many branches of the Christian community. Here, Peter is represented as trying to banish Mary from the circle of disciples, ‘for females don’t deserve life.’ Jesus permits Mary to remain in the group, but says:

“Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the domain of Heaven.”

In the New Testament, the authors of 1 Peter and the pastoral epistles voice similar opinions, urging the subordination of women to male leaders.

In an earlier Thomas saying about the necessity of transcending gender, the principle of transformation is applied to both sexes, who are to become like “nursing babies” in order to enter the kingdom:

“Jesus said to them, ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make the male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make… an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the (Father’s) domain].”

“In Thomas, Jesus’ redemptive work is accomplished through his teaching rather than his death, a factor that probably helps to explain why the mainstream church, with its emerging orthodoxy, did not preserve the Gospel.”

The Gospel of Judas

Lost for almost 1,700 years, a papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of Judas was probably discovered in a cave near El Minya, Egypt, about 1978, after which it passed anonymously through the hands of various antiquities dealers.

Its identity and value were not generally recognized, and for sixteen years, it lay crumbling in a safety deposit box in New York until it was handed over to scholars in 2001.

Although scholars had long known that a Gospel of Judas once existed – the church leader Irenaeus of Lyon had denounced it as heretical in 180 CE – no one knew its contents.

Composed originally in Greek about 140-160 CE and translated into Coptic about 290-300 CE, the Gospel portrays Judas Iscariot as radically different from the canonical Gospels.

Rather than a false disciple who betrays Jesus to his enemies for personal gain, in the Coptic text, many scholars believe, Judas is portrayed as Jesus’ truest friend, a man of spiritual stature exceeding that of the other apostles.

Gnostic Controversy

The unknown author of the Gospel of Judas expounds a variant of early Christianity known as Sethian Gnosticism, which postulates a dualistic universe containing many ranks of spirit beings.

According to this view, the true God – which Jesus teaches Judas to seek – has nothing to do with the physical world, which is deeply the flawed creation of the imperfect biblical deity, Yahweh, and is the source of ignorance, death, and corruption.

Unlike Judas, to whom Jesus has imparted knowledge (gnosis) and spiritual enlightenment, the other disciples can recognize only “their god [the biblical Yahweh],” misleading them to found a church modeled on their misunderstanding of true divinity.

In the Judas Gospel, salvation comes not because Jesus gives his life to pay for human sins, but because Jesus reveals the sacredness of the divine spark that dwells in many human souls and shows persons so endowed the way to discover the supreme God.

More Controversy

Some scholars, however, challenge the notion that this Gnostic Gospel actually places Judas in a positive light.

April DeConick argues that the National Geographic edition mistranslates the word daimon as “spirit” rather than “demon” (the text calls Judas the “thirteenth daimon”) and that the translators omitted a crucial negative (Judas “will not ascend to the holy generation”), proposing that the Coptic writer portrays Judas as an evil figure.

According to this interpretation, Judas is actually serving a malign god when he turns Jesus over to be crucified.

The Gospel writer is not trying to rehabilitate Judas, but perhaps seeking to show a Gnostic Jesus mocking his errant disciple’s self-deceptions.

Because the Judas manuscript is so poorly preserved, with many gaps and missing passages, scholarly controversies over the Gospel’s interpretation are likely to continue.

The Gospel of Secret Mark

Discovered in 1958 by New Testament scholar Morton Smith while cataloging manuscripts at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem, Secret Mark describes Jesus’ resuscitation of a rich young man, to whom he later privately teaches “the mystery of God’s domain.”

Whereas many scholars judge the work a forgery, others defend its authenticity.

If genuine, Secret Mark may preserve an early version of John’s famous account of the raising of Lazarus, indicating that this miracle story was also once part of the Synoptic tradition.

The narrative parts of Secret Mark are quotations in a letter purportedly written about 200 CE by Clement of Alexandria, a prominent church leader.

According to Morton Smith, Clement’s letter – the existence of which was previously unknown – was transcribed around 1750 on the blank pages of a book in the monastery library.

In Clement’s letter to a Christian named Theodore, he states that, after composing his Gospel for the general public, Mark wrote a revised version for more spiritually mature believers, including Jesus’ esoteric teachings about God’s kingdom.

The longer of the two excerpts, Clement notes, appeared between canonical Mark 10:34 and 10:35.

In the context of Secret Mark, the youth whom Jesus revives may have been the same wealthy young man to whom Jesus’ “heart [had] warmed” a few verses earlier in the same chapter.

Upon rising from the tomb, “the young man looked at Jesus, loved him, and began to beg to be with him.”

Six days later, Jesus summons the youth, “dressed only in a linen cloth,” to “[spend] the night with him,” during which time Jesus “taught him the mystery of God’s domain” – the same phrase translated as “the secret of the kingdom of God” in canonical Mark 4:11.

A similar nocturnal ritual, perhaps involving a baptism, may explain the presence in canonical Mark of a “young man with nothing on but a linen cloth and [running] away naked,” an incident that appears only in Mark’s Gospel (14:51-52).

Some commentators suggest that this unnamed disciple at Gethsemane is the same as the “youth sitting on the right-hand side [of Jesus’ empty tomb], wearing a white robe,” who announces Jesus’ resurrection on the first Easter Sunday (Mark 16:5-7).

At present, many in the scholarly community are still weighing the evidence for and against the authenticity of Secret Mark. If a majority eventually agrees that Clement’s letter is genuine – and that he does indeed quote from a subsequently lost edition of Mark – we may have not only a precedent for the resuscitation of Lazarus but perhaps also a clue to the identity of “the disciple [Jesus] loved” (John 11:35-36; 13:13-23).

The Gospel of Peter

Found in 1886, the extant portion is a Passion account, dramatically narrating Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

Because of the manuscript’s fragmentary state, we do not know if the original Gospel also included a report on Jesus’ public ministry and miracles; the narrative ends abruptly with Peter fishing at the Sea of Galilee, apparently about to witness an appearance of the risen Lord.

The Gospel of Peter resembles Matthew’s Gospel in many respects, including the story of Pilate’s posting Roman soldiers to guard Jesus’ grave, but it contains even more spectacularly supernatural, even bizarre, phenomena.

Late Saturday night, while Pilate’s guards watch in awe, the predawn heavens part, and two celestial beings descend to earth in a blaze of light and cause the massive stone that sealed the tomb entrance to roll away.

The transformed Jesus then emerges from the sepulcher, supported on each side by the two celestial beings, whose heads reach the sky. Standing even taller than his angelic companions, Jesus’ head “reached beyond the skies.”

When a heavenly voice asks if Christ has brought his message to the subterranean realm of the dead, a cross, the fourth figure in Jesus’ triumphal procession, testifies that he has.

Although scholars agree that the historical Peter had nothing to do with the Gospel attributed to him, they are sharply divided about the document’s importance to the Jesus tradition.

In the extant version, the Gospel exhibits several Gnostic touches.

Jesus’ silence during the Crucifixion intimates that (as pure spirit) he does not feel physical pain.

Also, instead of lamenting that God has forsaken him (as in Mark and Matthew), he complains that his “Power” has deserted him (perhaps indicating the departure of the supernatural Being that had previously dwelt within him).

Jesus’ death, moreover, is expressed euphemistically, for he is described as “taken up,” implying a divine rescue or escape into the spirit world.

The cross’s testimony that Jesus devoted the interval between his (assumed) death and visible resurrection to preaching in the netherworld also suggests that this Gospel’s author saw Jesus’ spiritual existence, in this life and the next, as a continuum.

The two canonical letters ascribed to Peter also refer to Jesus’ postmortem activities in the Underworld (1 Pet. 3:19; 4:6; 2 Pet. 2:4).

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

During the second century, curiosity about Jesus’ boyhood prompted several narratives that attempted to fill in the “missing years” of Jesus’ youth.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (ca. 150 CE) is ascribed to the apostle Thomas.

Unrelated to the Gospel of Thomas, this account of incidents from Jesus’ childhood uncritically incorporates popular legends and speculations about the Messiah’s youthful character and behavior.

Opening with anecdotes about the five-year-old Jesus performing mischievous tricks in his home village, the Gospel closes with a retelling of Luke’s story about Jesus, at age twelve, visiting the Temple in Jerusalem.

It says nothing, however, about Jesus’ young manhood, leaving blank the eighteen years that pass before the adult Jesus comes to John for baptism.

Modern readers are likely to be perplexed by the Infancy Gospel’s portrait of Jesus, who as a mere child possesses God-like powers that he at first seems too inexperienced or undisciplined to use wisely.

Acutely aware that he merits respect and deference from everyone, the young Jesus is easily angered by even casual slights and, repeatedly, employs his superhuman abilities to punish the offenders.

When a playmate disrupts pools of water that Jesus had formed in a stream, he furiously curses the child, withering him into a state of premature aging.

When another boy, running through the village, accidentally bumps into Jesus, Jesus strikes him dead.

After the dead boy’s parents demand that Joseph teach his son to bless people rather than to curse them, and Joseph privately warns Jesus about the negative effects of his conduct, Jesus causes those who criticized him to go blind.

When his first teacher, Zaccheus, tries to instruct Jesus in the alphabet, he calls his master a “hypocrite” for not knowing all the “allegorical” traditions surrounding each letter.

After totally demoralizing Zaccheus, an old man “conquered by a child,” Jesus is sent to another teacher, who makes the mistake of hitting Jesus on the head for speaking impertinently. The boy’s curse sends the man crashing to the ground in an apparent paralytic stroke.

Jesus’ third teacher, “a good friend of Joseph,” who evidently has learned from the experiences of his predecessors, does not presume to instruct his charge but instead wins Jesus’ approval by praising the boy, recognizing that he is “full of much grace and wisdom.” Because his new instructor has perceived and honored Jesus’ divine nature, the boy lifts the curse from his previous teachers.

Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth are appalled at his antics, for he is, literally, a holy terror.

They ask Joseph, “What kind of child do you have who does such things?”

Joseph privately tells Mary not to let Jesus out of the house "because anyone who angers him dies.”

As Jesus grows somewhat older, however, the beneficial aspects of his powers begin to outweigh the destructive.

After his public shaming of Zaccheus, “all those who had fallen under his curse” are healed, and Jesus begins a series of miraculous cures and resuscitations.

When a playmate dies after falling off a roof and Jesus is held responsible, he revives the boy to testify his innocence.

He also heals a young woodcutter whose misplaced axe blow had nearly severed his foot and saves his brother James from death by a poisonous snake bite.

In the last two reported miracles, Jesus resuscitates a dead child and a deceased workman.

Witnessing these deeds, the villagers now recognize Jesus’ special status: “This is a heavenly child, for he saved many souls from death, and can save them all his life.”

In the Infancy Gospel’s first episode, Jesus had “profaned” the Sabbath by shaping twelve sparrows from clay, technically violating the commandment to refrain from all work on the day of rest.

When Joseph confronts him, Jesus claps his hands and, instantly, the twelve clay birds fly away, removing the evidence of his misdemeanor.

In the Gospel’s final event, set in the Temple, Jesus’ precocity has deepened into a wisdom that foreshadows the man he will become.

Seated in the sanctuary, amid the “elders and teachers of the people,” Jesus “grew in wisdom…and grace,” perhaps suggesting that even God’s son – future judge of all humanity – underwent a learning process characteristic of the human condition.

The Infancy Gospel of James

Also called the Book of James or Protoevangelium of James, this Gospel supplies background information on Jesus’ parents and family, covering events that occurred up to and including his birth.

Based partly on the infancy accounts in Matthew and Luke and partly on oral tradition, this prologue to Jesus’ life story may include a few historical facts among its purely legendary components.

The work states that its author is James, who in this Gospel is identified as Jesus’ older stepbrother, the son of Joseph by a former marriage.

The story focuses on the personal history of Mary, Jesus’ future mother, who is born to a previously childless couple – Joachim, a wealthy herdsman, and his wife, Anna.

At age three, Mary is taken to the Jerusalem Temple, where she is raised by priests until her sexual maturation makes her ritually impure and disqualifies her from dwelling in the sanctuary.

The priests then consign the twelve-year-old Mary to the care of Joseph, a widower with children, who functions as her guardian and strictly respects her virginity.

The genealogies in Matthew and Luke both trace Jesus’ Davidic ancestry through his presumed father, Joseph.

In contrast, the Infancy Gospel of James states that Mary, too, descended from David.

Thus, her virgin-born son inherits his messianic heritage directly from her.

Written during the mid-second century CE when veneration of Mary and curiosity about her origins were growing trends in many Christian circles, this Gospel provides not only the names of Mary’s parents and the manner of her extraordinary birth and upbringing but also a doctrine of her perpetual virginity.

Divided into three approximately equal parts, the Infancy Gospel of James is largely a prose hymn of praise to Mary the Virgin, regarded as the most divinely favored of all women.

The first section recounts the divine intervention that resulted in Mary’s miraculous birth to Joachim and Anna and the immaculate purity of her Temple childhood; the second part explores the perplexities that Mary and Joseph faced in their unusual life together.

Although the narrator emphasizes that Joseph is only Mary’s devoted protector, not her husband, their relationship becomes particularly complicated after an angel visits Mary, announcing that she will bear a child conceived by the Holy Spirit.

When Joseph returns home from a long absence at work to find that Mary is six months pregnant, he agonizes over his apparent failure to protect her virginity.

Composing a lively conversation between the almost equally bewildered – and celibate – pair, the author creates a scene that combines sensitivity to the plight of a human couple caught up in forces beyond their control and the inescapable humor inherent in their strange predicament.

Interspersing elements from the canonical infancy stories with his own special material, the narrator devotes the final third of his Gospel to an account of Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem, closing with Herod’s murderous attempt to eliminate a future rival.

As if to guarantee the historicity of his account, the writer then reveals that he is none other than James (whom Paul calls “the Lord’s brother”), the son of Joseph by his deceased wife.

This final section contains a scene in which two midwives examine Mary after she has given birth to Jesus, discovering, to their astonishment, that she is still physically a virgin.

Traditional lore about Mary incorporated into the Infancy Gospel of James probably contributed significantly to the unique position that Jesus’ mother eventually held in both the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.

Its immense popularity in the church is reflected in the Gospel’s survival in over 130 Greek manuscripts.

Although never officially admitted to the New Testament canon, in some Christian groups the book has had as much influence in shaping orthodox belief as have the canonical Gospels.

The Diatesseron

A Christian scholar named Tatian (c. 170 CE) compiled a single Gospel for the congregations of Syria.

Tatian drew primarily on the four Gospels that eventually became canonical, but he also utilized some material from a lost work called the History of Joseph the Carpenter and a “Hebrew Gospel.”

Called the Diatesseron, Tatian’s selective harmonizing of the Gospels may have eliminated some of the problems of repetition, contradiction, and theological dissimilarity that characterize the four disparate accounts now included in the New Testament.

Although Tatian’s harmonization was popular in Syria, the international church did not adopt it, and by the late fourth century, even the Syrian Christians had replaced it with the four canonical Gospels.

Some Other Portrayals of Jesus…