It has been amazing to me for many years --actually not so amazing but incredible nonetheless-- that serious scholarship about Christian origins has largely been absent from the churches for as long as I can remember. It simply is not there, except maybe in snippets, or miscellaneous references, or veiled allusions. This is a major loss for Christian believers. No problem to see why, of course. The Religious Left finds references to lost scriptures as too much of a reminder of the life of the first generations of sincere believers, men and women who had a totally different worldview and faith than "modern" Left-leaning ersatz Christians. The Religious Right finds such information in conflict with a strictly Bible-centered view of faith since very early Christianity had no agreed upon New Testament, that would not happen until some time in the 2nd century. Even then some questions, like inclusion of the Book of Revelation and exclusion of Enoch, were not settled for another century or more. Enoch is interesting since it is alluded to in Hebrews and cited directly in Jude : ---------------------------------------------------- Hebrews 11:5 By faith Enoch was taken away so that he did not see death, "and was not found, because God had taken him"; for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God. Jude 1:14-15 [14] Now Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men also, saying, "Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of His saints, [15] to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him." The Book of Enoch was extant centuries before the birth of Christ and yet is considered by many to be more Christian in its theology than Jewish. It was considered scripture by many early Christians. The earliest literature of the so-called "Church Fathers" is filled with references to this mysterious book. The early second century "Epistle of Barnabus" makes much use of the Book of Enoch. Second and Third Century "Church Fathers" like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origin and Clement of Alexandria all make use of the Book of Enoch. Tertullian (160-230 C.E) even called the Book of Enoch "Holy Scripture... "The materials in I Enoch range in date from 200 B.C.E. to 50 C.E. I Enoch contributes much to intertestamental views of angels, heaven, judgment, resurrection, and the Messiah. This book has left its stamp upon many of the NT writers, especially the author of Revelation." There is abundant proof that Christ approved of the Book of Enoch. Over a hundred phrases in the New Testament find precedents in the Book of Enoch. Another remarkable bit of evidence for the early Christians' acceptance of the Book of Enoch was for many years buried under the King James Bible's mistranslation of Luke 9:35, describing the transfiguration of Christ: "And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, 'This is my beloved Son: hear him." Apparently the translator here wished to make this verse agree with a similar verse in Matthew and Mark. But Luke's verse in the original Greek reads: "This is my Son, the Elect One (from the Greek ho eklelegmenos, lit., "the elect one"): hear him." The "Elect One" is a most significant term (found fourteen times) in the Book of Enoch. If the book was indeed known to the apostles of Christ, with its abundant descriptions of the Elect One who should "sit upon the throne of glory" and the Elect One who should "dwell in the midst of them," then the great scriptural authenticity is accorded to the Book of Enoch when the "voice out of the cloud" tells the apostles, "This is my Son, the Elect One" - the one promised in the Book of Enoch. Many of the early church fathers also supported the Enochian writings. Justin Martyr ascribed all evil to demons whom he alleged to be the offspring of the angels who fell through lust for women (from the Ibid.)-directly referencing the Enochian writings. Athenagoras, writing in his work called Legatio in about 170 A.D., regards Enoch as a true prophet. He describes the angels which "violated both their own nature and their office." In his writings, he goes into detail about the nature of fallen angels and the cause of their fall, which comes directly from the Enochian writings.
Many other church fathers: Tatian (110-172); Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (115-185); Clement of Alexandria (150-220); Tertullian (160-230); Origen (186-255); Lactantius (260-330); in addition to: Methodius of Philippi, Minucius Felix, Commodianus, and Ambrose of Milanalso-also approved of and supported the Enochian writings. selections from the site : The Reluctant Messenger -------------------------------------------------------------- The Ethiopian Church, at that, regards Enoch as canonical. With discoveries at Nag Hammadi available in good translations since the late 1960s you'd think that the "lost gospels" and "lost epistles" would by now have become topical in churches, but to the extent that this is so, the best place to find discussions of such texts would seem to be in Unitarian congregations, and whether Unitarians actually are Christian is open to doubt. The most accessible book about the Nag Hammadi manuscripts is Eilene Pagels' 1979 opus, The Gnostic Gospels, with subsequent reprintings and new editions. Which is not some sort of recommendation on behalf of Gnosticism, certainly not generally speaking. Far too much is dubious, or of questionable value. But Paul, himself, sometimes wrote in ways familiar to the Gnostics, especially the Valentinians, who, to me, are there own thing and only partly overlap with the Gnostics. Indeed, Valentinus claimed to have been a member of Paul's inner circle, carrying on the Apostle's traditions. None of which even counts the many proto-type texts from Mesopotamia that give us early versions written a thousand years before any conceivable date for any of the Hebrew scriptures, documents that contain versions of famous OT stories ( Garden of Eden, Great Flood, etc ) and the first version of Enoch himself. Not to know about all of this, especially if it is accepted that it is important to understand the Bible as it was understood by the first few generations of Christians at the time the NT was written and codified, would seem to be inexcusable. Anyway, the material exists and is easily available for anyone with the interest to examine for themselves. Billy ========================================== Real Clear Politics / Real Clear Religion October 13, 2012 Alternative Christianities By _Philip Jenkins_ (http://www.realclearreligion.org/authors/?author=Philip+Jenkins&id=17157) On average, the Biblical world sees a startling new discovery of allegedly cosmic significance every four or five years. Most recently, we had Jesus's Wife, with the Gospel of Judas not long before that, and no great powers of prophecy are needed to tell that other similar finds will shortly be upon us. In themselves, the finds are usually interesting (if they happen to be authentic), but where the media always go wrong in reporting them is in vastly exaggerating just how novel and ground-breaking they are. So powerful are such claims, and so consistent, that it sometimes seems as if nobody before the 1970s (say) could have known about the multiple alternative Christianities that flourished in the first centuries of Christianity. Surely, we think, earlier generations could never have imagined the world revealed by such ancient texts as the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gnostic documents that turned up at Nag Hammadi. Lacking such evidence, how could older scholars have dreamed what we know to be true today: the vision of Jesus as a Zen-like mystic teacher, or perhaps a Buddhist-style enlightener, who expounded secret doctrines to leading female disciples, and who may even have been sexually involved with one or more of them? Today, for the first time, we hear the heretics speaking in their own voices! But here's the problem. Virtually nothing in that model would have surprised a reasonably well-informed reader in 1930, or even in 1900, never mind in later years. In order to make their finds more appealing, more marketable, scholars and journalists have to work systematically to obscure that earlier knowledge, to pretend that it never existed. In order to create the maximum impact, the media depend on a constructed amnesia, a wholly fictitious picture of the supposed ignorance of earlier decades. Just imagine an educated European or American in the 1920s. How on earth could they have broken the constraints of orthodoxy to imagine the primitive Christian world as we know it today, in all its strangeness and diversity? Well, for a start, they would actually have had access to an excellent range of original Gnostic texts in the orthodox Christian writings of the Church Fathers. But "alternative" gospels and texts had also been turning up steadily since roughly the time of the French Revolution. By 1900, G. R. S. Mead published an extensive collection of translated works in his best-selling Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, which influenced such towering cultural figures as Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats and Carl Jung. Mead himself was a remarkably modern figure with a profoundly global vision. As a Theosophist, he created an esoteric Jesus who fitted neatly into the Hindu and Buddhist world-views that were having such an influence on educated Westerners. It's no insult to either party to say that Mead's writings served the same popularizing role for his generation as the books of Elaine Pagels have in modern times. In 1896, Mead translated the book-length Gnostic tract called the Pistis Sophia ("Faith-Wisdom"), which had come to light in the late eighteenth century, and which Mead plausibly understood as a Gnostic Gospel. Pistis Sophia depicted a Jesus who preached at inordinate length to his disciples after his Resurrection, and who interacted closely with at least two Marys, namely his Mother and the Magdalene. If the "Mariam" character really is the Magdalene, then she is described as "thou blessed one...she whose heart is more directed to the Kingdom of Heaven than all thy brothers." Also central to the mythical system is Sophia, Wisdom, a kind of divine feminine counterpart to Christ. The Nag Hammadi discoveries certainly offered lots of additional information about this bizarre spiritual world, but in no sense did they bring it to light for the first time. If you'd read Pistis Sophia, you already had an excellent idea of the Gnostic universe, and entirely from the Gnostic point of view. Nor would a reader from the early twentieth century be too taken aback by the Gospel of Thomas. At least it you believe its advocates, Thomas portrays something like the authentic original Jesus, a pantheistic guru who utters cryptic sentiments like "Raise the stone and there you will find me; cleave the wood and there am I." But although Thomas was only discovered in full text at Nag Hammadi in 1945 (and translated years later), finds of miscellaneous passages had made much of the work quite familiar long beforehand. In fact, I'm taking the verse I just quoted from a popular British anthology published in 1932 and owned by my mother, a highly intelligent woman who was nevertheless no academic. This is just what ordinary people in the pews liked to read about. If you want to see just how much general readers knew about alternative early Christianities, then read Robert Graves's bizarre novel King Jesus, a book so floridly heretical it makes The Da Vinci Code look like a pious pamphlet from Our Sunday Visitor. King Jesus appeared in 1946, just as the Nag Hammadi documents were being unearthed, and even before the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet Graves already had full access to a panoply of lost gospels and Gnostic fragments, from which he concocted a mythology that includes virtually every radical view of Jesus that has surfaced in later years. We find Jesus as the secular revolutionary; the husband of the pagan Goddess of the land; the expounder of Oriental wisdom; the secret heir to the secular kingdom of _Israel_ (http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/israel/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautolink) ; the master of Hellenistic mysteries; participant in ancient tribal fertility rites; the esoteric teacher and numerologist; and (of course) the husband of the Magdalene. Huh, Jesus's wife, what a revolutionary new theory... Oddly, though, when a scholar wishes to present a new discovery or thesis to a publisher or a funding agency, they don't generally begin by saying, "Well, this really doesn't break any new ground in terms of what we know about the early church, but for specialists in Coptic linguistics, it's just heart-stopping." Rather, the aspiring author succumbs to the inevitable temptation to proclaim just how many boundaries he or she is shattering, and how, at long last, cutting edge research is breaking the irrational taboos set by the churches and their jaded orthodoxies. We are boldly going where no Jesus Quest scholar has gone before; and we will boldly ignore any evidence to the contrary. People being what they are, I know that situation won't change any time soon. But can I at least make a minimum demand? If you are going to claim a new gospel fragment as a revolutionary scholarly breakthrough, can you at least demonstrate that it significantly advances the state of knowledge beyond what existed in the era of Herbert Hoover? Is that too much to ask? Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
