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
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;
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
-- 