Jesus from Different Perspectives:

Other Gospels in Early Christianity  

Up to this point we have explored various portraits of Jesus presented in the principle documents that were included in the Christian Canon of the New Testament. Now we turn our attention to the documents that were not included in the Canon but were literally consigned to the trash heap of history by the faction of early Christians that prevailed over its rivals and defined itself as the "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church." The Proto-Orthodox, later to become Catholic, Church did not only ban and burn these books; they ignored them out of existence. Ancient books were preserved throughout the middle ages by scribes, most of whom were Catholic Christian monks. Generation after generation of these monks hand copied only the books that were sanctioned by the Catholic Church. That is why we have 5,700 extant manuscript copies of the books of the Greek New Testament; and this is only a fraction of those that were continuously and  widely copied by medieval monks. On the contrary, it is mainly through accidental discoveries that fragments or, rarely, more substantial copies of the outlawed books come to light. Hence the spectacular nature of a hoard of more or less complete copies of 52 early Christian works that had suffered the damnatio memoriae of the official Church.

What kind of Jesus will we encounter in these texts? How did the Jewish-Christians, the Docetists, the Gnostics, the Marcionites view Jesus and his message? Is it possible that these "heretics" may have preserved valid information about Jesus that was suppressed by later church authorities? Is it conceivable that the Jesus of the tradition that has survived through the centuries and into modern times was not the real Jesus? We have already seen abundant evidence that the person of Jesus was significantly altered by the anonymous authors of the "inspired" books of the Christian Bible. Can we hope to recapture the real "historical" Jesus from an investigation of all the surviving sources, canonical and non-canonical? This last segment of our course will be concerned with precisely these questions. After an overview of all the sources at our disposal, we will evaluate Bart Ehrman's own interpretation of Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet.

Read Carefully and Consider the Implications for our study:

• What to Expect, p. 204

• Pp. 204-205, reviewing the documents that were circulating before the canonical Gospels were written which were incorporated in the Gospels themselves, i.e., Q, M, L, the Signs Source, and previewing the other Christian sects whose documents we are now going to consider

Categories of Non-Canonical Gospels:

1. Narrative

2. Sayings

3. Infancy

4. Passion

• Narrative Gospels, pp. 205-208, Box 12.3

      Of all the "many narratives" that Luke refers in his Prologue,
          only Mark has survived. What were the others?

  • Jewish-Christian: Jesus from the Jewish perspective

    • Canonical Matthew (Catholic Encyclopedia)

    • Gospel of the Nazareans:
      
      an Aramaic version of the Gospel of Matthew minus the first two chapters;
      this raises some tantalizing possibilities given the very early witness
          of the Apostolic Father Papias of Hierapolis (see especially Ch. VI),
          who knows of a Gospel of Matthew that partially fits this description;
      Note that Papias describes a Matthew that is not our Matthew;
          actually Papias describes a document that looks a lot like Q!

      "Matthew composed the sayings [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language,
      and each one interpreted them as best he could."

    • Gospel of the Ebionites:
      
      a harmony of the Synoptic Gospels;
      compare this to the Diatessaron of Tatian,
      the Gospel of the Syrian Church for the first three centuries,
      See Box 13.1

    • Gospel of the Hebrews:
      
      According to NT Apocrypha specialist Ron Cameron:
      
      The Gospel of the Hebrews:

      • shows no dependence upon the Gospel of Matthew

      • seems to be independent of the New Testament

      "The story of the first resurrection appearance to James the Just

      suggests that the Jewish-Christian community that produced this document

      claimed James as their founder . . ."

      Compare this to Paul's reference to the tradition he received from the Apostles:

      The Gospel of the Hebrews and Paul both witness to an appearance of Jesus to James;
      why was this important information excluded from the official, canonical, Gospels?
      Is it related to the suppression of Jewish Christianity by the proto-orthodox "church"?

  • Marcion: Jesus from an anti-Jewish perspective

    • Marcion, a very influential Christian leader of the mid-second century,
          reputed to be the leader of the largest Christian group in the empire;
      the inventor of the idea of a Christian Canon;
      creator of the first "New Testament" (Luke and some letters of Paul);
      
      Marcion's Gospel was condemned and destroyed,
      but the early proto-Orthodox church father, Tertullian
          preserved most of it in his polemics against it;
      Tertullian's main criticism against Marcion
          was that he modified his sources by editing Luke,
          a criticism that would apply equally to Luke himself,
          as well as to Matthew, Mark, and John;
      in fact, this was standard procedure among all Christians,
      both "orthodox" and "heretical"

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• Sayings Gospels, pp. 208-214

  • The Gospel of Thomas: the most important of the new documents

    • The author is identified as Didymus Judas Thomas;
      Didymus means twin in Greek and Thomas means twin in Hebrew,
          thus the name of this person is Judas Twin Twin;
      
      Whose twin was he?
      In the Book of Thomas the Contender
          (in the same volume as the Gospel of Thomas from Nag Hammadi)
          Thomas is identified as Jesus' twin brother;
      Jesus did have a brother named Judas according to Mark 6:3 (see Box 13.2)

    • The Jesus of Thomas is not the Jewish Messiah,
          nor the miracle-working Son of God,
          nor the crucified and resurrected Lord,
          nor the Son of Man who will come on the clouds of heaven;
      he is the eternal Jesus whose words bring salvation
      
      The Thomas Jesus is closest to the Jesus of the canonical Gospel of John
          as a man sent from heaven with a message, and who will return to heaven;
      John was considered to have been a second-century Gnostic Gospel
          until the discovery of the early papyrus fragment Rylands 457,
          which some date to the first half of the second century CE;
      the Jesus of Thomas is in stark contrast to the Jesus of the Synoptics

    • The Character of the Sayings in Thomas is a major point of controversy;
      the central theme of the book is that humanity was saved
          Not by Jesus' crucifixion as a lamb sacrificed to atone for all sins,
          but rather by understanding the message in Jesus' words;
      For those who understand Jesus' words,
          the kingdom is here and now,
          a present reality that is inside and outside them

Thomas Saying #3:
Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you,
'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,'
then the birds of the sky will precede you.
If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,'
then the fish will precede you.
Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.
When you know yourselves, then you will be known,
and you will understand that you are children of the living Father.
But if you do not know yourselves,
then you live in poverty,
and you are the poverty

• To the Thorny Question of the earlier sayings in Thomas,
      Ehrman admits that some of them may go back to Jesus himself,
      although they are embedded in a Gospel that has Gnosticizing tendencies;
  it is worthy of note that the very eminent scholars
      who originally researched the Gospel of Thomas,
      James Robinson and Helmut Koester,
      believe it to be essentially a first century work;
  this will be a significant issue when we study Ehrman's interpretation
      of the historical Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet in chapter 17; see Box 13.3

•  Revelation Discourses:
  Documents in which Jesus appears to his apostles and
      gives them revelations about the origins of the cosmos
      and how humans can escape their present imprisonment
      in the realm of the evil creator Ialdabaoth;
  the Apocryphon of John serves as the classical formulation
      of the Gnostic Mythological World View.

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• Infancy Gospels, pp. 214-215

  • The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: a late and secondary work
    shows how the early Christians tried to fill in the gaps
        in the available information about Jesus' life,
        especially the three decades between his birth and his baptism;
    Christians imagined Jesus as a troublesome child
        who sometimes killed his teachers and playmates
        because he was not mature enough to understand
        and control his divine power

IV. 1 And after some days,
as Jesus passed through the midst of the city,
a certain child cast a stone at him and struck his shoulder.
And Jesus said to him: You shall not finish your course.
And immediately the child fell down and died.
And they who were there were amazed, saying:
From where is this child,
that every word he speaks becomes a perfect work?

• The Gospel of James: (Protevangelium)
  the story of the life of Jesus' mother, Mary,
      including her annunciation, conception, birth,
      dedication to the Jerusalem Temple at the age of 3,
      where she stayed until she conceived and later gave birth to Jesus;
  this Gospel is responsible for several major later Christian doctrines
      such as the perpetual virginity of Mary and the immaculate conception

My article: Christmas with Salome

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• Passion Gospels, pp. 215-221

  • The Gospel of Peter: an early anti-Jewish Docetic document
        independent of the canonical books; contains legendary elements;
        this Gospel was only known from negative comments by early Bishops,
        until an 8th century partial manuscript of it was found in Egypt in 1886;
        English translation by Raymond Brown: text

  • The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter: contains the "Laughing Jesus" story
        indicating that Jesus was watching his own crucifixion
        and laughing at his crucifiers' ignorance;
    it is only Jesus' corrupt body (created by the evil Ialdabaoth)
        that is crucified and dying,
        representing Jesus' liberation from this corrupt world of ignorance;
    Jesus criticizes the bishops and deacons as "dry canals"
        who lead people astray and "who do business" in his name;
    Jesus specifies that these church leaders
        "hold fast to the name of a dead man"
        indicating their obsession with his death as an atoning sacrifice

  • The Gospel of Judas Iscariot: discovered in 1978; only recently published
    Ehrman calls it the most important manuscript discovery
        since the Nag Hammadi books sixty years ago;
    reaffirms the "Laughing Jesus" of the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
        and its polemic against the authorities of the Church;
    Judas is a sympathetic figure in this book
        as the one apostle who truly understood who Jesus was;
    Judas betrayed Jesus for the positive purpose of helping him to be crucified
        so that he would be liberated from his corrupt body created by Ialdabaoth;
    this Gospel ends with Judas' betrayal of Jesus,
        minimizing the importance of the crucifixion in the overall scheme of things

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Learn the Key Terms on p. 222 with special reference to their original context