Gnostic Gospels are not Agnostic or Atheist

The jury is still out in my mind about the Gnostic Gospels. If you think gnostic means agnostic or atheist then you would be wrong. It will be interesting to see where this forums goes.

Gnostic texts may show added insights

Did Christ save 'mysteries' for close disciples?
By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret News religion editor

While the four gospels of the New Testament have been officially canonized as "orthodox" Christian scripture, a set of ancient texts believed to be copies of early apostolic writings seem to show that Jesus taught casual followers on one level while providing a set of "mysteries" to his closest associates.
Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton University, told students at Brigham Young University during a recent forum that the Nag Hammadi texts — unearthed by an Arab villager in Egypt in 1945 — include "the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down."
Pagels, a scholar who in 1979 published what has become known as the definitive work on the texts, called "The Gnostic Gospels," told her audience that the ancient papyrus documents provide insights into the teachings of Jesus that he apparently shared only with true disciples. The texts — written in Coptic — were comprised of 13 papyrus books bound in leather that were discovered in an earthenware jar the discoverer smashed, thinking it could contain treasure.
They were translated after coming to the attention of a Coptic scholar who found them in the Cairo Museum after they had been sold to an antiquities merchant. The original texts from which they were copied are believed to have been written in Greek, she said.
Pagels dwelt heavily on one of the texts, known as the Gospel of Thomas. "Unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, this book was identified as a secret gospel. Many of the things you would hear reading it would sound the same" as the four gospels, while other accounts of what appears to be the same teaching "appear strikingly different" in the Gospel of Thomas.
At least one prominent scholar has suggested the original documents from which the Gospel of Thomas were copied may have pre-dated the four gospels and may have been used by the authors in writing their own works. They apparently circulated widely throughout the known Christian world prior to the second century.
The reason the texts were extinguished from public view until the ancient documents were found goes back to the origins of what became the Catholic and Orthodox churches, Pagels said. At least two different archbishops who were trying to establish an institutional church and hierarchy condemned the Gnostic gospels as "heresy" and had them banned or destroyed beginning about the second century A.D. They continued to exist in the libraries of early monks but eventually were nearly lost, leaving the four New Testament gospels as the only officially sanctioned record of Christ's ministry.
Yet monks and others who had translated the Gnostic gospels did not consider them heresy, but rather the expanded teachings of Christ to his closest followers. The term "Gnostic" is literally translated, "those who know."
Such knowledge was not intellectual wisdom, she said. Rather it referred to spiritual understanding "about the knowledge of who we are and who God is. A knowledge of the relationship between ourselves and God, knowing who we are, where we came from and where we are going."
Two of the many points of similarity between the texts and the New Testament gospels have to do with Christ's teachings about the "kingdom of God." While Mark's account of Christ's references to such a kingdom seem to refer to "a cataclysmic event drawing near that was meant to transform the world," the Gospel of Thomas shed a different perspective on the same teaching.
It says the kingdom of God "is inside of you and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father."
Thus "those Christians who see the kingdom as a place or a time are not understanding it fully," she said, referring to Christ's disciples, who kept asking when the kingdom would come. He was trying to tell them that "the kingdom of God won't come by waiting for it." Rather, it "is spread out on the Earth but people do not see it."
Other teachings in Thomas include the origin of man. "You come from the kingdom and you will go there again," one saying urges. "Blessed are the solitary and elect for you will find the kingdom. For you are from it and to it you will return."
The text affirms a deeper meaning to personal identity than even gender, family name or ethnic origin imply, Pagels said. "It means a discovery of ourselves as coming from a divine source. It suggests that entering the kingdom of God is knowing who we are. As we come to know ourselves at the deepest level, we come to know God as the source of our being."

http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,355010719,00.html

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