The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (23 page)

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE EGYPTIANS (2)

Also titled the Holy Book of the Egyptians concerning the Great Invisible Spirit, this book has nothing in common with any known gospel form or with the material quoted by Clement as from a Gospel according to the Egyptians. Most likely the copyist had heard of the book Clement mentions but never saw it and jumped to the conclusion that he had been referring to this book with a similar title. This one, discovered at Nag Hammadi, outlines the salvation history of Sethian Gnosticism. Its divine savior is not Jesus Christ but Seth, messianic son of Adam. A scribe has arbitrarily inserted forms of the name Jesus twice, but the book is the product of Jewish Sethian Gnosticism, which may be related to Dositheanism, founded by Dositheus, a disciple of John the Baptist. It is a good example of the kind of Gnostic theological discourse that Catholic Christianity eventually simplified for use in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

THE ORACLES OF OUR LORD

Somewhere around 150, Papias, bishop of Hieropolis in Asia Minor (close to the New Testament cities of Colosse and Laodicea), compiled a kind of scrapbook of reports he had gathered about Jesus and his teachings. Eusebius disdained the book, saying that it included “certain strange parables.” One prediction of the abundance of nature in the coming millennium seems to have been lifted almost verbatim from the Second Apocalypse of Baruch and then misattributed to Jesus. The book disappeared long ago.

THE EPISTLE OF THE APOSTLES

Here is a second- or third-century collection of creedal formulas and paragraphs from theological treatises dressed up superficially as postresurrection teachings of Jesus. It appears to be an attempt to co-opt the Gnostic genre of revelation dialogues to reinforce Catholic doctrine, a case of trying to beat the enemy at his own game. Interestingly, this book considers Peter and Cephas to have been separate apostles, not two names for the same one. Also, it shows how easy and natural it seemed, even for centuries after Jesus, for the pious to place their own words in his mouth, truckloads of them!

THE PROTEVANGELIUM OF JAMES

The title of this book, which was also known as the Gospel or Book of James, reflects a theory that it was the source of the nativity stories of both Matthew and Luke, that both of those evangelists drew elements from this supposedly earlier, fuller version (a “protogospel”). That is hardly likely, however, since in that case Matthew’s and Luke’s nativity stories would look a great deal more alike. Instead, we have to conclude that this book, written, it seems, toward the end of the second century, draws on and harmonizes the divergent nativities of Matthew and Luke.

The spotlight is as much on Mary as it is on Jesus. We see here the beginnings of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox anxiety about the sexuality of Mary the mother of Jesus. No one had thought of the Immaculate Conception of Mary yet, but the Protevangelium is much concerned to vindicate her perpetual virginity, and to that end it dramatizes the theory that Mary and Joseph had only a legal marriage so as to avoid having Jesus born illegitimate. It posits the clever solution that Joseph was an old widower with four sons and some daughters (Mark 6:3), while Mary was quite young. The two had a completely Platonic “spiritual” marriage as was common among second-century ascetical Christians.

We also owe to the Protevangelium the idea that the “stable” in which Jesus was born was a cave. Jerome believed he was staying in it, near Bethlehem, many years later.

THE INFANCY GOSPEL OF THOMAS

If nature abhors a vacuum, so does popular piety. Early Christians just could not abide not knowing what the Son of God must have been doing before he began his public ministry. If all one had was Mark’s gospel, the answer would be: nothing special. Jesus’s boyhood and young adulthood would have been presumably even less eventful than most since he was busy being righteous. (Granted, Mark has him appear at a baptism of repentance, but as everyone knows, it is only the righteous whose conscience impels them to such rituals.) For Mark, the “action” started only once Jesus was endued with power from on high, at the baptism. Matthew and Luke have begun to compromise this picture, since they have added a miraculous birth story and so made Jesus a demigod right from square one. Thus it comes as no surprise when Matthew has Jesus already know he is God’s Son before he is baptized and when Luke portrays him at twelve years old as a child prodigy—no real child at all, but a godling in childlike form. Once this precedent was established, Christian curiosity was given the green light, and the pious imagination went wild concocting stories of what the divine boy Jesus might have done, would have done, and finally
did
do. Such stories are filled with contempt for the dullwitted adults around Jesus. The point is to glorify Jesus at their expense; they must, like Mark’s disciples, be fools, or Jesus’s preternatural wisdom cannot shine the brighter.

One may say that the spiritual level of the stories of the Infancy Gospel tradition is not very high. The young Jesus is ruthless, not to say capricious, in his application of divine power. He does not suffer fools. The gospel saying that best fits him is Mark 9:19, “O faithless generation! How long am I to be with you? How long must I endure you?” The stories are none of them elevated beyond the level of 2 Kings 2:23-24, where the prophet Elisha rids himself of the nuisance of mocking children by summoning she-bears to rip them to bloody tatters. More than anyone else, the young god Jesus must remind us of blue-skinned Krishna, a godling who plays jokes on his devotees, only Jesus has less of a sense of humor!

Though most of the individual episodes and anecdotes in Infancy Thomas do not require any particular setting (come to think of it, just like most stories and sayings in the familiar adult gospels!), on the whole the book has been constructed as a great patch to fill a perceived hole in Matthew: What happened while the Holy Family was sojourning in Egypt, then when they returned? We seem to be brought up more or less even with Luke 2:41 by the end of the book. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is the earliest of its genre and goes back, at least in some basic form, to the late second to early third century.

THE ARABIC INFANCY GOSPEL

Actually titled The Book of Joseph Caiaphas, this gospel stems from somewhere in the fifth to sixth century, hence too late even for Teabing’s stash of Sangreal documents. It combines much material from both the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Protevangelium of James, adding a section recounting
Arabian Nights
-style miracles worked by Mary during the Holy Family’s sojourn in Egypt. One interesting distinction of the book is its explicit mention of Zoroaster: He is said to have predicted the birth of Jesus, and it is this oracle that led the Magi to come looking for him in Bethlehem! The book exists only in Arabic, but it was probably composed in Syriac.

THE INFANCY GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

A product of the eighth or ninth century, this one is derivative of both the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Protevangelium of James, apparently adding some material from the Arabic Infancy Gospel as well.

THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK

Morton Smith claimed that, while cataloging manuscripts at the monastery of Mar Saba in 1958, he ran across a fragmentary copy of a letter written by the great second-century theologian Clement of Alexandria. It purported to answer the questions of a certain Theodore relative to a hush-hush document, a secret edition of the Gospel of Mark, whose circulation was restricted to the advanced members of the church. It seemed there were various, even
more
secret, versions in circulation, and the Carpocratian Gnostics were citing a copy that implied Jesus was in the habit of initiating new converts into the Kingdom of God via homosexual rituals (“naked man with naked man”). Such scandalous elements Clement dismissed as fabrications, though he did consider authentic a passage that he quotes, providing a simpler Markan counterpart of the Johannine resurrection of Lazarus.

Many scholars accept Smith’s claims at face value, but there has always been deep suspicion that Smith faked the whole thing. Specifically, it appears he may have cooked up the idea inspired by a then-recent mystery novel called
The Mystery of Mar Saba
, in which a hoaxer claimed to have discovered (at the Mar Saba monastery no less!) an ancient document in which Nicodemus confessed to absconding with the body of Jesus and helping Joseph of Arimathea to bury it elsewhere.

THE GOSPEL OF TRUTH

We knew of this gospel through the attempts of Irenaeus of Lyon to discredit it, but it was not until a copy finally turned up among the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945 that we had a chance to read it for ourselves. It is the work of Valentinus, the greatest of the second-century Gnostic theologians, he who claimed to be a disciple of Theodas, Paul’s disciple. It is not a narrative about Jesus; the title comes from the fact that the phrase “The gospel of truth” leads off the book, and ancient books were often called by their initial words. The book is actually a meditation on the nature and implications of the Christian message as Valentinus understood it. It would then be analogous to the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is fascinating in that it omits reference to the elaborate theological features of Valentinian belief as we know them from later theological debates. Perhaps it was an early work of Valentinus, before he himself had elaborated its implications. Or maybe it was Valentinus’s attempt at his own
Mere Christianity
.

THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP

This work is neither a connected treatise like the Gospel of Truth nor a narrative like the familiar gospels. Again, it is not a set of sayings like Thomas. It seems rather to be a collection of notes, perhaps sermon notes, compiled by a Valentinian Gnostic. The book reminds one of the aphoristic philosophy of Wittgenstein. Philip sets forth a surprisingly sophisticated theory of language and signification. Richard Arthur discerns certain Dosithean elements in the book. Most scholars date Philip in the second century, quite reasonably, given the clear Valentinianism of it. But Barbara Thiering has made the case for a first-century date, pre-70, based partly on the apparent hostility toward Gentiles the book displays, which would seem to fit best amid the Jewish-Gentile Christian struggles that are ubiquitous in Acts and the Pauline epistles.

THE GOSPEL OF BARNABAS

Muslims today consider this long text to be the original gospel as delivered to Jesus (which seems a bit unlikely since it takes a retrospective look at Jesus). It is a peculiar work, combining a synthesized gospel harmony with a great deal of other narrative and teaching material. In its present form, it dates from the late sixteenth century and is likely the work of an apostate monk, one Brother Marino, who had worked for the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Strangely, the book depicts Jesus as a prophet, but no messiah. That dignity it reserves for Muhammad when he should arrive. But then Barnabas cannot be the work of a Muslim, since Muslims believe Jesus, not Muhammad, was the messiah! Nor is it likely that a man who worked with the Holy Office would not have been aware of this. The Gospel of Barnabas also shows pronounced Jewish-Christian, Ebionite features, such as advocacy of Jewish dietary laws and opposition to Paul.

The best solution to the long-standing puzzle is that offered by Rod Blackhirst, namely, that this long medieval work was based on an earlier Ebionite text (or traditions) filtered through the syncretistic Carmelite hermit brotherhood, a very ancient group predating the arrival of Latin monasticism in the region.
¹³
Tracing their pedigree (whether or not fictively hardly matters) to Elijah and the Rechabites (Old Testament Jewish ascetics mentioned in Jeremiah 35), the Carmelites had a mixture of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs, and if there is anyone liable to reshape Jesus as an Elijah-like forerunner for someone else, it would be them.

THE WISDOM OF JESUS CHRIST

The most interesting thing about this second- to third-century Gnostic revelation text (discovered at Nag Hammadi) is the valuable insight into the artificiality of the whole post-Resurrection dialogue genre. No reader can seriously entertain the notion that any of these dialogues actually preserves quoted material, whether from a waking encounter with the Risen Jesus or from a dream vision. Every one of them is flagrantly a case of the author simply putting his or her own ideas into the mouth of Jesus in order to pull rank by using his name. Of course, we witness the same phenomenon in the New Testament gospels (which is why, for instance, several different opinions as to the validity of fasting are ascribed to him). As it happens, we are able to corroborate such literary judgments very definitely in the case of the Wisdom of Jesus Christ because we also find among the Nag Hammadi texts the original source of this one, namely, Eugnostos the Blessed, a theological treatise that matches this one almost word for word. A redactor has simply snipped up Eugnostos the Blessed into answers by Jesus to artificial questions by the disciples, which the editor himself has supplied.

THE DIALOGUE OF THE SAVIOR

Many scholars today believe that this Nag Hammadi Gnostic revelation dialogue incorporates several distinct sources, though that is hardly obvious from a surface reading. One of the supposed sources is held to be a Thomas-like or Q-like set of sayings of Jesus, which have been placed, almost totally absorbed, one might say, in the present context. It seems just as likely, however, that the book is the work of a Gnostic writer who remembers certain sayings from hearing the gospels (Matthew, Luke, John, and especially Thomas, possibly the Gospel according to the Egyptians) read in Gnostic meetings and peppers his own creation with them to give it an air of authenticity. The result is quite intriguing in any case, containing both a semi-philosophical creation myth and a revelation of the challenges facing the ascending soul of the Gnostic.