Darrell Bock & the Nag Hammadi "Missing Gospels"

For the past half year or so I have done a bit more reading some early documents.  You can still see NT Wright's Judas and the Gospel of Jesus : A Christian Response sitting on the reading list, although I finished it last spring.  One of the other books I have recently read is by Darrell Bock.  It's called The Missing Gospels.  It is a fairly good introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts; the many so called "gospels" which pop up in the news, in pop culture and in scholarship on a regular basis.  (Usually around Christmas and Easter, in order to "debunk more fully the mythology" which traditional Christianity has assembled around those dates.)

For the rest of the week I will be doing some posting around this particular area.  What are these "other gospels" which one hears about?  What do they say about Jesus?  Bock does a great study of the original materials, both the Nag Hammadi & the traditional gospels, and compares them in several categories:  God and Creation;  Jesus - Divine and/or Human;  the nature of Redemption - Spiritual/Physical;  Jesus' death.  I will also throw in some stuff from Wright's analysis of the Gospel of Judas.

There are so many fundamental questions involved it's hard to know where to begin, but let me suggest this as a starting point.  in my reading of various churchy-type publications (okay, I like to read church newspapers), I came across a description of a traveling Jesus Seminar presentation in the Diocese of Calgary: 

For those who attended the Seminar at All Saints, our speakers presented  Jesus as one who was just as radically counter cultural in his own day as he is in ours.
An illiterate rural peasant from a dirty town, itinerant preacher and a day laborer...
Sower (big pdf, pg 8)

There are two things which jump out at me.  First is having a look at some of the "alternative texts" which people use to establish a new idea/picture of Jesus.  And second is the question of whether there are fundamental problems which arise in this sort of re-drawing of Jesus.  Many folks might be startled by this description.  Jesus an illiterate peasant?  How then shall we think of this:

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.

Let us fix our eyes on Him.

Comments

[The Sheepcat]

Yikes. Speaking of illiteracy (Biblical illiteracy, that is) ...

But I'm sure the Jesus Seminar experts have a way of explaining away that passage too. I was surprised, though, that the scholars are presented as saying St Paul "got" Jesus better than anyone. I'd thought these ultra-modernists pretty uniformly presented Paul as a distorting influence on Christian thought. (Then again, I haven't seen what they've done with Paul.)

Indeed let us fix our eyes on Jesus.

[sameo416]

You might also point to the encounter with the 12-year-old Jesus in the temple when found by his parents..."Luke 2:46 After three days they found him in the temple, sitting amongthe teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.2:47 And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers."

Pretty impressive "An illiterate rural peasant"...