Bock & the Missing Gospels: an intro to the questions

Picking up from here.

For a number of years I’ve had an interest in older things.  Probably explains why I ended up in Classics.  Old texts, old thoughts, old ways of looking at things – all of these capture imagination, both mine and those of others.  Over the past number of years we’ve seen the publication of things like the Qumran scrolls, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi material, and if you recall, the most recent “discovery” of the Gospel of Judas.

Often what one encounters is a sound bite of such ancient texts, in the form of an interpretive summary.  Sort of “I’ve looked at the material and can now say X about the historical Jesus/ the early Church/ Judaism/ Paul/ insert item here.”  I’ve encountered many people in bible studies, discussion groups and in conversation who have heard of these kinds of documents and about a particular interpretive school of thought.  One hears about these texts and their interpretation, significance or meaning from religious studies courses, local study groups and lectures, and from the more popularized works of theologians and would-be theologians.

I was an undergraduate in Classics a few years after Elaine Pagels published  “The Gnostic Gospels” (Princeton, 1979).  The book was an instant success.  Bock introduces his work with a quote from the back cover of Pagels’ work: 

…to illuminate the world of the first Christians and to examine the different ways in which both Gnostics and the orthodox Christians constructed God, Christ, and the church.  Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

Whether you have studied or read in this area, or simply picked up a newspaper around Easter every year, you will have heard names like Bart Ehrman, Crossan and the Jesus Seminar.  The inside jacket of Ehrman’s “Lost Christianities:  The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew” (Oxford: 2003) makes the claim that:  “…these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners.”  Bock looks at the announcements surrounding the more recent work by Marvin Meyer (The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus):  “an image of Jesus as the ultimate wisdom teacher.”  Students and laypeople alike will recognize (and have differing opinions of) what Bock refers to as the “new school”.

So where do we start?  In a sense we are starting ahead of ourselves:  we really need to look at what we understand by revelation and Scripture.  But for the time being, I want to take a walk through Bock’s work – looking at the Nag Hammadi texts at some depth.  This is really the most fruitful way of discovering any ancient way of thinking.  Read the text.  The same principle is true of the gospel of John and the letters of Seneca:  read the text.  It is great and helpful to read commentaries and interpretive materials, but they are no substitute for immersing yourself in the text.

Bock calls himself a “tour guide” for the reader.  No doubt he has his positions and beliefs, as we all do, and so one might be skeptical as to whether or not he will simply point out his favourite portraits of Jesus and early Christianity.  Yet I think overall he does a fair job of presenting the texts, the various interpretations, and giving the reader enough context to draw conclusions.  He limits his study to

“the period before Irenaeus, that controversial church father of the late second century.  The new school claims that Irenaeus ‘won’ and was the key architect of orthodoxy.  The claim is that this orthodoxy … emerged even more clearly in the third and fourth centuries.  So the new school argues that the Christianity we know has roots that do not really go back to the time of Jesus or even to the apostles in a way that precludes other alternative views of Christianity.” (xxv)

In chapter one, Bock gives the reader some basic historical background to the time period of the second and third centuries.  The first context of “Christianity” is the Jewish setting in which it arose, with the Jewish beliefs about God, and the broad category of the covenant and the promises to Israel.

It is helpful to think about some rough timeline in early Christianity, although one should remember that there are not abrupt jumps from one time period to the next.  Bock gives a brief overview of three:

1]  The time Jesus and the Apostolic period – up to the end of the first century.  This is the period in which Jesus and his immediate followers (apostles) would have been active.  The latest date for New Testament writing puts us in the 90’s AD, so with the death of the Apostles comes the end of the Apostolic age.

2]  The age of the “Apostolic fathers” covers the time the time of the first few generations after the first period, roughly up to 150 AD.  The Apostolic fathers were those “who had contact with the apostles or fit in the period just after them.” (9)  In this period you will encounter texts like 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius (a bishop of Antioch), the “Martyrdom of Polycarp”, the Didache, the “Shepherd of Hermas”.  It is in this time period that one can certainly see the rise of “alternative” views of Christianity, particularly some Gnostic texts.  We will talk about the Gnostics below.

3]  The age of the Apologists goes from the previous period through to Nicea (325) and beyond. (10)  In case you are confused by the term “apologist”, it isn’t someone who is sorry for Christianity, it is one who writes a defense of Christianity, or makes an argument in its favour.  Apologists often wrote with specific “opponents” in mind.  In this time period you will see names like Justin Martyr (100-165; who, by the way, predates Irenaeus), Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origin.

So why is the history important?  Well, it is argued by the new school that these later apologists are the ones responsible for forming what we might call orthodox Christianity.  It is claimed that earlier on, there were:   [A] competing views and interpretations, or [B] an entirely different understanding of Jesus and Christianity, and that [C] these later apologists pushed out the other views and imposed ‘orthodoxy’ on the church.  Some questions which come to mind:  did these “orthodox’ beliefs exist in the early Christian communities?;  was there suppression of such beliefs?  Or, as NT Wright asks in his work, have we missed the truth about Christianity?

A word about the Gnostics.  While Bock gives us a brief overview, I would also point you to part one of Jaroslav Pelikan’s work, “The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition” from his five volumes on the history of Christian doctrine.  It is a more thorough and presents the reader with the “next step up” in terms of indepth history of the period.  It is worth getting.  But back to Bock’s overview.

When we think of possible “alternatives” to orthodox Christianity in ancient times, the term “Gnostic” always rises to the surface.  The term comes from the Greek words for knowing or knowledge.  In modern scholarship, Gnostic or Gnosticism is used to refer to those who held that belief was rooted in a “special knowledge”.  As Bock summarizes, “those in the know are called Gnostics”.(15)  In chapter two Bock looks at some of the discussion and difficulties around the term.  It is a term, which was used both positively and negatively in early Christian circles.  We can see both uses as we read the scriptures:  many Christians will be able to quote a text like “you shall know the truth…” and yet we have Paul writing “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”

Bock points us to the work of Kurt Rudolph, who has listed five traits of Gnosticism (19ff):
1]  Dualism – the belief that creation and humanity are a mix of good and evil, based upon the view that there is a distinction between the true “God” who is above all, and a lesser “God” who created the material world.  Often the “true God and the Creator God of Genesis are not the same thing.”
2]  Cosmogony, or how the universe is set up.  There is a contrast between light and dark, soul (or spirit) and body or flesh, knowledge and ignorance – things exist in pairs of opposites.  If point one shows us a dualism in God, then this point shows us a dualism in the created world and how we live in this dualism.
3]  Soteriology, or what we mean by salvation, and how it is brought about.  Salvation is by knowledge of the true state of things, and it is salvation of the non-material part of humanity.  There is a saving of the mind/ soul or spirit, but not of the body.  Because the body and flesh belong to the darkness, there is generally no resurrection of the body.
4]  Eschatology, or what the end-times of all things will be like.  Think “Left Behind”, but with panache.  There is a restoration of the spiritual to the Spiritual, and not much interest in having a re-newed creation.
5]  Cult and community, in which cult means not the people who sell peanut brittle at the airport and live on a commune, but the way the believers or adherents practice their faith in worship and liturgy and ritual.  For instance, the Gnostics had practices like baptism, and other liturgical ceremonies.

So Gnosticism and Orthodoxy – which came first?  Did Gnosticism give birth (by opposition) to what we call orthodoxy, or was it a derivative set of beliefs, a parasite upon orthodox belief and practice?

That’s it for tonight.

Comments

[Troy]

Last year when the gospel of Judas made the news, my grade 8 and 9 students asked about it; and being the opended minded sort that I am, I thought I would teach heresy. Why not?

I put before them a passage from Judas, and then a passage from Matthew, without telling them which one was which. I said, "Decide for yourselves which one reminds you of the Jesus and which one doesn't."

They chose Matthew without any prompting from me and gave reasons why Jesus would never the say the things he did in the Judas gospel. I would not describe my students as good church going kids or well educated in the gospel, but whatever.

Call you it what you want, enter the kingdom of heaven as a child, from the mouths of babes, etc...

Adults who are grasping for straw out of the manger, betray, and make the baby Jesus cry.

[joseph]

we'll get around to looking at some of the texts in question & doing a bit of comparison. One of the questions which pops up for people is "how do I know which - if any - of these ancient texts (including the canonical gospels) can be trusted as most authentic. For that we will have a look at Bock's analysis of Bauer, who sort of started this off in the 30's, but really came into his own in the mid 60's. He's the grandaddy of the quest for alternative gospels, and an alternative Jesus.

[Mike S]

Of course, the thing we all want to know about is the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Unfortunately, my personal impression of Mary as a wealthy matron and personal friend of Jesus' mother simply does not sell as well as a twenty-something hottie.

[Troy]

The scholastic tradition to which I follow is indeed the 30's and 60's but not the 1930's and 1960's.

"how do I know which - if any - of these ancient texts.. etc....."

Sure, that's a new question. No one has ever asked that before.

[joseph]

Mike: yes, there is that marketing aspect to everything...

Troy: I think it is the kind of question which predates and postdates Christendom. In the earliest times, for those who were outside the circle of Christian tradition (those being evangelized), and prior to the treatment of text as canon, the existence of a variety of texts would have raised such a question. And in a post Christendom context, this is the first time one can have access to so many of the early texts at once. So again, from the missional perspective, it is the kind of question which can be raised in our day and age, which was not raised (indeed could not, because of lack of access to texts) in prior times.

The broader answer (from the point of view of the orthodox tradition) is to look at the early church and see how and why certain texts became canon and others did not. That was really the first full form of the question, and it's fullest answer.

[Christianity]

The gospels provoked by the author is very good and he has given very good definitions for Dualism, Cosmogony, Soteriology, Eschatology and Community all are very good.