Nag Hammadi or the New Testament?

Our present time in history is marked by an interesting phenomenon. Almost daily the mass media features news or documentary on the origins of Christianity. In recent months Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code has especially exploited popular interest - and ignorance - in this area. Questions have been asked: Is the New Testament portrait of Jesus reliable? Are there secret traditions about Jesus that have been suppressed by the ‘established church’? What about all these ‘gnostic’ religious groups? Are there new discoveries that discredit Christianity as it has been taught and practised for 2000 years? These questions force us to think and be clear about the foundations of our faith.

The New Testament

The New Testament writings preserve for the Christian church the authoritative record of Jesus’ teachings and the distilled history of his saving life and death. Christians believe the New Testament, together with the Old Testament, to be the revealed word of God in writing and the only reliable source and standard for what Christians believe, teach and practice. Yet the New Testament acknowledges that not everything that Jesus and the Apostles did and taught is recorded in it (Jn 20:30-31). As far as we know, Jesus didn’t write letters or books, and much of what the Apostles taught was never written down, or if it was, has subsequently been lost (2 Thess 2:15; Col 4:16).

The New Testament also acknowledges that even from the very beginning there existed religious groups whose members claimed to be followers of Jesus, yet were not in fellowship with his chosen Apostles. For example, Paul contended with ‘false apostles’ (2 Cor 11:13). There were some who preached God’s word ‘for profit’ (2 Cor 2:17); others who preached a ‘different Jesus’ from the one proclaimed by the Apostles (2 Cor 11:4), or a ‘different gospel’ (Gal 1:6). Other quasi-Christian groups tended towards more esoteric forms of religious practice: some worshipped angels (Col 2:18); others denigrated marriage or certain foods (Col 2:21; 1 Tim 4:3). Others taught false ideas about the resurrection (1 Cor 15:12; 2 Tim 2:18), or speculated about aspects of Jewish mythology (Titus 1:14; 2 Tim 4:4), or were especially taken by claims to be able to acquire special secret knowledge or gnosis (1 Tim 6:20-21). Finally, some people were baptised and professed faith in Christ yet also remained caught up in conflicting religious trends (see Acts 8:9-24). Members of such non-mainstream Christian groups would, most likely, have developed their own oral and written traditions either blended with, alongside of, or separate to the Apostolic traditions now preserved in the New Testament.

Gnosticism

Two matters have arisen again and again in media coverage of Christian origins. They are (1) new archaeological discoveries, like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi Library, and (2) the new light such discoveries may shed on the early Christian world. Of especial interest to media and scholars alike is the ancient religious current known as ‘gnosticism.’ The word ‘gnosticism’ comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge. It is used to describe various religious movements from the second century: some with semi-Jewish and Christian connections, others inspired by various philosophical trends or practices of the Near Eastern mystery cults, still others a mix of all the above. Early Christian teachers such as Irenaeus (2^nd century AD) encountered gnostic heresies and teachers such as Valentinus and refuted their false doctrines about creation and redemption from Scripture, the church’s confessions (or ‘rule of faith’), reason, and by appeal to the commonly accepted facts of history.

Evidence of gnostic trends can be found already in the New Testament writings. Emphases included the individual’s search for personal experience of the divine; a limited revelation for a spiritual elite; speculation about non-human spiritual beings; access to hidden (occultic) knowledge; the repudiation of matter and creation; a tendency to deny created, bodily differentiation (eg. male and female); the repudiation of doctrine, beliefs, and objective revelation; a belief in ‘the divine spark’ – a divine inner core in each person; rejection of creator God of the Old Testament; and the idea that creation is the product of multiple divine emanations from an original divine principle. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, who was a life-long student of gnosticism in its various historical forms, wrote, ‘We find in Gnosticism… a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods.’ And Elaine Pagels, a world famous scholar of the Nag Hammadi texts and not without personal sympathy for the heart of gnostic philosophy, defined its essence in these terms: ‘the self and the divine are identical’.

The Nag Hammadi ‘Library’

The Nag Hammadi ‘library’ is a collection of around 50 manuscripts discovered in 1945 in northern Egypt. The manuscripts date from the 4^th century AD, and are written in Coptic, a Greek form of an Egyptian dialect. It seems they were likely discarded or salvaged from the library of a nearby 4^th century Christian monastery.

Some of the manuscripts contain material that issues from as early as the late 2^nd and early 3^rd centuries AD. The material includes religious texts from a wide range of non-Christian and semi-Christian traditions, including mythological stories, spiritual speculations, initiation rites, liturgical ceremonies, reflections on the Gospel accounts, familiar sayings of Jesus from the Gospels, alleged ‘secret’ Jesus sayings, stories about figures from the New Testament writings, and personal revelations.

As an example of some of the liturgical material, consider the following, from The Second Stele of Seth: ‘Great is the first aeon, male virginal Barbelo, the first glory of the invisible Father, she who is called "perfect".’ Or as an example of one of the ‘secret’ sayings of Jesus, we have this from The Gospel of Thomas: ‘Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human."’ At greater length, we may quote ‘Jesus’ from The Sophia of Jesus Christ:

Mary said to him: "Holy Lord, where did your disciples come from, and where are they going, and (what) should they do here?"

The Perfect Savior said to them: "I want you to know that Sophia, the Mother of the Universe and the consort, desired by herself to bring these to existence without her male (consort). But by the will of the Father of the Universe, that his unimaginable goodness might be revealed, he created that curtain between the immortals and those that came afterward, that the consequence might follow ... [BG 118:] ... every aeon and chaos - that the defect of the female might <appear>, and it might come about that Error would contend with her. And these became the curtain of spirit. From <the> aeons above the emanations of Light, as I have said already, a drop from Light and Spirit came down to the lower regions of Almighty in chaos, that their molded forms might appear from that drop, for it is a judgment on him, Arch-Begetter, who is called 'Yaldabaoth'. That drop revealed their molded forms through the breath, as a living soul. It was withered and it slumbered in the ignorance of the soul. When it became hot from the breath of the Great Light of the Male, and it took thought, (then) names were received by all who are in the world of chaos, and all things that are in it through that Immortal One, when the breath blew into him. But when this came about by the will of Mother Sophia - so that Immortal Man might piece together the garments there for a judgment on the robbers - <he> then welcomed the blowing of that breath; but since he was soul-like, he was not able to take that power for himself until the number of chaos should be complete, (that is,) when the time determined by the great angel is complete.”

Finally, as an example of its mystical teachings, consider the following, from The Gospel of Phillip: ‘Those who say that the Lord died first and (then) rose up are in error, for he rose up first and (then) died. If one does not first attain the resurrection, he will not die.’

Conclusion

Excerpts like these are typical of the kind of material the Nag Hammadi Library has preserved (read for yourself in the online library of The Gnostic Society, www.gnosis.org). Students and scholars of early Christianity have found the manuscript collection both to confirm traditional accounts of gnosticism in Irenaeus and Tertullian, as well as to shed new light on the highly diverse character of the gnostic movement and its penchant for a creedless, a-historical, individualistic spiritual eclecticism. Though some of what the Nag Hammadi Library reports about Jesus and the Apostles is consistent with, or even directly draws from, the New Testament texts, most represents a weird and diverse concoction of mythological reflections. With its speculative, pluralistic and mythological worldview, as well as its mystical esoteric tendencies, it will certainly appeal to the curiosity of the modern neo-gnostic spiritual inquirer.

Yet precisely in these respects the Nag Hammadi literature fails to do justice to the facts of Jesus’ life and teaching, as summed up in the earliest narrative formulae (eg. 1 Cor 15:1-7). The four Gospels and primary New Testament letters acquired pre-eminence in the early church because, from a very early date, they plausibly, consistently, and compellingly represented, and reflected, the unified story and teachings of Christ and the Apostles. Moreover, and also important, they were recognised as being in harmony with, and in fulfilment of, God’s saving deeds with Israel as recorded in the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (see Luke 24:44-47). Other, additional writings - possibly not excluding some of those preserved at Nag Hammadi - may have been composed from traditional sources and preserved for devotional and didactic purposes, especially in isolated monastic circles. But ultimately they were seen to lack the historic reliability, the Apostolic authority, and the saving efficacy of the good news proclaimed in the New Testament books.

Adam G. Cooper

Geelong