Second Feature

I. Unusual “Gospels”

In the last few years, and increasingly in the last several months, the media have highlighted sensationalistic claims about “gospels” that few people within the church even knew existed.

Many of these stem from the discovery in 1945 of a library of writings at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. This library included many “gospels” that reflect the teachings and beliefs of a syncretistic philosophical and religious movement called Gnosticism, which was prominent in the Greco-Roman world in the second century A.D. and beyond. The writings demonstrate the syncretistic nature of Gnosticism, in that they demonstrate acquaintance with literature from Neo-Platonism,¹ Judaism,² and Christianity.³

With the translation and publication of these “gospels,” some scholars have made sensationalistic claims.

For nearly twenty years the Gospel of Thomas has received extensive media attention. In 1993, the problematic Jesus Seminar placed it as the fifth gospel on an authoritative par with the four Gospels of the New Testament. From Thomas they derive the assumption that Jesus never understood himself to be the supernatural, divine Son of God who was crucified and raised from the dead. Instead, they claim that Jesus knew himself to be only a wise man who tried to cast a new vision of spirituality by speaking in parables and sayings that riled the social and religious establishment.⁴

Over ten years ago my colleague J.P. Moreland and I assembled a team of New Testament and philosophical scholars to address this phenomenon in a book entitled Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus (Zondervan, 1996). Although we believe that we countered the claims of the Jesus Seminar surrounding the Gospel of Thomas, the biblical portrait of Jesus continues to come under fire from other sources.

The meteoric rise of the popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has produced an accompanying rise in the visibility of the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. This source, along with a passage in the Gospel of Philip where Jesus is said to “kiss” Mary,⁵ is used to spin a novel conjecture that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, they had children together, and the resultant bloodline was the chalice of the Holy Grail.⁶

Most recently the National Geographic Society announced in April 2006 the discovery of a lost gospel, the Gospel of Judas, which they claimed was one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century.⁷ This writing reassesses the traitorous relationship between Jesus and Judas as we find it in the four New Testament Gospels and portrays Judas acting at Jesus’ request when he hands Jesus over to the authorities. ⁸

II. What Should We Think?

What are we to make of these so-called “gospels”? The media attention given to these and other gospels has generated a number of questions in the minds of people, even among evangelicals. Do these writings contain any truth? Because they are getting so much attention, even from some highly visible New Testament scholars, should we fear that our Bibles are incomplete and that these other gospels contain truth not found in ours? Is the real story of Christianity after our New Testament Gospels recorded in these gospels? Are all of these “gospels” heretical? What was the process in the church that concluded some gospels were to be included in the canon, and others excluded?

These are important questions to address, but we must recognize that challenges will come in different ways and in different contexts. The last question is an important starting point.