Hearing the Gospel

This past weekend I was lucky enough to catch a lecture by Elaine Pagels. Her most recent book, Beyond Belief, formed the basis of her talk. It is about the Gospel of Thomas, rejected long ago for the canon. The First United Methodist church was a packed house so I got there early so I could get a front row seat. Pagels' specialty is early Christianity and Gnosticism.

It basically goes without saying that I found her speech to be utterly fascinating. She is a fantastic speaker. She spoke with enthusiasm and injected a lot more humor into her lecture than I thought she would. Plus she roamed the stage so she could speak facing everyone in the room. I really appreciated this as I was sitting at a 90 degree angle to the front of the podium.

She began by explaining that it was found written in Greek and that she thinks that it was probably written in the early part of the second century C.E. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings that are attributed to Jesus. (If you want to read it, go here.) She went on to talk about how it was not given canonical status yet shares a lot of passages with those that were made so. Pagels covered a lot of territory and, since this isn't a topic about which I'm intimately familiar, I won't be able to summarize her very well, unfortunately. I can relate, however, the parts that intrigued me the most.



One idea she laid down was the view of The Gospel of Thomas and that of John as being in opposition. They have radically different approaches with Thomas being rather more egalitarian than John. Thomas also seemed to me to portray the divine a bit more as pagans do, namely, as being immanent, being around us on this earth and now. I was fascinated with how she brought in the concept of light from Genesis. Instead of it being light as in a stream of photons emanating from the Sun, it was divinity. Entering the Kingdom of God here is not about moving from this life into another but rather about seeing the light which is divine everywhere right now – by returning to the time before the fall of man. Yeah, I know I'm butchering it.

(50) Jesus said, "If they say to you (plur.), 'Where are you from?' say to them, 'It is from light that we have come - from the place where light, of its own accord alone, came into existence and [stood at rest]. And it has been shown forth in their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say 'We are its offspring, and we are the chosen of the living father.' If they ask you, 'What is the sign of your father within you?' say to them, 'It is movement and repose.'"

I really enjoyed how Pagels was able to be scholarly while sounding more like she's giving a sermon. She made it very easy to see the beauty in Thomas and, to a lesser extent, in Christianity. I mean, I'm no friend of religion but it's not hard to see the appeal of the transcendentalism (would that be the right word?) of it. In fact, Thomas sounds a lot like what little I know of Buddhism as well as paganism. I like how she tied that elliptical knot and brought it all back to Genesis.

After her speech, there was a break during which she signed books and chatted with folks. I ended up way towards the back of the line and didn't get the chance to meet Pagels owing to time constraints. However, I did end up chatting with the guy behind me. He was really nice. At one point he asked if I went to church there. I was a bit nervous to tell him that I am an atheist, but when I did so, he was very accepting and we just continued our conversation.



With the break over, a small panel discussion ensued with Pagels joined by a professor of religious studies here at the university and a man from the church who deals with community outreach. Most of the questions were directed at Pagels, unsurprisingly, but the prof got dragged in a lot. Unfortunately, the church representative didn't have much room to speak but what he said spoke a lot. I was impressed with his introduction in which he was very critical of evangelicals generally and the Christian Right specifically. One audience member asked about traditions and types of knowledge. I think it was inspired by something Pagels said during her lecture about Jesus potentially having had one set of knowledge for the masses and another for his intimate disciples that was "secret". I forget what the woman from the audience asked specifically but recall the responses. Pagels contrasted a bar mitzvah with an Episcopalian confirmation. At the bar mitzvah, she explained, the boy would choose a passage from the Torah and do a little exegesis on it. For the confirmation, on the other hand, the young person would just recite a Biblical passage assigned to him. The church rep spoke up at this point and related a telling story. He had been attending meetings of a campus evangelical group, presumably attempting to build bridges with its members. He attended several of them and noticed that there was a table with literature on it about feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and just helping the poor in general. He also noticed that at none of the meetings were these issues ever discussed so he asked why it was that the material was there but it never got mentioned. Whoever it was that led the group told him that such activities were "advanced stuff" and that they only went over the "basics" in the group's meetings. I think most of us in the audience were rather surprised/shocked to hear that proselytizing should take precedence over being good to one's neighbor for them.

For more on Elaine Pagels and her ideas, go here.

This was the second David P. Lyons Lectureship in Theology seminar that the church has held. Next year Karen Armstrong is coming to town.