Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas Reviews

• 
  Jan-Maat

  Long ago but not so far way I bought this book for my father, who was interested in reading the Gospel of Thomas. I had read an apocryphal Gospel one day while a student, happily nosing around in the reference section - it related how once when Jesus was a boy he was out playing in the street when some bigger boys came along, stamped on his mud pie and laughed at him. Jesus' eyes at this flashed with anger and those bully boys fell dead. Later their parents went round to Joseph and Mary and complained bitterly about Jesus' behaviour. Joseph and Mary gave Jesus a good talking to, after which he raised the boys from the dead and restored them to life.
  
  For various reasons I'm a cautious and wary person, and so was unkeen, unfamiliar as I was with the Gospel of Thomas, to present my father with this kind of material without some kind of explanatory framework no doubt fearing some outbreak of gnosticism in middle England not that this could make it any worst, and so it came to pass after some poking and prodding, that I came across Pagels' book, thought it looked the part, and gave it to the old man. I'm still not sure if he ever read it.
  
  Which plainly was his loss if he didn't because it is a great introduction to the spiritual world of the early church, the one problem with which is that I'm not sure that the Gospel of Thomas as it is presented here on it's own has the weight to sustain her argument.
  
  Pagels frames the story of the quashing of spiritual interpretations of the meaning of the ministry of Jesus I am picking my words with as much care as I can after a mere couple of glasses of an indifferent white wine, I know what Rabelais would advise me to do in this case in favour of an Orthodox and Catholic church by the time of Constantine with her experience as a mother living through the death of a son, attending church first in crisis, later with her daughter for a Christmas service. I felt this placed a discussion of religious matters in its proper context: the experience of life, rawness and loss, the openness to community, a sense of loss and a sense of the need for metaphysical meaning. But then again I dreamt last night that I was employed by the British Government to buy and sell warships to African heads of state, so your opinion may well be different unless you were having the same dream, which would explain why I wasn't able to sell any, not even to the one with really bad eyesight me and my dream are presuming that you've heard of how the UK government some years back managed to sell leaky submarines to the Canadians and to think a good chunk of the UK population believe that the country will thrive in a free trade environment .
  
  To do this Pagels assumes that the Gospel of John was written in response to the Gospel of Thomas, my concern here was that she advances no discussion of the possible date of composition for either, but at a pinch, reading, one can assume that the first was written, if not in response to the Gospel we can read at the end of this book ,then in general terms to beliefs that the author of John did not approve of all of the Gospels are pseudonymous, nobody knows who actually wrote them. It is equally plain that there was a lot to be gained in believing that each was written by somebody who was personally acquainted with Jesus and that this is in fact fairly unlikely as evidenced by John's presentation of "doubting" Thomas. Pagels' basic conception is of a dynamic, human, environment, and the various oddities of the Gospel attributed to John lend themselves to supporting that view - in other words John's Gospel is really not much like the three synoptic Gospels which together with John form part of the orthodox canon of the New Testament although Pagels also points out that the way we read the Gospel of John is enshrined in translation practice and even in contemporary Greek editions - eg the capitalisation of logos which would not have been originally present.
  
  Pagels puts forward to the reader that there were two types of believers in the early church, a distinction that reminded me of Karen Armstrong's
  A History of God. On the one hand there were those who accepted what they were taught, on the other those who took this as a starting point to seek for themselves after truth. Or perhaps those who believed that at most only Jesus had (at least) some element of divinity in his nature and quite how much and in what way, were themselves to become hugely controversial issues and those who felt that everyone has sparks of the divine in them - this later was to become an important element in Jewish mystical tradition at times I wonder if the Early Christian church might be most interesting for Jews curious about the archaeology of some of their traditions since there seems to be a fair bit that isn't attested in writing until centuries later in Jewish writings yet apparently was already current in the diversity of Christian belief in the first couple of centuries AD. Or again that there are two types of conversion experience...the first sees salvation as deliverance from sin and death; the second shows how someone "ignorant of God and of [one's] own nature," and mired in destructive activity, eventually develops a growing awareness of - and need for - relationship with God (p162-3). Pagel cites Heracleon who describes the first group as perceiving God as a strict, limited, but well-meaning master and father, who has decreed the death penalty for every one of his children who sins and yet loves them and grieves when they perish. But they also believe that, apart from Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross, God does not forgive his children; he actually only saves those who 'believe' (p161). The alternative, for Heracleon, and I suspect for Pagels (and for that matter
  Karen Armstrong) is a conception of God as spiritual nourishment (pp 161-2). The story she tells in her book is that the first won out over the second. The hows and the whys are tempting to speculate about, but we don't even know much about the winning side, and what we know about the loosing side almost entirely comes from what the winners choose to say about them.
  
  Almost. Luckily for us in the 1950s, an Egyptian uncovered a stash of writings deemed heretical by Athanasius - repeatedly bishop of Alexandria apparently he was a controversial figure even in his own lifetime and was deposed and reinstated as Bishop as other people pack away and bring out their Christmas decorations in the late fourth century and buried for safe keeping by Nag Hammadi. One of those texts was the Gospel of Thomas. This reads as a stripped down version of the Gospel of Mark. It has no stories, only sayings attributed to Jesus, most of which seem in comparison to the conventional Gospels very familiar. Some are not familiar but similar. A few are a little bit different. Not, I felt, different enough to sustain Pagels' argument, but then I am not a second or third century Bishop striving for order and to contain debate.
  
  Longer years ago I first read Eusebius and Henry Chadwick's
  The Early Church. Later Geza Vermes'
  The Changing Faces of Jesus. With each subsequent book I read on faith, on the early Church, I imagine that I am a little like an exploratory spacecraft sent into orbit around a planet to build up velocity so I can fling myself sling-shot style further out in search of understanding. In orbit one rotates round and round the same material, but sees it from a new angle with each approach.
  
  Slowly I learn the oddness of what had been taught to me in school as plain and uncontroversial.
• 
  Lee Harmon

  Pagels is a recognized scholar of religion, and the author of The Gnostic Gospels, among others. This book might be her best.
  
  Don't buy this expecting a dull, scholarly exposition on the Gospel of Thomas. It's hardly that. It's sort of an unobtrusive evangelism for unorthodox Christianity, a plea for the kind of "religious truth" that can never hide behind a stale set of doctrine.
  
  Pagels bares her soul in this book, and her passion for spirituality, religion and Christianity shines. The result is inspirational. This is the book that turned me on to Pagels' scholarship, and I've felt a distant kinship ever since. It's really less about the Gospel of Thomas and more about diversity and meaning within the early Christian movement. John's Gospel actually gets as much attention as the Gospel of Thomas. While John hints of gnostic influence, it also finds itself in direct opposition to Thomas on many topics, such as the divinity of Christ. Pagels embraces this diversity of ideas, and spends a great deal of time discussing how the canon of acceptable scripture grew.
  
  I love engaging, thought-provoking books, and Pagels never disappoints.
• 
  William2

  There is a lot here about Irenaeus, a major second-century figure in the establishment of the early Church and its gospels, which were later confirmed at the Council of Nicea (325). There is also very interesting material on Emperor Constantine. I had not known, for example, that his support of the early Church had so pervaded the everyday workings of his empire. In addition to sponsoring the Council of Nicea, Constantine ruled the empire from the perspective of a Christian, issuing numerous edicts favorable to the Church and Christians. Not long before that, of course, Romans were throwing Christians to the lions. The book is worthwhile reading. It's filled with interesting bits. But it's not a cohesive work. I found it lacking the overarching unity such as I found in
  The Gnostic Gospels and
  Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. It seems clear that the data before Dr. Pagels, who is really a wonderful writer, did not permit the sort of unity that I as a reader sought. So she can't really be blamed. Beyond Belief touches on a private tragedy in Dr. Pagels’s life. Though the book is religious scholarship, the inclusion of such a heartbreaking tale gave it a human dimension this reader warmed to. I felt the narrator to be someone I knew something about, and that made my progress through the text far more pleasurable than it would have been had she employed the usual scholarly anonymity.
• 
  Kathryn

  I used this for my MA thesis. It's very smoothly and interestingly written--engaging, really--and contains a great deal of interesting information on the foundations of Christianity and, especially, how early church leaders strove to overpower one another and promote their own view of Jesus. Focus on is the "lost" Gospel of Thomas, part of the Nag Hamadi library--theory is that church leaders who came to power tried to destroy evidence of this report of Jesus' teachings that centered more on Gnostic and mystic spirituality. (Warning: Naturally, this may be off-putting to those who prefer to focus on traditional perspectives of the Bible. However, those interested in exploring various aspects of spiritualty and perceptions of Jesus would probably find it interesting.)
• 
  Megan

  Elaine is wonderful and I began enjoying her work as a student. I think her book on the Gnostic Gospels in general is intelligent and accessible yet this particular work ( though I stand by my 5 star rating) is, at times, redundant. This is an endlessly fascinating subject for me and I trust Pagels knowledge base and motives. Good book.
• 
  Erik Graff

  During my studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York I became acquainted with Elaine Pagels, initially on a social level as one of my girlfriend's favorite teachers at Barnard College, then as my own teacher for a course entitled "Creation Myths in Genesis" at Union. I wasn't much interested in the course topic, but I was interested in working under the author of The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis, a book which had impressed me while working on my undergraduate thesis on the history of scholarly debate about the origins of "gnostic" movements. As it happened, she was considerate enough to allow me to supplement the course work with a review of all of the patristic testamony through the fourth century and an encyclopedic thesis covering this material entitled "On the Procession of the Heresiarchs of Gnosis." Since then I have endeavored to read all of her books as they became available.
  
  This particular title followed upon the deaths of her son, Mark (1987) and--unmentioned in it--husband, Heinz (1988). At the time I was acquainted with her and Heinz, neither seemed particularly religious, but as the text indicates, these losses caused her to reconsider her position. Such personal reflections introduce the text.
  
  Three main topics come up repeatedly in Beyond Belief. First, The Gospel of Thomas, a version of which was discovered in Egypt in 1945. A collection of the sayings of Jesus, some have attempted to relate it to the long hypothesized Q, or "source", behind the canonical gospel sayings. Pagels does not push this thesis. Instead, she takes this and, to a lesser extent, other extra-canonical gospels to represent the actual diversity of early Christian belief and practice, a diversity suppressed by the affiliation of one section of the movement with the Powers and Principalities of Rome. Second, she employs Irenaeus, and most particularly his Adversus Haeresis, as an early example (c. 180) of the repressive ideology which won out. Having studied him myself rather intensively, I would only fault her for failing to emphasize how personal much of his invective is and for failing to note the irony of some this supposedly orthodox Father of the Church's own beliefs, most particularly his claim that Jesus lived to a ripe old age. Third, she discusses the original imperially-sponsored Council of the Church (325)which capped the early stage of ideological repression. With this, and with some brief review of the Arian controversy associated with the Council and its consequences, her overview ends.
  
  Pagels' thesis that the early church was diverse and that the concretization of an orthodoxy under the Empire led to the suppression of many elements, particularly those maintaining a more democratic, or "low", Christology, is incontestable. She doesn't go far, however, in expositing what these other streams of thought actually maintained. Instead, she alludes, mostly by quotation, to some characteristic positions later rejected by the Church. The most important of these would seem to be, first, that what the Christ was we can be and, second, that there are many paths to such realization. In other words, what the official Church tried to stamp out was experientially-based religion--precisely, though not explicitly stated, what led her to reconsider her own beliefs.
  
  This book was written for the general public. No specialized knowledge is required, the documentation being confined to endnotes, beyond a general familiarity with the Christian tradition.
• 
  David Withun

  -
• 
  Mark

  The book compares the outlook of the apostle Thomas with the writings that became the book of John. His outlook is that God is within all of us and Jesus told us to find the way to heaven. Even that all people have the spirit of God within us and need to come to Gnosis ( a mutual knowing or understanding of one another with God) through meditation, introspection and study. My main complaint is that very little of the book actually discusses what Thomas' teachings are. Mostly, the book focuses on how his teachings were repressed in favor of John in the creating of the canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. First Pagels focuses on Irenaeus who pushes for a 'four-formed' canon in the 2nd century, then she focuses a large part of the book on Roman Emporer Constantinus' conversion and acceptance of Christianity, his patronage, and his organization of bishops to create the Nicene Crede, which is still the basis for ecclesiatical books included as orthodox Christian teachings and the basis for most subsequent versions of the bible. She makes MANY references to the books of Nag Hammadi, which were the basis for her book The Gnostic Gospels.
  
  I find her writing to be interesting, although with sheer amount of dates and names, it can be a bit dry. It is educational to read about how the teachings of Christ were captured and synthesized into what has become the Catholic Church. She follows many of the political and ideological controversies of the first few centuries after Christ's life.
• 
  David Elkin

  Pagels is a well know Gnostic writer and this book is one of her better ones. A nice study of a Gospel not found in the Bible
• 
  John Martindale

  This book hardly touches on the Gospel of Thomas. I read the Gospel of Thomas before coming to this book, and I was hoping for some scholarly reflections, but I got very little.
  
  She briefly comments on a handful of saying such as:
  Jesus said, "That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves. That which you do not have within you will kill you if you do not have it within you." It seems this is the passage that resonated most with Pagels, having rejected traditional Christianity, this passag is right up her ally.
  
  She points out the following passage as something Gnostics may have used to identify themselves.
  Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where did you come from?', say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?', say, 'We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.' If they ask you, 'What is the sign of your father in you?', say to them, '.
  Pagel's think maybe some of the Gospel of John was written in opposition to this.
  
  Pagel mentions nothing concerning the bizarreness found in Thomas like the following:
  Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life."
  Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."
  Not any mention of weirdness like: Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."
  
  But yeah, she presents the Gospel of Thomas evidence that there were these Christians who believed we could find the truth within ourselves, that everyone came from the light was was created in God's image and had access to the truth within themselves, if we only seek it. While the gospel of John on the other hand, mentions people are in darkness, and turn from the light, cannot find the truth and only Jesus reveals the truth to the elect. Pagels seems to be attempting to say there was a better form of Christianity that was destroyed by the dogmatic catholics, which is what most of the book is about. But eventually while writing about Irenaeus and his "Against Heresies", pointed out that Irenaeus was actually rather inclusive as he tried to define catholicity and outline spectrum of "orthodoxy", the reason he was so hateful towards the Gnostics, was their stuck up attitude, their walking around like they were the enlightened people, and dismissing and brushing off the enlightened who just couldn't get it, or couldn't the truth. But yeah, Pagel's seem to suggest Irenaeus depictions here was accurate, and this may be in part why he turned against them so strongly, throwing every vindictive and hateful epithet their direction. If this is the case, it seems to go against just how wonderful these gnostic Christians were. Looks like both ends of the power struggle had their share of nastiness.
• 
  Heather Shaw

  You don't have to agree with everything Elaine Pagels says to love her. This book combines scholarly research with a personal vulnerability that is very disarming, and I found myself engaged with the book on a personal level that I did not expect.
  
  That said, I was troubled by Pagels' tendency to equate mysticism and gnosticism, and I think this is problematic to her argument. I would loosely define mysticism as a belief in man's capacity to commune with God on a personal level, to recognize God within himself and to become one with God. Gnosticism is a very specific belief system that contains mystical elements, but which was declared heretical by Irenaeus in the second century.
  
  Pagels' argues that the Gospel of John was likely written to refute the so-called gnostic gospel of Thomas, and that Irenaeus championed the Gospel of John and the Nicene Creed (which draws freely from John's gospel) to establish the divinity of Christ as the central doctrine of Christianity, which in turn would rid the church of pesky gnostic sects. The New Testament canon, along with the Nicene Creed, effectively excluded all mysticism from the catholic (lowercase) church, while instituting a Catholic (uppercase) doctrine of atonement and original sin. Here's the rub: Pagels seems to equate the acceptance of Christ's divinity with a denial of mysticism. We are separated from God by original sin, therefore we cannot have access to God without a mediator (Christ).
  
  What bothers me is that Pagels creates this false dichotomy between orthodox doctrine and christian mysticism, without any mention of how these traditions intersect and complement each other within the orthodox faith. I am no scholar, nor am I well-educated on the finer points of Orthodox doctrine, but I do know that the Orthodox Church does not hold a doctrine of atonement or original sin (in the same sense as the Roman Catholic church), but does promote the concept of theosis, a mystical journey wherein man is ultimately joined to God, becoming divine by grace. Pagels oversimplifies her argument by excluding any mention of these points, which present a rather compelling gray area between the gnostic sects and modern Christianity (with it's focus on man's separation from God).
  
  I enjoyed reading the book, overall, but found myself more interested in what Pagels leaves out, and why...
  
  
• 
  Shawn

  Elaine Pagels writes with such honesty and intimacy that it’s almost as if she’s in the room talking to you as you read this. Elaine opens herself up to her reader so truthfully and honestly that it almost makes the reader want to reach over and hug her, to hold her close, and to whisper a quite “thank you” for what she’s accomplished in this book.
  
  Every Christian should read this, particularly those who have a tendency to worship their Bible. Christians should read this to better understand the precarious way in which the particular gospels of the New Testament were assembled; and to be reminded there were other gospels that were excluded. Preachers like to wave their Bibles about in passionate sermons, but few take the time to inform their parishioners of its actual origins.
  
  In Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels provides a very readable overview for the origins of New Testament scripture. However, I’m not really sure why Elaine chose to subtitle this “The Secret Gospel of Thomas”; because it’s really more about the endeavors of the church father Irenaeus to perpetuate his favored version of the gospel. A more suitable subtitle might have been “The Role of Irenaeus to Retard freethinking in Western Civilization.” Irenaeus (130-202) was a pupil of Polycarp (69-155), who was burned at the stake as a martyr and whose own mentor was the disciple John (6-100). Irenaeus declared that only the synoptic writings (Matthew, Mark & Luke) and that of John, constitute the proper gospels. This four-gospel canon has remained a basis of orthodox teaching ever since.
  
  Think for Oneself or Believe Blindly?
  
  By seeking to control and manipulate the beliefs of the church, Irenaeus is a precursor of what has clearly evolved into orthodox “indoctrination”, especially when we consider that term to mean “preprogrammed thinking”. Irenaeus believed that self-understanding and self-revelation should take a back seat to an established, common theology that every churchgoer should embrace. Irenaeus felt this was necessary to preserve a unified and undivided church. And, quite frankly, that’s exactly what the church has ever since been doing to its youth; sequestering them into Sunday School rooms and systematically indoctrinating them with the particular beliefs that Irenaeus and his cohorts consolidated centuries ago.
  
  In opposing the Gnostics, Irenaeus opposed the right of the human being to think for itself, which is the very essence of what it means to be “in the image of God”. For Irenaeus, consolidation of belief was more important than self-authentication. For Irenaeus, faith was the acceptance of established thinking, not faith borne from personal introspection. For Irenaeus, the establishment of a universal church was more important than the unquantifiable Word itself!
  
  In contrast, Jesus taught his disciples through their experiences together. Jesus did not indoctrinate his disciples. Indoctrination is the insertion of something artificial or foreign into the natural psyche, something that is imposed into minds. That’s not what Jesus did. Jesus allowed his disciples to grow and learn through their experiences and their relationships with him. Some of them even learned through the process of denying Him.
  
  The Intransigent Church
  
  By combatting the process of personal revelation, through censorship and denigration of self-thinkers, Irenaeus fermented the narrowminded and stiff-necked church that persists to this day. Irenaeus established the church that would go on to conduct inquisitions, murderous crusades, burn heretics, burn books, persecute Jews, sell indulgences, and deeply retard social progress. It is only through reform of these oppressive doctrines that the human race may start regaining the truer concepts of love and community that Christ actually preached.
  
  Most churchgoers are inclined to see the Bible as sacred writings handed down to us through the ages and they hold deep deference for it. However, most churchgoers do not know the history of how the Bible actually came to be and preachers generally don’t elaborate much on ancient church history in the pulpit. Much of the Bible is composed of the writings of Paul, who wrote at least twenty years after Jesus’ death and wasn’t one of the initial disciples. The life of Paul is instrumental in exemplifying that a relationship with Christ may occur after his death through personal experience and introspection. The earliest of the synoptic gospels was Mark, which was written about forty years after Jesus’ death. Luke’s account was written ten to twenty years after Mark’s.
  
  If Jesus had desired to leave dogma, theology and doctrines, He would have written them Himself. The only writing Jesus did was in the dirt, perhaps thereby symbolizing the inability of writing to adequately contain his ineffable message. What Jesus desired to give us was not writings, but rather a call to introspection, repentance and rebirth. Nevertheless, about a hundred years after the death of Jesus, Roman Christians started to consolidate certain beliefs against a freethinker known as Marcion, calling him a false teacher. Several hundred years after the death of Jesus, such dogma would be consolidated by the Roman emperor Constantine. Constantine’s efforts to create a generic Christianity further deterred the sort of spiritual freethinking exercised so openly by Jesus and considered of such value that martyrs would die before relinquishing it.
  
  The symbolical significance of martyrdom is preservation of the new spiritual person, at whatever cost. The very reason for the death and resurrection is to convey this message through time. In fact, one early church father, Justin Martyr (100-165), who wrote
  The First and Second Apologies referred to baptism itself as “illumination” and remarked that: “we baptize those who not only accept Jesus’ teaching but who undertake to be able to live accordingly”. This is the gaining of a self-understanding that changes the individual, not a pledging of allegiance to some written creed. The fact that the Catholic Church built itself upon the latter has resulted in much horror for the human race.
  
  Let the Light Not Be Extinguished By The Pagan Church
  
  In contrast to the modern church, the earliest Christians saw themselves not so much as “believers” but rather as people “seeking” for God. Jesus beckons us to “seek”, not believe blindly. Jesus speaks of “seeing”, as in becoming aware of the light within. Gnostic writings challenge one to find “the way”, to discover themselves as progeny of the light, and to understand Jesus through Jesus, as opposed to through preordained theology.
  
  One either discovers the Light within themselves as the same Light that emanates throughout the whole universe or one lives in darkness. This awareness of the Light shatters the way in which people typically identify themselves. An encounter with Jesus aids us in recognizing the truth about ourselves. How could the symbology of the story of Jesus healing the man born blind or raising the dead be made any clearer for us?
  
  Most Christians today do not understand the way in which the Romans hijacked the church and they choose to ignore the obvious paganism that has been incorporated into the church. It never ceases to amaze me how modern Christians can reconcile that the Romans inflicted such horrible massacres upon Christians in diabolical efforts to exterminate Christianity and then suddenly chose to embrace Christianity wholeheartedly.
  
  What the Roman’s actually did was choose to corrupt Christianity; because the murders and tortures they were inflicting upon Christians was not deterring Christianity. It seemed that for each martyr, countless other Christians appeared. The early church father Tertullian (155-240), remarked that: “the more we are mown down by you (the Romans), the more we multiply; the blood of Christians is seed.” Plan “B” for the Romans was to acquiesce to a blending of the Christian message into their paganism, to the extent necessary to retain religion as a means of sustaining power.
  
  Justin Martyr worried that the evolution of the Eucharist into a ritual for eating human flesh and drinking blood was in fact taken from ancient cult worship. In fact, from the 4th century onward, Christians came to celebrate the birthday of Jesus on December 25, the time of the winter solstice, which had been previously recognized as the birthday of the sun god Mithras. The sacrifices previously conducted within these pagan cults were eliminated in the recognition of Christ as the ultimate sacrifice of all time. The virgin birth became interpreted literally, instead of something that happens to anyone who is reborn spiritually, via impregnation with the Holy Spirit. Justin Martyr was beaten and beheaded. Mary was enshrined as Goddess. Esoteric incantations were developed. Human remains were stashed superstitiously beneath altars for magical power. Horrible visions of hell were elaborated to keep the masses in line. Even today, the Vatican museum remains filled with abundant pagan imagery and statuary.
  
  This process of hijacking Christianity required combatting and censoring those Christians who did not follow the Roman line. The orthodox succeeded in destroying many Gnostic texts but many were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, The First Apocalypse of James, The Acts of Peter and many others. Others were discovered in Egypt in 1896, as part of what is called the Berlin Codex, including the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, The Sophia of Jesus Christ and the Act of Peter. These Gnostic gospels teach that God’s light shines not only in Jesus but potentially in everyone, that one must actively “seek” to know God, and that Jesus represented God’s own light in human form. Some believe these writings represent a transition from a lower to a higher Christology.
  
  Enduring Through Mysticism
  
  The Gnostics believed that the kingdom of God is already here, as an immediate and continuing spiritual reality. They believed that the great transformation the orthodox expected at the end of time actually happens in the here-and-now. For them, it was a mistake to assume the kingdom of God to be an otherworldly place or a future event. The simple dictum was that: if you believe in the kingdom then live in it now, while the opportunity is afforded unto you.
  
  The attempts of Irenaeus and the Romans to squelch the Message has ultimately been unsuccessful, although it has often necessitated a cloaking with mysticism to avoid persecution from the church. In books like, The Kingdom of God is Within You, writers like Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) would urge Christians to give up coercion and violence in order to realize God’s kingdom in the here-and-now. In this book, Elaine suggests that the Gnostics interpreted the Kingdom of God in a way similar to Thomas Merton (1915-1968), who wrote
  The Seven Storey Mountain . In this autobiography, Merton gives an account of the process of seeking God through self-searching, and the sort of changes wrought upon the individual as a result, although Merton never altogether escaped the throes of Catholic superstitions and ritual.
  
  Like Merton, many mystics and deep theologians have had their “seeking” corralled by the preordained dictums of the Catholic Church, not the least of these was Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), whose beautiful writings first attracted me to the less orthodox and more mystical side of Christianity. Eckhart writes: “For the root of love is God and He is love. He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.” For such exclamations, Eckhart and many like him have been accused of heresy and tried as heretics. By exerting such strict impediments upon freethinking, the Catholic church has clearly been a retarding factor in the historical development of humanity.
  
  The beautiful words of St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), in her book
  The Interior Castle , is one of my favorites; and yet Teresa also met with determined opposition from the Spanish Inquisition. In The Interior Castle, Teresa provides very moving descriptions of the stages of spiritual development by comparing them to movements through successive rooms within a castle. As Teresa remarks, many find the earliest room of celebration for their salvation sufficient, never noticing the corner staircase that leads to even more intimate and profound relationships with God. It seems the intention of overbearing orthodox persons, like Irenaeus, is to destroy St. Teresa’s corner staircase, and keep all of the church body muddled below, within a single room of preprogramed ignorance.
  
  Remarkably, certain Gnostic sects have survived since ancient time in the form of people groups like
  The Druze or the Cathars, who have persisted despite horrible persecutions and massacres instituted by the Catholic Church. Many have studied the occurrence of Gnostic thinking in the work of Carl Jung (1875-1961), who’s work
  The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious is absolutely fascinating. In
  
  The Gnostic Jung ,Robert Segal has related much about Jungian Gnosticism. Many more novels and writers than we could ever mention here have been associated with Gnostic thinking, including several of the existentialist writers.
  
  REVIEW CONTINUED IN COMMENTS SECTION BELOW
• 
  Lisa Louie

  While I'm a little disappointed that Beyond Belief is not the book I was hoping it would be, the book's argument builds steadily to a satisfying plateau of understanding, namely that the social and political upheaval that dominated the first two centuries after Jesus' life and death motivated the likes of church father Irenaeus to unify the church under one set of beliefs and practice, and simultaneously to squelch the diversity of beliefs about God and Jesus that abounded in the early church.
  
  "How can we tell the truth apart from lies?" was the question that prompted Iranaeus, Alexander, and Athanasia to delineate the orthodox understanding of the Christian message and to codify it in the Nicene Creed and the New Testament canon. And from what Pagels argues, the question is still being debated today, especially in light of the ancient "Gnostic" and apocryphal texts found at Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi texts show modern scholars the diverse points of view that were present in early Christianity and that were excluded from orthodoxy and branded "heresy"; they suggest the historical reasons (e.g., persecution) that brought the orthodox position into being. Needless to say, this argument contradicts what I was taught in Bible college. Bible college professors taught us that God revealed the orthodox position to the church fathers and through the outcome of political squabbling, legitimated it as the truth. Rather than assuming that God's mind was already known when the orthodox position was formulated and the canonical texts selected to support that position, Pagels makes the convincing argument that the "truth" was arbitrated and brokered according to the political and survival interests of the church fathers, and that the re-emergence of the apocryphal books should provoke a deep reconsideration of what it means to be a Christian as well as a non-Christian.
  
  For me, Pagel's book gives me one more good reason to think I made the right move in leaving orthodox Christianity if only because I no longer have to constrain my spiritual imagination to the rigid boundaries of orthodox dogma.
  
  
  ***
  (Review I wrote while reading:)
  I had high hopes that Pagels' Beyond Belief would be a mixed genre one that combined spiritual memoir with New Testament and Nag Hammadi scholarship. I've read half of the book so far, and I've found that it is mostly a scholarly treatise whose contents I've already encountered elsewhere for the most part.
  
  Nonetheless, I enjoy being reminded that orthodox Christianity as it exists today was not the only way that Christianity was understood to the first Christians. While I'm hopeful that the Nag Hammadi texts might convince the orthodox to understand Christianity as an esoteric wisdom religion shaped specifically for Palestinian and Roman people 2,000 years ago rather than a set of truth statements that must be confessed, I'm not hopeful. The book is erudite in scope, but I don't think it would change an orthodox mind. So far, I think Pagels' Gnostic Gospels was a better read.
  
  
• 
  Andy Heckathorne

  My first Elaine Pagels book, but definitely not my last. I appreciated that Elaine leads off by giving the reader some insight into her own spiritual journey by sharing some painful experiences that give her a unique perspective as both historian and fellow human and precipitated her search for answers to life's biggest questions.
  
  Elaine does a wonderful job of communicating to a layman like myself. She gives an easy-to-follow overview of the early days of Christianity with its multitude of accounts of Jesus' life being written and the diversity of thought that existed since the beginning of this movement.
  
  I suspect that the subtitle of the book was added by the publisher for marketing purposes–"The Secret Gospel of Thomas"–and there is significant content on this topic–but the inclusion of this particular Gospel account serves a greater purpose in Elaine's book. By contrasting the Gospel of Thomas to our very familiar and beloved Book of John, we are able to better see "behind the curtain" into the diversity of thought in the early days of Christianity.
  
  Persecution and political pressure followed these early Christians, whose early factions were spread far and wide. As a result, early church visionaries identified the need to band together into one universal ("katholikos") church as a means of survival. As a result, the need to identify singular or unified thoughts and accounts of Jesus became necessary. This approach, of course, included the elimination of any viewpoints or accounts that didn't jive with "orthodoxy" (majority view) and were deemed "heretical" (minority view).
  
  This book is thought provoking and challenges assumptions I have made about Scripture. And for that I am thankful.
• 
  paper0r0ss0

  Quando furono trovati a Nag Hammadi, in Egitto, nel 1945, i manoscritti gnostici gettarono nuova e inaspettata luce sulle origini del cristianesimo. Erano scritti destinati all'oblio e hanno invece reso quanto mai chiaro come il percorso verso l'attuale vulgata cristiana sia stato travagliato, movimentato e.... casuale. Quello che conosciamo come Vangelo canonico e' solo il frutto di una lunga, appassionante e talvolta violenta controversia teologico-filosofica tra i padri della Chiesa dei primi tre secoli del primo millennio. Per lunghi tratti e' stata possibile una diversa religiosita', una diverso modo di pregare, una diversa concezione di Gesu' stesso. Il vangelo di Tommaso in particolare, ha conteso per anni la scena al celeberrimo vangelo di Giovanni che sarebbe risultato poi vincitore. Solo grazie allo strenuo impegno di figure come Ireneo e Atanasio, si giunse alla statualizzazione di Costantino e al concilio di Nicea. Da li' prese piede la prassi della gerarchia ecclesiastica di avversare ogni eterodossia, ogni ipotesi di ricerca personale della divinita'.
• 
  jcg

  I thought the book was going to be about the Gospel of Thomas, but it is really an overview of early Christianity tied in with Elaine Pagels personal search for something to make sense of the world.
  
  Written in plain language, it covers a lot of territory and shows how the beliefs of some groups were crowded out of orthodox Christianity. As always, the most ruthless win.
  
  The main investigation of the book is how to tell the difference between divinely inspired texts and those that are human imagination.
  
  She doesn't touch on the work of scholars who believe that the Gospel of John was originally written more sypathetically to the Gospel of Thomas, but that a later Redactor added the opening chapters and inserted additional material to change the perspective to refute Thomas.
• 
  Chip

  Yes, there is a discussion of the Gospel of Thomas; yes, there is a little about the author's struggle to find her own faith; there's even a compact overview of the first millenium of Christianity. What this book is concerned with mostly is the internecine war for dominance between the proponents of the Gospel of John and the proponents of every other Gospel. This book dissects and examines the history of that war and demonstrates how the results of this war shaped, and continues to shape, the Christian world today. The rest mentioned previously is the gilding on the frame; the meat of this book is the incisive examination of the winners (the Orthodoxy) and the losers (the Gnostics). Very well done and a compelling read.
• 
  David

  Read this one for my wee kirk Adult Ed class.
  
  It's world-class scholarship, to be sure, and starts strong. Pagels seems to be setting us up for a vibrant discourse between her groundbreaking study into the gnostic gospels and her personal journey of faith.
  
  The book wanders off, though, into an extended historical-critical deconstruction of John's gospel and the sausageworks of canon creation. The Gospel of Thomas and other gnostic gospels seem...strangely...less well observed and described. Few of the tools of criticism are applied to those texts, to the point that when they do surface, they feel peculiarly idealized. I mean, there be issues with 'em, ones that go beyond just gnostic writings being "the gospels *they* don't want you to read." But we don't really get that at all.
  
  Honestly, it felt at times like the book would be better named: "Beyond Belief: I Have Issues With Irenaeus."
  
  Still, some interesting stuff. A three point four.
• 
  Mark

  Beginning this as part of a new book club, yay! I've always gotten more from a book when I had to review it, and heard others' thoughts as well. This time's no exception.
  
  I began wondering whether the title is a double entendre, revealing a loss of faith, but no. Heart on sleeve, Dr. Pagels' tragedy prohibits any thought of joke or insincerity, though maybe desperate hope is on the menu. Further study of Pagels' work clears any doubt; she is an evangelical scholar and proponent of Gnosticism, the crunchy Naropa outreach of Christianity. Obviously well researched, this is a companion volume to the Gnostic Gospels, which reads like an Indiana Jones script with intrigue, shadowy forces, craven looters and museum professors showing unsuspected guile and muscle. The time when this all "hit" the western world was around 1960, doubtless creating an effervescent atmosphere in the religious history department of all the ivyed colleges where young future professors like Elaine were starting their spiritual careers off with a buried jar of heretical bible treasures. That no doubt made it exciting and she tells some stories, in online talks, about her ignited interest in cabinets full of alternate gospels. That they're sort of reserved for the confirmed inner circle of monks, not suitable for mention on Easter Sunday or indeed from the pulpit On Any Sunday. I imagine this made religion seem refreshlingly less dogmatic: these gospels directly contradict, with at least equal historical bona fides, the canon of today's religion, exposing it all as a business, tuning its product for mass appeal. It seems to me that seeing the hand of Man working behind the scenes to shape and spin the official public facing image of God erodes much of the credibility and magic from the whole enterprise. Like the President or Beyonce, the Talent is just the public facing image of the business, a spokesmodel. For me this is damning. Is it somehow reconcilable for Beyonce's inner circle? ...for Jesus's?
  
  In picking and choosing whole chapters to decide which best fit the mission and public image of the business, are not the Holy Catholic Church admitting, at least to themselves, that it is a franchise, perpetuating itself for the sake of the stakeowners? With these facts in sight, I don't understand how insiders can remain honestly devout.
  
  In summary, the discovery of the Gnostic gospels, while creating excitement and new scholarship contain a poison pill that suffuses a scent of capitalism and manipulation across the Bible, revealing it to be crafted, not divine. Is there any divinity left?
  
  Reading some of the work closely, I am struck that the form of the text is poetry. I don't mean that it rhymes, but that the word choice is indirect and metaphoric, even (seemingly) wrong and perhaps purposely so. Pagels uses a sharp analytical knife to show space between Thomas, Luke and John, arguing that Jesus was God descended to become man in one case, or maybe man elevated to God in the other or (by Thomas) that we are all God. The words don't seem that clear to me. They seem designed not to be clear. Also, I have some other references with which to compare, where grand, oblique writing makes word choices that leave meaning, _and proof_ as an exercise for the user, where the wrong word makes a mystery of intent, or leaves a frisson of intrique as to what the author may have meant.
  
  Is Thomas just confirming Judaism? ...the postulate that God is in you and Jesus just a teacher? I'm off to the internet to ask that quesiton now.
  
  Maybe much of this can be put down to the difficulty of translation and time. Numerous authors are rewriting from the original, changing language as they go, and making semantic choices along the way. One can say those were bad or slipped out of style somewhere, and that careful scholarshop can put them back in place: Pagels one time identifies Jesus as a rabbi, noting the author uses words that would have been associated with "teacher" in the time and culture of their writing. This example is common in erudite academic analysis of the bible. Knowing what a word meant can give a more exact, and credible (at least to me) alternate interpretation of the text today. (find and cite one?) but when elucidated, these examples do not usually add confidence but rather, erode it.
  
  In the very end of a talk she gave on this, Pagels said, "The creed creates an institution which claims to be the only way of salvation. ... There's good reason, maybe, why in the second century they battened down the hatches and created an institutional structure because these other visionary teachings and spiritual searches might not have created that (structure) but I just wonder, now, (that we are grown wise and can handle some controversy without losing faith?) whether you think they can add to our understanding, or whether ...they ought to be thrown out."
  
  Hofer's wonderful quote,
  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9183471, highlights that our stodgy religions were once argued over. Maybe the Nicene Creed and definition of the trinity was a moment of nailing things down, when our dogma coagulated from sap, leaving some things out.
  
  Another quote, apocryphal, is that the church is surely right because what survives must be so. This views religion as a Darwinian meme which, like much of evolution is hard to argue against. "What's most survivable survives," is a tightl little tautology that can maybe explain why anything IS. But my goodness, that doesn't mean it's right!
  
  A last note, the poem, _Thunder: Perfect Mind_ is a good thing to look at.
• 
  Eleanor

  This was interesting, though I was disappointed that it was not more about the Gospel of Thomas specifically, as the title indicated, but was more generally about the strife within the early Christian church/es as to which "version" should prevail.
• 
  Aria

  This is kind of all over the place, & not really much about Thomas. It also has no flow, which makes it a chore to read. I'm dnf'ing.
• 
  Jason

  First and foremost I think Elaine Pagels writes nicely. She gives her work a nice tone and it flows easily. This book itself seems to contrast an apparently ancient work, the Gospel of Thomas, to one of the main works in the Four Formed Gospel, John. The Gospel of Thomas was discovered with some other works hid away in a field in the town of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt. Apparently these works which oppose orthodox Christianity were hid there to preserve them from being destroyed. Pagels herself was apparently disillusioned with orthodox Christianity at an early age and asked herself 'how could people with different beliefs be condemned to hell?' Therefore, she has found great comfort in works like the Gospel of Thomas which seem to say the Truth of God can be found within as opposed to John which says Jesus is the way to the Truth etc. The Gospel of Thomas has a bit of similarity with Buddhist thought (especially Zen) which emphasizes looking to oneself for ultimate answers and also the idea that we only lose perfection through not realizing our Buddha natures. For these reasons this book is actually an interesting read but I can't give it a high rating because I find it fanciful to say the least. There is a reason John was included in the gospels of the new testament by the early Christians. I don't believe like Pagels does that John was written perhaps to refute the more heretic book of Thomas. Secondly, John seems to have much in common with the synoptic gospels even though Pagels proclaims it doesn't. If you do a thorough check of the information you will see for yourself. I simply cannot believe that for nearly two thousand years we've all been duped about how Christianity should have been. I have no doubts that Pagels has some merit of scholarship but I do not feel she's above and beyond the many scholars who have looked and written about this issue extensively. To put it simply: Pagels doesn't give any strong proof for us to accept the Gospel of Thomas and also other so-called secret works.
  
  Throughout the book Pagels gives us an account of a man named Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, and his struggle to suppress what he viewed as heretical works of the day being put forth.
  
  Later in this book Pagels goes on to give a minor historical account of the Nicene Creed. Of course, this was the time when the orthodox doctrines were agreed upon by most of the Christian leaders and would shape the universal Catholic church in the future. Perhaps distressingly to "true" Christians the concept or idea of the Trinity was solidified here. We are also told about a bishop who held a contrary view, (as did some other Christians at this time) Arius. However, ultimately the emperor Constantine who had been a Christian convert prevailed and we have what constitutes orthodoxy today. My point here being that Pagels did a good job of providing interesting reading. Her minor tracing of history keeps you interested enough to plow ahead. It's a shame the other parts of the book didn't have more support or weight to help make them more convincing. This is what ultimately causes this book to fall short.
  
• 
  John

  This was a real disappointment. Pagels made her name with her popular history of the so-called Gnostic Gospels -- early Christian texts that deemed heretical and excluded from the new Testament. That book has its issues, and I saw more clearly when I reread it recently, but provides a very useful introduction to the topic. I expected that a follow-up called Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas would be a deeper dive into one of the texts Pagels first explored in The Gnostic Gospels. Certainly I wasn't pulling that assumption out of thin air; not only is it implied in the title, the book was overtly marketed that way. But that's not the case.
  
  What we have here instead is a mishmosh, and while much of it is interesting the whole is nevertheless much less than the sum of its parts. Pagels begins on a highly personal note, discussing how a devastating personal tragedy, the terminal diagnosis of her son, led her back to church, but how she still questioned Christian dogma and was drawn to the seeking spirituality of the gnostics. Rather than staying with her own quest, however -- which could have been quite interesting and moving, in the manner of Barbara Ehrenreich's recent memoir or Annie Lamott's writing -- Pagels pivots to a history of the gnostics that is mostly a rehash of her earlier work, and does not really discuss the Gospel of Thomas in any real depth (indeed, I came away with the impression that she gave greater attention to the Secret Gospel of John, another gnostic text). She ends up in a very superficial discussion of Constantine, the Council of Nicaea, and the establishment of Christian orthodoxy, then brings it all home by going back to her personal experience but without any deep insights to offer. It's all quite frustrating.
  
  So what's good here? Two things in particular. First, the book contains an excellent discussion of the relationship between the canonical Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas. This focuses much, much more on John that Thomas, but that's not a complaint; Pagels explores the ways in which John may have been written as a direct refutation of Thomas, as well as the process and politics of getting John included in the New Testament, in spite of the fact that it is far more similar to the excluded gnostic texts than to the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Had that discussion been expanded to be the whole book, it would have been more satisfying that Beyond Belief. And second, an appendix includes the Gospel of Thomas itself, which is a fascinating, elusive, and occasionally flat-out bizarre read (Verse 36: "Jesus said, 'Do not worry, from morning to evening and from evening to morning, about what you are going to wear.'" Imagine a world religion built on that rock.) Unfortunately, the very strangeness of the actual text of Thomas only deepened the frustration that it wasn't the actual focus of this book that bears its name.
• 
  Librita

  ¡Magnífico libro! Para aquellas personas que quieran saber, a grosso modo, los inicios de un pequeño movimiento que inició hace más de 2,000 años, y que llegaría a cambiar la historia del mundo: El Cristianismo. Libro escrito de forma amena y sencilla, teniendo en cuenta que estudiar y comprender la Biblia es demasiado complejo independientemente de la Fé de quién la lee. Hay que destacar la manera respetuosa, y hasta cierto punto imparcial, en que la autora hace su esbozo. Sin apasionamientos fanáticos o ateos, simplemente contando lo que sus estudios en Historia de las Religiones le han llevado a leer y estudiar. Ampliamente recomendado para católicos, ortodoxos, ateos, gnósticos, etc, etc. Puedes amarlo odiarlo, pero el Cristianismo, y más específicamente la Religión Católica, marcó un antes y un después en la historia de la humanidad. Puedes creer o no creer, pero todo Occidente estuvo dominado, durante milenios, por las bases morales y filosóficas cristianas. Así que este es un libro de cabezera para los diletantes que quieren comprender un poco el pasado milenario de lo que habría de formar nuestra visión del mundo.
• 
  Don S

  My first exposure to Gnosticism, the recently discovered alternate biblical texts banished by the early church and labeled heresy. Very powerful stuff. Elaine Pagels is an expert in the field and while this book focuses on only a small portion of the texts, it raises important questions about the early church and our own understanding of modern day Christianity.
  The alternate texts resonated with me much more than conventional Christianity. Simply put, some early texts claim God is within all of us and we are able to reach him on our own vs currrent Christianity which requires Jesus as an intermediary. In fact Pagels explains how many, if not most, early Christians viewed Jesus as the messiah, but not God, just a man. Only the book of John proclaimed him God.
  I was aware that the early church stamped out these other beliefs but never thought about the reason, besides a pursuit of power. Pagels argues that it was instead done to ensure unity. Without strict adherance to one gospel Christianity would splinter into innumerable sects. The Protestant Reformation proved them right. A must read for anyone interested in religion or history.
• 
  Susan

  I read this book for our EfM book club. Many of the books chosen are theological and dry- not this one. Pagels has written a highly readable and extremely interesting exploration of texts of the Bible and the history of the early Christian Church. She discusses the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John, the former focusing on Jesus as a personal savior and the source of a light within each person while John focuses on the transcendent and triune Jesus. Pagels explores the differing approaches to interpreting Jesus and his life and teachings and discusses how the version of Christianity contained in the four gospels and then the Nicene Creed came to predominate. This is a very interesting read that will inspire me to read more in this topic or to return to Dermot Mcculloch’s magnum opus in the history of Christianity.