Karen King is a professor at the Harvard Divinity School that specializes on the shards that remain of the documents concerning the time of the Gospels that are not considered part of the canonical literature, particularly the one called “The Gospel of Mary'' where Mary Magdalene is treated as a figure that led the Christian community even if that role is attributed to Peter as the one upon which the Church was set. Like Elaine Pagals, just one generation before her, King thinks that these gospels discovered in the last 150 years shows that the well known gospels suppressed the roles of women and perhaps led to a patriarchal sense of Christianity that has persisted ever since. Scholars investigating these non-canonical texts will reveal a very different history for Christianity than is the one with which people are familiar. One of those texts King investigates is a shard that refers to both “Jesus” and “wife”, which would suggest that Jesus rejected a wife or treated the Church as his wife or even had married her. That would be quite a finding.Ariel Sabar’s new book “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” tells the story of that discovery within the very rich context of contemporary Biblical scholarship and eventually unravels the fact that this text was a forgery, fooling even the most authoritative of scholars.
What was the point of the exercise? The object was to do nothing less than to refashion the entire history of Christianity to replace its male centered roots with its female centered roots, and doing so could be considered trivial or fundamental. It is trivial in that the basic insights of Christianity having to do with original sin, atonement, suffering, the historical fact that at one point in history, about two thousand years ago, God, which is eternal and omnipresent, is confined into a single person, actually took place, are far more weighty than whether men or women were important associates with that God-man, no more important than whether those people were tall or short or Jewish or gentile or lived in Jerusalem rather than, let us say, in pre-Columbian America, as the Mormons would have it. It was existential while the mixture of sexes was circumstantial and historically driven. On the other hand, reframing the story set up in the Gospels as female rather than male centered might be crucial if you think that a female perspective would be very different from the one to which we have become familiar. It isn’t just that women would be in the palace guard; they would also shape events and beliefs and tones so that, perhaps, Christians might be even more pacific or allow more mystical and magical elements in their religion, or sstick more closely to Palestine and so much more gradually expand rather than leapfrog, as the male disciples did, to large cities on the way to Rome, the seat of the Empire. Maybe Christians might cultivate family rather than the collective ministry of the disciples, a set of hearths rather than an organization out to promote its collective prospects. I don’t know what would have happened if women ran Christianity.
What I can say, however, is that these considerations do not seem to me to be central for the scholars who ponder whether thee papyri that are presented to them are authentic, or even whether the women historians of religion use the project of feminism any more than as a useful excuse for a framework or purpose so as if to appear as if to have a goal when it is the chase itself after research into ancient antiquities that is an end in itself. My suspicion is that these scholars care more about scholarship than they care about religion, however immersed they are immersed in religion. How to tell which is which or at least that the two coexist while not challenging one another? Think of the following analogy. A person is a marine biologist who spends a lot of time on the water and using snorkel gear to inspect sea creatures and then catches and dissects them and moves on to another place to do the same thing and write reports about the fish one finds and the significance of these for evolution or oncology or some other rlevant topic. That person may have a Ph. D. in marine biology as an excuse to provide the person with a legitimate occupation to go along with their calling, but he or she is motivated by fish and the outdoors rather than by scholarship, just as a literary critic may become a scholar of the work of Shakespeare or Walt Whitman when what the person really loves is to pursue the escapism that drove them as children to spend time with literature rather than with friends or the doldrums of ordinary life. So too with biblical scholars, however spectacularly learned they may be. They like the game afoot more than what it all means.
A suspicion that I am right is that there is not in the conversations recorded what it would mean in religious thought and feeling if some revolutionary discovery concerning the Gospels and the non-canonical Gospels had been discovered. People of religious views do indeed fill many a journal with the nuances of religion, how religion is to be taken, how these views have changed over the centuries and how each scholar of old has a distinct view of what it all means, but that is not the preoccupation of the historical scholars (with the very notable exception of Adolf Harnack, the late nineteenth century German scholar who dug deeply into unravelling ancient traditions of Christianity and also offered what it all added up to).
Here is a central question to ask. If Christianity were rethought as centered around Mary rather than Peter, and all the adumbrations that followed from that, how was a Christian to think about the validity of the central story itself, which claims that the Jesus story, however nuances might matter, was the real thing about the encounter between God and man, that Jesus was the resurrection and the life? It could not be possible that what had been the corpus of understanding that had stood coherent, such as it was, paradoxes aplenty, was just a fake that had been suppressed for political reasons. To the contrary, the fact that the corpus does not change for two thousand years is itself evidence of the fact of its truths, and certainly to its authority. That is why Harnack, to name one, saw the historic unfolding of dogma over the course of two thousand years, from Marcion through the Social Gospel in its own time, as inevitable, the way the what seem simple proclamations become elaborated through time inevitably to end up to what the initial primitive insights had become and would continue to unfold in the future, the essence of things elaborated in time because that is the only process whereby it can in that thee are no thunderclaps whereby there is sudden illumination except for those figures like Moses and Jesus and Paul which are allowed to experience that while the rest of us work through ideas as best they can to slowly distinguish, recategorize, reconceptualize and do all the other things that minds do when they try to dig deeply into concepts. To simply reinterpret the sacred history is to do something much more weighty than that. It is to replace a sacred history with another one, which is to deny or reject the prior history that has in fact been the central core of the religion. A religion is thereby debunked rather than merely reformed.
Roman Catholicism has created a number of hedges to protect the corpus and the experience of Christianity from wavering very far from the orthodoxy that it established, let us say, in the Council of Nicea in 453. It invoked reason and natural law to counteract the mystical and enthusiastic versions of Christianity that would arise in the millenium afterwards. Most of all, it supported orthodoxy and traditions as ends in themselves so that the authority of the Church rested on the idea of authority itself, every peasant and every lord beholden to their ecclesiastical betters so that the Church became for a while a kind of universal government that with notable exceptions such as the Albegensian Crusades, attempt to increase its society to be ever more humane, even if towards the end of that thousand years the Church had become avaricious and grandiose.
The Protestant Reformation was daring because it set aside that millennium of consistency, to turn topsy turvy the tables so that the Roman Catholic Church was the antichrist in the now sense of the unfolding of Christian history, rather than just an appeal against indulgences and Papal pomp, those dealt with through much more modest theological and world historical revolutions. The Protestant reformation was perhaps to do so because it tried to escape history, the facts of what had happened for a thousand years, the immensity of that disruption, by escaping beyond time into fundamental experiences and beliefs that are purported to be the essential experiences and practices of the early years of Christianity. Luther had proposed justification by faith as exposing the Christian to be directly connected to the personal experience of the intersection of the believer and Christ Himself. It isn’t so much that there was no intermediary whereby the Church connected the believer with Jesus; it was that such a relationship was not possible, a distraction from the inevitable and existential fact of the believer alone with God. Calvin accomplished the same spiritual trick by what we might regard as justification by election, a person adrift except for a decision on high of a person being saved or not, an even more appeal to authority than Catholics had envisioned. The Bible encloses itself also out of time by making it inerrant and so American Evangelicals of the present day take on all comers so as to maintain what they think of as the Biblical vision without allowing it to be purloined by liberalism or evolution even though Jesus seems much more charitable than contemporary believers and because evolution seems an issue that wouldn’t seem to bother people much in that God can do mysterious things and that whether the age of the earth is 6000 years or 6 billion ones is just a moment in the relation of Jesus to a person, the relationship between the two everlasting as well as essential. But theologians do nod their imaginations and so do not think as grandly as they might, but only whether insects had to be included in the Ark. They are wrapped up in the Bible rather than with religion, just as the biblical scholars are more engaged with scholarship than with religion.
The Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman in his proposes that what he called the proto- orthodoxy of Christianity that came to dominate Christianity and left us with the canonical New Testament was able to overcome the various other strands of early Christianity, such as the judaizers who wanted gentiles to accept Jewish traditions, becoming more like Jews, and so accepting circumcision, or the Gnostics, who believed that enlightenment rather than resurrection was the path whereby people escaped from the material world, because the proto-orthodox were more concerned with texts and communicated better with those in other congregations.
I suggest that there is a way for a non-scholar such as for myself or, for that matter, for any lay believer or non-believer, can assess the fidelity of the canonical New Testament to the beliefs and experiences of the original Jesus community without going to the authentication of texts that have been discovered in the past hundred and fifty years or to arrange the chronology whereby these texts are related to one another in precedence. The argument is that the canonical texts have a very high literary quality in that they are terse and fresh and of a high philosophical quality in that they explore the alpha and the omega of human existence, the frailties and evils of which people are prone so as to distinguish whether to forgive readily or not, and a vivid account of the communal life of Jesus’ time, what with weddings and sermons and journeys. Most importantly, Jesus himself is presented as a complicated very human person given to doubt and despair and also angry and demanding as well as compassionate, while also a supernal figure looking ahead to an end of days, whether metaphysical or political. He is always at that crux and that has marked the Christian experience ever since.
The non-canonical texts, for their part, are neither poetic nor sublime nor particularly wise, mostly out to make a rather parochial case about, for example, the condition of women, and are hardly terse or poetic. To put it otherwise, the editors of the New Testament, as were the editors of the Old Testament, had high degrees of taste and so included things of merit just because they were so well done, like “Revelations”, which is so contrary to the rationalistic bent of whatever else was included, while excluding others as not worthy of inclusion. Taste, after all, is an indication of the deepest content rather than just the frosting on the cake. That is what makes the New Testament abide, even if, in my view, the Christian civilization’s preoccupation with sin and suffering make it inferior a civilization to that of the Greek, Roman and Anglo-American civilizations, but at the least do justice to what Christianity feels and thinks rather than to a peripheral issue, such as gender, which is the topic of the moment.
The inferiority of style is apparent in the sayings of Jesus that are included in the Gospel of Thomas. That text includes remarks that are also said in the canonical Gospels. The image of the mustard seed, that grows and flowers into a great thing, is a telling and continuing image, while some of the other remarks in Thomas that are not included in the canonical Gospels seem lame or confused, as is the case with the saying “If those who lead you say to you ‘see the kingdom is in the sky’, then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea’. then the fish will precede you. Instead, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.” This is fake profundity worthy of Monty Python. Clearly, the sky or the sea are significant because of their enormity, their reference to powerful forces, rather than to birds or fishes, and so the point is tendentious, while the point that the kingdom is both internal and external is obvious in that what else could it be than both and the passage is unspecific while Jesus was concerned about personal evil and external good deeds. The Gospel of Thomas is therefore a kind of Rosetta Stone in that it compares the quality of texts rather than the same passages in different languages. A superior set of passages in Thomas are also those available in the canonical Gospels. Point made.
This inferiority, however, is not just a matter of style. The non-canonical texts are regarded as the Gnostic Gospels because they are infused with the gnostic doctrine that people are encrusted in their bodily and material mortality and can be liberated into knowledge and salvation through knowledge of the higher realm. Not so much about Jesus as a contemplation of what is eternal. But there is no lever as there is for Jesus to make the transition, knowledge a precious resource that will itself make the leap. That seems a weak tea on which to fuel salvation, and so something that was put aside by Christianity as an unsatisfactory vision of the nature of the universe. It should be said that the literary critic Harold Bloom thought that Gnosticism was a vivid and satisfying belief and experience, he himself considering himself a Gnostic and he also thought that Gnosticism was the distinctive viewpoint of American religion, containing movements as different as the Mormons and Southern Evangelicals.
Gnosticism’s outlier point of view, however, is confounded by the image and thoughts concerning the paradoxical Jesus, both human and divine, a moment in time and of all eternity, whose singularity is ever more circumscribed so that it is an event without parallel rather than a continual eruption of new saviors making their appearance, even if ritualized so that the Mass includes, every time, a magical moment when the wine and wafer are turned into the blood and flesh of Jesus. Ritualism replaces magic and Protestantism goes further in dispensing all magic in the name of a vision which fills a person with words that will illuminate and nourish the soul. It is hard to beat Christianity for its imagery and complexity of thought however foreign it is to my own secular understanding of how the universe works.