What is Christianity, and what is
religion, I wondered, and why do so many of us still find it compelling,
whether or not we belong to a church, and despite difficulties we may have with
particular beliefs and practices? What is it about Christian tradition that we
love—and what is it that we cannot love?”
Elaine Pagels from Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
I love the work of Elaine Pagels. For my
money, she’s one of the best scholars of the Bible around today. She is a professor
of religion at Princeton University and one of the top authorities on the early
Christian church. The quote above is from her 2003 book Beyond Belief in which she explores the origins of our New
Testament canon. From her writings I gather that she can’t quite get herself to
sign on to traditional Trinitarian Christianity the way we confess it in the
historic creeds of the Church. She wants to know a lot more about how this
crazy business got started. She’s not going to jump on the bandwagon without
some more empirical data to back it all up.
Can you blame her? In a way, she’s a lot
like Thomas in our Gospel lesson for Easter 2 (John 20:19-31). There are just
some things which don’t make any sense, and we’re not convinced merely by the
personal experience of others. We want to know it for ourselves.
So here’s my shout-out to Dr. Pagels for
the research she’s done to help us learn more about our own faith. In Beyond Belief she makes an argument that
the Gospel of John may have been written in response to another popular work of
the period, the Gospel of Thomas. The latter work would be deemed heretical by
the Council of Nicaea (the folks who bought you the Nicaean Creed) in the
fourth century, and all copies of this text were to be burned by order of the
Holy Catholic Church. A copy of the Gospel of Thomas did survive, however, and
it’s been a great help to scholars like Dr. Pagels in understanding the early
church.
Early Christians who belonged to the “Thomas”
school might be identified as gnostics.
That is, they believed that their sect possessed secret knowledge passed on to
the disciples by Jesus himself which wasn’t known to the rest of the Christian world.
The “John” Christians held that belief in the divinity of Jesus was the only
knowledge anyone needed in order to be part of the Kingdom of God and inherit
eternal life.
The tension between the “Johns” and the “Thomases”
gets played out in John’s Gospel. John tends to make Thomas look like a
slightly dim bulb. Thomas appears pessimistic and fatalistic in chapter 11:16
when he’s certain a return to Judea will mean death to Jesus and the rest of
the disciples. He has no clue what Jesus means when he talks about his Father’s
house by saying, “You know the way to the place where I am going.” (14:1-6).
And, of course, there’s the story we always read on the Sunday after Easter
which forever brands poor Thomas with his nickname, “Doubting Thomas.”
Is John trying to “dis” his rival, Thomas,
or did Thomas really not believe in the resurrection? Or does it matter? Both
ideas could be correct. But, since the Council of Nicaea saw fit to give us
John’s Gospel as our authoritative source (Sorry, Thomas), I’ll just try to see
what message this narrative communicates to me. I’m guessing that John might be
saying, “You want to know what real life is? Just look to Jesus. You don’t need
that fancy esoteric stuff. Just look to Jesus.”
So Thomas wants to see Jesus. And what
does he want to see? The marks of the nails. The wounds. That’s what clinches
the deal for him.
I say all the time that my job as a
Christian is to see Christ in others and to be Christ for others. If I can’t
see him, I can’t be him. I can certainly look for Christ’s forgiveness, his
compassion, his healing spirit, his wise teaching, and his grateful faith. But
I also have to look for the nail holes.
In 2000 years our Church hasn’t come that
much closer to unity than in the days of John and Thomas. We still have different
worship styles and different emphases in our traditions. There are lots of
Christians whose dogma just sets my teeth on edge. In fact, I find that I
prefer the company of a pious Muslim to some evangelical American Christians.
When I feel like that, I have to realize that I am forgetting the point of John’s
story: the longing of Thomas to see Jesus, and to see his wounds.
There’s no rule stating that we have to
agree with everybody’s point of view. But I think we have to look for their
wounds. After all, Jesus came to share our suffering. The least we can do is frame
our relationships with others by looking for
their suffering. It doesn’t have to make us fall in line with their
thinking, but it will keep us from hating them.
May God bless you this week. Thanks again
for visiting my site.
PS-To
learn more about Dr. Pagels, you might want to check out this interview with
her from last December. Just click on Elaine.
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