Gnostic Gospels

The 4 Canonical Gospels in the Bible are completely entrenched in the 1st century Jewish time/place context...completely dripping with references to accurate locations, people, Roman officials, Jewish festivals of that day, geography, laws, customs, etc. The gnostic gospels are not only void of this historic verification, but they typically don't even have a narrative, they are mostly just a bunch of sayings, or proverbs. But more importantly, the Canonical Gospels are completely coherent with 1st century Jewish theology. The gnostics are of a completely different type of theology. Whereas the canonicals clearly match up as a continuation of an Old Testament belief system, the gnostics teach a completely different picture.

In other words even an atheist historian would reject the gnostics on historical and inconsistency grounds. And let's not forget, why are these 2nd century gnostic gospels trying to pass themselves off as being written by the prominent (and long dead) 1st century inner circle characters?? #1 They cut their own credibility throat by doing that, and #2 they indirectly confirm for us who the most important and accurate teachers of Christianity were...clearly if you are trying to LIE ABOUT being Mark, or Peter, or Thomas, etc, you are confirming that in the 2nd century everyone knew that these people were the true inner circle of Christianity. So by trying to undermine these authors they indirectly confirm their credibility.

Sif said:

Hello.

I am curious as to the reason/reasons that what re called the Gnostic Gospels were not included in the Bible. I understand some where not written until much later dates that then Four Gospels in the Bible. Beyond that what are some of the general reasons the Gnostic Gospels are rejected?

Please understand that I have not read the Gnostic Gospels and what little I have read about them comes from the internet (and we know how reliable the internet can be )

I am also willing to read any Christian scholarly articles on the subject you can post links to.

Thank you for your time.

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For the same reason that the histories of Josephus, the Socratic Dialogues, or the works of Tacitus were not included. That is, there was never a move to have them included, and they really have no business anywhere near the Biblical Canon.

Though I suppose it's worth getting a bit deeper into it.

Largely speaking what are termed the Gnostic gospels aren't gospels. The Greek word euaggelios, translated as "gospel", means "good report", "good news" or "good announcement"; in the context of the Roman empire the victories against Rome's enemies out on the frontier were "gospel", the good news of Caesar's power and kingdom extending further into the known world. This idea of gospel was used to describe what Jesus was saying and doing, namely Jesus was preaching the good news of God's kingdom, God's reign. The Christian Gospel is the annunciation and proclamation of God's reign manifest and made known through Jesus for the salvation and restoration of all creation. And so the message of Jesus is called the Gospel, and when Christians wrote that story of what God was doing in and through Jesus, that the Christ (Messiah) had come and inaugurated God's reign and rule in and for the world they called those written accounts gospels.

By way of contrast the various Gnostic gospels aren't gospels in this sense at all, they are primarily esoteric treatises and intentionally cryptic wisdom literature. There is sometimes a narrative structure, but the chief structure of the narrative is to have the figure of Jesus give lengthy exposition on esoteric, mystical, and generally highly cryptic ideas about the secret inner workings of the cosmos.

There was no single Gnostic group, what we call "Gnosticism" is an umbrella term for a highly diverse number of sects, different sects had different texts. The chief defining feature of Gnosticism is a belief that the ultimate spiritual goal is to attain knowledge (gnosis), specifically knowledge of a particular kind. Different Gnostic sects had varying and sometimes quite diverse cosmological accounts, but in general most Gnostics believed something like the following:

There is an Ultimate Spiritual Reality sometimes called the All, sometimes called the Monad. It is a purely spiritual reality beyond all comprehension. This Ultimate Spiritual Reality produced a succession of emanations known as aeons, spiritual sparks of the divine pleroma. One of these divine sparks, usually called Sophia or "Wisdom", itself produced an emanation, this emanation was so far removed from the Ultimate Spiritual Reality that it ignorantly thought it was the true god and the only god there was. Different Gnostic sects differ in what to call this ignorant subdivine thing, common names were Yaldabaoth and Saklas, the former generally believed to be a butchering of the name of the Jewish God YHVH and the latter means "fool".

This ignorant creature thinking it was the only god decides to create a world of matter, and thus becomes the Demiurge, the world-maker. In creating the physical, material world the Demiurge traps many of the aeons in prisons of matter and flesh, these became human beings. The Demiurge also emanated a race of subbeings known as the archons or "rulers", akin to angels in Judaism and orthodox Christianity. The archons served the Demiurge to rule the material world tyranically. Following this the Gnostic story usually then blends into the familiar Old Testament story, except that from the Gnostic perspective the Jewish God is an ignorant false god who has imprisoned the divine sparks into prison bodies of flesh.

Thus a liberator is required, a powerful aeon manifested itself in human form, again different Gnostic sects disagreed on this, some said that that Christ was merely a powerful divine apparition with no solid form at all, others that this christ aeon attached itself to the human Jesus taking over his body temporarily to serve its purposes. In either case "the savior" has no interest in healing the world since the world is intrinsically wrong and evil, but is interested in dispensing true knowledge to the special elect few who can comprehend its mysteries. In different Gnostic texts this is usually presented as Jesus choosing a special disciple, with the rest failing to get the mysteries and turning against Jesus' chosen pupil. In the Gospel of Judas it is Judas Iscariot, in the Gospel of Mary it is Mary Magdalene, in others it's Thomas, and so on. The point remains basically the same however:

The elect pupil represents the Gnostic who has been initiated into the sacred mysteries and secrets of his sect and thus is more powerful than the ignorant fools who don't have this knowledge, the mainstream Christians represented by the majority of Jesus' followers who do not understand or who reject Jesus' chosen pupil.

So Gnostic texts simply had no place for the mainstream Church, because those texts were highly exclusive to the sect or sects that used them and which weren't generally well known except by some church leaders who may or may not have ever actually seen the text for themselves but relied primarily on hear-say. The theological content was fundamentally at odds with the mainstream Christian Church which relied on the public testimony and tradition of the Apostles and the disciples and successors of the apostles--the succession of bishops who did not receive a secret knowledge, but had received the public confession and teaching of the Church going back to the beginning.

There was never any move to have these texts in a Bible; it's not like there were a bunch of books floating around and people just arbitrarily picked and chose some to be in something called a Bible. The Bible was a slowly evolving corpus of sacred scripture that relied on the general and broad consensus of the Church all over the Christian world and over time. From about as early as anyone is even talking about these sorts of things there was already a rather core New Testament, namely the four Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the Acts of the Apostles, disputed books (Antilegomena) was a very small category that includes the rest of what we call the New Testament today with a handful of other books that were considered Scripture by many in the ancient Church, such as the Epistle of Clement, the Epistle of Pseudo-Barnabas, and the Didache. No Gnostic text was ever part of the Antilegomena and thus was never under discussion for acceptance or rejection by anyone in antiquity as to what is and isn't canonical Scripture.

It's not that they were rejected, it's that they were never considered at all by anyone.

-CryptoLutheran

Sif said:

Hello.

I am curious as to the reason/reasons that what re called the Gnostic Gospels were not included in the Bible. I understand some where not written until much later dates that then Four Gospels in the Bible. Beyond that what are some of the general reasons the Gnostic Gospels are rejected?

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That a gospel was not believed to have been written by one of the apostles, or somebody associated with them, would by itself be enough to ensure that they were rejected.

I have read some of the gnostic gospels, and the Jesus to be found in them doesn't sound one little bit like a first century Galilean preacher.

Sif said:

lesliedellow, I do get the impression the Jesus presented in what are called the Gnostic Gospel is not the Jesus presented in the Four Biblical Gospels

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Here's a quote I just posted in another thread where part of the discussion concerned the Gnostic "gospel", the Gospel of Thomas. You are right, it doesn't sound a bit like the Jesus who speaks in the Bible or what He teaches there concerning salvation.

Yours and His,
David
p.s. - I see you are still fairly new here Sif, so let me just add, WELCOME TO CF ..

The so-called Gospel of Thomas is fascinating because it is entirely devoid of any narrative at all, but consists entirely of sayings without any context. Many of the sayings parallel sayings in the Synoptics, many times they look a little different, and in some cases such as the above quote there is no corresponding statement in the Synoptics.

The GoT is often regarded as a Gnostic gospel, though it is unique because there is little that is explicitly Gnostic, instead its Gnostic quality seems to largely be in that its presentation of Jesus is chiefly as a dispenser of esoteric wisdom.

-CryptoLutheran

Yep, nothing in GoT #114 that resembles Jesus' teaching or any other part of the Bible, especially concerning women. There are also a number of other verses that seem quite opposed to the what the Bible teaches, but there are still others that seem, as ViaCrucis just pointed out, quite similar to the Bible.

There isn't a single version of Gnosticism. The revision of the kjv was to secure a solid dialectic.

The Gnostic gospels were rejected primarily because they were too new to be considered authentic and their theology was only appreciated by a small minority of Christian groups at the time. And many of the Gnostic gospels at the time indeed contained very anti-Jewish theology and it is clear they did not represent the views of a first century Jew like Jesus.

The Gospel of Thomas is unique in that it possibly contains sayings that are as old as Mark or even older according to some scholars. It is not blatantly Gnostic and some say it should be consider a proto-Gnostic gospels as it does not teach docetism, a demiurge, archons, etc. It is literally just a collection of wise sayings like the Analects (which I own). This style along with some of its passages like the one referring to James the Just in saying 12, has some scholars point to the idea that is of first century origin. But it was ultimately rejected, because it did not contain the theology the proto-orthodox church had in mind and some of its sayings were too cryptic.

We must also remember that the Gospel of John was almost rejected for being Gnostic as well, but it contains a theology that could lend weight to the evolving doctrine of the Trinity.