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Time magazine's cover story (only available online to subscribers and AOL users) jumps onto the Gnostic bandwagon (not that this web site is immune) to explain why the dozens of alternative gospels, for centuries discarded, are suddenly all the rage.

Writer David Van Biema fairly balances neo-Gnostics' claims that early Christians snuffed out competing views while the orthodox maintain the alt. gospels simply faded into oblivion, as they should have. The current bandwagon, driven first by The Matrix trilogy, and more recently by the novel, The Da Vinci Code, is part of the overall challenge posed by mainline Christians to the orthodox faith. In the 1990s, Van Biema says, they challenged the "historical Jesus" and reduced the Gospels "down to the few verses that seemed factually plausible to them (yes to Jesus' healings, no to his Resurrection)." Then, they went searching for more scriptures.

Van Biema starts his article with a selection from the Gnostic Gospel of Peter in which Jesus is assisted in his resurrection by two men who descend from the sky. The cross follows the three men, "walking" on it's own out of the tomb. Then a voice from the sky asks, "Have you preached to those who are sleeping?" and the cross (not the men) answers yes.

But the interest in alt. versions of the good news is not because the new miracles are better than the old ones. "As Marcus Borg, author of The Heart of Christianity, bluntly puts it, 'There's a lot of interest in early Christian diversity because many people who have left the church—and some who are still in it—are looking for another way of being Christian.' "

Also, the new texts "feed America's ever sharpening appetite for mystical spirituality." Madonna and Britney Spears are promoting Jewish mysticism, so Christians need to counter. Or, as a Zen priest said, "Had I known the Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn't have had to become a Buddhist!"

The new interest has opened up discussions about early Christianity. The early Christians weren't so unified as many lay people thought. Van Biema writes, "The faith's historical silhouette was traditionally thought to resemble that of a hardwood tree: bushy with denominational profusion on top, but plumb line straight in its bottom half, theologically unified down through the hardy 'primitive church' and on, through apostolic roots, to Christ." Some of the newly discovered branches include: the Ebionites, who saw Jesus as the Messiah to the Jews only, the Marcionites, who dropped Jewish references in the new faith and added a god, and the Gnostics, who saw the world as a corpse that one could escape from with a special knowledge and the spark of divinity. In all the branches, Jesus is seen as having "transcendent" importance, writes Van Biema.

The Gospel of Thomas, like other Gnostic texts, according to Elaine Pagels, author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, "encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus, as to (try) to know God through one's own, divinely given capacity."

Many Christians say that what the neo-Gnostics discover in the alt. gospels is already in the original. Van Biema quotes Frederica Mathewes-Green who says such seekers are cherry pickers who take what they want from the new texts and leave the rest. In a Books & Culturearticle, she expands on that, saying what neo-Gnostics pick out of the texts is already a part of orthodox faith. "A look at the supposedly scandalous material comes up short. The most-cited Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas, mixes familiar sayings of Jesus with others of more mystical bent. These are sometimes cryptic but hardly outrageous. They're not far different from Christian poetry and mysticism through the ages. Where's the problem?" The problem with the Gnostics is not with the "cherries" neo-Gnostics pick, but with the ones they leave behind. The early church also left those behind.

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December (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47