Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth---and How They Confirm the Gospel Accounts by Robert J. Hutchinson

Author:Robert J. Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2015-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS: A NEW AGE JESUS

The message of Jesus as portrayed in the canonical gospels has been proclaimed by the various Christian communities for more than two thousand years. For centuries, the message was proclaimed orally to illiterate peasants, depicted in passion plays, and portrayed in stained-glass windows. But we know from the letters of the apostle Paul that very quickly, within decades of Jesus’ crucifixion, different groups started seeking newer, more esoteric teachings of Jesus—teachings that would not be quite so demanding and that allowed them a little more freedom.

In Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, we learn that Paul’s message of the cross—which is Jesus’ message of self-sacrifice and mercy—was being “updated” by some early followers in Corinth so that, for example, some members of the community were visiting prostitutes (1 Cor. 6:16). There also are hints in Paul’s writings that some early Christian groups were dabbling in the theosophical speculations that would, a century or more later, characterize the religious sects known as Gnostic.

This trend continued for centuries. Some of the alternatives to the Jesus movement portrayed in the New Testament involved messianic Jewish groups such as the Ebionites and Nazarenes, who saw Jesus as the Jewish messiah but believed in maintaining scrupulous Torah observance. Other groups went in the opposite direction, toward a more Hellenized, even occult version of Christianity that involved various gods, “emanations” of God, and so on. Historians know about many of these Gnostic groups through the writings of the early church fathers, such as Irenaeus (ca. 130–202) and Origen (ca. 182–254). In most cases, however, the writings from these various alternative Christian sects were not preserved, either as a result of deliberate censorship by the “winning” group, orthodox Christians, or simply because the alternative sects died out and no one remained to preserve and pass down their writings. Thus, of the more than thirty alternative texts identified as “gospels” of Jesus Christ—such as the gospel of the Hebrews, the gospel of Cerinthus, the gospel of Judas, the gospel of Thomas, and so on—only four complete texts and seven fragments remain.15

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