About Those Nag Hammadi Scrolls...

The Nag Hammadi Scrolls - mostly comprised of 52 Gnostic treatises.

A common complaint of the higher religious academic community, including theology scholars at major universities - such as Oxford, Yale, Harvard and Loyola- is that their work -research is constantly being second-guessed and bad mouthed by know nothings ,......many of whom earned their "pastor" credentials at online schools, or worse - via mail order.

This is not surprising. We know that a lower echelon of "lower learning" exists which is vocal and also committed to its preconceived doctrines, such as biblical inerrancy (long since demonstrated by academics to be a fantasy). The largest proportion of this lower learning group is comprised of hardcore fundamentalists whose primary response to facts and actual detailed scholarship is to plug both ears, close their eyes and sing: "La, La, La...Jesus loves me yes he do, that I know as I sits in my pew"

One of the recent hobby horses of these knuckle draggers is to try to enlist the Nag Hammadi scrolls (discovered in the form of 13 leather-bound papyrus codices in a sealed jar, by local farmers near the Egyptian city of Nag Hammadi) to push their notion that the scrolls show an indisputable arc of history that gives full support to their crazy belief the Bible is "inerrant" and more over a record of history. Of course, this is total bollocks given that the preponderance of materials found are comprised of 52 mostly Gnostic tractates (treatises), believed to be a library hidden by monks from the monastery of St Pachomius when the possession of such banned writings, denounced as heresy (See below). Given that the fundies are all about attacking the Gnostics as some kind of demonic or "unbiblical" spinoff, it therefore makes no sense at all they'd invoke the Nag Hammadi to support their scriptures as "inerrant". Cognitive Dissonance, anyone? (Of course, one theory here may be that they are confusing the Qumran or Dead Sea scrolls with the Nag Hammadi scrolls- which were unearthed 25 years later!)

But let's get down to cases. In her masterful work, The Gnostic Gospels, scholar Elaine Pagels not only provides a detailed accounting of the discovery of all the assorted scrolls but also insight into each document. What is much more revealing is how the details of the Nag Hammadi materials were delayed, and she cites Prof. Hans Jonas who refers to them "beset from the beginning by a persistent curse of political roadblocks, litigations and...most of all,...scholarly jealousies". The latter isn't surprising given that the orthodox Christians of today would be as committed to sustaining their pet conceptions of scriptures as Irenaeus and his clique were 1800 years earlier.

For example, up until the discovery and publication- dissemination, it was widely accepted that the early Christians all: a) believed the same teachings (especially concerning Yeshua), b) all revered the authority of the apostles, and c) shared all their money and property and worshipped together. (Pagels, p. xxii)

The assorted, newly found documents, scrolls punctured this mythology and big time. If one admits that even some of the fifty two texts found genuinely represent early Christian teachings, one must also recognize - as Pagels has noted - that "early Christianity was far more diverse than anyone suspected before the Nag Hammadi discovery".

That such "heretical" documents as The Gospel of Philip and The Apocryphon of St. John were discovered among the Nag Hammadi scrolls is itself nothing short of amazing. In saying this, one must appreciate that by AD 200, the Christians had become fossilized into an orthodox hierarchy comprised of three tiers: bishops, priests and deacons, who took their charge to be the "guardians of the true faith". In this guise, they were also dedicated to expunging or wiping out what they believed to be the "untrue faith" or heresy. It is also not suprising that during their reign most of the pseudepigraphy and forgery of the gospels transpired - including excising text not deemed acceptable, or adding other text its place that passed muster. (A number of these example are mentioned in the Yale lecture on the Gospel of James, at the end of the previous blog)

One of the most intractable, hostile and belligerent Faith Protectors was Bishop Irenaeus, who insisted there "could only be one Church" and that outside that Church there "could be no salvation" (where have we heard this claptrap before?) Whoever remotely tried to challenged this entrenched authority was driven out of the respective communities and it would be unlikely any of their scripts or tracts would see the light of day. Not surprising then they would feel the need to conceal scrolls they felt might incriminate them, especially with Irenaeus on the rampage and looking for divergences anywhere he could find them.

Thus, the fact that a goodly number of controversial scrolls survived, including the above mentioned, as well as The Gospel of Thomas, The Letter of Peter to Philip, and the Gospel of Truth, is nothing short of ....well...."miraculous"! Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls, nearly all extant information of their existence arrived via the attacks of the orthodox upon them - in the same way today's evangelicals fancy themselves the voices and repositories of the 'one truth' and attack all other faiths or believers. To them, unless one accepts THEIR doctrine: that everyone believe on the Lord JC, they could as well be unbelievers, since they receive the same comeuppance ....damnation. This is also the penalty exacted by Irenaeus in his time, against the Essenes, Marcionites, Gnostics and others.

Pagels notes that Gnosticism was perhaps the most threatening of all the declared "heresies" and this wasn't surprising. Before the Nag Hammadi find, indeed, only a handful of Gnostic texts were in hand, and none before the 19th century. Why were the Gnostics so threatening to the Church Power structure?

One reason was their concept of sin. Pagels observes ('The Gnostic Gospels', Vintage-Random House, 1979), p. 124

"While Pauline Catholics taught a reality of 'sin' and that 'Jesus alone could deliver healing and forgiveness of sins' the Gnostics on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering. The gnostic movement shared in this certain affinities with contemporary methods of exploring the self through psychotherapeutic techniques."


And (p. 125):

"Whoever remains ignorant... cannot experience fulfilment. Gnostics said that such a person 'dwells in deficiency'. For deficiency consists of ignorance."

Perhaps the most daring, and threatening proposition of the Gnostics, was their belief in gnosis, or the 'de-localization' of Christhood. Why? Because if the ('Institutionalized') Church accepted this, they would have to surrender their coveted power wielded via intermediaries (priests, bishops, cardinals, etc.). Paul knew this full well, which is why he had to fight against the Gnostics' egalitarian Christhood with all his might.

Pagels also observes (ibid., p.134):

"Whoever achieves gnosis becomes no longer a Christian, but a Christ."

In effect, in the Gnostic teachings, anyone had the capacity to become 'a Christ'. Pauline Catholicism, meanwhile, held there could be only one, on which all others had to depend for 'salvation'.

Pagels goes on (ibid.):

"We can see, then, that such gnosticism was more than a protest movement against orthodox Christianity. Gnosticism also included a religious perspective that implicitly opposed the development of the kind of institution that became the early Catholic Church. Those who expected to 'become Christs' themselves were not likely to recognize the institutional structures of the church -its bishop, priests, creed, canon, or ritual - as bearing ultimate authority. "

And this, of course, is precisely why Bishop Irenaeus and his jackbooted cohort felt compelled to drive the Gnostics, as well as the Essenes (who promoted a mystical concept of Christ) into caves and obscurity - where their scrolls were finally uncovered nearly 1800 years by local farmers. If not for them (who unfortunately burned some of the pages), we'd not know anything positive of the Gnostics other than their predation by the Pauline orthodoxy and ...by the 4th century...the Roman Army under Constantine that helped them to ferret out the 'heretics".

Supporting biblical mythology? Small potatoes compared to the finds of the assorted scrolls above. And as I will show in a subsequent blog, the extent of forgeries and pseudonomous writings and erroroneous re-transcriptions of the orthodox gospels make them no more acceptable than the Nag Hammadi gospels (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Truth).

As scholar John Allegro has pointed out, this is one compelling reason why the translation of the scriptures offered by The Catholic Biblical Association of America accords full weight to ALL the scrolls, readings, and doesn't give short shrift to the Gnostic ones. This has provided a breath of fresh air in the field of biblical scholarship, though obviously the lowbrow fundies will never agree, as they are too wedded to their limited (flawed) KJV's which as Allegro notes, "is accorded a totally undeserved authority".