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Gospels: Gnostic Gospels
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From the outset, the four Gospels, the sacred character of which was ... recognized very early, differed in several respects from the numerous uncanonical Gospels which circulated during the first centuries of the Church. First of all, they commended themselves by their tone of simplicity and truthfulness, which stood in striking contrast with the trivial, absurd, or manifestly legendary character of many of those uncanonical productions. In the next place, they had an earlier origin than most of their apocryphal rivals, and indeed many of the latter productions were directly based on the canonical Gospels. A third feature in favour of our canonical records of Christ's life was the purity of their teachings, dogmatic and moral, over against the Jewish, Gnostic, or other heretical views with which not a few of the apocryphal gospels were tainted, and on account of which these unsound writings found favour among heretical bodies and, on the contrary, discredit in the eyes of Catholics. Lastly, and more particularly, the canonical Gospels were regarded as of Apostolic authority, two of them being ascribed to the Apostles St. Matthew and St. John, respectively, and two to St. Mark and St. Luke, the respective companions of St. Peter and St. Paul. Many other gospels indeed claimed Apostolic authority, but to none of them was this claim universally allowed in the early Church.
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By this set of shared traits, very few of the other "gospels" even qualify as gospels. This is particularly true of the so-called "Gnostic Gospels" which comprise the only ancient sources Teabing bothers to cite in support of his conspiracy theory. In comparison to the canonical gospels, these gospels have a timeless, ahistorical, and almost disembodied character to them. Their Jesus has no racial identity, engages in no public debates, and indeed occupies no historical space at all. This Jesus not only did not die on a Roman cross and subsequently rise again, but could not have done so, since his very mission was to propound secretly to a small circle of disciples the unreality of what we take to be human life and death. Far from embracing a role in the Jewish story about God, creation, and Abraham and Sarah’s children, the gnostic Jesus purports to expose all these as illusions conjured by a creator-god—a god intent on keeping a select few from transcending the material world of variation and change, of sex and procreation.
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In 1945 an Egyptian peasant unearthed what proved to be the Gnostic Gospels, thirteen papyrus volumes that expounded a radically different view of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ from that of the New Testament. In this spellbinding book, renowned religious scholar Elaine Pagels elucidates the mysteries and meanings of these sacred texts both in the world of the first Christians and in the context of Christianity today.
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That is why and how the Gnostic gospels were created. The Gnostics fraudulently attached the names of famous Christians to their writings, such as the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Philip, the gospel of Mary, etc. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in northern Egypt in 1945 represented a major discovery of Gnostic gospels. These Gnostic gospels are often pointed to as supposed "lost books of the Bible."
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The special ... delves into the Gnostic Gospels, scrolls that tell alternative versions of early Christian beliefs. These scrolls, discovered just 50 years ago in Egypt, depict Mary Magdalene as one of the closest companions of Jesus and maybe even his most beloved disciple. Was she later the victim of a power struggle that pushed women into lesser roles in the Church?
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The Gospel of the Egyptians, while perhaps not as interesting as the texts mentioned earlier, is actually the work that most closely resembles the canonical gospels. This gospel is notable for its esoteric and mythological nature as it describes a Gnostic salvation history. A heavenly Seth, the son of Adamas, is portrayed as the father and savior of the human race, putting on the garment of Jesus for a time in order to effect the salvation of his children.
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Gnostic Gospels