Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas

 

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels

You’ve heard the axiom “You can’t judge a book by its cover”.  This book is an example of “You can’t judge a book by its <I>title</I>”.  As enjoyable as this book was, I confess I’m quite confused as to why author Elaine Pagels chose this particular title.  When one picks up a book with a title such as this, they might expect that they would read about the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, which was recently discovered in clay jars in the caves at Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt in 1945.  They may even believe that this gospel is extensively examined, or at least perhaps quoted.  Nope.

In fact, the Gospel of Thomas seems rather a cornerstone to the main historical narrative that Dr. Pagels chooses to expound.  This book is rather a study of the early church, and how fractured and diverse these new Christians could be.  We mainly read about the brilliant early church father Irenaeus of Lyon, and his power struggles with other followers of Jesus as to how they felt Jesus and God should be revered and worshipped.  The Gospel of Thomas, with its gnostic tendencies, seemed a bit “far out” to Irenaeus, and he preferred that a work such as the Gospel of John should be the foundation of the faith.  In fact, we read an awful lot more about the Gospel of John in this book than we do the Gospel of Thomas.

Supposedly, the Gospel of Thomas contains (what was then considered) secret insights to the Kingdom of God, whereas the Gospel of John was a much more straightforward (but non synoptic) account of Jesus, his accounts, and his teachings.  So one wishes that Dr. Pagels had chosen a different title even though the subject matter is highly interesting and well discussed.  One of her assertions is that politics played a big role in the canonization of scripture as opposed to any of the writings being “divinely inspired” to be chosen.

She tends to drift an awful lot as well. Sometimes she strays a bit too much from her current topic of the particular chapter.  It’s a rather minor sin as she never bores her reader, but it still can leave one scratching their head.  Think about talking to a friend with the goal of telling them about a movie you just saw, and you accidentally drift in your narrative and wind up talking about restaurants. Yes, that happens a lot when people converse, but one would think a serious book might warrant a tad bit more care to stay on topic. The last chapter of the book (there are only five) “Constantine and the Catholic Church” doesn’t really even mention Constantine nor the Catholic Church until well over half the chapter has been complete. 

As long as the reader keeps note of this tendency of the author, the overall book is still quite resourceful and enjoyable. Early Christianity is a topic that doesn’t seem to get nearly enough attention concerning how prevalent the faith is.  Therefore, I look at any well written account of the first few centuries of Christianity as a welcome narrative.

The book is rather small and short, but it’s quite dense. I found that I couldn’t really read more than 20 pages or so in a single setting.  The prose isn’t difficult nor mundane, it’s just that there’s a lot of people and places that are talked about, and if one wants to truly savor the reading experience, one who doesn’t possess a lot of knowledge of the particular time in history should take their time.

I would recommend this book, but if you’re really wanting to read anything remotely connected to the Gospel of Thomas as opposed to the politics of early church history, I would strongly suggest you look elsewhere.