2-15-98 ELAINE PAGELS AND THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

They say that if you preach something long and loud enough, it will be accepted as truth. Likewise, if you keep silent about something long enough, it will be forgotten. This is the attitude of conservative Christians towards the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts. Ignore them long enough, and they may go away. This is particularly the case with the Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Mary Magdalene, and another called The Gospel of Truth, because these gospels present a very different message than the traditional four of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,, especially with regard to the meaning of the kingdom of heaven and how and where it is to be found.

One religious historian who will not let these newly discovered scriptures be ignored is Elaine Pagels. Her five books on this subject are articulate, open minded and yet non-compromising as regards the implications of these newly discovered scrolls and texts. In fact, her book entitled "The Gnostic Gospels" won the National Book Award.

Through Pagels' and others work, it is now apparent that religious politics played a significant role in determining which religious texts were deemed the official and authentic ones and that those gospels which were meant for more advanced spiritual seekers, such as the Gospel of Thomas, were later shunned by the more traditional religious communities. The message of Christ in the Gospel of Thomas is QUITE DIFFERENT in its emphasis than the traditional four gospels. and leads Pagels to conclude in her book, "The Origin of Satan", that this was possibly a secret gospel to help more advanced souls understand Christ's inner teaching.

Of course, if we accept the views of one of the early church fathers, Origen, all scripture has a threefold meaning: the obvious sense of a passage, its essential meaning and its spiritual meaning. Origen stated that any attempt to reduce the meaning of scripture to some literal interpretation was fruitless. Given these facts, why should it surprise us that scriptures themselves may also have been written with such a classification in mind?