The Gnostic gospels — why they were not included

In December 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a group of farmers digging for fertile soil at the foot of a cliff struck a sealed earthenware jar. Inside were thirteen leather-bound books — papyrus codices — containing more than fifty texts in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt.

Some of the pages were reportedly burned as kindling before anyone understood what they were. The rest passed through the Cairo antiquities market and eventually into the Coptic Museum. It took three decades for them to be fully published, and when they were, they changed popular conversations about early Christianity more than almost any discovery since.

Much of what is said about them is wrong. This article sets out what they are, when they come from, what they teach, and why the early church did not receive them. How the New Testament canon itself was formed is covered in The Bible canon — why these 66 books?; here the focus is on these texts themselves.

What was found, and what else we have

The Nag Hammadi library is not a single "Gnostic Bible". It is a collection: Gnostic treatises, revelation dialogues, prayers, a fragment of Plato's Republic in Coptic, and several works called gospels. The books were copied in the fourth century — scraps of dated letters used to stiffen the leather covers point to the middle of that century — and buried, probably before AD 400.

Who buried them is disputed. A Pachomian monastery stood nearby, and one theory holds that monks hid the books after Athanasius's Festal Letter of 367 told Egyptian churches to put away secret writings. That is possible, not proven. What the burial does show is that these were translations of older Greek works, copied by people who valued them in a region with no imperial police force looking for them.

Nag Hammadi was not the only find. The Berlin Codex, bought in Cairo in 1896, contains the Gospel of Mary. Greek fragments dug up from the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus between 1897 and 1904 were later recognised as parts of the Gospel of Thomas. And the Gospel of Judas surfaced in the 1970s in a separate Coptic book, Codex Tchacos, which spent years deteriorating in a bank safe in New York before it was conserved and published in 2006.

What the Gnostics believed

"Gnostic" comes from the Greek gnōsis, knowledge. Some scholars, notably Michael Williams and Karen King, have argued that the label is too loose to be useful, because the texts vary so much. That caution is fair: Sethian texts (such as Judas) and Valentinian texts (such as Philip) differ considerably. But there is a recognisable family resemblance, and the early church writers described it accurately.

• Two gods, in effect. Above everything is an unknowable, perfect Father. The world of matter was made by a lesser, ignorant or malicious being — the demiurge, often identified with the God of the Old Testament.
• A spark in a prison. Some human beings carry a fragment of the divine light, trapped in the body and in the material world.
• Salvation by knowledge. Christ comes not to die for sins but to awaken the spiritual few to who they really are, by imparting secret knowledge.
• No bodily resurrection. Since the body is the prison, the goal is escape from it, not its redemption. Many texts hold that Christ only seemed to suffer.

Put that beside the opening of Genesis — God made the world and called it "very good" (Genesis 1:31) — or beside John's "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14), and the distance is obvious. This is not a mystical flavour of the same faith. It is a reversal of its account of God, creation, sin and salvation.

The texts, one by one

The Gospel of Thomas

Thomas is a list of 114 sayings, introduced as "the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke". About half have parallels in Matthew, Mark and Luke; the rest are unfamiliar, some deliberately cryptic. There is no birth, no miracle story, no passion, no resurrection.

Its date is the one genuine scholarly debate in this field. A minority, associated with Helmut Koester, Stephen Patterson and the Jesus Seminar, argue that an early layer goes back to the first century and represents an independent sayings tradition. Most specialists date the book as we have it to the second century, for reasons that have strengthened over time: Thomas reproduces details that are distinctive to Matthew's and Luke's editing (Simon Gathercole's detailed case), shows possible links with Syriac Christianity of the later second century (Nicholas Perrin's case), and frames Jesus' teaching in terms of self-knowledge and return to the primordial light.

The fair summary: some sayings in Thomas may preserve early tradition independently of the Gospels, and scholars will keep arguing about which ones. The book itself is a second-century reinterpretation of Jesus.

The Gospel of Judas

In April 2006, National Geographic unveiled the Gospel of Judas with a documentary and a press conference. The headline was that Judas, far from being the betrayer, was the one disciple who understood Jesus and handed him over at his own request, so that Jesus could be freed from "the man that clothes" him.

The text is genuine and ancient — the copy dates to around the third or fourth century, and Irenaeus names a Gospel of Judas around AD 180. But within two years specialists had challenged the initial translation. April DeConick, a Gnosticism scholar at Rice University, argued in The Thirteenth Apostle (2007) that the team had softened or misread several key passages: a word that elsewhere means "demon" had been rendered "spirit", and a negative appears to have been overlooked in a passage about Judas ascending. Read again, Judas is the "thirteenth demon", tied to the ruler of this world, and his act serves the hostile powers. Many scholars now read the book as a Sethian satire on the mainstream church — its apostles, its sacrifice, its Eucharist — rather than a rehabilitation of anyone.

The episode is worth remembering as a pattern: a dramatic public claim, a slower scholarly correction, and a correction that rarely receives the same publicity.

The Gospel of Mary

The Gospel of Mary, probably second century, survives incomplete — more than half its pages are lost. In what remains, Mary Magdalene comforts the disciples after Jesus' departure and relates a private vision about the soul's ascent past hostile powers. Peter and Andrew object that Jesus would not have revealed such things to a woman; Levi defends her.

It is a genuinely interesting document for the debates of second-century Christians about authority and revelation. It is not a first-century record of Mary herself, and its teaching — the soul rising away from matter — is recognisably Gnostic.

The Gospel of Philip

The Gospel of Philip is a third-century Valentinian anthology of reflections on sacraments and mystical union. It is the source of the Da Vinci Code claim that Jesus kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth. Two things should be said. First, the manuscript has a hole at exactly that point: "mouth" is a modern guess to fill the gap. Second, in Valentinian imagery the kiss is a symbol of spiritual union and the passing on of grace; the text uses "companion" for Mary, and nothing in it reads naturally as a historical claim about marriage. It is two centuries removed from Jesus in any case.

Irenaeus: the church's answer, in public

Around AD 180, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon in Gaul — who had heard Polycarp, who had known the apostle John — wrote five books whose full title is Refutation and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So-Called. The phrase is from 1 Timothy 6:20. We usually call it Against Heresies.

Irenaeus did what a careful critic should. He summarised Gnostic systems in detail, often accurately enough that the Nag Hammadi texts have vindicated his descriptions. He named teachers and books. He then argued against them from the Scriptures and from the rule of faith — the summary of apostolic teaching confessed at baptism in churches from Gaul to Asia: one God, maker of heaven and earth; one Christ, who truly became flesh, suffered and rose; one Spirit.

His most famous argument concerns the Gospels themselves:

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are.— Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8

His supporting reasons (four winds, four zones of the world) strike modern readers as odd. The significant thing is the fact behind them: by AD 180, a bishop in Gaul could assume that four, and only four, Gospels were received by the churches. He was not proposing a list. He was describing one.

Why they were not received

The early church did not vote on these books. It recognised the books that had been read in worship from the beginning, and declined the rest. The criteria were rarely laid out in a single list, but they recur in every early discussion.

The last point matters more than is often noticed. Gnostic texts present themselves as secret: "secret sayings", private revelations, teaching for the few. The church's Gospels were public documents, read aloud to the whole congregation. A book that claims to be hidden knowledge cannot easily also claim to be what the churches had always read.

These texts are pseudepigrapha — works written under the name of a figure from the past. That was a recognised literary practice, and the early church knew to watch for it. Writing under Thomas's or Philip's name in AD 180 could not make a work apostolic.

Not suppressed by Constantine

The popular story runs: early Christianity was a free market of equally valid gospels until Constantine, in the 320s, imposed a canon and burned the rest. It fails on every point of chronology. Irenaeus was answering these texts around AD 180. The Muratorian Fragment, usually dated to around 170–200, lists most of the New Testament. Origen in the early third century already distinguishes the four Gospels from a Gospel according to Thomas and others. And the Nag Hammadi codices were copied after Constantine, in his empire, and survived.

Constantine's actual role in church history is discussed in the separate article on Constantine. Whatever else he did, he did not choose the Gospels.

Pagels and her critics

The most influential modern reading of these texts is Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Building on Walter Bauer's thesis (1934) that "heresy" was in many regions earlier than "orthodoxy", Pagels argued that early Christianity was diverse, that the Gnostic groups offered a more inward and less hierarchical faith, and that the winners — bishops with institutional interests — wrote the losers out of the story. Her work is serious scholarship, and some of her points are true: early Christianity was more diverse than older textbooks implied, and church politics did play a part in later controversies.

Critics have pressed several responses. Bauer's regional reconstructions have not held up well on the evidence, as Andreas Köstenberger and Michael Kruger argue in The Heresy of Orthodoxy. The texts that became the New Testament are demonstrably earlier than the Gnostic ones, so it is the Gnostic texts that are the later reinterpretation. The shape of what became orthodoxy — one God the creator, Christ crucified and raised bodily — is present in Paul's letters of the 50s (see the article on the earliest creeds). And diversity is not equality: the existence of rival claims does not make every claim equally connected to Jesus.

Larry Hurtado, a historian of early devotion to Jesus, put the point well in substance: the question is not whether there was variety, but which forms of devotion go back to the first circles of Jesus' followers. On that question the evidence points one way.

The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown's 2003 novel popularised a set of claims: that Constantine chose four Gospels out of eighty, that Jesus' divinity was decided by a vote at Nicaea, that the Gnostic gospels preserve the "human" Jesus married to Mary Magdalene. None has an ancient source. There is no list of eighty gospels. Jesus was worshipped as Lord within years of the crucifixion. And the Gnostic texts are, ironically, the least interested in Jesus' humanity of any early writings — their Christ is a revealer from above who often only appears to suffer.

The novel is fiction and says so on its cover. The trouble is the page at the front that tells readers its descriptions of documents are accurate.

Why this matters here

Gnosticism is not only an ancient curiosity. Its instincts recur wherever Christianity is told it has a hidden, higher level available only to the initiated: in esoteric orders such as the Rosicrucians, which have long had a following in parts of Nigeria and West Africa; in prosperity and "deeper life" teaching that promises secret keys to power; and in any spirituality that treats the body and the ordinary world as beneath God.

The apostolic answer is the same as Irenaeus's. There is one God, who made the world and called it good. There is one Lord, who became flesh, died in public and rose bodily. There is one faith, handed down openly, "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 1:3). It is not secret. It was preached in the marketplace, and anyone may test it.

"O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge" (1 Timothy 6:20).