Readings:
Is 35:4-7a
Ps 146:7, 8-9, 9-10
Jas 2:1-5
Mk 7:31-37
“How do you know the gnostic writings provide us with a less historically accurate depiction of Jesus than the Gospels?”
That question was put to me a few years ago after I had given a talk about The Da Vinci Code at a Catholic parish. The man who asked it was apparently upset I doubted Dan Brown’s claim that the so-called “Gnostic gospels” described a believable, human Jesus, while the four canonical Gospels had created a deity who had little or nothing to do with the real world.
My answer was simple: “I read them.”
No need to take my word for it when the evidence is readily found on the printed page. The Gnostic “gospels” aren’t gospels in the sense Christians use the word. They lack historical narrative, concrete details, historical figures, believable people, and details about social and religious life. The Jesus they describe has hardly any interest in the material realm. After all, the primary goal of Gnosticism, which came to maturation in the second century, was to escape the physical world. The Gnostic Jesus talked endlessly (and often nonsensically), but wouldn’t get his hands dirty.
Compare that with today’s Gospel reading, the story of Jesus healing the deaf mute, which is unique to the Gospel of Mark. It is a masterful and pithy account, filled with theological and spiritual riches. Jesus and the disciples were spending time in Gentile territory, circling north and then east before traveling south to the district of Decapolis, which is east of the Jordan River and south of the Sea of Galilee. During his previous visit to the region, Jesus had freed a man from demonic possession by sending the unclean spirits into a herd of swine (Mk. 5:1-20). Word of his return had apparently spread, and he was asked to heal a man who was both deaf and mute.
The primary source for Mark’s Gospel was Peter, and the detailed description of the healing indicates the head apostle was profoundly moved by what he witnessed. There are seven specific actions described by Jesus: he took the man away from the crowd, touched his finger to the man’s ears, spit, touched the man’s tongue, looked to heaven, groaned, and said, “Be opened!”
In many ancient cultures, saliva was believed to possess healing properties. What is perhaps more striking for the modern reader is the intimate physicality of the action, as when a mother uses her saliva to rub dirt from her child’s cheek. The healing was not the work of a dispassionate doctor, but of the Lover of Mankind, the healer of body and soul. The Son, in becoming man, did not reluctantly put on flesh and blood, but was truly Incarnate, embracing humanity fully, completely, wholly. “That power which may not be handled came down and clothed itself in members that may be touched,” wrote Ephrem the Syrian, the great fourth-century theologian, “that the desperate may draw near to him, that in touching his humanity they may discern his divinity.”
Whereas the Gnostic Christ fled the material realm and ultimately failed to meet man where he lives, the real Christ—the Creator of all things seen and unseen—entered into time and history, experiencing the heat, the hunger, the sorrow, the weariness, and the pain.
But this miracle, like all of Jesus’ healings, was about far more than relief from physical ailments and illness. It was a sign that the Kingdom was established, that streams of living water had been loosed in the desert, and that the poor were being offered the riches of faith and everlasting life. Jesus embraced all of humanity—Jew and Gentile, healthy and ill, hearing and deaf, speaking and mute—because each of us needs to be touched and transformed by his hands and his word.
So, one reason (out of many) the Gospels are far more believable than the Gnostic writings is they describe real people in the real world meeting a Man who really heals both body and soul.
(This “Opening the Word” column originally appeared in the September 6, 2009, issue of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
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Good article. The great victory of Catholic biblical modernism during and after Vatican II, was to convince many in the Church that we do not have the actual words and deeds of Jesus, that “it is not necessary to have a corpse to have a Bodily Resurrection,” Schillebeeckx, and what we have in the Gospels is the faith of the early Church. And of course, it is claimed, it is up to biblical scholars to determine what actually true and what is simply faith that can change, as can moral truths. It is not accidental that the embrace of sexual immorality is part and parcel of the modernist program for the Church. Modernism is simply the most recent form of Gnosticims.
There is a field called textual criticism that involves the study of manuscripts. It is my understanding that the Bible has a manuscript record that is as good as, if not better, than other manuscript records of antiquity.
Thank you, Mr. Olson, for a concise and valuable piece. In a culture which has various versions of Gnosticism, your article comes as a timely reminder of the truth that “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”.
Thank you for these beautiful and encouraging thoughts.
Elaine Pagels Religion Historian Princeton who reconverted to Christianity then an aficionado of Gnosticism commenting on the Gnostic gospel of Thomas in Beyond Belief describes Christ an enabler of the grandiose, who teaches Thomas that we become equal to Him, rather than our savior. There is a virtual inevitability when Christians subvert the Gospels to their liking, that they become messianic, the Messiah.
Apotheosis, the deification of self is a common trend in Gnostic thought. Fr Matthew Fox OP preached a New Age Cosmic Christ, present everywhere. New Age theology influenced by Rahner’s theology of self realization, is especially evident in persons realizing within the mind all the capabilities of God. Fox was censured 1989 by then CDF prefect Ratzinger and opposed by his confrere Aidan Nichols OP.
There is an apparent trend touching on this Gnostic phenomenon in the Synod on Synodality [SOS]. SOS, an apt acronym for a Synodal movement of private contact with the Holy Spirit who reveals new knowledge not necessarily identical to Apostolic revelation yet considered hermeneutically consistent. That of course is actually consistent with emphasis by Pope Francis of the problem, even sin of inflexible dogmatism or doctrinal legalism. Example, SOS Relator General Cdl Hollerich recently remarked that in Japan the people perceive an interchangeability between black and white, putatively an allusion to good and evil. The concept of interchangeability of essences is ancient, finding roots in Zoroaster later in China and Yin Yang. What we may elicit from these two trends is the intersection of two polluted rivers. Translation: moral contamination.
I always suspected that Dan Brown had never read the Gnostic Gospels and perhaps not the canonical ones, either.
Getting into the nitty-gritty of “interreligious” dialogue, we can remain aware that for Muslims the Bible is interpreted through the lens of the Qur’an. And this Muslim interpretation makes use of the Gnostic gospels…
Overall, the Muslim theory is that the four Gospels (and, other non-canonical writings) are all later corruptions of an earlier true Gospel of Jesus more akin to Islam. The Muslim scholar Abu Zahrah (1898-1974) of the Hanafi school of jurists (one of the four Islamic legal schools) speculated/rationalized that the elusive Source Q in biblical scholarship was possibly this earlier writing. He held that Source Q was deliberately destroyed by Christians because of a resemblance to the later Qur’an.
Likewise, Muslims also appeal to one or two of the non-canonical Gnostics gospels such as Barnabas, which (they hold) was “perhaps written by a Christian convert to Islam.” This question must be respected and addressed…if proselytizing is to be avoided in intercultural or interreligious dialogue (a dialogue possibly not to be rendered as “interfaith”), then what should still permitted as preliminary “education,” and how might this be be respectfully, matter-of-factly, and artfully achieved?
The underlying and symmetrical comparison is NOT between the two scriptures, but rather between the factual “Word made flesh” (John’s Gospel) versus the Islamic and scriptural “word made book” (the Islamic expression). This disconnect is more than just a textual difference between equivalent (!) kinds of “doctrines and dogmas.”
Let us always remember that the Holy Bible is truly the Word of God; God chose the prophets and prophetess and the apostles and filled them with the Holy Spirit of God and sent them out to preach His Word and to write them down so that future generations (us) would come to know The Way, The Truth, and The Life. Let us always remember this.
Amen
Sola Scriptura? St. Paul instructs us to “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15).
The Son of God is also the True Holy Word of God, as per the beginning of John’s Gospel. Please be careful not to try to limit God’s Word to what you think it should be. It was the Holy Spirit working within the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church that gave Christianity that Bible, and the New Testament Canon that even non-Catholic Christians believe is the saving Scriptures.
Mr Olsen, yes the historical provenance of Gnostic writings is minimal. But I must make a separate minor point. The evidence that the primary source for Mark was St Peter is also minimal. People are arguing about that in some university somewhere as you read this.
In some university, surely. But then there’s still this “minimal” evidence: The historian Eusebius quotes Papias, a disciple of John, as stating this in writing around the year 125:
“Mark, having been the interpreter of Peter, wrote accurately, though not in order, all that he remembered of the things said or done by the Lord. For he had neither heard the Lord nor been his follower, but afterward, as I said, he was the follower of Peter, who gave his instructions as circumstances demanded, but not as one giving an orderly account of the words of the Lord. So that Mark was not at fault in writing certain things as he remembered them. For he was concerned with only one thing, not to omit anything of the things he had heard, and not to record any untruth in regard to them.”
As not a biblical scholar, yours truly simply wonders whether the supposed and later anonymous author of Mark is still predominantly the original Mark, the companion of Peter? Just as it can be asked whether the undiscovered “Source Q,” supposedly behind the Gospels of Mark and then Matthew, both in Greek, is actually the first and lost Matthew in Aramaic?
Peter, you just demonstrated that there is too much debate about the source for Mark for any definite statement about its origin. That was my point. So thanks confirming that, even unintentionally.
Or, that there is too much debate about the debate. Checkmate.
Peter, Checkmate? Obviously you know as much about chess as about Biblical history.
The passage you cited is also cited in the Dr. Pitre outline of “The Origin of the Bible: Human Invention or Divine Intervention?” on page 7 along with other sources. On page 8 he says that there are multiple ancient manuscript sources for the New Testament. It is my understanding that only the text of the books of Bible are inerrant. Things like footnotes, etc. are not covered by inerrancy. Scholarship is the work of humans, only the Word of God is eternal. There is a Bible study on the Gospel of Mark by Augustine Institute presented by Dr. Tim Gray. It is part of the Lectio series. Dr. Gray says that Mark is the action Gospel, making frequent use of the action word immediately. It is available for sale and on the Formed website. Some parishes have subscriptions to the Formed website for parishioner access.
For those who are interested Dr. Brant Pitre has a presentation titled “The Origin of the Bible: Human Invention or Divine Intervention?” for sale at Catholic Productions. If you want to get a good summary of the presentation there is a free PDF outline available for download at the Catholic Productions website. Just go to the presentation on the website. Near the bottom of the web-page there is a tab titled Excerpt & Outline where you can download it. His outline says that the dating was within 20-50 years after the Crucifixion for the four Gospels. He said that there were many false and heretical writings in circulation. He places them from 2nd to the 6th centuries A.D. He also covers the so-called “Lost Gospels.”
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I have taken many Catholic Bible studies. One benefit is that the presenters can fill in the cultural context in which the books were written and make the connections between the Old and New Testaments. Too many modernist presentations tear the Bible raw and bleeding out of its cultural context.
A further comment on Olson’s theme Gnostic Christ fails true Christ heals in context of the trend toward apotheosis when we abandon Christ as revealed in Gospels and by the Apostles in their letters and oral tradition.
Gnosticism, the belief in superior knowledge that surpasses the traditional four Gospel accounts confirmed by the early Church through guidance of the Holy Spirit, and already evident in the very lives of saints of the new covenant community. Gnosticism which leads us from Christ to a Christ that is revealed in our native self. That is, as inherent to our nature. An idea articulated by Karl Rahner in which we find the capability of becoming God.
This inner self focus points us in two deadly directions, one in which we find self assurance and satisfaction in ourselves. Pride is the dynamic which unwittingly positions us in this Gnostic posture. The other is in the failure to find satisfaction in our pursuits, lack of recognition and affirmation from others leaving us the self evaluation of our emptiness, of nothing that possesses value, darkness and ugliness leading to despair and frequently suicide. Whereas the Christ centered person always has the very source of all beauty and goodness to turn to and to find within himself through love, and in a wonderfully intimate manner the Holy Eucharist.