The Secret Gospels of Thomas

[Dave Monroe]

Pagels, Elaine.  Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospels
   of Thomas.  New York: Random House, 2003.

Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s most important
writers and thinkers on religion and history, and
winner of the National Book Award for her
groundbreaking work The Gnostic Gospels, now reflects
on what matters most about spiritual and religious
exploration in the twenty-first century. This bold new
book explores how Christianity began by tracing its
earliest texts, including the secret Gospel of Thomas,
rediscovered in Egypt in 1945.

When her infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary
hypertension, Elaine Pagels’s spiritual and
intellectual quest took on a new urgency, leading her
to explore historical and archeological sources and to
investigate what Jesus and his teachings meant to his
followers before the invention of doctrine—and before
the invention of Christianity as we know it. 

The astonishing discovery of the Gospel of Thomas,
along with more than fifty other early Christian texts
unknown since antiquity, offers startling clues.
Pagels compares such sources as Thomas’s gospel (which
claims to give Jesus’ secret teaching, and finds its
closest affinities with kabbalah) with the canonic
texts to show how Christian leaders chose to include
some gospels and exclude others from the collection we
have come to know as the New Testament. To stabilize
the emerging Christian church in times of devastating
persecution, the church fathers constructed the canon,
creed, and hierarchy—and, in the process, suppressed
many of its spiritual resources. 

Drawing on new scholarship—her own, and that of an
international group of scholars—that has come to light
since the publication in 1979 of The Gnostic Gospels,
Pagels shows that what matters about Christianity
involves much more than any one set of beliefs.
Traditions embodied in Judaism and Christianity can
powerfully affect us in heart, mind, and spirit,
inspire visions of a new society based on practicing
justice and love, even heal and transform us.

Provocative, beautifully written, and moving, Beyond
Belief, the most personal of Pagels’s books to date,
shows how “the impulse to seek God overflows the
narrow banks of a single tradition.” Pagels writes,
“What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity
of our religious traditions—and the communities that
sustain them—is that they offer the testimony of
innumerable people to spiritual discovery, encouraging
us, in Jesus’ words, to ‘seek, and you shall find.’”

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?0375501568

http://www.semcoop.com/detail/0375501568

On "Fresh Air" on NPR today.  Noon here (Central) ...

http://freshair.npr.org/

Okay, a hunnert other messages here to read, so ...



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