Quotes About Gnostic Gospels

I'm not a Coptologist. Coptic is one of those languages that I taught myself in my spare time over the years, mainly because I wanted to be able to read ancient Coptic translations of the New Testament and some of the Gnostic Gospels discovered in the twentieth century.

The Gnostic Gospels. Vintage: New York, 1989

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance, it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing.

What happened to the Divine Feminine? Why has She apparently disappeared from Judaism, Christianity and Islam? In the Gnostic Gospels, we learn that Mary Magdalene was probably the closest disciple of the Christos, the one whom the Master taught the most arcane esoteric wisdom. She was and is the representation of all wisdom. The male apostles of the Christos demonstrated both their jealousy and respect for the wisdom and position of Mary Magdalene.

In particular, the story Revelation tells is the same story that all four gospels tell, though the church, which has done its best to hush up this fact about the gospels, has not usually recognized the similarity. The four canonical gospels (unlike the so-called gnostic 'gospels'!) tell the story of how Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, conquered the power of evil through his death and became the lord of the world.

Ultimately, the so-called 'gnostic gospels' would be a denial of what Jesus and the church believed about God himself and what the canonical gospels are inviting the rest of the world, ourselves included, to believe about God. The canonical gospels are saying, in form and overall substance, that the word 'God' properly belongs to the creator God, the God of Israel, the God who has kept his promises to creation and to Israel and has done so in this way.

Some people, including some who wanted to think of themselves as followers of Jesus, took exactly that line. We can watch the process taking place in the so-called Gnostic gospels (books like the Gospel of Thomas).