Elaine Pagels - What do "secret gospels" suggest about Jesus and his teaching?

0:00 good afternoon one and all thank you so much for being here my name is Kyle queers I am the associate director of the Kaufman interfaith Institute here at Grand Valley State University on behalf of Kaufman and GVSU it's my pleasure to welcome you all to our annual academic consortium conference why religion featuring the esteemed scholar dr. Elaine Pagels here to introduce dr. Pagels is our very own visionary and namesake Sylvia Kaufmann West Michigan has a rich history of ink sorry about that with West Michigan has a rich history of engagement and interfaith dialogue largely because of the organizations and movements Sylvia has generated and led sylvia initiated the first community dialogue on interfaith issues through

0:45 the former West Shore Committee for Jewish Christian dialogue in 1989 since that time hundreds of premier scholars clergy citizens and students from various traditions have come together every year for either the triennial dialogue or the academic consortium conference in 2001 sylvia kaufman brought together a group called the west michigan academic consortium to in order to extend the work of the West Shore Committee and to lay foundations for what would become the Kaufman interfaith Institute the mission of these groups was simple provide programming that leads to greater interfaith understanding and mutual acceptance today the West Michigan academic consortium consists of eight colleges and universities from across

1:32 our region who with Sylvia's tireless dedication and leadership continue to advance that cause of appreciative knowledge and mutual respect across belief systems and cultures now for real would you join me in welcoming Sylvia Kaufmann to the stage [Applause] good afternoon so good to see all you people here on this beautiful West Michigan day we'd like to thank her in

2:19 Valley for hosting today's conference and it welcomed its new president president Filomeno Mantella who will be with us this evening thank you also to Brent Smith who's the academic consortium committee member representing Grand Valley and but currently on sabbatical I'd also like to recognize and applaud Junction's kenchi for his excellent leadership now in many accomplishment it's as director of the Coffman Institute he continues to expand the program's enormous Lee thank you also to our new the associate director Kyle coiours and the entire Coffman Institute team I don't think Jesse Bernal heads here

3:06 but he is very instrumental vice president of equity in inclusion as Kyle mentioned this is the 13th annual consortium conference and at this time I'd like to recognize the committee and ask them to please plant a standard so we can applaud you all together you all might not be here but let me mention you anyhow from Aquinas College Chad you know from Calvin Franz Bandera from Calvin Theological Seminary Cory Wilson from Cornerstone Martin Spence from Grand Valley Brent Smith represented by Diane now despite Sir from Hope Barry banther and recast Peter das from Tiger

3:54 bleeds the hopefully boom I'd also like to welcome and recognize worried Saban executive director the Society of fellows of the Aspen Institute where dr. Peggle serves as a member of the board and he is here and now it's my great honor and privilege to introduce a dear and greatly admired friend professor Elaine Pagels I refer you to the print program for a few of her many distinguished accomplishments in addition to being the Harrington spear pain professor of religion at

4:40 Princeton she is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship a National Book Award for her for religion and inspiration for the gnostic gospels and many more i met met Elaine and aspirin several years ago and have tried for years to encourage her to be the featured speaker at one of our conferences professor Pagels was a doctoral students and did study under the advice of this of crisp terse dental our dear friend a blessed memory who encouraged he also encouraged us to try to engage healing during the summer have got 2018 I was fortunate to be seated

5:28 next to her at an Aspen Institute dinner in fact she was seated between my late husband dick of blessed memories and me we competed to be able to talk to her dick about his doctoral dissertation which he was finalizing and me about speaking at one of our consortium conferences she was always supportive of our work but unable to accept a speaking invitation because of her crowded schedule at Princeton and extensive travel schedule so here we are anxiously waiting to hear dr. Pagels who were present what DS secret Gospels suggests about Jesus and his teachings

6:16 please join me in a warm West Michigan welcome here Elaine Pagels and thank you so much Elaine did not arrive till 1:30 a.m. last night or this morning and she didn't get to bed until 3:00 but she is here and we are so grateful thank you so much Sylvia it's such a joy to be here having heard so much about the miracles that Sylvia Coffman has wrought in this here and brought together so many meetings and

7:04 marvelous consortium of people with this interfaith community and I just want to say that for me I'm missing of course as many of us are the presence of dick Kauffman I had talked with him years before that about his dissertation and it was a it's a wonderful piece of work I'm so glad it will be published soon but we miss him terribly and I just felt that this is kind of a day in his honor as well so thank you I'm really happy to to be talking about that you asked me what what the secret Gospels I've been

7:50 studying for quite a while suggests about Jesus and his teaching and we're beginning to I mean these were discovered as many of you know in 1945 and they were found in Upper Egypt the story tells us that Muhammad Ali who was a local member of the village in nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt a small town was digging for fertilizer by that cliff that we saw and that he struck something underground and when he he dug he found a 6-foot jar and in the jar were 13

8:36 books like this about these are the books bound in tooled ghazal leather and each of the books had maybe five or six or ten different separate little books in them this was a six foot high jar and it's an astonishing find and we started working on it when I was in graduate school and now it's a few decades later we're beginning to understand better exactly Silvia how they deal with interfaith issues because I'm beginning to think that the Gospel of Thomas which is one of my favorite discoveries in this find may have a lot to do with Jewish mystical tradition that that is probably its source and the question is how would Jesus know it did he know it is this

9:24 something about Jesus or is it not and we don't have all the answers but we certainly have a lot of questions about so there are many texts found in this discovery the Gospel of Thomas the gospel of truth the gospel of Philip the gospel of of the Egyptians and so forth but the Gospel of Thomas was the most startling because it claims to be the sayings of Jesus and if you've read it I just gave you a little sort of ordered here of some of the secret Gospels this is a selection of sayings it's really more like seven pages if you write them all out and you have two here and half of the sayings are virtually identical to what you find in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke so Jesus says love your

10:12 brother as the apple of your eye Jesus says blessed are the poor Jesus says no prophet is welcome in his home country there's the parable of the sower and the parable of the mustard seed I didn't put those on the list but much that you know from the New Testament if you know those Gospels you'd find in the Gospel of Thomas but the other part of the Gospel of Thomas has sayings that we did that we never knew except some of them had been found one of this is a fragment found in a garbage dump in Egypt Egypt is one of the only places in the world that is so dry that papyrus doesn't rot and so in the garbage dump you can find

10:57 wills and deeds and and accounts and all kinds of stuff but one of the one of the things people found in in the 1890s this saying which says these are the secret words which Jesus the living one spoke and which his disciple Judas Thomas wrote down and he said whoever finds the meaning of these words will not die we didn't know what the rest of those words but when one of when John Doris a French scholar first went to Egypt to find out what was in these texts because they were astonished to find there were actually a text that claims to be the secret teaching of Jesus he read these lines as the opening

11:44 lines these are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Judas didymus Judas Thomas wrote down now if you know the Gospel of John you know that didymus Judas Thomas is mentioned there as one of the disciples so it's attributed to a disciple of Jesus but many people have thought these were heretical so I just wanted this is sort of silly but here's the New Testament here's the secret Gospels are they apples and oranges or rotten eggs that is sort of the way they've been treated ever since the second century when Irenaeus of Leon one of my favorite bishops from the second century says oh well the heretics say they have more Gospels than there really are but they

12:32 only have Gospels that are full of blasphemy and insanity an abyss of madness and blasphemy against Christ which I thought was kind of a priceless comment and I must say when my first book was published Raymond Brown who was of then a prominent New Testament scholar what that didn't know what the New York Times is that he was a soup listen priest dedicated to the preservation of Orthodoxy and religion basically gave it a nice review and said she's a pretty good scholar but she's been misled by Jason Epstein her editor I thought wow he don't even think I these are my own ideas but he says these Gospels were rubbish in the first century and they're still rubbish so we don't have to worry about them and our

13:17 dear friend Christo Stendhal said to me more recent you know Elaine we used to think these Gospels were just weird and we did because they didn't look like the ones in the New Testament entirely so the first stage of research when they were first discovered the Gospel of Thomas was published by arif Charles Parish and pahor lab even gilles quispel a french egyptian and dutch scholar they published the Gospel of Thomas and they said well what is this anyway this can't be one of the real Gospels which are written say between the period that maybe 40 years after the death of Jesus - 50 or 60 years with in the first century say well this must be maybe

14:04 twice as old twice as sort of if the Gospel of Mark was written in the year 70 let's just say a hundred and forty this is obviously late and derivative and that's what they wrote it's a much later gospel however when I was starting in graduate school helmut Kester was one of my professors and he was studying the sayings of Jesus and how they were first preserved orally and he began to say wait a minute some of these sayings look like very early versions of sayings that we find in Matthew and Luke maybe these are not the oldest I mean the most recent Gospels maybe this are the they go back

14:49 to the earliest list of sayings of Jesus maybe they were written he said as early as maybe 20 years after the death of Jesus which would make him the earliest source of the teaching of Jesus so we started thinking in a very different way and that was helmets hope to find sort of the real Jesus speaking in those in this particular gospel and that started a whole cottage industry of scholars looking for that I would say now we're in the third stage of research which is shared by people who have very different opinions one of them was Hans Martin Schenk ah at the University of Berlin an extraordinarily fine scholar

15:35 who basically said well some of these sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are very early versions of sayings of Jesus and some of them are later sayings and I think that's accurate some of them are early and some of them are later reflections on sayings of Jesus when people amplified them and interpreted them and you can see examples of this now for shankha that meant this is a very very exciting text for Simon gather coal at Cambridge University it means that their only derivative and they're late and worthless he's written about a thousand page book about it to demonstrate how inferior this text is and I disagree with him what do they

16:23 suggest about Jesus well we don't know you know we don't really it's hard to trace anything directly back to Jesus of Nazareth because many scholars as you know thinking he was probably not someone who could read and write although he would have likely memorized many passages from the Hebrew Bible as we can see in in the reports of his teaching but what they do suggest unequivocally is that Jesus didn't teach one way that that he taught publicly one way and he taught in parables that is what you find in the Gospel of Matthew Mark and Luke you find the public teaching of Jesus but that when he was

17:10 alone with his disciples he taught a different way and if that's true it would mean that he taught the way other first century Rama is taught or rabbis and pastors and many of you are teach that way today right there's one thing to a congregation and another to the people who are studying with you who are learning with you there's different ways of teaching and teaching in a public way and an esoteric way is is the case with most most kinds of spiritual teaching in fact every tradition I can think of say Judaism has an esoteric form in in

17:56 Kabbalah and an exoteric form in Islam you have you have Sufi teaching and you have public teaching you have mystical teaching and you have public sort of well what you'd call in Hebrew Holika right and and also in Buddhism you have esoteric Buddhism and public forms of Buddhism so this would be par for the course for for virtually every religious tradition that we know is it plausible did Jesus have a secret teaching Irenaeus who was intent on unifying Christians under the same set of beliefs and under the same sort of structure

18:44 basically said no there's no valid secret teaching he wrote five massive volumes he must have devoted about 40 years of his life to writing enormous volumes against those he called the heretics who claimed otherwise but as you likely know the earliest knew the earliest account we have of Jesus says that Jesus did this is days of our mesh professor of New Testament and Bible at Oxford University he's recently deceased an extraordinary scholar he wrote about Jesus as a rabbi but the Gospel of Mark as you know is the earliest gospel written maybe around 40 years after the

19:32 death of Jesus and it says this as you well know when Jesus was alone those people around him with the twelve asked him questions and he said to you has been given the secret that that word in Greek is the mystery mysterion to you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God but to those outside everything is in parables so they can listen but they're not gonna understand that's you know ministers like to say Jesus taught in parables to make things simple but mark says he taught in parables to make them oblique to make his teaching oblique because it says he spoke to them people outside only in parables but he

20:19 explained everything in private to his disciples but mark tells you almost nothing about what he said in private mark tells you everything about parables so what is the mystery or the secret of the kingdom of God well you know if you read the Gospel of Mark you know what it is it's it's the first announcement Jesus makes he says the kingdom of God is coming soon repent believe in the good news that's the word gospel of course believe in the gospel the good news is the kingdom of God is coming soon the end of time the day of judgment Luke will also suggest that the kingdom of God is is heaven in Luke 23 when Jesus is dying on the cross the other person dying next to him says remember

21:07 me when you come into your kingdom and he says you will be with me today in paradise and that suggests that the kingdom of God is is understood as heaven there are different interpretations in the New Testament Gospels about what the kingdom of God is there's a whole range of suggestions but there isn't a single single answer to that question it's a mystery and that's why Christians still debate it is that the church is that the presence of Christ among us is it what is it becoming eschaton well the Gospel of Thomas is meant to be the secret teaching and here Jesus according to the Gospel of Thomas says something different he says if those who lead you say to you

21:53 look the kingdom is in the sky then the birds will get there first and if you say say it's in the ocean then the fish will get there first that is he says look it's not a place it's not an event in time it's not a place in space it isn't that so what is it rather he says the kingdom of God is within you and outside of you when you come to know yourselves then you will come to know that you are children of God this is very much like what you see in Luke 17:21 asked when the kingdom of God was coming jesus said the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed

22:39 you won't say look it's here look it's there rather the kingdom of God is within you among you is another translation whom on whatever however you translate but it's it's the same saying apparently so how do you find the kingdom this teaching of the Gospel of Thomas I would suggest is not meant to replace the teaching and mark or the other New Testament Gospels it's meant to supplement them it's meant to be additional information think of how little we know about Jesus of Nazareth I mean the Gospel of Mark the earliest account is about 17 pages the Gospel of

23:26 John says if everything Jesus didn't said was written the world wouldn't contain all the books well probably an exaggeration but nevertheless John isn't saying there's a great deal we don't know there's a great deal we didn't write down and of course there must be for somebody this powerful and this influential in the world so the question then is how do you find the kingdom this this supplemental gospel says Matthew and Mark say wait um watch Matthew says watch be up be aware any time it could come any time I don't know when it's gonna come Jesus says but it's going to come soon only the father knows when right you have to look toward the end of

24:14 time to find out when is the kingdom gonna come at the end but the Gospel of Thomas says something different here Jesus says have you found the beginning that you look to the end blessed is the one who stands in the beginning this is saying 18 on your handout blessed is the one who came into being before he came into being what what do you mean came into being before he came into being what was there before we came into being what was there before there was a world well you know this author assumes that you know where to go to find out about the beginning right you go to Genesis so if

25:02 you want to go back to the beginning of time you go back to what talks about the watery Thabo who of the of the primordial the primordial seas that were then divided as the creation occurred before the world was created what was there well Genesis 1:3 says God said let there be light right and there was light but this light is not the light of the Sun or the moon or the stars as you know because according to the story they hadn't been created yet so the the light that came into being when God first spoke according to Genesis was

25:49 understood by rabbis to to mean there's this primordial energy this primordial divine energy and the only appropriate metaphor for the energy of God or the energy of the divine energy that created the world is light this this extraordinary immaterial material medium and actually in Greek when when people were reading the Hebrew Bible in Greek as many Jews were they would understand phos light phosphorescent write puns on the word human being foes anyway as though there's a human being what does that mean we're not sure but anyway there's energy in the beginning of time

26:36 and this is Blakes image of the primordial light when when there was light and in the Gospel of Thomas if you asked who is Jesus well you know mark says who do people say that I am well one of the prophets and Peter says you're the Messiah and that's clearly the right answer in the Gospel of Thomas there's a further development of that saying Jesus says compare me to someone tell me whom I am like Peter says you're like a righteous messenger and that I think is is a Greek term DKR Sangha loss for Messiah because Messiah would be a term

27:21 that people who didn't know Hebrew wouldn't understand so you'd say a righteous messenger right Messiah and Matthew says you're like a wise philosopher and the Gospel of Matthew pictures Jesus as a teacher philosopher would be the way Greeks would use the term they wouldn't say rabbi you know when you read the New Testament in Greek they speak of Jesus as rabbi which is translated teacher but but Thomas says master my mouth is not capable of saying what you are like and it says Jesus took him aside and said three things to him privately and they came back he came back to the others and they said what did he tell you and Thomas says if I said one of the

28:10 things he said to me you would you would take stones and throw them at me and the stones would burn you up well what would you could only be stoned for adultery or blasphemy so presumably this is a case of blasphemy by Orthodox standards later in the Gospel of Thomas the suggestion is made that what and many people think that what Jesus said is something like I am you you are say us or divine I I am divine you are divine we don't know but the Gospel of Thomas says who is Jesus he isn't just the Messiah

28:58 of Israel he's not that only but he is light just as the Gospel of John says what came into being with the law goes in the beginning of time was life and that was the light of the world Jesus speaks of himself as the light of the world in the Gospel of John and 77 in the Gospel of Thomas says Jesus says I am the light that is before all things that is a primordial light he speaks as a voice coming from that divine energy at the beginning of time I am all things all things come forth from me all things return to me split a piece of wood and I am there lift up a rock and you will

29:45 find me this is about divine energy that permeates the universe and and is the invisible reality of all materiality that's why it reminds me so much of what you find in Kabbalistic teaching a thousand years later more than a thousand thousand to fifteen hundred years later in Jewish writings coming out of the communities in Spain it speaks about the divine energy in the universe and so Genesis speaks of the light that comes forth and and and comes forth from God the energy from which all

30:31 things are created and then people would go on to the creation of the world and then the human being and of course in Genesis it says and then God created Adam humankind in His image what image you know you can't have an image of God in traditional Judaism but there is an image that was used and that's the image that Ezekiel uses when the prophet Ezekiel said that he saw he was from somehow allowed to see the do being on the throne well he didn't quite see the being he said he saw something like something like a human form

31:17 something like that but he doesn't he's not specific what he saw he said he saw jewels and he saw lightning and fire and hands and radiance and a crystal see what he saw was light he saw kaavo he saw the glory of God the radiance of God he saw God's shining and so so that's the only image that I know that the prophets use for for the Lord that he he he looks like light something like that that's that's of course a metaphor and Blake made it made a picture of it so they would say well when the Lord created Adam in His image what image

32:03 well there was the divine light this divine energy Adam was created with this divine energy within him so the divine energy that that Jesus manifests as well so this text goes on to say well how do you find the divine light well Thomas says just keep looking don't stop seeking until you find and when you find you'll be troubled and when you're troubled you'll be astonished and Thomas saying seventy this was what always as some of you know one of my favorite sayings if you bring forth what is

32:51 within you what you bring forth will save you if you do not bring forth what is within you what you do not bring forth will destroy you well I took that psychologically when I first read it and I think it works that's why I wrote the Gnostic Gospels because I was so excited about these texts and I wanted to share it and because they spoke in a very different way than anything I'd seen but I now think it's not just a psychological statement I think it's a theological statement saying if you look within yourself deeply enough what you will find if you really search is the

33:38 divine energy as the source of your being you'll find that light but it's it's not on the surface it's hidden so when the disciples in Thomas say to Jesus will show us where you are we have to be where you are we have to we have to be like you Jesus says no you don't we don't have you don't have to be where I am just look within yourself because within a person of light there's light and if it's illuminated it lights up the whole world and if it's not illuminated everything is dark so this is the idea

34:24 that every every person potentially could discover this divine light with a process of interior searching so the Gospel of Thomas is really about transforming one sense of identity I mean you know how we identify where do you come from what is your name what's her family where do you live the Gospel of Thomas suggests that that what you have to discover is that you know your name

35:10 isn't well whatever Elaine Pagels grew up in California none of that female and when the disciples say to Jesus when when will we see you when will we see who you are and Jesus says in 37 when you take off your clothes without shame and become like little children this is a saying as Jonathan Smith at the University of Chicago points out it's about baptism because in the early Christian church this is one of the oldest paintings in the catacombs of baptism people were baptized naked in the river and they would come out a different person right so saying 50 and

35:55 49 actually 49 50 in the Gospel of Thomas are the liturgy for a baptismal ritual so this is maybe a second kind of baptism Jesus says if they ask you where do you come from say we come from the light the place where the light came into being by itself at the beginning you know at the beginning of time and where the light established itself in the image the image of God where the light came into being in the very primordial beginning before there was a world right and it's not just I came

36:42 from it it's we came from that we all came from that because Jesus says you came from the kingdom you will find it again that is the kingdom becomes understood as an image of this place of light and then when they say well who are you what's your family say we are children of the light children of the living father and they say well how do you identify yourself you say movement and rest just like Genesis the Lord moves and rests in Genesis 1 so what this suggests is is that one to discover that in internal light that divine

37:27 source in which were created according to this teaching you have to divest yourself of of your ordinary sense of who you are that's why it's troublesome and it makes people anxious and scared because without our ordinary identity we feel rather lost but it's a different Under standing and then the Gospel of Thomas attributed to Thomas which you know in aramaic means twin the twin Tomas whose twin I mean John Doris thought did Jesus have a twin brother what's this about I don't think so a Thomas the twin his name in in is in

38:16 in in the New Testament in John's Gospel this Thomas didymus Judas Judas didymus Thomas or Thomas didymus Judas the the persons the disciples given name was Judas but they called him Thomas twin in Aramaic or didymus which is Greek for twin so it's Thomas between the twin now whose twin the Gospel of Thomas says when you come to know who you are on this spiritual level you'll know that you are the children of God the Gospel of John says Jesus comes from the kingdom when we come from the earth but this gospel says something a different it says no Jesus says you two you come

39:02 from there you come from the light and you go back to the light that's where we go that's where we came from and Thomas 1:08 Jesus says whoever drinks from my mouth that is accepts my teaching will become like me and I will become that person and the mysteries will be revealed to him so here I suggest that calling this the Gospel of Thomas the twin the twin suggests that you the one who hears or reads is to learn that that Jesus is your twin spiritually speaking and that

39:49 you are the twin because you come from the same place you belong to the same family you participate in the same life and so other sayings in the Gospel of Thomas talked about the divine image Thomas says most images are visible like you know the image of a table but the light within the images is hidden in the image of the father's light the image of the father is hidden by his light there are these riddling sayings translated from Greek into Coptic so it's hard to know quite how the original read but it's clear that this gospel is teaching it says you see you're you you look in a

40:35 mirror and you see your likeness and and you rejoice well some people rejoice and some don't but he says but when you when you see your images that came into being before you what you cannot see how much will you have to bear so then you if you look into that other spiritual mirror and you see that that your other that you see the reflection of the Divine image that's strange and powerful some people have asked about the last saying in have you noticed any of you this saying the last saying anyone anyone

41:23 this is what I was working on this when I was a student at Oxford and Harvard and I will take Mary says Jesus and make her by the way Peter says tell Mary to leave she's a woman and not worthy of life spiritual life and Jesus says I will take Mary and make her a male so that she may become a living spirit resembling you males for every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven and a lot of people say wait what's going on here that shows you how Michelle misogynist well it was a misogynist age and of course it's assumed by the by the writers and the culture that men are more important than

42:09 women but actually it's a saying about that is it Midrash again on Genesis 1:27 which says God created Adam human kind right Adam in his image in the image of God he created him a single being male and female he created them and just as we spoke Philo judea's reading in Greek and Rob by Samuel bar mock Nachman said well the original creation of the human was a spiritual being and it was a single being it was a it was a spiritual being not a physical one this is influenced by

42:55 Plato no doubt as much of the culture was but when humans came into the form that you and I are male and female they were no longer in the divine image they lost the divine image and that they had to recover it so the physical being divided into male and female is no longer understanding itself in the image and so there's a saying here on 61 I wonder where I have it here where the disciple Salome a this isn't the one who danced for Herod this is a disciple of Jesus solo me says to Jesus who are you

43:41 man that you came up on my couch and have eaten from my table it's rather sexually charged and Jesus according to this text repudiates that and says sort of don't call me man you woman it's not this kind of sexualized encounter he says I'm the one who comes from what is the same from what is not divided because whoever is from one will be filled with light but whoever is divided will be filled with darkness so he says don't don't say who are you men and I'm a woman and this sort of thing but rather I'm I'm I'm not

44:26 identifying with gender even though gender is the first way we identify a new human being right male or female that's the most basic form of the way we identify but that original being that spiritual human that the Gospel of Thomas articulates is is what exists before we are divided in the forms that we are and when Mary I'm sorry when Salome a realizes this we have to go back here sorry Thomas's Gospel says on the day that you were one you became two

45:11 I think that refers to this the first day of creation I'm sorry the sixth day of creation when God creates Adam he creates a single one and then he divides Adam into male and female Philo said yes the first Adam is the spiritual one and that he's divided Rob a Samuel bar Nachman said well the the the original Adam was androgynous had both genders or not or was not gendered it's only us who are gendered beings so so on that first day of creation there was one being divided into two and Thomas 22 says when you make the two one so the male is no

45:58 longer male and the female no longer female then you will enter the kingdom so there's something about reconciliation to being one and the same so I think that all of this is an interpretation of of who we might be on a spiritual level it's a different kind of teaching that speaks about the divine light so that's just a quick dash through the Gospel of Thomas and there's a lot more we could talk about but what interested me and I want to keep it short so we can have a conversation why is this gospel rejected why why did people think it was weird why did they insist it was heresy

46:46 well I suggest when we worked on it it was it was this that the New Testament Gospels all insist that Jesus is utterly unique this is the good news of Jesus the Messiah the son of God Matthew this is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David the son of Abraham and Luke goes on the same path John's Gospel more than the others basically says Jesus is God's only Son he is utterly unique he is not like you and me he is totally different he is wholly other he's a divine being and you and I are not he's essentially God manifest there's only one God and that there's

47:34 only one son of God and that's why one has to believe in that son Jesus and without him one is completely lost but what we find in the secret Gospels is not the basic elementary teaching you find in the Gospels of Matthew Mark and Luke but you find an esoteric teaching in addition which suggests suggests that there's this other dimension of the teaching of Jesus which doesn't speak about his uniqueness or his necessity for salvation in the same way it goes on to suggest that on another level we are to understand who we are and that we come from the same source from which he

48:21 came and when I say echoes of Jewish mystical teaching we were just talking about I was talking at Yeshiva University two professors of Bible does this sound like esoteric Jewish teaching could Jesus have known this kind of teaching there you find something I think you know I've been looking at Gershom Scholem again he spoke about this to some extent and many scholars have debated whether Jewish mystical teaching that comes out in Kabbalah actually extends back for thousands of years or hundreds of years before it's written down because there was a prohibition against writing much of this kind of teaching and I'm

49:08 wondering frankly if if we find Jewish mystical teaching written down only in sources that are called Christian heresy this is a current guess the Gospel of John has a basic message and you know what the message is you need to know who Jesus is that's the point who is Jesus and you need to believe in Jesus and Jesus is the only Son of God the Gospel of Thomas would amplify that teaching and say next what you need to know is who you are that's on a different level it's a kind of knowing it's not about

49:56 faith primarily it's about recognition so people who said will not enosis Gnosticism it's all about knowing things and secret passwords and you know and mystical drunk but gnosis comes from a Greek word well you know in Greek there are two words for knowledge there's there's a deign which comes from the word to see right so you see in the mind if we say as Plato says cat you see a cat in your mind and that's a kind of mental image that's intellectual knowledge is knowledge of mathematics

50:42 the knowledge of physics the knowledge of geology that's epistemic that's ideas that's consent but this kind of knowing if you know who you are it's not that it's the knowledge of the heart the word gnosis is the is the root of the word recognize and you see of course in French you get the same thing you get savoir and Cornette wa and spanish you get conocer and sub ere the difference between intellectual knowledge and personal knowledge in german is canon and vision so in greek this knowledge is

51:28 recognition do you know who you are do you know God and and the premise of this type of teaching is different from what we call orthodoxy because as I understand it and I'm ready to be corrected by people here orthodoxy as I understand it in Jewish teaching in Islam and Christianity teachers that God is holy other right than us we are creatures we are nothing like God we are holy other Martin Buber said using that term but esoteric teaching not only

52:14 Jewish but Muslim and Christian suggest that God and human nature are not are not dis continent discontinuous but rather there's a continuity between the two that created in the image we too are children of the Father intrinsically related to the divine so this isn't Orthodox but it is esoteric is it heretical that's the other question and here there are lots of different views but the Gospel of Thomas the message I think the basic one is that when you come to know who you are really on the

53:00 level of the heart you come to know God as the source of your being and the gospel of truth found with it says safe from the heart that you are the perfect day in you dwells the unfailing light now from an Orthodox point of view this is heresy no question right you're not supposed to compare yourself to Jesus much less the 4th century Jesus who becomes God incarnate or gone John's Gospel in John's Gospel Jesus says you are from below I am from above without you must believe in me or you will die in your sins this gospel doesn't necessarily contradict it but it claims to go further and say no there's also

53:49 besides the discontinuity and the the abrupt break between the divine and the human there's also a continuity that you can understand on a different level but it is esoteric and you're not supposed to write it down because if you do foolish people can get the idea that there are somehow God and make all kinds of stupid and and hyperbolic claims about themselves the Gospel of Philip says don't don't just seek to become a Christian but a Christos in the Gospel of Philip being anointed in Baptism as Jesus was anointed in Baptism or Jesus at baptism the Holy Spirit comes down says mark you could become rather more

54:39 like him and so that's that's the idea of becoming the twin now there are hints of this kind of teaching in the other New Testament Gospels Matthew says as Jesus say you you are the light of the world luke says don't look for the kingdom of God here the kingdom of God is within you so we have hints in other sources that Jesus said things like this but but they do primarily give the public teaching and when Constantine was trying to unify the Roman empires Christiane's he told the bishop says you know to create a creed and a cannon to say who's in and who's out he had an

55:25 enormous empire and there were all kinds of different Christian groups scattered from Spain to Africa to to what is now France and Britain and and and Iran and Germany of Christians all over the world different groups how do you how do you deal with an empire that big how do you do it one of the ways Constantine did it was to unify try to unify all of them saying I don't worship the Roman gods anymore I worship the one true God and I am his representative on earth and and Christ is his representative on earth and this single Church is his representative on earth and will say it's a universal Church so we want to

56:11 create a universal a unanimity of Christians his Ally Biff Bishop Athanasius will sometime ally and sometime enemy but that's how it worked then basically wrote in the fourth century there was still an open question of what are you going to put in the new what what what are you going to collect now that the emperor is a Christian that happened in about mmm 3:20 well he was he became a currently a Christian in 312 but about 320 225 he told Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea get me the scriptures okay get me copy of the scriptures and the question is well

56:58 what do you include we sort of know the Hebrew Bible or 22 books that pretty much agreed on and and Christians read a lot they read this one called Matthew they read John they read Luke a lot but which do you include there wasn't a single list until after the Year 400 because we have five different lists and and they have different things on them although there's a great deal of unanimity but Athanasius in Alexandria the head of the Catholic Church their Catholic means universal as you know said my list is this one and don't read those secret Gospels please

57:43 those will lead you astray the point of a Canon was not to say that everything else is garbage the point of a Canon was to say what should we read in church what's appropriate to read for everybody not for the few who might go to advanced level so what you read in church are the Gospels of the New Testament and these secret Gospels were actually being read out here in the desert by monks they were Coptic Christian monks they were they had translated these texts carefully into Coptic from the original Greek and he said get rid of those books and he wrote a letter said get rid of

58:30 those books just these books these ones I write down 27 of them that's it the rest they're not all bad but they'll lead you astray and that letter was written on the wall of the oldest monasteries in Egypt the monasteries established by Saint Pico meais and somebody disobeyed the archbishop and put these texts out of the library in a big jar and sealed it and hid it so that it would be found well it was found as you know in 1945 so Constantine's purpose as you know was to create these institutional structures Creed kin and clergy unify Christians all over the world establish a universal church this was his church the great Church of Holy

59:18 wisdoms Santa Sophia in Constantinople the city of Constantine he wanted a church without the Roman gods but a church with its an amazing Church and bishops he adopted the point of view of bishops who insisted that there's only one church we'll call it Universal and outside the Universal there is no salvation and the only Gospels that are admitted admissible in that church are the ones now in the New Testament with the public teaching of Jesus so any source claiming secret teaching or coming up with a new vision had to be discredited and so I'm just about ready to stop but I wanted to show

1:00:04 you a couple of other texts just a couple of other sources that are kind of interesting little hors d'oeuvres on that show you what the secret Gospels claim to offer then about the teaching of Jesus is it true I can't guarantee it I don't know but it's not it's not unlikely is that there's additional teaching for believers who keep on seeking Augustine later said his his his quest was faith seeking understanding can these Gospels be useful to us or not another one is the gospel of Mary Magdalene some of you have read this it was totally destroyed it's now only there are five fragmentary pages found

1:00:51 in Ethiopia was translated into many languages and the gospel of Mary Magdalene claims that Mary had a vision and was a primary disciple as many of you know the story Peter ridiculed her and said wait we're not gonna listen to a woman and she says Peter you know do you think I just made this up in my heart you think I'm lying about the Lord and Peter obviously does and but at the end of the gospel of Mary she is vindicated as a fellow disciple and apostle and they all go out to preach I mean it's no wonder the gospel was destroyed a long time ago the secret revelation of John opens as the disciple

1:01:38 john greaves after the death of jesus he goes out into the desert somebody says you know you've been deceived by that Nazarene he was a fraud he was a fake you're just totally wrong you're on the wrong track and he goes out and weeps for Jesus and then he said suddenly I saw this brilliant light and I heard a voice and it said John John why do you weep I am the one who is with you always I am the father I am the mother and I am the son and when I read this I thought well would you expect to find with the father and the son I the mother right but if you read were reading in Hebrew

1:02:23 and the word for spirit was feminine if it was Rua you might hear it his mother if you're reading in Greek talks no ma it's it's neuter if you're reading in Latin its neuter or masculine so you don't get that image but in the earliest movement there was this this sense that there were manifest manifestations of the divine some of them in feminine form as well another text that I actually like is the revelation of the Austrian I was just mention it for a minute just the opening it's about a young man he's clearly Jewish and he says he goes out in the desert he couldn't get answers to

1:03:08 all the questions he was asking he he just could not understand his life and he was deeply troubled and he went out into the desert to kill himself and when he did he said suddenly had the sense of this divine presence coming toward him like a light irradiance and he heard a voice saying sauce Triano's have you gone mad and then he says he was taken up into this light and he went through some experiences that he couldn't later articulate but he said then I came to understand that the light in me was greater than the darkness I love that and so he then goes out to preach so

1:03:55 that's another text with the idea of finding this light one finally the poem called thunder perfect mind or complete mind this is a voice a divine voice who comes forth from the power the first and the last they honored and scored the horror and the Holy One speaking in a divine voice like Rewa spirit or hawk my divine wisdom this voice says I'm in the palaces I am in the garbage dumps I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband there's all kinds of strange paradoxes the mother of my father is probably speaking about the

1:04:43 Holy Spirit who is the mother of Adam but but the Holy but the Spirit is also Eve who is the sister of Adam born on the same day so to speak this this remarkable ancient poem is probably Egyptian it could be in the form of a poem of Isis the goddess Isis but it speaks of a divine power that is shunned saying I am great in Egypt my image is great in Egypt the image of Isis the image of the Divine Being and feminine form as well as masculine but I have no image among the Jews in Jewish tradition there is no such image but it strikes me

1:05:29 that interesting that many women artists Toni Morrison created songs out of thunder they were beautiful songs and I said where did you get that she she had them played at Princeton she was on our faculty then said oh well you know it's thunder i I just changed a few words and she has a book in in our library privately published with illustrations by the artist Carol Walker of her poems about thunder also Leslie Marmon Silko Native American writer wrote about thunder as the treasure of her people treasure that was considered trash by Western culture Julie - did a poem I'm sorry a film

1:06:16 called daughters of the dust which uses the poem women artists have like this now this aren't the text Gnostic this is what Aaron EO says heretics throw together all kinds of human emotions and intentions attributing to God whatever they are experiencing themselves well yes they do this comes out of imagination and so some people may say it's it's not worth worthwhile spiritually but where do these sources come from anyway I think with that we'll just stop for now and just open it up [Applause]

1:07:07 thank you so much so much dr. Pagels uh we have a few minutes for some questions I just want to comment fifty years ago when I spent a couple of years at the Divinity School at University of Chicago I had professors who I took notes and filled up my notebook and I had other professors who made me think and you did both you gave me lots of lots of good information but you also made me think and thank you very much for that so we have some time there there are mics here on both sides if you have a question please come to the mic and we'll recognize you for that and I think we've got our Hindu friend Fred before Fred says anything I'll just note if you're unable to come to the front of the room

1:07:53 for any reason go ahead and shoot your hand up and I'm happy to come around to you with the microphone thank you I truly appreciated your your presentation and as you probably know I'm sure you know that in the Hindu scholarly community over the past hundred plus years they've been looking at this kind of Jesus because Hindu mysticism looks like Kabbalah looks like Sufism too many too many degrees but it was one thing that has always been concerned to me is IRA næss being such such a you know mr. crankypants about all of this he was so close to Jesus chronologically

1:08:42 I mean he was the disciple of Polycarp and Polycarp the disciple of John any speculation as to how he would have gotten all of this wrong I don't suppose he got it all wrong Irenaeus was living well close to Jesus I mean you know it's about the Year 160 so that's a hundred and thirty years after the death of Jesus something like that but yes he was a disciple of Polycarp why did he insist that there's only one right way only one church one because Polycarp also talked about a universal church Polycarp a division he said look I'm here you know in Asia Minor but the church in Germany and the

1:09:27 church in Gaul he sent Irenaeus as a missionary from from Antioch where was Polycarp was burned in Smyrna he was he was burned alive in the stadium for his Christian profession and Irenaeus was his disciple and sent as a missionary to the ignorant and rural people of then France right and and so he Polycarp won't you said yes but but we're the same as those people and those should be teaching the same people and I think the reason for that and it took a while to figure this out is that Irenaeus was living very close to

1:10:12 intense state persecution and his own beloved teacher had been burned alive between the ages of eighteen and ninety in a public stadium in his home city where he was highly revered and Irenaeus members of his community had been arrested and and questioned about whether they were Christians and thrown into prison to wait torture and death to celebrate the birthday of the Emperor right in the public Stadium in Lyon and so Christians who lived in awareness cute awareness of persecution wanted to unify Christians in this tiny little unclaimed and goal with those Christians

1:11:00 in Rome with those in Asia Minor wanted to say no it's not just our little group of say 40 people here we can go down and nobody will know the difference now we're part of a universal movement and we want them to know so that you know those those people arrested and in prison waiting their death sentence asked him to go to Rome and and tell the people in Rome what was happening so that their story became a story that we know about and and he knew about polycarp's death and that news travel but but in order to connect Christians in Germany with Christians in Gaul Asia Minor with Rome and Spain and Africa and Egypt you had to sort of say all right

1:11:45 what's the basic common denominator what do we all believe and the basic stuff would be well most people are using the narrative Gospels they're the easiest to read Matthew is very highly attested in the garbage dumps of Egypt so is Luke so is the Gospel of Thomas but you want the basics right just the basics on which we all agree and these other texts are not texts that you would read in church anyway so he insisted that these are the only ones we we have and I think it's about persecution rather like the American Revolutionary said if we don't all stand if we don't all hang together we will surely all hang separately it's

1:12:33 that mentality I think so I don't think he got it wrong he knew there were other Gospels and he spent 40 years thinking they were important enough to contend with interestingly though as you know Thomas the disciple is said to have gone to India and you know that there's the Thomas Church in India which claims to go back to the disciple Thomas so some people say well did Jesus spend his Lost years in India you've heard all that stuff and I say well I think it's a stretch for a village rabbi from Nazareth I really think so but the idea that teaching of Jesus would have traveled to India right by decades after his death is very

1:13:20 plausible and maybe come back influenced by by Indian teachings what the kind of heretical things Hippolytus of Rome talks about heretics and he says those naked Indians by the Ganges you know meditating those Sadow's those are heretics too so I think there's probably influence of Indian teaching so that's why I don't think he necessarily got it wrong but the situation he was in seemed to him to demand sort of tighten the borders clarify what's basic throw out the rest Thank You that's an important question I'm sorry I talked too long I grew up Catholic and went to

1:14:12 Catholic school for 12 years church every day and every day and in the 66 I've graduated and became a hippie you know which means you know you open you open your mind up and you question everything so I'm as I'm listening I can't get lost what's the problem with all this stuff and a question comes to mind like when you do open your mind so much do you lose your way and start thinking all kinds of thoughts that might just be in your head easily I would say one of the biggest problems could happen when you think maybe that you're God you know this mirror image thing that you're talking about in the twin and you take that whether it's

1:15:01 through drugs or whatever and you take that thought and you put it in your ego and that's where the biggest problem happens if you know how to not do that not judge and not then you have a chance to stay there you I think your totally right the fact is that anybody can make up secret teaching of Jesus right so it it can and also as you say if it's read egotistical II it can be it can lead to some kind of foolish or even insanity right so that's why this teaching this kind of teaching has always been spoken from teacher to disciple when you're ready the disciple can learn but it's only when the teacher

1:15:47 thinks that you're mature enough to handle it and that's why it's been protected important point well thank you what you're saying is so beautiful and so interesting to me I've been thinking a lot about it lately I was reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead this morning and part of Egyptian religion as far as I understand it which is limited is that the highest thing that people could do in their religious experience was to become one with God and that's what I'm sort of hearing in this and maybe Jesus didn't go to India but we know he spent time in Egypt that is in the Bible and

1:16:35 so I'm just wondering if some of this very esoteric teaching came through that Hagin line and of course because it was pagan and related to Hinduism and other things it was completely thrown out it's like heresy heresy we can't do it but I feel strong vibrations with it with the Egyptian Book of the Dead that's very interesting because you know also there were Buddhist missionaries in Egypt at the time and they were teaching something not so different I mean the Gospel of Thomas Jesus has spoken of as the living one 'men it just like the Buddha is the enlightened one he's a human like you and me but he's

1:17:21 enlightened Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas can be seen as the one who's who's illuminated and you could be illuminated but you know but he would be seen in that way so these influences are very possible thank you that's we should did I talk I talked too long I really wanted more discussion but we'll have it this afternoon one simple question just maybe clarify for me but I'm seeing be and you hadn't mentioned that but you got up to it about the Nicene Creed now that really was about two strong

1:18:07 individuals in an ACS in areas and so it came down to a boat and that's where the whole Trinity came from and you know the Trinity's been a real stickler at least that I've seen because if you don't believe in it you're not a Christian but I'd like some to go back to some history because it was a it was a political civil vote or something it was Constantine wanted to get everything together and he wanted and so in the Canon what he chose as what he chose would be in the Bible but there like you said you did a wonderful job there are a lot of things left out so I kind of

1:18:54 wonder about all that well it was a vote of over 300 bishops and Constantine made it clear where he stood so on there there were only two or three who who dissented from the Creed but the Creed is informed you know it creates an institution which claims to be the only way of salvation and some of these other teachings can be fuzzy or they can sound like other traditions and there there could be problems with them it's just that I think that there's there's good reason maybe why in the second century they batten down the hatches and create an institutional structure because these other visionary teachings or spiritual

1:19:42 searches might not have in courage that but I just wonder now what do you think do you think they can they can add to our understanding or are they just the kind of thing that we ought to be throwing out hey thank you very much I think I think this is a beautiful example of what we seek to do in our interfaith efforts here in West Michigan we want to affirm where we stand on our faith but we also want to be open for other insight and Elaine Pagels has bring brought us a lot of insight from other traditions and from other writings even in the Christian tradition so we

1:20:29 thank you for that and there's going to be more we're going to take a real quick break I know that a lot of you are anxious to hear more about this we're gonna have our panel at that quarter till and then to come back this evening or Elaine Pagels is going to take what you've heard today and apply it to how it has influenced her own life and a very interesting life story and so we're anxious to hear more from her and we're anxious for you to continue our discussion quick right keep it to 15 minutes so we want to regain here at quarter till