REconstructing with Extra-Canonical Writings

Part Two of Three

Last I said my deconstruction journey came in two parts.

Act One challenged my conceptual understanding of what a Christian was. Act Two was about cracks in the foundation. The Holy Bible. Without the infallible, inerrant “Word of God,” what can be trusted at all?

I won’t keep anyone wondering. It turns out that even if the Bible is written by people, along with their different views, opinions and expressions, and different social context and audience, it can still be helpful.

But more importantly to me was learning about those other voices from the earliest followers of Jesus and the stories they told. You see, we live in a world even now with voices that are being suppressed, and the messages they’re sending are vital, too.

For hundreds of years, all we’ve had about other views, or “heresies,” were from the voices of their opponents. Nothing that lets them speak for themselves. One doesn’t have to have a big imagination to see what that looks like today in our current political and cultural environments. We’ve seen firsthand when one only hears from the power hungry and oppressors’ point of view. 

That’s pretty much what happened in the fourth century when a Christian faction took power, demonized those who were different, and had all the others’ writings and structures demolished.

Fortunately, in the last century we’ve found copies of some of these lost manuscripts, and they paint a rather different (and lovely) picture. 

Most folks have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are a collection of ancient Jewish texts that were discovered in the 1940s and 50s. They correlate with the Old Testament.

Fewer have heard about the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of manuscripts that coincide with the writings of the New Testament. One may wonder why we know less about these. The biggest reason should not be a surprise: suppression. Upon discovery, less than a hundred years ago, not much was known about the Coptic language they were written in. But more so was the fact that they were quickly associated with the so-called Gnostics. At the time–and frequently even now–the uninformed belief that Gnostics were an organized heretical group made it easy for folks to dismiss. But the Nag Hammadi Library contains writings of early self-identified Christians. Some are considered more Valentinian, Sethian, Basilidian, Hermetic, or Platonic, but all of the manuscripts were actually shared among many early Christian communities.

Perhaps the most well known extra-canonical manuscript is the Gospel of Thomas. And I think it’s a great place to start for someone interested in exploring what several early Christian communities were inspired by. In fact, two-thirds of it have synoptic gospel parallels, and a third can be also found in the Gospel of John. (And there’s strong evidence that it was actually a source that gospel writers used, preceding the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But that’s an aside.) So, it makes it very approachable.

It also resonates strongly with the Gospel of John, a big fave with most Christian. That’s probably what attracted me to it at first. And I was hooked! I was so taken by it that I spent three years in a deep dive–reading 50 books about it, over 200 academic papers about it, studying both Greek and Coptic (the two languages its original manuscripts are found in), and writing a modern translation and commentary for it. To me, it’s that good!

I said that it has parallels. By that, I don’t mean exact word-for-word accounts. Not even the four gospels do that when they overlap. Surprised? So was I until realizing that what we’ve been told is often harmonized, even along with Paul’s letters–these days, it’s all presented as one congruent picture, but it’s not once you examine it honestly.

Examples from the Gospel of Thomas are easy to find. Other great extra-canonical writings are the Gospel of Mary (not from Nag Hammadi, but from two of several other discoveries). You may be familiar with it from being in The Da Vinci Code. Others I really like are the Gospel of Truth, the Dialogues of the Savior, the Gospel of Philip, The Thunder Perfect Mind, and the Apocryphon of John, just to name a few.

By reading these extra-canonical, one gets a more 3-D view of Christianity from its very onset, instead of the standard, faded, black & white photocopy. For me, this has been a revelation that Christianity is a big, beautiful garden and not just the peonies shoved in my face. 

So if you’re like me, with a love for the spiritual, you can find it everywhere, sure. I did. But I would also invite you to take this extra-canonical field trip. It’s truly stunning.

And that’s not all! See ya in Part Three…

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