The Truth About
THE FIFTH GOSPEL
When an Egyptian farmer uncovered new "sayings" of Jesus,
Christians asked,rrDo they challenge the Bible
or confirm it?" Only now do we have a clue to the answer
By the Rev. DON CLEVELAND NORMAN
Religion Editor, American Peoples Encyclopedia
Digging on a cliffside for fertilizer one day in
1945, an Egyptian farmer uncovered an ancient
tomb and, inside it, several leather-bound papyrus
volumes. Today, his discovery is stirring the Chris
tian world from its Biblical scholars to the layman
with little knowledge of the Book's history.
Do these musty manuscripts contain a fifth
Gospel? Did the Apostle, Didymus Judas Thomas
"Doubting Thomas" compile 114 sayings and par
ables of Jesus, some of which are not covered by
Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John?
Only recently has the layman been able to evalu
ate these questions. Last fall, Harper & Brothers
published "The Gospel According to Thomas," con
taining 114 sayings. And in February, Doubleday
& Co., Inc., published "The Secret Sayings of Jesus,"
an independent translation and analysis by Robert
Grant of the University of Chicago.
Biblical scholars, however, have been debating
the questions of "the fifth Gospel" since the original
volumes worked their way into the antiquities
market more than a decade ago.
The farmer who had uncovered the manuscripts
along the Upper Nile, near the Egyptian village of
Nag Hamadi, reportedly had burned one to warm
his tea. He sold 13 others to a village merchant for
three Egyptian pounds later, one volume report
edly brought $10,000!
Since the manuscripts were written in Coptic, an
Egyptian-Greek language in common use 2,000
years ago, 12 volumes found their way into the
Coptic Museum in Cairo. The other was purchased
for the Jung Institute in Switzerland by Gilles
Quispel with a gift donation.
With Henri-Charles Peuch, A. Guillaumont,
Walter Till, and 'Ard Al Masih, Quispel began
translating and, with the "sayings of Jesus," ex
ploding a bomb in the normally staid community of
Biblical experts!
Why call these 114 disconnected "sayings" of
Jesus a Gospel? they demanded. What about the
sayings that conflicted with the teachings of Jesus
in the four Gospels accepted by Christendom? And
why are the sayings so mystical and obscure?
Only- now are cool-headed answers coming to
these indignant questions. First of all, whatever
these 114 sayings are, they are not a Gospel. In the
early days of Christianity, there were many writ
ings which purported to be "Gospels." Church coun
cils, after long study, admitted only 27 books to the
New Testament. Those not admitted were consid
ered "apochryphal," meaning not of the inspired
apostolic age and secondary in church literature.
A study of the "Gospel according to Thomas"
indicated that it was a Coptic adaptation of such a
writing attributed to Thomas about 140 A.D.
Then how did contradictory sayings get into the
Coptic Thomas? The scholars know that the "lost
manuscripts" were written by the Gnostic sect
which flourished from the 2nd to 4th centuries and
was, considered heretical by the church. The Gnos
tics believed in a redeemer-deity and personal
salvation and, therefore, saw in Jesus' life and
teachings much that paralleled their own beliefs.
Evidently, they adopted the Thomas sayings which
fitted these beliefs and invented others for ideas
foreign to Christianity.
And the curious, almost unintelligible style in
. which Jesus "speaks" in the Gnostic gospel?
That, too, traces back to Gnostic beliefs and indi
cates why they were considered heretical. While
believing in a Christ figure, they also believed sal
vation was reserved for a select few who were liter
ally "in the know" "Gnostic" coming from the
Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge. To pre
serve their secret of salvation, they veiled their
writings in obscure language.
With such a history behind it, the "Gospel ac
cording to Thomas" would seem worthless, perhaps
even dangerous to Christianity.- But many schol
ars believe just the opposite.
The Coptic Thomas, says Professor Oscar Cull
man, a leading Swiss theologian, is of greater sig
nificance to scholars than the finding of the Dead
Sea Scrolls because it helps prove again that "our
four canonical Gospels are the only ones on which
we can rely. Again and again, we must marvel at
the. fact that from the large number of primitive
Christian writings only those were accepted as
canonical which really came from the oldest time
and which were free from heretical tendencies."
S?
Or. Pohor Lahib, the director of the Coptic Museum in
Cairo, examines one of the fragile papyrus pages from
the ancient manuscript discovered in an Egyptian cave.
And Gilles Quispel, the dedicated scholar who
spent years helping translate the sayings, sums up
their contribution to Christianity by saying:
"We may now have an independent Gospel tradi
tion which ... in its broad outlines of both style and
theology, agrees with the text of our canonical Gos
pels. This shows that behind our Gospel tradition
there stands a Person whose words have reached
us substantially unchanged."
What Are the New "Sayings"
of Jesus?
Many of Jesus' "sayings" recorded in "The Gos
pel According to Thomas" (Harper & Brothers)
paraphrase words of the accepted Gospels, such as
this rendering of Matthew 11:28-30:
jesus said: Come to Me, for easy is My yoke
and My lordship is gentle, and you shall find repose
for yourselves.
Others, however, are totally foreign to the canoni
cal Gospels and mystical in the Gnostic style:
jesus said: This heaven shall pass away and the
one above it shall pass away, and the dead are not
alive and the living shall not die. In the days when
you devoured the dead, you made it alive; when
you come into light, what will you do?
jesus said: If those who lead you say to you:
Behold, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds
of heaven will precede you; if they say to you that
it is in the sea, then the fish will precede you. But
the kingdom is within you and it is outside of you.
COVER:
There's a bloom on us today. It goes from
Winston Pote's cover of crocuses, which
know it's spring despite the snow, to the
young miss who's budding as a hostess
despite being seven years old (see p. 18).
LEONARD S. DAVIDOW President and PublMcr
WALTER C DREYFUS Vice President
PATRICK E. 01OURKE Advertising Director '
Send all advertising communications to
Family Weekly, 153 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 1, III.
Address all communications about editorial features to
Family Weekly, 60 E. 56th St., New York 22. N. Y.
March 20, I960
Board of Editors I ERNEST V. HEYN Editor-in-Chief
BEN KARTMAN Executive Editor
ROBERT HTZGIBBON Managing Editor
MARGARET BE 11 Feature Editor
PHILLIP OYKSTRA Art Director
MELANIE DE PROFT Food Editor
Bob Driscoll. Irma Heldman, John Hochmann, Jerry Klein,
Harold London, Jack Ryan; Peer Oppenheimer, Hollywood.
19M, FAMILY WEEKLY MAGAZINE, INC, 153 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 1, III. All rights reserved.