Why the Gnostic Gospels Lost

Bible scholars aren't often accessible, but Darrell L. Bock has made a name for himself as a scholar equally at home in the pages of academic journals and on the New York Times best-seller list. Bock's Breaking the Da Vinci Code broke down the thorny historical and doctrinal questions raised by Dan Brown's popular novel. In his latest book, The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities, Bock weighs in on a related discussion that has also made its way into popular discourse: What do the Gnostic gospels of Judas, Thomas, and others tell us about Jesus and Christianity? Bock recently discussed his work with Beliefnet.

Your book says Matthew, Mark, Luke and John can be trusted as history in a way that the Gnostic gospels of Thomas and Judas, etc., cannot. Why?

The short answer is that the rootage of these gospels either involves an apostolic figure or someone closely associated with an apostolic figure. In the traditional explanation of authorship, we’ve got John and Matthew, who would be apostles. We’ve got Mark, who’d be connected to Peter, and Luke, who’d be connected at least to Paul, if not to a whole series of early church leaders. Even less conservative people will acknowledge that, if they don’t accept that Matthew and John were responsible for those gospels, something influenced by those figures is at work. So, they’ve got apostolic rootage in a way that the Gnostic gospels do not.

The gospels that ended up in the Bible are all from the first century. No gospel of that [Gnostic] list that I’m aware of is actually dated in the first century. There are some people who try to date Thomas that early, but the normal date for Thomas is early second century, and there’s no other gospel that comes that early.

Why is there a debate over dating? Is it clear that one gospel originated in the first century and another originated in the second century?

There is a belief that the movement that’s reflected in a work like the Gospel of Judas might, in fact, be earlier. The problem is there’s no evidence for it.

A lot of the debate over Gnostic gospels is based on a group of ancient texts found in Egypt over 60 years ago. Why are we suddenly hearing a lot about these texts now?

It takes time to work through them; it was a good several decades’ process just to collect the texts and get them published, first in the originals and then in translation. And then, it took a while for people to digest this material. Initially, they were received with a great deal of skepticism as to how much they could actually tell us about the first century. Now, there’s been a whole body of scholarship that’s attempted to argue that they go back pretty early and are pretty significant.

What inspires that scholarship?

There’s a revolution that’s going on in the humanities about how to handle history. The old mantra is that history is written by the winners. Now we’re digging up material by the losers. You read the material by the losers, and then you tweak the history. In some cases you revise it. What I’m trying to do is to explain this movement and then [ask] whether the revision is actually historically valid or not. My premise is that, yes, history is written by the winners. But sometimes, the winners deserved to win.

Continued on page 2: Should the Gnostic gospels alter our view of Christianity? »