Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The Gospel of the Ebionites

  There may have been more than one Christian group called Ebionite. Three Gospels have come down to us that appear to have been used by various Ebionite groups. One is the truncated version of the Gospel of Matthew mentioned earlier. Another is known simply as the Gospel of the Ebionites. It no longer survives intact, but we know about it through the quotations of a fourth-century heresy hunter, Ephiphanius. What he tells us is quite intriguing. Apparently this group of Ebionites believed that Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for sins, which meant that the Jewish sacrifices in the Temple were no longer required. And so they were Jews who no longer believed in Jewish sacrifice; they did, however, keep the other aspects of the law.

  In the ancient world, about the only time a person would eat meat was when an animal had been ritually slaughtered by a priest, as a sacrifice to the gods or to God. Since this particular group of Ebionites no longer believed in sacrifice, they became, on principle, vegetarians. This choice of food is reflected in the way they told their Gospel traditions. For example, when the disciples ask Jesus where they are to prepare the Passover meal for him, in this Gospel he replies, “I have no desire to eat the meat of this Passover lamb with you.” Even more interesting is that in this Gospel, John the Baptist’s diet apparently changed. In the canonical Gospels he is said to have subsisted on locusts and wild honey. By changing one letter in the Greek word “locust” (which is, after all, a meat), the Ebionite Gospel stated that John was eating pancakes and wild honey—a much better choice, some of us might think.

  The Coptic Gospel of Thomas

  Among all the archaeological discoveries of noncanonical texts in modern times, none is more significant than the Gospel of Thomas, found among the Gnostic Gospels at Nag Hammadi. Like the other books found at the same time, it is written in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language.9 It is significant both because of its unusual character and because of its relative antiquity: it is one of the earliest noncanonical Gospels yet discovered and most likely dates from just a few decades after the Gospel of John.

  Unlike the Gospels of the New Testament, which narrate the words and deeds of Jesus up to his death and resurrection, the Gospel of Thomas contains only a group of sayings of Jesus. Altogether the Gospel presents 114 discrete sayings. Most are introduced with the words “And Jesus said…” Many of these sayings are similar to teachings of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament. For example, one finds here the parable of the mustard seed and the saying of the blind leading the blind, in slightly different forms. But around half of the sayings, depending on how you count, are unlike the canonical accounts. Most of these unique sayings sound bizarre to people raised on biblical accounts of Jesus’ teaching. For example, here it is recounted that he said, “The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?” (saying 11).

  What is one to make of the unusual sayings of the Gospel of Thomas? For the past ten or fifteen years there have been heated scholarly discussions on just this point, with some scholars thinking that these sayings make the most sense if placed within the thought-world of some form of early Christian Gnosticism, and others arguing that they are not Gnostic at all. I myself take the former view. These sayings do not promote the Gnostic myth, but that does not mean they are not best understood gnostically, just as a lot of Marxist writings do not lay out the tenets of Marxism. A gnostic framework explains a lot of this Gospel.10

  In it Jesus indicates that his hearers have a spark of the divine that had a heavenly origin. This world we live in is a cesspool of suffering that he calls a corpse. A person’s inner being (the light within) has tragically fallen into this material world and become entrapped here (sunk into “poverty”), and in that condition has become forgetful of its origin (become “drunk”). It needs to be reawakened by learning the truth of both this world and its own heavenly origins. Jesus is the one who conveys this truth. Once the spirit within learns the truth, it will strip off this material body (symbolized as clothes to be removed) and escape this world, returning to the divine realm, whence it came.11

  The most striking feature of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas is that it does not narrate Jesus’ death and resurrection. Salvation does not come by believing in Jesus’ death but by understanding his secret teachings: “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death” (saying 1).

  The Acts of Thecla

  According to the protoorthodox theologian and apologist Tertullian, the church leader who forged the Acts of Thecla was caught in the act and severely disciplined by being removed from his position of authority. This unhappy result does not appear to have had much effect on the success of his endeavor. Stories about Thecla continued to circulate long after the book had first been put into publication, some time in the second half of the second century. For centuries after that, Thecla was a household name throughout parts of Christendom, and in some places she vied with the Blessed Virgin Mary herself as the most revered saint.

  But the forger did not make up his stories out of whole cloth. He evidently drew on oral traditions then in circulation concerning the apostle Paul and his most famous female convert. The Acts of Thecla tell the history of their association.

  Thecla is said to have been a wealthy young upper-class woman engaged to be married to one of the leading men of the city. Thecla lives next door to the house where the Christians meet, and when Paul comes to town he preaches there, a sermon that Thecla can hear from her upstairs window. She sits enraptured for days on end. On this occasion Paul preaches the gospel of sexual renunciation: people should remain celibate and will thereby inherit the kingdom of God.

  Thecla is persuaded by this message to convert, much to the consternation of her fiancé, who was anticipating a long and happy married life together. She breaks off the engagement and becomes a follower of Paul, which leads to a number of very strange and intriguing episodes in which Thecla is threatened with martyrdom, only to escape by the supernatural intervention of God. Possibly the most memorable incident occurs when she is thrown to the wild beasts for embracing the Christian faith; desperate to be baptized before her ultimate demise (Paul had put off baptizing her), she leaps into a vat of “man-eating seals” and baptizes herself in the name of Jesus. God sends down a thunderbolt to kill the seals, she escapes, and more adventures ensue.

  The Acts of Thecla is now found in a collection of traditions about Paul’s missionary escapades known broadly as the Acts of Paul.

  Third Corinthians

  Also in the Acts of Paul are two noncanonical letters, one written to the apostle by his converts in Corinth and the other the reply written by him. This exchange is called 3 Corinthians, to differentiate it from 1 and 2 Corinthians in the New Testament.

  The occasion for the correspondence is spelled out in the Corinthians’ letter, where they say that two Christian teachers, Simon and Cleobius, have arrived in town and have been teaching that God is not the creator of the world, that the Jewish prophets are not from God, that Jesus did not come in the flesh, and that the flesh of believers will not be raised at the resurrection. (These teachings seem to reflect some kind of Gnostic point of view.) What are the Corinthians to make of such teachings?

  Paul responds by addressing himself to the heretical views one by one, showing that they do not accord with the truth of the Gospel. He emphasizes that the material world is indeed the Creation of the one God, who spoke through the prophets and has now sent Jesus into the world in the flesh “so that he might set free all flesh through his flesh, and might raise us from the dead as fleshly beings.”

  This is a protoorthodox, antignostic production. Not well known to most Christians in the West, it had a remarkable reception in other parts of the world. In Armenia and parts of Syria it was accepted as canonical Scripture, even thou
gh, as well known to scholars, it was written at least a century after Paul’s death.

  The Letter of Barnabas

  According to both Paul and the book of Acts, one of his close apostolic companions was a man named Barnabas, about whom we are otherwise poorly informed. About seventy years after both Paul and Barnabas died, some anonymous author wrote a “letter”—actually more of a theological treatise—that eventually came to be attributed to Barnabas, no doubt in order to promote its reputation among Christian readers. Some protoorthodox Christians were quite insistent that the book belonged in the canon of Scripture, and it is found among the New Testament writings in our earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament, known as the Codex Sinaiticus, dating from the middle of the fourth century.

  Christians of modern times might express some relief that Barnabas was not eventually included among the books of sacred writ. Even more than the books that did get into the New Testament, this letter is virulently and unashamedly anti-Jewish in its views. In fact, it is largely a discussion of the Jewish religion and the Jewish Scripture.

  Its overarching theme is that Jews are not the people of God because they rejected the covenant that God made with Moses on Mount Sinai, for down below they were making and worshipping the golden calf. As a result, God rejected them. The laws he gave Moses were misinterpreted by the Jewish people, who were not the covenantal people at all. And they are still misinterpreted by them since they think the laws given to Moses were meant to be taken literally. They were actually symbolic laws meant to direct people about how to live. For example, the prohibition on eating pork did not mean that one could not eat any pork; it really meant not to live like pigs. Moreover, according to Barnabas these laws look forward to Jesus, whose followers are the true people of God.

  In short, says Barnabas, the Old Testament is not a Jewish book. It is a Christian book. And the covenant God made with the Jewish ancestors is not a covenant for the Jews. It is a covenant for the followers of Jesus.

  The Apocalypse of Peter

  Another book considered canonical in some protoorthodox circles was the Apocalypse (or Revelation) of Peter. This book cannot be found in any of the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament, but is mentioned as belonging, or potentially belonging, to the canon in several early church writings. Whatever its canonical status, it is an intriguing narrative, the first surviving account from early Christianity of someone being given a guided tour of heaven and hell.

  Most of us are familiar with this motif from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante did not make up the idea, however; he had lots of predecessors, and so far as we can tell from the written record, the Apocalypse of Peter was the first.

  The account begins with Jesus talking to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, discussing with them what would happen at the end of all things (Mark 13; Matthew 24–25). Peter asks Jesus about the afterlife, and Jesus begins to explain it all to him. At this point it is not completely clear whether Jesus’ explanation is so graphic that Peter can visualize what he is describing or whether Jesus takes him on an actual tour. But the reader is treated to a vivid description of both the realm of the blessed, in heaven, and the realm of the damned, in hell.

  By far the most interesting part of the tour is the description of hell. It is a bit difficult to describe at any length the ecstasies of the blessed: they are, after all, extremely happy, and there’s only so much one can say about it. It is quite easy, on the other hand, to let one’s imagination roam when portraying the various torments of the damned. And this book is nothing if not imaginative.

  Those being eternally tormented are punished appropriately for the sin they most often committed while living. Habitual liars are hanged by their tongues over eternal flames; women who braided their hair to make themselves attractive to men in order to seduce them are hanged by their hair over the fires; the men who gave in to their seductions are hanged by…a different body part. As one might expect, the men cry out, “We did not know that we should come to eternal punishment!”

  And so it goes. The point of the narrative is quite clear: anyone who wants to enjoy the blessings of heaven and escape the torments of hell needs to live a proper, moral, and upright life. Otherwise the flames of hell are waiting.

  The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter

  There is another Apocalypse of Peter that is decidedly not protoorthodox. Rather, it is a Gnostic text, discovered along with the Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi, that provides a firsthand account of the crucifixion of Jesus. To those familiar with the accounts of the New Testament, this narrative will seem very bizarre indeed.

  After Peter receives a secret revelation from Jesus, he has a vision that he cannot understand. He is standing on a hill talking with Jesus when he sees Jesus down below being arrested and then crucified. More peculiar still, he also sees a figure above the cross who is happy and laughing. He asks Jesus, standing next to him, what it is he is seeing, and Jesus explains. The one the soldiers are crucifying is merely his outer shell; the one above the cross is his true self, the spiritual being who cannot suffer.

  This odd image is closely tied to the Gnostic understanding of Christ spelled out earlier, in which the man Jesus was temporarily inhabited by the divine Christ. Here the Christ is laughing precisely because the people crucifying him don’t understand what they are doing. They are simply killing the body, the clay vessel, that the divine being had inhabited, but they can’t hurt him, the real Christ. He is incorporeal and above all pain and suffering. And he finds the ignorance of his enemies hilarious.

  It is no surprise that a text like this had no chance of making it into the protoorthodox canon, since it celebrates a view of Christ that the protoorthodox vigorously denounced as heretical.

  THE DEBATES LEADING TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CANON

  There were lots of other books considered sacred by one or another group that I have not been able to discuss here. Some were protoorthodox, others were not: Gospels allegedly by or embodying the perspective of Jesus’ brother James, his disciple Philip, Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot, and many more. There were books of Acts that describe the missionary endeavors of John, Andrew, Peter, Thomas, and others. There were letters allegedly from Paul to the Christians of Laodicea and correspondence with the Roman philosopher Seneca; letters allegedly from Peter and James; letters from one of the first bishops of Rome, Clement; Apocalypses and Secret Revelations of Paul, John, James, and a Roman Christian named Hermas. But the ones I’ve discussed can at least give you an idea of what was being written, and read.

  The Case of the Gospel of Peter

  With all these books floating around, many of them representing a very wide range of theological points of view, how did the protoorthodox go about deciding which ones to include in their canon of Scripture? An instructive anecdote is told by the fourth-century historian Eusebius, the so-called father of church history. Eusebius tells a story about a second-century bishop named Serapion and his encounter with a Gospel allegedly written by none other than Jesus’ right-hand man, Simon Peter.

  Serapion was the bishop of the large church of Antioch, in Syria. As part of his official duties he occasionally made the rounds among the towns and villages under his jurisdiction. According to Eusebius, on one occasion Serapion visited the Christian church in the village of Rhossus and while there learned that there were some disputes among the Christians involving a Gospel by Peter. Without reading the book himself, Serapion reasoned that if Peter had written a Gospel, it must be acceptable, and so he told the church members to go ahead and read it.

  When he returned home to Antioch, however, some informers came forward to tell him that this was a heretical book, used by docetic Christians—Christians who, like Marcion and some Gnostics, denied that Jesus was fully human but only appeared to be. Serapion obtained a copy of the book to evaluate its teaching. In his opinion most of the book was orthodox in its views, but there were some passages that were questionable, open to a docetic interpretation.

/>   He fired a letter off to the church in which he detailed the problems with the book and concluded that in light of its dubious passages it could not actually have been written by Peter. He forbade the church to continue using it.

  Eusebius tells this story and actually quotes portions of Serapion’s letter. Unfortunately, he does not quote the passages that Serapion cited from the Gospel that made it appear potentially heretical. This is a real shame, since a fragmentary copy of a Gospel allegedly written by Peter turned up in modern times, and it looks very much like the Gospel that Serapion discussed. But since Eusebius preserves none of his quotations of the book, we can’t know for sure whether it is the same book or not.

  The modern discovery occurred during the winter of 1868–69, when a French archaeological team was digging in an ancient cemetery in Akhmim, Egypt. They uncovered the tomb of a person they took to be a monk who was buried with a book. The book contained sixty-six pages on which were transcribed portions of four texts—it was a small anthology. One of the texts was a Greek copy of the protoorthodox Apocalypse of Peter, but the most sensational text was a Gospel, written in the first person, allegedly by Simon Peter.

  Regrettably the text is fragmentary. It begins in the middle of a sentence, in an account of Jesus’ trial before Pontius Pilate, and it ends in the middle of a sentence, in a story that appears to be an account of Jesus appearing to his disciples after his resurrection. Between these two partial sentences is a narrative of Jesus’ trial, condemnation, death, and resurrection.

  The account is like the Gospels of the New Testament in many ways. But just as they all differ from one another, so, too, this account differs from each of them. For one thing, the Jewish leaders and Jewish people are portrayed far more negatively here than even in the canonical accounts. It is the Jewish king, Herod, not the Roman governor, Pilate, who condemns Jesus to death. The Jewish leaders are fully culpable in his execution. The Jewish people realize that they are now under the judgment of God, that in fact their city of Jerusalem might now be destroyed in judgment (later Christians interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE as God’s punishment for the death of the Messiah).