Culture boosts gnostic gospels

One person’s good news may be another’s lost cause. And that is, literally, the gospel truth.

Just ask Elaine Pagels, a champion of lost gospels, as she rides the wake of Mel Gibson’s Gospel extravaganza, “The Passion of the Christ,” and Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” a novel tribute to the noncanonical gospel according to Mary Magdalene.

The movie and the book have spiked new interest in Pagels’ work, especially her books “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” (Vintage Books, $13, 242 pages) and “The Gnostic Gospels” (Vintage Books, $12, 174 pages).

Gibson’s movie provoked conversations about how the four Gospels of the New Testament — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — differ from one another and how historical they might be.

Brown’s book, alleging a conspiracy to suppress “other” versions of the gospels, has inspired readers to rush to Pagels’ work to see for themselves what they make of these other “lost” texts.

A religion professor at Princeton University, Pagels is an expert on gospels that didn’t make the canonical cut and so aren’t included in the Bible. She’s a veteran of TV specials on New Testament times.

Initially, she made a name for herself with her study of gnostic gospels, a category of manuscripts scholars associate with the Greek word “gnosis,” or knowledge. Some connect these writings to a separate strand of religious belief, one that puts more emphasis on personal or secret knowledge of the divine instead of faith, or confidence in things one cannot see.

Not all noncanonical gospels are gnostic, says Marvin Meyer, professor of Bible and Christian studies at Chapman University. An editor of “The Gnostic Bible” (Shambala, $34.95, 848 pages), he has collected gnostic texts from the Greco-Roman, Jewish and Muslim traditions, too. It’s his English translation of the Gospel of Thomas, a Coptic and Greek text found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, that Pagels uses in her book.

“When I was in graduate school, we were told that these gospels were just weird,” Pagels said.

“They were identified as gnostic, which then only meant that we didn’t know much about them except that they were heretical.”

But when Pagels read the Gospel of Thomas for herself, she was surprised.

“I expected that it would be rubbish, garbled, foolish. It turned out to be actually powerful and compelling writing,” she says.

Pagels is encouraged that more and more lay readers are scrolling the Internet and buying books to read noncanonical gospels for themselves. These texts suggest that an orthodox Christianity, one prescribed by a single authority, isn’t the only way to approach Jesus and his message, she says.