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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://www.egroups.com/group/Sitaram

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=74463

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week706/profile.html

(excerpts):

Elaine Pagels is an historian of religion at Princeton University.
She has written best-selling books on what are called the Gnostic
Gospels.

Elaine Pagels seems comfortable keeping Christianity at an academic
distance. But in 1982, it got personal. Her only child had just been
diagnosed with a terminal lung disease. Pagels found herself outside
the Church of the Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church in Manhattan,
doubting its orthodoxy, needing its sustenance.

I was extremely upset. I hadn't slept in days. Distraught. I was
trying to calm myself by running that morning. It seemed to me the
possibility of a church like this, the way it engages the issues of
life and death, put the prospect of losing a child into a context
that was much larger than an ordinary one.

Raised by nonobservant Protestant parents, Pagels shocked them by
joining an Evangelical church at the age of 13, then quit when the
church announced a friend of hers would go to hell because he'd not
been "born again."

"I realized that I did not accept what they were saying. I didn't
agree with it. It didn't make sense to me". BUT, "I was aware that
something very powerful had engaged me. What is so powerful about it?
How does it transform people in the way that it does? I remembered
that very well. So I decided that I would have to seek for myself."

I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I'd heard
when I was growing up were simply made up -- and I realized that many
parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out.

What came to be known as the Gnostic Gospels (from the Greek word
meaning "to know") is an explosive, some say heretical, look at
Christianity's evolution. And evidence of fierce theological debate
before Christianity was encoded into a set of beliefs.

In order to preserve Christianity, scholars believe church fathers
had to unify a fractious lot of competing voices. They found many
Gnostic ideas intolerable. In particular, the idea that each of us
can become connected to God without priestly intervention was a
threat to their authority. Scholars believe the Gnostic texts were
buried at Nag Hammadi at the close of the fourth century because
church fathers had ordered the monks to burn them.

The bishop who wanted authority consolidated in himself told
them, "Get rid of all those books. You don't need all those books.
All you need are the ones that I will mention now." And then he
mentions a list, which is our first list of the 27 books of the New
Testament. So he told them.

At the time, I think it was absolutely essential for the survival of
the movement, because it was so much threatened by persecution and by
complete scattering. So it was at that time necessary, probably, to
consolidate the church and try to make a simple message accessible
and universal.

(Regarding personal tragedy in her life):

One can think, "Well, I've been doing it pretty well, and things
should turn out well." And when you do that and things turn out
horrendously, our impulse, because of our tradition, is to blame
ourselves. After all, if you read the book of Genesis, it says people
who do good things receive good things, and people who do bad things,
you know, have terrible things happen. It certainly would have
shattered any kind of conventional faith.

Elaine Pagels's intellect may have lacked conventional faith, but she
had the heart of a spiritual seeker. And her path was the church.

One somehow has to go on and find a way to hope again. And I found in
that church, the people gathered there in various ways, some solace
and some help.

Pagels transformed pain into scholarship, digging again into the
trove from Nag Hammadi. And this year hit the best-seller list with
BEYOND BELIEF: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF THOMAS. Scholars believe the
Apostle Thomas's Gospel was written at the time of Christ, along with
the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Pagels transformed pain into scholarship, digging again into the
trove from Nag Hammadi. And this year hit the best-seller list with
BEYOND BELIEF: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF THOMAS. Scholars believe the
Apostle Thomas's Gospel was written at the time of Christ, along with
the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Pagels believes John was written to counter Thomas.

The Gospel of John speaks of Jesus as the "light of the world,"
the "Divine One" who comes into the world to rescue the human race
from sin and darkness, and says, "if you believe in him, you can be
saved. You can have everlasting life. If you don't believe in him,
you go to everlasting death." The Gospel of Thomas, on the other
hand, speaks of Jesus as the "Divine Light" that comes from heaven,
but says, "and you, too, have access to that divine source within
yourself" -- even apart from Jesus. That might suggest you don't need
a church, or a priest, or an institution.

When asked if belief in Jesus as God been overemphasized in
Christianity, Pagels explains: "I think it has. Most people think
that if you're talking -- if you and I are talking about religion,
we're talking about, "Do you believe in God?" "Do you believe in
Jesus as the son of God?" It's not all about what you believe. It's
about what values we share. It's about what commitments we have to
the sacredness of life, for example."

There are people who think that this kind of exploration is
faithless, is antithetical, is damaging to God's truth.

I realize that I cannot live without a spiritual dimension in my
life. I mean, I was brought up to believe that that was some archaic
relic that we could live without. I don't think that is true anymore.
The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important
and the religious communities are also important. The question of
believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important,
because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on
other elements of the tradition.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_pagels.html

The Gospel of Thomas is a quite amazing text. It consists of just… it
starts with the words, "These are the secret words which the living
Jesus spoke. And Thomas wrote them down." And all it is, are sayings
of Jesus. But unlike the Gospels in the New Testament, like Matthew
and Luke, this one has not public teaching, but secret sayings. It
speaks about a Jesus who speaks about every one of us coming from
God's primordial light. It speaks about all beings coming from God.
The New Testament Gospel of John says Jesus is the light. Everything
refers to Jesus. Jesus teaches you have to believe in Jesus, you have
to follow Jesus. This Gospel is not about that.

Many of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are the same as you'll
find in the Gospel of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament. And some
of them are quite different. They're not simple. They're kind of
puzzles. They're koans. They're meant to be struggled with.
Jesus says things like, "If you bring forth what is within you, what
you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is
within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

We need to find spiritual resources within ourselves. And according
to this kind of source, the reason we can find it within ourselves,
is that we come from that source.

The clergy and hierarchy thought that it was dangerous to say, "Well,
you could go off and find God on your own. You don't need the beliefs
that the Church establishes. You don't need the Bishop, you don't
need to go to church. You don't need to be baptized." I mean, to say
that might make the church less important.

What fascinates me here is that so much of Christianity has turned
into a set of beliefs like, if people say, "Are you a Christian?" And
if you then say, "Well, what do you mean by that?" They'll usually
say, "Well, do you believe that Jesus is… whatever… the son of God."

Christianity becomes just a set of things you believe in. It's almost
an intellectual kind of abstract issue. But these texts don't talk
about what you believe in. They talk about what you experience, what
you know on the level of the heart.

One friend of mine during my adolescence, 16 years old, was was
killed in an automobile accident. I went back to the evangelical
church, I guess looking for comfort. And the people there
said, "Well, was he a Christian? Was he born again?" And I
said, "No." And they said, "Well then he's in hell." And I thought
this does not make sense to me. This is not a community in which I
can worship. It didn't make emotional or intuitive or religious sense
to me.

The Passover story is celebrated every year in Passover. It's about a
people in bondage and oppression, moving out of bondage and
oppression to deliverance and freedom. Or you take the story of
Jesus. It's about a man who suffers the worst things one can imagine,
you know? Arrest on a false charge. Torture, abandonment by his
friends. A terrible, painful death. And yet, that story goes on to
speak about hope. And that, in some ways, speaks to what we need to
hear, sometimes.

"Most of us, sooner or later, find at critical points in our life, we
must strike out on our own to make a path where none exists."

Many, with only the vaguest of road maps, try to find paths that may
be different for each of us. There are so many people, both Jewish
and Christian, who've given up religious belief altogether, who for
example, find themselves doing meditation in a Buddhist style. Or in
any other kind of way. Spiritual exploration takes many forms. It
often engages many traditions. And some people make fun of that, and
say this is convenient, or this is cafeteria-style religion. I think
this is simply the kind of exploration we need to do in the 21st
century.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAITH AND BELIEF

Faith is a quality of relationship. faith can be verified in
experience. If I have faith in you, or you have faith in me, it can
be betrayed, or it can be verified.

Belief can be a system. It can be, but many people say Christian
tradition traditionally said, "Well, believe in this. You have no
verification, but you're just supposed to take it on somebody else's
word." That's very different from verifying in experience the faith
that comes through relationship with another person, or with a divine
source.

Faith requires practice to validate. It requires practice and
experience and intuition, A kind of spiritual intuition. Many of
these ancient gnostic sources talk not about believing in God, but
about a human capacity. which is described as something each of us
has. To experience a connection with God, that happens just because
of the nature of our being.

SFG75 · Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005 11:41 pm Post subject:

This is one heck of a book Sitaram. I read it a few months back and all of the accolades this scholar receives are well-deserved. I in particular enjoyed hearing about how the gnostic gospels and their followers were marginalized by the larger, more dominant forces within christianity who were of the Pauline persuasion. While I expected a somewhat "dominance bashing" stance by Pagels, she did point out that it was necessary for christianity to eventually have a concise, and well organized system of beliefs in order to become a world power in terms of ideas. Had christianity maintained it's thousand different schisms, it's doubtful that many converts would have been won over in certain parts of the globe.

It is also nice that the more esoteric writings of early christians are being published and becoming more accesible to the average christian and non-believer alike. There are many books on the gospel of St. Thomas and others, but it's a shame that I didn't learn of these works much earlier in my life. With christianity in Europe dying off and the protestant churches as a whole, in decline, it could be these slumbering works that could inject some adrenaline into the faithful. Who knows?

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