Gnostic Gospels
Gnostic Gospels
As we have noted, comparing many other surviving “gospels” with the canonical ones is somewhat like comparing apples and oranges. If this observation is true regarding apocryphal gospels, which are essentially novels but at least share the canonical Gospels’ narrative form, it is much more the case with regard to “gnostic gospels,” most of which are largely collections of sayings. (While Jesus researchers are happy to study Jesus’ teachings, what we could say about his “life” would be severely limited if these sources were all we had to work with.)
With regard to literary form, the gnostic gospels are nothing like the canonical Gospels; they are called gospels only because they purport to convey good news.43 Thus at most we could look there for some of Jesus’ sayings, not a biographic narrative about him (though some do frame sayings with narrative, the emphasis is normally on the sayings). Much of what we find in the gnostic “gospels” are in fact random sayings collections including both sayings of Jesus (often randomly arranged) and later gnosticizing words attributed to him.
Indeed, most of what appears in the gnostic gospels is not helpful even for reconstructing Jesus’ teachings. Most sayings that first surface in the gnostic “gospels” are hardly early, though the earlier of these collections may preserve or adapt some authentic agrapha as well as sayings also reported in our canonical gospels.44 The collections as a whole are tendentious in a gnosticizing (and hence later) direction and lack most of the sort of early Palestinian Jewish material frequently found in the Synoptics and even John.45
The leading gnostics for the most part represented an academic elite, and in their purely gnostic form never commanded a majority within ancient circles of Christians. It is also unclear to what degree the plethora of “gospels” and other works functioned as “canon” among them, and to what degree some gnostic schools appreciated the authority of other gnostic schools’ revelations. Groups categorized as gnostic by the later church were more diverse than we usually assume;46 today some scholars even regard our category as anachronistic, a neologism.47 Gnostics emphasized the secrecy of their knowledge partly because they appealed to an elite class of “insiders,”48 but probably also because they lacked any true sources that allowed them to claim earlier public traditions.