Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas
Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagel’s book Beyond Belief is somewhat a continuation of her book, the Gnostic Gospels. It was written more than 20 years later, and in addition to being a historical account of the Gospel of Thomas, it also includes elements of a memoir. The results is a book that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It isn’t a memoir, however, the elements of memoir make it so that it doesn’t quite read as history either.

Pagels’ focus, “is how certain Christian leaders from the second century through the fourth came to reject many other sources of revelation and construct instead, the New Testament gospel canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, along with the ‘canon of truth,’ which became the nucleus of the later creeds that have defined Christianity to this day.” Pagels chooses the Gospel of Thomas as a vehicle for comparison to the canonical gospels, particularly the Gospel of John. Of all the canonical gospels, John is the gospel believed by most scholars, to have been most heavily influenced by the gnostics. Pagels describes the process by which canonical and gnostic gospels, rather than being complementary, were set up to be rivals by the men who were intent on establishing a universal Christian church.

Her protagonist is not Thomas but instead, Irenaeus, the 2nd century BCE Bishop of Lyons. Despite his hard-line orthodoxy, Pagels portrays his motives with sensitivity and understanding. He was the primary architect of the four-Gospel canon. She points out that he wasn’t opposed to diverse interpretations of scripture; what he opposed was the gnostics’ methods. The gnostics were what we might today call elitist. For example, they believed that there were two levels of baptism. The basic level required a person to repent past sins, confess his faith to Jesus Christ, and promise to live according to that faith. The second level required “soul-searching” - asking question after question to know oneself (gnosis) and attain spiritual transformation, therefore becoming Christ-like. This division of the congregation into “basic” and “higher level” Christians greatly concerned Irenaeus because of its exclusivity. Pagels does a wonderful job explaining Irenaeus’s motives. He was not a philosopher, but instead was a person thrust into a leadership position at a young age who had grown up watching his teachers and mentors violently persecuted and killed. Any threat to Christian unity was concerning to him. He believed unity was needed to create a strong community assured in the strength of its common faith against Roman foes.

As Pagels shows the progression of the orthodoxy and its growing strength against the decline of gnosticim, she incorporates pieces of her own spiritual evolution. Like Irenaeus, her own journey is rooted in grief. She must navigate the impact of the death of her young son on her personal beliefs. While I sympathized with her personal journey, I felt that it was a bit misplaced in this particular book. She didn’t focus on it enough. However, if she had, the historicism of the journey away from gnosticism and toward orthodoxy would have lost its focus and therefore power. It would have been better to write a separate and more in-depth memoir. Instead, she inconsistently sprinkled in personal thoughts and feelings that felt out of place. I enjoyed reading the historical aspects of Beyond Belief. And I would have loved to read more about her own personal journey. Just not in the same book. ( )

This was an excellent history of how our scriptures were compiled. In truth, I only give it 3 stars because the title was a misdirect for me. Had hoped the book focused on Thomas. ( )

Yes, more early Christian history. Pagels presents a fascinating view of early Christian politics and the fight between the authors and followers of the gospels of John and Thomas. If the gnostics had won that particular battle, the course of history would have been quite different. ( )

Pagels here describes the differences between the Gospel of Thomas, a gnostic text and the gospel of John, an orthodox text. She puts forth that John is written to combat certain heresies identified by the orthodox bishop Iraneus (or his predecessor, I can't remember right now) -- specifically the heresies in thomas: that God is in us and we are in God.

A fun and easily read romp. ( )

The author argues for an ongoing assessment of faith and a questioning of religious orthodoxy. Spurred on by personal tragedy and new scholarship from an international group of researchers, she investigates the “secret” Gospel of Thomas and breathes new life into writings once thought heretical. As she arrives at an ever-deeper conviction in her faith, she reveals how faith allows for a diversity of interpretations, and that the “rogue” voices of Christianity encourage and sustain “the recognition of the light within us all.”