finitum non capax infiniti

N.T. Wright is my favorite author, hands down. Every time I read his work I am encouraged, pushed, engaged, challenged, and learning. Do your self a favor and read everything he has ever written.

One of my friends at work asked me recently about the so-called “Gospel of Judas” lately, so I decided to read through Wright’s book Judas and the Gospel of Jesus again (it’s a short book and takes a few hours to read entirely). What my friend said to me was that they had heard, basically, that Christianity persecuted those who did not agree with them and who wrote different books. That is why the Bible only has 4 gospels.

According to PBS, ABC, and the History Channel, this may be correct. But according to actual history, nothing could be further from the truth. This excerpt from Wright’s book is lengthy, but profound and well worth reading more than once:

[The martyrdoms of Christians] is the Achilles heel of those who would propose, by whatever means, that we should somehow prefer the gnostic and similar writings to the canonical Scriptures. Reading Ehrman, Meyer and others, it is easy to forget that what was really going on at the time, and to imagine that Ignatius, Irenaeus and others like him were simply unpleasant and arrogant heresy-hunters, eager simply to prop up their own power and ecclesiastical systems. That, indeed, is the underlying argument of one of the best-known books within the whole modern rehabilitation of Gnosticism, Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels. Again and again she examines the conflict between emerging orthodoxy and the emerging Gnosticism, and offers what she calls a “political” explanation: Ignatius, Irenaeus and the rest were doing what they were doing–including embracing martyrdom, it seems–out of the driving passion they had for political control, for creating a monolithic ecclesial structure.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The people who were being burned at the stake, fried on hot irons, thrown to the wild beasts, pulled apart on the rack, and the other delights which the letter from Vienne and Lyons reports–these people did not imagine themselves to be on the way to a great political victory of “orthodoxy” over “heresy.” They were not, as is often suggested, settling down and making comfortable compromises with the status quo, anticipating by over a hundred years time when, much to the astonishment of the Christians following the horrific persecution of Diocletian, the Christian faith became first permitted and then official. They were following their crucified Lord. If what you want to do is to advance a program for ecclesial structure and control, highlighting your own official position within that program, it hardly seems sensible to embrace and teach a message which is likely to get you and other key leaders tortured and killed. Rather, what we see in Ignatius and Irenaeus is the natural insistence that, if the authorities are bent on persecuting the church, it is vital that this beleaguered little community stick together, and that is should hold on firmly, not to a grandiose or triumphalistic hierarchical structure, but to that leadership which, precisely by its unity across the traditional dividing lines of the human race, constitutes a sign to the powers of the world that Jesus is Lord and that they are not. The faith they were holding onto was making them, in the world’s terms, less powerful, not more.

Let’s be clear, then. The Christians who died in Gaul in 177, and the thousands who died around the whole Roman Empire in that century, were not reading “Thomas” or “Peter” or the “Gospel of Judas.” They were reading, quoting, praying and singing Matthew, Mark, Luke and John–the texts which nurtured their vivid faith in Jesus, not as a revealer of secret truths to help them escape the wicked world, but as the Lord they knew and loved, the one whose death and resurrection had unleashed a new power into the world, into people’s lives, giving them hope not for a disembodied spiritual bliss in a non-spatio-temporal world, but for the resurrection of the body in the renewal of the created order, a renewal which had already begun and was already making inroads into the real world. Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, 94-94.