Endnote 4 – Why Christians Must Search for the Historical Jesus

Gnostic Christianity is, throughout history, the permanent shadow of Catholic Christianity. It is evident wherever faith ignores facts, dominant wherever theology avoids history and triumphant wherever Christian theologians look only to heaven and not equally to earth. Catholic Christianity lives in the dialectic of those dichotomies and also in that of body and soul, flesh and spirit. It dies whenever that dialectic is diminished, denied or destroyed. What is open for discussion is whether examples of Gnostic Christianity’s present ascendancy include such scholars as Luke Timothy Johnson and, unless they did not read him carefully, those authors who praised him on his book’s cover.