Now Playing: The Gospel of Thomas

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One Sunday morning several years ago, a most astonishing thing happened to me. I was attending services at a local church in Claremont, California, where I was a graduate student working on a (then) relatively obscure text known as the Gospel of Thomas. I rose and began to sing the announced hymn with the rest of the congregation. Then, right there in the third stanza of this early-20th-century hymn, I saw: “Lift the stone and you will find me, split the wood and I am there.” I only made it through the first phrase before my jaw dropped wide open. “Oh, my word,” I blurted loudly enough to attract my wife’s puzzled gaze. “It’s the Gospel of Thomas!”

Now, the thing is, this hymn was written in about 1915. But the Gospel of Thomas wasn’t discovered until 1945! I thought that I had witnessed a miracle, a prophecy, a channeling…something!…right there in the Congregational Church on this bright, sunny southern California morning. Naturally, I kept it to myself.

When I got home, I went straight to my study to verify the wonder. There it was all right, in the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel that contains 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Saying 77 of the gospel reads: “Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.” I was just about to launch a full-scale investigation when I noticed the footnote. Oh yes—the Greek fragments. You see, a complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas in the Coptic language was discovered only in 1945. But fragments of the original Greek version (versions, actually) had been discovered much earlier—around the turn of the century. They were published widely and heralded as newly discovered fragments of a “lost gospel.” Among them were the words of Saying 77: “Raise the stone and you will find me. Split the wood and I am there.” And so I read them in the footnote (now with the phrases in the right order), just as I had seen them in my hymnal earlier that morning. The hymn’s composer had obviously read these intriguing words in a popular publication of the “lost gospel,” remembered them and incorporated them into his song. Miracle over. Case closed.

Lost gospels, new discoveries, strange manuscripts…these always seem to curry the anticipation of something phenomenal. I can still recognize the expectant look in the eyes of a student encountering apocryphal gospels for the first time. And I’ve always felt that there was Hollywood potential there. As for myself, after 15 years of working on Thomas and other “lost” texts, I have become jaded. When Denys Arcand in Jesus of Montreal used Hebrew letters on the computer screen of a renegade priest to suggest that new, subversive information about Jesus had just come to light (through the use of computer technology?), I was only slightly amused. And when The X-Files built a whole show around a forged Gospel of Mary, which a fanatic bishop tries desperately to suppress, I almost wrote the producers to tell them that there really is a Gospel of Mary and that it’s even better than the forgery they dreamed up for the show. That is, by the way, the common plot through all of these lost gospel dramas (beginning perhaps with Richard Lang’s 1978 film, 039The Word): A new gospel is discovered, but church fanatics suppress it for fear that its disclosure would “bring down the church as we know it.”

The latest attempt in this emerging genre is Stigmata, a suspense thriller directed by Rupert Wainwright. But Wainwright takes the idea to new heights. He builds the story around an actual gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, and he uses sayings from the gospel to grind his own theological axe. The story unfolds as Frankie Paige (expertly played by Patricia Arquette), a 23-year-old atheist hairdresser by day, hedonist party animal by night, is possessed by the spirit of a dead priest. Father Alameida, however, was no ordinary priest. He was a renegade, on the run from the Vatican with the only copy of a gospel that he feared church authorities would suppress if they could ever get their hands on it. So, deep in the Brazilian jungle, hiding out in a village church, he secretly translates the lost gospel. But as he works, the profoundly troubling gospel plunges him into spiritual anguish—so deep and so intense that he is cursed/blessed with the marks of the stigmata.

Ah yes, the stigmata. The first and most celebrated case of stigmatization was that of Francis of Assisi in the 13th century. Legend has it that as Francis was praying one morning on Mt. La Verna, in northern Italy, he was confronted with the image of the crucified Christ. Thereafter Francis himself bore the marks of Jesus’ wounds, known as the stigmata (Latin for “signs”): the nail holes in his hands and feet and the piercing of his side, inflicted by a Roman spear. The stigmata are said to be wounds that cannot be cured and that always remain fresh. They are a sign of a saint’s struggle with the powerful forces of evil that killed Jesus. There are actually five stigmata: the holes in the hands and feet, the wounds from the crown of thorns, the lashes on the back, and the pierced side.

This was Father Alameida’s plight, and it is all transferred to Frankie Paige in Pittsburgh. Father Alameida’s spirit takes possession of Frankie’s body after her mother sends her the deceased padre’s rosary, which she bought on the streets of Brazil as a souvenir. If all of this seems a little unlikely, Wainwright does a pretty good job convincing you, with special effects, that it is all very possible. So far as I know, Wainwright is the first person to attempt to show how one actually gets the stigmata. In this version, at least, the wounds appear when demons attack your body, just as Jesus’ tormentors attacked his. It gets a little confusing: Sometimes Frankie is possessed by Alameida’s spirit, then sometimes by demons and other times, it seems, by Jesus himself. But the effect is dramatic—Frankie is pierced and whipped and generally thrown around by invisible demonic forces in several chaotic and frightening scenes. When Vatican officials hear about this, they send one of their investigators, Father Andrew Kiernan (played by Gabriel Byrne), to Pittsburgh to debunk the story. Kiernan (the good guy in the movie) battles against the demons for Frankie’s life. Soon, however, he finds himself fending off evil Vatican officials, too, who wish to suppress any knowledge Frankie has of Father Alameida’s lost gospel.

This lost gospel is key. Frankie, when possessed by Alameida, has the entirety of the gospel in her head and 040soon begins to write it down. She renders one of the verses in Latin, which Kiernan translates for her (Latin wasn’t in her cosmetology curriculum): “Lift the stone and you will find me, split a piece of wood and I am there.” “Beautiful,” Kiernan says, but he doesn’t recognize the verse. I did. The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 77 (the Greek version!). I was thrown off a little later, when Frankie wrote several verses from this gospel on her bedroom wall in Aramaic. So far as I or anyone else knows, Thomas never existed in Aramaic (or in Latin, for that matter); it was a Greek text (later translated into Coptic).^a Artistic license, I guess. At any rate, Kiernan photographs the verses and faxes them to a linguist friend at the Vatican. There, however, they fall into the hands of the Vatican officials who have been trying for years to hunt down the renegade priest, Father Alameida, and regain the dangerous gospel he possesses. They recognize the lost gospel for the threat that it is, and well, what comes next is predictable, as Hollywood genre takes over: The evil institution of the church, which could not recognize a miracle or the gospel if it were as plain as bloody tears running down the face of a marble statue of the Virgin, seeks to destroy the truth that would destroy it. It is quite suspenseful, and the special effects are better than what I remember from, say, The Exorcist. All in all, the film is pretty entertaining fiction.

But Wainwright isn’t finished yet. Before the credits roll, he displays one of those afterword comments that are supposed to help you put the story in context. It reads: “In 1945 a scroll was discovered in Nag Hammadi…the Gospel of Thomas…claimed by scholars around the world to be the closest record we have of the words of the historical Jesus. The Vatican refuses to recognize this gospel and has described it as heresy.”

Now, what does this mean? That the events of the movie could have happened? That they sort of did happen? Huh?

I am one of those “scholars around the world.” And I know most of the others. These things did not happen, nor could they. Here’s what did.

In 1945 a whole library of texts was discovered in, yes, Nag Hammadi. That is in Egypt, where the monks who likely preserved this library and eventually hid it spoke and wrote Coptic. So, our only surviving copy of Thomas is in Coptic. Originally it was written in Greek—not Latin or Aramaic. An Aramaic Thomas would be astounding, for that could indeed put Thomas closer to Jesus’ original words—assuming that Jesus spoke Aramaic. But alas, there is no Aramaic Thomas. Thomas is just like the other known gospels in this respect. It is an interpretation of Jesus, a rendering of his sayings, several decades removed from his actual voice.^b

The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945, but it wasn’t actually published until 1957. This might lead some to suspect a conspiracy—but if there was one, the church played no role in it. The problem with getting texts to scholars, and then to the broader public, has to do with how manuscripts are usually discovered and handled. Churches seldom come into play. In the case of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, the finders did not immediately realize the value of their discovery and so did not move quickly to dispose of it. Antiquities dealers and speculators soon entered the picture. Some of the texts were sold, only to be smuggled into private collections. Others were 041nationalized and taken into custody by the Coptic Museum in Cairo, which led to a series of legal battles over their ownership. Then came the Suez crisis of 1956, which delayed work even further. Once scholars finally got hold of the texts, the issue of intellectual property rights came into play. The work soon fell into the hands of a small cartel of scholars, who denied others access to them. The translation and publication of the texts slowed to a snail’s pace. Eventually the cartel was broken, and the texts were expeditiously published.¹ Today all of the Nag Hammadi texts are widely available. (In the case of another famous find from the same era, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the same kind of delay and ultimate disclosure occurred.)

At no point did the Vatican or any other church authority factor into this story. So far as I know, church governing bodies are not much concerned with such things. No Vatican officials cruise the antiquities shops of Cairo looking for scary renegade gospels. No “Gospels Commission” labors in secret behind Vatican walls, translating various dangerous noncanonical texts. In Stigmata Father Alameida was part of an elite team of three translators, each of whom received only a third of a manuscript to translate, so that none of them could get the whole picture before the Vatican made a decision on the gospel’s acceptability. Nonsense. At one point, Father Domenico, the last translator still remaining from the team, tells Father Kiernan of 35 untranslated and unknown gospels still being studied. Unless the Vatican guards its secrets as well as the CIA, this, too, is pure fiction. The translation of the world’s most important ancient manuscripts is a widely dispersed activity. There is no design to it. Vatican scholars might occasionally be involved, but only as their expertise and interest would allow. The Nag Hammadi texts were translated by Americans in Claremont, Canadians in Quebec, French in Paris and Germans in Berlin, all by happenstance as texts became available to them. The Americans, for example, worked from photographs bootlegged from the study of a Paris scholar who was reputedly spending more time sampling the restaurants of Paris than translating the texts entrusted to him.

Could the Roman Catholic Church suppress the publication of a text? No, not very likely. Would it want to? Again, no. The Roman Catholic canon of scripture was established in the 16th century at the Council of Trent, and it has not changed since. The books of the Bible are set. This means that anything new that comes along, regardless of its content, will not become authoritative for the Catholic Church and so can be greeted more or less with indifference. (This is true of Protestant denominations as well.) I do not recall anyone from the Vatican expressing a strong opinion on any newly discovered text, whether ancient or modern. No text, no matter how dramatic its contents, could “bring down the church as we know it.” 051In the Gospel of Philip, a third-century apocryphal text well known among scholars, Jesus is said to have “kissed” Mary Magdalene “on the lips.” If that didn’t bring down the house, I can’t imagine what would!

The story of the most recent gospel discovery may paint a more realistic picture than what we find in Stigmata or movies of its ilk. In 1967 a fragmentary parchment manuscript was purchased by the Egyptian Museum in Berlin from a Dutch antiquities dealer for about 300 Deutschmarks. The museum staff catalogued the manuscript and did some initial preservation work, but then stored it away with thousands of other manuscripts. There it lay for the next 25 years. In 1991 an American scholar, Paul Mirecki, took note of the manuscript and transcribed some of it, but then laid it aside for other projects that seemed more pressing. In 1995 another American, Charles Hedrick, also found the manuscript in storage in Berlin. He, too, began to transcribe and translate it. Soon Hedrick and Mirecki were working together. Still, the work of editing a manuscript is painstaking and time consuming. It would be another five years before the Gospel of the Savior finally made its debut in the scholarly world.^c Now, 33 years after its purchase, it can be read by anyone.² I must confess I visited that same storage area of the Egyptian museum many times myself in the 1980s, but never took notice of this manuscript. Had I looked carefully, I might have read:

Whoever is near me, is near to the fire;
Whoever is far from me, is far from the fire.

This is very close to the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 82, which reads: “Whoever is near to me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the kingdom.” This saying of Jesus is known otherwise only from the early church father Origen. Had I seen that, I would have taken note indeed! But I did not. And that is the less-than-glamorous truth about how and why lost gospels become lost in the first place.

There are probably many similar as-yet-unknown gospels sitting unnoticed in museums all over the world. They are not suppressed. No one is fighting off stigmata-inflicting demons to read them. There are simply not enough scholars with enough time to tend to the task of “discovering” them, translating them and publishing them for the world to see. We do not see the importance of these ancient things. And in that sense Stigmata makes a point worth underscoring. Perhaps we do underestimate the power of these ancient texts to move us in our modern world. Perhaps our expectations of religious discovery in general are too low. How much gospel truth are we missing as we ignore the past for more pressing engagements? We may never know.

Will newly discovered texts like the Gospel of Thomas ever lead to significant changes in the way Christians understand their faith? Perhaps. But this will take time, for it takes time to assess the value of a newly discovered text. Now, after more than 50 years, Thomas is in fact beginning to change the way many scholars think about early Christianity. For example, in the ongoing debate about the historical Jesus, Thomas has played a significant role in the development 052of the hypothesis that Jesus was a wisdom sage and did not (contrary to the canonical view) think that the world was about to end or that he would play a role in this catastrophic end. What would Christianity be like if it were not centered around an apocalyptic drama at the end of time? Such shifts in thinking would not bring about Christianity’s demise, but they would certainly alter the way many approach their faith.

Will texts like Thomas ever become part of a new, expanded Christian canon of scripture? Again, maybe, but only after much time and reflection. The canon of scripture—what Christians find when they open a Bible—is the result of centuries of church life. Texts “made it” into the Bible largely on the basis of their usefulness to lives of faith. Of course, what was useful in the 16th century may not still be useful. And texts that were suppressed because they were useful to heretics could conceivably find new life among more tolerant believers today. But that remains to be seen. Again, Thomas is somewhat of an exceptional case here, since it is preserved reasonably intact, is relatively easy to understand and has become quite well known. I have heard, anecdotally, of mainstream churches in which Thomas is occasionally read from the pulpit, and thus treated as scripture. But this is not true of the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of the Savior and other less-known and more obtuse ancient works. Still, the fact that many churches are far more open to diversity of opinion, and are less committed to firm doctrinal boundaries (not even the Pope has burned anyone at the stake lately!), means that in principle the canon of Christian scripture could eventually include newly discovered works that believers find beautiful and inspiring.

And what of the stigmata? Could reading an ancient text land you in the emergency room with unexplained holes in your hands and feet? I can speak from personal experience here. After spending a good deal of time with Thomas and other mysterious texts from the ancient world, I have yet to be “stigmatized.” The only stigmata or signs I bear from this work are a thick pair of glasses and an aching back, modern tortures to be sure, but not so bad in the greater scheme of things.

One Sunday morning several years ago, a most astonishing thing happened to me. I was attending services at a local church in Claremont, California, where I was a graduate student working on a (then) relatively obscure text known as the Gospel of Thomas. I rose and began to sing the announced hymn with the rest of the congregation. Then, right there in the third stanza of this early-20th-century hymn, I saw: “Lift the stone and you will find me, split the wood and I am there.” I only made it through the first phrase before my jaw dropped wide […]