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Find out what the church has been trying to hide for hundreds of years! In, 1945, in the Nag Hammadi region of Egypt, a cache of books was discovered; books that until that time had only been a matter of hearsay and the subject of vague and hostile references made by ancient writers of the early church.
The books found in Egypt were a nearly complete collection of the Gnostic Scriptures, and the story they told of the life and sayings of Jesus the Christ would forever change the way the history of early Christianity was viewed. In The Excluded Books of the Bible, author Sean Casteel offers an analysis of many of the excluded books discovered more than sixty years ago and explains why they are so different from the canonized scriptures we take for granted today! If you are interested in the Bible but seek to know more about the religious and historical truths that never made the cut, so to speak, then let The Excluded Books of the Bible take you on a journey into early Christianity and the strange ways of the Gnostic belief system, kept hidden for millennia by the politics of the self-appointed orthodox religious authorities. |
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Table of Contents |
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Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Sources and Recommended Reading
Copyright John Anthony Miller 2006 |
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Chapter One |
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Unearthing A Mystery
What determines whether a book is canonized scripture or just the ravings of a heretic? Who makes that decision for the many believers looking for a reasonable approach to questions of salvation and righteous behavior? Should we trust our individual instincts regarding our worship of God or follow the leadership of an organized clergy? What is the ultimate truth behind the many divergent accounts of the life of Jesus Christ? This book will grapple with those and other issues by examining an often overlooked school of religious thought-the Gnostics of early Christianity, a movement that was steadfastly denounced and vilified by the established church and whose writings were buried away in Egypt for nearly 1600 years. The discovery of those hidden texts has changed not only the way we think about that historical moment in time, but has also given us a new perspective on the sayings and deeds of Jesus that was impossible before. THE DISCOVERY AT NAG HAMMADI The story of how the Gnostic scriptures were found is almost as fascinating as the books themselves. James M. Robinson, writing in the introduction to the English translation of the complete cache of manuscripts, tells the tale this way: It was December of 1945, a time when the peasants of the Nag Hammadi region of Upper Egypt fertilize their crops. Two such farmers, the brothers Muhammad and Khalifah, were digging for a kind of soft soil that is used there as a fertilizer when they came upon the jar, made of red earthenware and about a meter high, containing the books. The jar had been hidden beneath a fallen boulder for more than a millennium. Muhammad was at first hesitant to break the jar, fearing that it may have housed a demon. But after thinking that the jar could possibly have contained gold, he decided to take his chances and smashed the jar open. "Out swirled golden-like particles that disappeared into the sky," Robinson wrote. "Neither jinns nor gold but perhaps papyrus fragments!" Muhammad wrapped the books in his cloak and took them home. Then the story rewinds to a time six months before, May 7, 1945, to be exact. That's when the father of the two brothers killed a marauder as he stood watch over irrigation equipment in the fields. The father was killed himself the next day in blood vengeance. "About a month after the discovery of the books," Robinson continued, "a peasant named Ahmad fell asleep sitting in the heat of the day on the side of the road near Muhammad's house, a jar of sugar-cane molasses for sale beside him. A neighbor pointed him out to Muhammad as the murderer of his father. He ran home and alerted his brothers and widowed mother, who had told her seven sons to keep their mattocks sharp. The family fell upon their victim, hacked off his limbs bit by bit, ripped out his heart, and devoured it among them, as the ultimate act of blood revenge." Ahmad, the brothers' victim, was the son of the local sheriff, and Muhammad feared having his house searched and the books discovered, so he passed some of them along to a local priest for safekeeping. The books would eventually be purchased by a series of Egyptian antiquities dealers, but not until after Muhammad's mother had burned a portion of them, thinking either that they were worthless or a possible source of bad luck. It wasn't until 1970 that a committee was formed to supervise the translation of the books from their original language of Coptic, which is the name given to Greek after it has been translated into Egyptian. Now that the job of translating the books has been completed, a new era of studying their contents has just begun. We await the verdict of scholars in our own time as well as that of the scholars to come. But whether we ever actually solve the many mysteries the Nag Hammadi find poses to us, we can at least rest assured in the knowledge that some of the world's greatest scholars of ancient writings are doing their utmost to decipher the truth. WHAT DOES "GNOSIS" MEAN? Gnosis is simply the Greek word for "knowledge." In the same way that those who claim to know nothing about the nature of God and reality in general are called "agnostics," literally "not knowing," the person who claims to know such things is called "Gnostic," according to Elaine Pagels in her landmark book The Gnostic Gospels. "But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge," Pagels cautions. "The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge ('He knows mathematics') and knowing through observation or experience ('He knows me'), which is gnosis. As the Gnostics use the term, we could translate it as 'insight,' for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny." Pagels takes that basic formula one step further. "Yet to know oneself," she writes, "at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis." Pagels then quotes the Gnostic teacher Monoiumus, who declares: "Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, 'My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.' Learn the source of sorrow, joy, love, hate. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find them in yourself." That inner-directed viewpoint seems fairly tame in our time, but among the ancient Christians those sentiments were considered blasphemy and heresy, and the Gnostics feared persecution from many elements that they had considered to be their fellow Christians. There existed a huge theological divide over the issue of the value of the experience of the individual looking inwardly to find God as opposed to finding God in the collective experience of the catholic or universal church. As is nearly always the case, history is written by the winners, and until the discovery of the Gnostic books in Nag Hammadi, the only historical accounts available about the Gnostic movement were to be found in the writings of the various orthodox religious leaders and historians who denounced them. WHY WERE THE GNOSTICS SO DIFFERENT? In addition to their focus on the subjective nature of genuine religious experience, the Gnostics also held to other beliefs that were hated by the orthodox. The Gnostics deified the feminine element of God, for instance, believing in God as both the Father and the Mother. They believed that Creation, the physical world, was created by an evil god, the equivalent of Satan, and that suffering, labor and death were not the fault of mankind's sin but of the wicked designer of reality. Some Gnostics did not believe in a literal resurrection, choosing instead to see Christ's rising from the dead in symbolic terms. Pagels points out that the orthodox church also held to what would seem to be some strange doctrines, such as the belief that God is perfectly good and yet created a world that includes pain, injustice and death; that Jesus was born of a virgin mother; that after being executed by Pontius Pilate, he rose from the grave on the third day. But the source of the conflict between the Gnostics and the orthodoxy, according to Pagels, was not just the many differences of opinion regarding religious and philosophical issues about Jesus. It was about control, specifically political control. A Christianity that required faith in a central church was much more likely to exert control over its masses of believers than one that counseled each individual to look within himself for answers. Which again is why the discovery of the Gnostic scriptures is so crucial, because it offers an alternative view of Christ, a view long hidden beneath the sands of Egypt, suppressed by the religious authorities of its time, and excluded from the Bible as we know it today. This book will attempt to give an overview of the Gnostics, their beliefs, and their relevance to today's world, and to break through the censorship that has existed since ancient times.
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