As I Look Upon The Morning Star

opinions

finally! a chance to blog.

It's been two days since I created this thing, and I've barely been able to sit down and collect my thoughts, let alone clickety-click-click them into the world wide web.

So today I'm thinking about the dozens of "gospels" out there, with the presentation of the Gospel of Judas hitting the airways this evening.

The gospel of Judas, like the texts found in Nag Hammadi in Egypt, is considered coptic, or gnostic in nature. What does this mean? Well, Gnosticsm is the belief that through knowledge we redeem ourselves. According to Marian Webster: "the thought and practice especially of various cults of late pre-Christian and early Christian centuries distinguished by the conviction that matter is evil and that emancipation comes through gnosis." The word "gnosis" is greek and literally translates to knowledge.

Now the argument is that the gnostic books were destroyed by the church and should not have been, because the books contain thoughts and ideas that support a desired way of life. Is that about the gist of it? Every piece I've ever read by a gnostic sympathiser amounts to about this.

THE TRUTH:

Yes, the church decided that these gnostic gospels are bunk.

The church did destroy some of them, simply to prevent the spread of error. The Church is not to offer conflicting ideals, but to make a unified stand on the teachings of its head, who is Christ. As Christians, we don't believe salvation is something we can achieve by any effort on our part, but is a gift from God: "Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb." (Rev 7:10)

See, the early Church had the teaching already, and selected the books that supported it; not the other way around, as the gnostics would have had it. This is why the books that did not support the teachings of Christ as passed down through the 12 Apostles and their successors were discarded. It wasn't their right, but their RESPONSIBILITY.

Sure, the Church knew that copies of the texts would survive, and certainly more than the ones found at Nag Hammadi are certainly not the only texts of antiquity that exist. There are the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Epoch of Gilgamesh, the works of Flavius Josephus; not to mention the Bible.