Quotes of the Day

The Cross talked. And walked. Jesus had died the day before, uttering his last words: "My power, O power, you have left me behind!" His body was taken down and placed in the tomb. But now, as the Sabbath dawned, a great voice came from the sky, and two men descended. The stone blocking the tomb rolled away of its own accord, and while Roman soldiers gaped, "three men emerge(d) from the tomb, two of them supporting the other, with a Cross following behind. The heads of the two reached up to the sky, but the head of the one they were leading went up above the skies. And they heard a voice, 'Have you preached to those who are sleeping?' And a reply came from the Cross, 'Yes.'"

It is a surreal Resurrection: the all-important Christian instant, but garbled, like a favorite song issuing from the bottom of a deep well. And yet according to the new book Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, by Bart Ehrman, it was Holy Writ for several centuries to some early Christian communities in the Middle East. The passage comes from something called the Gospel of Peter. You probably haven't heard of Peter because by A.D. 350 church fathers had tarred it as heresy, along with dozens of other early Scriptures with names like the Gospel of Mary, the Acts of John, the Homilies of Clement and the Gospel of Truth. Thus Peter and the others languished in ignominy, more or less forgotten.

Until now. Recently these texts-you might think of them as lost Christianities if you're a religious liberal or as early heresies if you're a conservative-have been experiencing a resurrection of their own. Their renaissance is unlikely to reinstate them in the exalted company of the canonical New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But it fills a perceived need for alternative views of the Christ story on the part of New Age seekers and of mainline believers uncomfortable with some of their faith's theological restrictions. This yearning is transforming the once obscure texts into objects of popular discourse. Their rising cultural profile can be seen in:

The Da Vinci Code. A key plot point in Dan Brown's best-selling novel, with 4.3 million copies in print, is that the Roman Catholic Church suppressed 80 alternative Gospels, several describing a physical relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Other reinterpretations of Mary Magdalene. Feminist biblical scholars like Harvard's Karen King use some of these texts to argue that far from being a wanton prostitute, Magdalene was seen by some as a disciple whose standing rivaled that of the Apostle Peter .

The Matrix trilogy. The movies' premise that the world we know is neither good nor real but the creation of a malign power echoes early texts that are now known as Gnostic. Similar themes mark the work of science-fiction patriarch Philip K. Dick, whose stories have been turned into movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report and John Woo's Paycheck, opening on Christmas. nChurch study groups. Princeton professor Elaine Pagels won a National Book Award for her 1979 essay The Gnostic Gospels, which explored those alternative interpretations of the Christ story. The book was a surprise best seller, and three titles later, study groups at churches around the country are using Pagels' works to supplement more traditional Bible studies.

New-Age rituals. More and more people are turning to ancient Christian texts to develop their own religious rites.

What explains our current fascination with long-discounted stories and the long-dead communities that told them? For one thing, it is the latest expression of mainline Christians' ongoing challenge of their received verities. In the 1990s this impulse fueled the "historical Jesus" debates as liberal scholars questioned the historical accuracy of the New Testament and whittled the Gospels down to the few verses that seemed factually plausible to them (yes to Jesus' healings, no to his Resurrection). Now the same restlessness is causing some believers to look beyond the established texts to heretical or noncanonical Scriptures. If we were willing to question the Gospel writers' historical accuracy, goes the implicit argument, why should we blindly accept their institutional successors' judgment that other texts were utterly devoid of the spiritual truth? Or as Marcus Borg, author of The Heart of Christianity, bluntly puts it, "There's a lot of interest in early Christian diversity because many people who have left the church-and some who are still in it-are looking for another way of being Christian."

The recovered texts also feed America's ever sharpening appetite for mystical spirituality. At least since Eastern disciplines became popular in the 1970s, some Christians have searched their own tradition for an inner path to the divine, hoping to balance or even supplant the sometimes dry diet of Sunday churchgoing. Yoga, the Cabala and Marianne Williamson have been taken up by those seeking a relationship with God that is not strictly tethered to Christianity. But some of the lost Christianities encourage esoteric knowledge and practice while maintaining Christ's teachings as their center. Pagels quotes an American-born Zen priest as joking, "Had I known the Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn't have had to become a Buddhist!"

The ancient texts also address questions-about evil and suffering in the world, about the relationship of body and soul, about God's simultaneous closeness to and apparent distance from us-that never seem totally settled in this age of second-guessing and postmodern mix and match. Traditional Christianity, for example, may explain alienation-the feeling that we don't really belong here-by saying we are all just passing through this sin-stained world on our way to Christ's Kingdom. But the feeling of disjunction continues to gnaw at many and, especially for young people, seems only to worsen. Hence we toy with the Gnostic idea that our seeming reality is an evil sham-even if only within the safe confines of cyberpunk fantasy, as when The Matrix's Morpheus tells Neo, "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth."

That these yearnings are finding such expression, however, owes everything to a recent scholarly reappraisal of the early development of Christianity. The faith's historical silhouette was traditionally thought to resemble that of a hardwood tree: bushy with denominational profusion on top, but plumb line straight in its bottom half, theologically unified down through the hardy "primitive church" and on, through apostolic roots, to Christ. To be sure, there was some record of early deviations, or heresies. But they seemed minor, perverse curiosities of limited interest.

Later, however, as more "heretical" artifacts surfaced, scholars began suggesting that early Christianity may have been far more diverse than was previously acknowledged. This theory received a significant boost in 1945, when the discovery of a remarkable trove of noncanonical Gospels (biographies of Christ), epistles and apocalypses near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi enabled several previously mute traditions to speak for themselves. Gradually, the more liberal historians came to view early Christianity not as an oak but as a mangrove, a welter of trunks with names like Gnosticism, Ebionism and Marcionism, each offering a different vision of Christ and Christians. The "orthodox" stem, they concluded, had only gradually strangled or absorbed the others. The scarcity of lost texts, the revisionists decided, did not reflect unpopularity in their day so much as a later campaign by the church to eliminate what it deemed misguided teaching.

Haltingly, then with increasing enthusiasm, cultural interpreters have explored this reversal's possible implications. Examining the Nag Hammadi trove, Pagels has identified a bouquet of elements attractive to the modern spiritual seeker: echoes of Buddhism and Freud and a lively appreciation of women's spiritual role. She claims to have found a Christianity less keyed to make-or-break beliefs like the virgin birth or even Christ's divinity and more accepting of salvation through ongoing spiritual experience. Some of the texts, she has written, deserve to be considered "not as 'madness and blasphemy,' but as Christians in the first centuries experienced them-a powerful alternative to what we now know as orthodox Christian tradition."

The current flurry of popular interest in the subject can be traced to Brown's The Da Vinci Code. A rowdy carnival barker of a thriller, it accuses the Roman Catholic Church of concealing the "true" sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene by suppressing early alternative Scriptures. In a much watched abc news special on Magdalene that aired in November, Brown extended the lure of the forbidden to the entire noncanonical library, saying "The question historians ask themselves is, If the church was making such a concerted effort to destroy this information, you have to assume that it was fairly explosive."

Presumably, this sentiment will gain a yet wider audience when Ron Howard delivers his film The Da Vinci Code, scheduled for release in 2005.

Darker imaginations, meanwhile, have fixed on grimmer aspects of the recovered texts. Writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski have been intentionally coy about their debt to Gnosticism. But their Matrix trilogy's catchy yet disturbing message that our waking world is an illusion and that we can somehow break out of it by using esoteric knowledge (in this case, hacking) might have been ripped straight from 1,800-year-old noncanonical classics such as the Gospel of Truth and the Origin of the World.

The recovered manuscripts don't speak unanimously. Lost Christianities author Ehrman, who chairs the religious-studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, notes that some of the early Christians believed in one God, some in two, and others in 30. "There were some who believed Jesus' death brought about the world's salvation," he says, "and others who thought it had nothing to do with it. Others said Jesus never died." But all the lost Christianities shared one conviction: that Jesus Christ's relatively recent presence, activity and fate on this earth were of transcendent importance. They grappled with essential questions of sin, death and Christ's nature. Some of their answers are interesting now mostly for their oddity (one text tells the Garden of Eden story from the serpent's viewpoint; another speaks in the voice of a female divinity). Others illustrate stages, eventually left behind, in the development of the Christianity we know today. And still others are compelling enough to stir both conservative fears and liberal hopes. A charting of the full theological kaleidoscope would take volumes, but it is possible, using Ehrman's book as a jumping-off point, to examine some of the more striking and widespread of the Christian roads not taken.

THE EBIONITES
The earliest of the now banned faiths might be described as Christianity still climbing out of its Jewish shell. Jesus was a Jew, and groups like the Ebionites insisted a person had to be Jewish to be his follower. They made use of ritual baths and prayed facing Jerusalem. They believed in Christ but saw him, as Ehrman puts it, "as the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of Jewish Scripture." The Ebionites' Jesus was not a member of an eternal Trinity. They claimed he was a man whose original distinction was that he kept the entire Jewish law-with its hundreds of commandments handed down from God through Moses-to perfection and that God recognized this extraordinary righteousness by adopting him as his son and assigning him a special mission: to sacrifice himself in atonement for human sin.

Several of these ideas obviously run counter to today's Scripture, notably the Gospel of John's celebration of Jesus' divinity from the dawn of time ("In the beginning was the Word"). But then the Ebionites' good book excluded John. It consisted of the Old Testament and most of the Gospel of Matthew, which emphasizes Jesus' Jewishness. The Ebionites had a particular dislike for Paul, referring to him as an "enemy," owing to his claims that belief in Christ made the entirety of Jewish law irrelevant for salvation. In the Ebionites, you can see a people struggling to digest into a much loved set of beliefs an element so radical that it would eventually separate itself entirely. That they were able to maintain themselves for centuries suggests how flexible early Christianity was.

THE MARCIONITES
The ebionites' mirror opposites, the Marcionites, made a point of eliminating even the smallest speck of Judaism from their Christianity. And they achieved spectacular success, dominating the new faith in parts of Asia Minor and influencing it elsewhere for hundreds of years. In order to do so, however, they created two Gods.

The sect's founder, Marcion, a shipping magnate in the Black Sea port of Sinope, traveled to Rome in about A.D. 139 and impressed himself on its Christian church with a princely donation of 200,000 sesterces. He then produced two books of theology and convened church leaders to discuss them. Upon reading the works, the leaders excommunicated him and returned his money.

Like other theologians, Marcion struggled with the existence of suffering and death in the world. But his explanation for them differed vividly from the eventual Christian conclusion that Adam's original sin had corrupted God's good creation. Instead, Marcion decided that the world and its complaints had been created by a bad God, a harsh Jewish deity who imposed a death sentence on humanity when it could not meet his law's impossibly high standards. The "God of Jesus," meanwhile, was a totally unrelated and unanticipated figure. This loving deity appeared one day from heaven and sacrificed himself to free humanity from his vengeful predecessor. Those who accepted him would be relieved of sin and would triumph over death; those who did not would remain in the Jewish God's angry clutches and hence, eventually, go to hell.

By neatly separating the two Gods, Marcion, says Ehrman, managed to emphasize what many in the Roman Empire found most enchanting about Christianity-love, grace, opposition to this harsh world and salvation from it-while getting rid of its less appealing aspects-law, guilt, judgment, eternal punishment and close ties to Judaism, a faith many saw as odd. Ehrman imagines that for many Marcionites "there was probably a burst of energy that came with being relieved from the law and the God that gave it, a little like the one born-again Christians have today when they realize that the burden of sin has been lifted from them and they have been saved. I think it was a type of ecstasy."

The price of that ecstasy, however, was the abandonment of the idea of monotheism and the acceptance of a totally otherworldly Christ, whose nonmembership in breathing, bleeding humanity would seem to negate his agony on the Cross. This angered the founders of today's church, many themselves facing martyrdom for the faith. It might make Marcion's vision unappetizing even today. Yet Ehrman reports that as he describes parts of it, he often sees people nodding. Many, he thinks, tend to see Jesus as primarily heavenly. Others, when confronted with some of the harder Old Testament stories, retreat to the (inaccurate) notion that the Jewish God is a "God of wrath" and different from the New Testament's "God of love." These people would not get up today and follow the man from Sinope, says Ehrman, "but they're kind of closet Marcionites."

THE GNOSTICS
Gnosticism may have originally been an adaptation of Greek philosophy. Ehrman summarizes it as follows: "The world is miserable, a cesspool of ignorance and suffering ... and it's not even really our world. We come from somewhere else, and salvation is finding our way back." Like Marcion, the Christian Gnostics believed that our troubled world and deteriorating bodies were created by an inferior (they would add malign) deity. Their particular conviction was that at the last instant a higher, better God inserted in each of us a spark of his divinity. If we could attain enough knowledge (gnosis in Greek) to conquer our delusional attachment to material reality, we could free our spiritual selves to join our real Father in a better place. The world, to paraphrase James Joyce, was a nightmare from which the Gnostics were trying to awake. And Christ was the alarm clock. Gnosticism saw him as the envoy of gnosis, sent by the true God to enlighten and free us. The Crucifixion was secondary; after all, Christ was merely shucking off his fleshly body. His real task was to transmit a special wisdom (alluded to in Gnostic writings but not spelled out) that would liberate us.

There is something simultaneously repellent and seductive about this myth. Repellent because most of us today tend to see our world as a mixed bag of good and bad, and the Gnostic references to it as a "corpse" seem harshly dismissive. Seductive because the Gnostics, suggests Ehrman, "were saying religiously what we tend to say psychologically." Or fictionally, as when Morpheus explains to Neo that humans are "born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch" but promises to set him free.

FOLLOWERS OF THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
The gnostics were élitist-most felt that only a fraction of humans were capable of their kind of salvation-but among themselves they were democratic, abandoning titles like bishop or deacon for a kind of commonwealth of individual inspiration. Some accepted the testimony of anyone who felt moved to prophesy in God's voice, with women participating equally with men. This irked critics who were building a church with the hierarchy and discipline to withstand Roman persecution. Attendees at Gnostic services "all have access equally," grumbled Tertullian, a church father who helped consolidate the Christianity we know today. "They pray equally ... they share the kiss of peace with all, for they do not care how differently they treat topics. All are arrogant. All offer you gnosis!"

Tertullian loathed the preference of "heretics" for personal knowledge and experience of God over the great communal truths of the faith. One of the most intriguing manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi is the Gospel of Thomas. In it the dual-world thesis fades so far into the background that some scholars have suggested it isn't even Gnostic. Either way, it provokes thought. It consists of 114 sayings, most attributed to Jesus. Some are nearly identical to verses from Matthew, Mark and Luke. But others, notes Ehrman, "take a twist." For instance, Saying 2 begins, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds" (which sounds a lot like "Seek and ye shall find"). But it resumes, "When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all."

Several other verses extol knowledge, frequently self-knowledge, in terms that would not be out of place in a therapist's office. "That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves," reads Saying 70. Thomas, writes Pagels, "encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus, as to (try) to know God through one's own, divinely given capacity."

She contrasts this pointedly with traditional Christianity's emphasis that salvation depends on, among other things, accepting Christ's divinity and his exclusive claim, expressed in the Gospel of John, that "no one comes to the Father except through me." There can be little doubt as to which she prefers. Having "moved away" from a youthful Evangelicalism she calls "very exclusive and hostile," she writes of being drawn back to Christianity after a series of personal tragedies, but of tempering her faith with ideas she had been studying in the Nag Hammadi trove. Her exposure to Thomas, she told Time, "was like opening a window, allowing more room for openness, for possibilities."

A GNOSTIC NATION?
By the late 300s most of the alternative Christianities had disappeared. Liberals tend to see this as a straightforward consequence of imperial laws against possession of "heretical" texts, instituted after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted and proto-orthodox bishops became the shepherds of their former persecutors.

Conservatives, however, regard the lost Christianities' eclipse as guided by God's hand. The Catholic historian Raymond Brown's review of one of Pagels' early books called her topic "the rubbish of the second century," adding that it was "still rubbish." Others argue that long before the creeds were written or the canon set, there was a recognized core of Christian belief and that Ebionites, Marcionites and Gnostics were on its dubious fringes. They ask how widespread Gnosticism could have been given the absorption of detailed secret lore involved. "It was insider-trading knowledge and only for those capable of understanding," says Ben Witherington of Kentucky's Asbury Theological Seminary.

Orthodoxy, by contrast, was "good news and salvation for everyone, and you didn't need a Ph.D. to understand it." Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation, suggests that the lost variants' new enthusiasts are guilty of theological cherry-picking. "They take the parts they like and reject the rest," she says. And the parts they take, most critics agree, do little but add to Americans' accelerating spiritual narcissism.

It is said that no idea, once conceived, ever really disappears. And echoes of the early Christianities, either intentional or subconscious, resound all over the country today. Literary critic Harold Bloom has claimed for years that Americans' intense emphasis on personalized contact with the divine exceeds the bounds of Christianity proper and tends toward Gnosticism. What are the Jews for Jesus if not a modern attempt to try to square the Judeo-Christian circle that preoccupied the Ebionites? When congregants in a modern Pentecostal church, both male and female, stand up and prophesy, the free-flowing movement of the Spirit is one that might have reminded church fathers like Tertullian of the Gnostic meetings they criticized. And the New Age impulse, which becomes more a part of our mainstream each decade, is about nothing if not the attainment of personal enlightenment outside a conventional context. Indeed, thousands of Americans follow Gnosticism avidly in New Age publications and actually re-create full-dress spiritual practices from the early texts and other lore. Some attend the Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum sanctuary in Palo Alto, Calif., where the bishop, or tau, is a garrulous Frenchwoman named Rosamonde Miller. Miller's Sunday Eucharistic service honors Sophia, a wisdom deity in some Gnostic mythologies, as well as Christ. Her creed that "each soul is born on a mission, but somewhere along the way we forget what it is" is classically Gnostic.

A LATTER-DAY THOMASINE
And then there are folks like bill Coffey, who would be an unlikely visitor at the Ecclesia. Coffey, 82, a former research scientist at General Electric, has been a Methodist from his youth. He is secure in his faith-in the Trinity and the Ten Commandments and Jesus' ethics, whose rules for living, he says, "stand strong." But since his teens, he says, "I looked upon certain things that were presumably orthodox and taken on faith to be a little hard to swallow." The scientist in him had trouble with the virgin birth and miracles and the physical resurrection of the dead. He found some of John's vision of Christ a bit much, "all dolled up and high-level, saying 'The only way you're gonna know God is through me.'" Coffey thinks non-Christians may be able to find their way to God too.

Coffey did not share these "reservations" with anyone outside of family. But recently he heard them aired in a public forum. For six Sundays this fall, he arrived 90 minutes before services at Burnt Hills United Methodist Church in Burnt Hills, N.Y., to attend an adult-education seminar offered by a fellow congregant on the Gospel of Thomas and Pagels' latest, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Coffey was fascinated. Thomas' image of the Saviour seemed less like God on earth and more like someone whom "the knowledge of the infinite was passing through." It offered no miracles. At one point its Jesus even rejected the title "master" and suggested that his followers were simply "drunk" on the same heady wisdom as he. When the six weeks were up, Coffey felt that both Thomas and Pagels were saying, "It's sort of a do-it-yourself kit you're endowed with. You've got to grab the stuff in your own soul and work on it to realize your relationship with God."

He pauses for a moment, a man a long way from a talking cross or The Matrix but nevertheless touched by a text most thought had disappeared long ago. A man who feels he has been granted a certain reassurance but knows it is not one that everybody would accept. "This is probably heresy among certain people in the Christian faith these days," he says. "They would take objection. But my picture of Jesus is more plausible now; it made my faith a little more believable, a little more genuine. I think my faith is enriched."

—With reporting by Maggie Sieger/Chicago and Chris Taylor/Palo Alto

• David Van Biema