You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.  --Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.  --Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.  --Carl Jung

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Redeeming Christ, Part II, Chapter 5, How We Got Our Bibles

Below is Chapter 4 of "Redeeming Christ".  Some of what I say below may not make sense unless you've read the Indispensable Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.  

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(Jefferson's official portrait.  Source:  Wikipedia)

Divine Inspiration

If the earthly Jesus didn’t authorize our Bibles, and if Christians argued for centuries over its makeup, how did history finally settle on “the” Bible? Well, as we shall come to see, it didn’t. But, to the extent that some modern Literalists believe that there is a single agreed-upon, infallible book of scripture, it is due, in their view, to the concept of “divine inspiration”—the idea that God’s hand directed both the writing and the compilation of the Bible over hundreds of years.

But, is this idea of divine inspiration a reasonable one? As suggested in the prior chapter, if God had intended for us to look to a history book for our spiritual salvation, he certainly should have, dare I say would have, made his intentions plainer, no? As Professor Ehrman notes:

It is one thing for believers to affirm, on theological grounds, that the decisions about the canon, like the books themselves, were divinely inspired, but it is another thing to look at the actual history of the process and to ponder the long, drawn-out arguments over which books to include and which to reject. The process did not take a few months or years. It took centuries. And even then there was no unanimity. (Lost Christianities at 230)

Because few lay Christians have ever done so, let’s examine this drawn-out process in more detail. 

The Gospels

Much of the early arguments over the Bible centered upon which gospels should be included, and which excluded, from the New Testament. After all, as previously noted, there were far more gospels in circulation than merely the four known to our Bibles today:

The greatest difficulty was in choosing the Gospels, and after much controversy, four were chosen: three, those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are synopses of Jesus’ life, while John’s Gospel concentrates on a few specific miracles performed by Christ. (Solomon J. Schepps, Foreward to the 1979 edition of Lost Books of the Bible at 9)

Limiting the Gospels to only four was very important to some early Literalist leaders, although other Literalists and most Gnostics opposed this limitation, and the rationale for it was strained at best. Irenaeus, who we met in the last chapter, was one of the earliest and most vehement proponents of a four gospel canon, arguing that, “it is not possible that there can be more or fewer than four” for “ just as there are four regions of the universe, and four principal winds” there must be only four gospels. Though hardly compelling, this rationale has been frequently cited over the centuries. 

Later orthodox Literalists, who ultimately assumed control over the selection process (as we will discuss below), did offer more rational justifications for limiting the gospels to four: They deemed some of the additional ones to be merely supplementary or redundant and therefore unnecessary, while they viewed others, particularly those without a Literalist bent, as outright heretical:

Of the accounts of the life of Jesus that were rejected by the Fathers, many were considered supplementary rather than false. Such was the case with the Gospels of Peter and Nicodemus and the two accounts of Christ’s infancy (I and II Infancy)….

***

Peter’s Gospel, which was once held as high as those of Matthew and Mark, and more highly than those of Luke and John, was ultimately rejected because it differs too much in its details from the three chosen synopses. The Gospel of Thomas, one of the Nag Hammadi documents, was rejected for a very different reason. It opens by saying that he who understand the words of Jesus will be saved. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the chosen Gospels…which say that it is he who believes that will be saved…. (Forward to the 1979 edition of Lost Books of the Bible at 9-10)

The last of the “chosen” gospels, often called the fourth gospel, was that of John. But the modern reader may be surprised to learn that many early Christians disapproved of it selection:

Even its first generation of readers disagreed as to whether John was a true gospel or a false one—and whether it should be part of the New Testament. John’s defenders among early Christians revered it as the “logos gospel”—the gospel of the divine word or reason (logos, in Greek)—and derided those who opposed it as “irrational” (alogos, lacking reason). Its detractors, by contrast, were quick to point out that John’s narrative differs significantly from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. [A]t crucial moments in its account, for example, John’s gospel directly contradicts the combined testimony of the other New Testament gospels. (Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas at 34-35)

Even so, because it can be bent to a Literalist interpretation, John’s gospel came to be accepted as canon. 

By way of contrast, the Gospel of Peter--a book much prized by most early Christians, rivaling in popularity the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and exceeding Luke and John--was ultimately rejected because it lent itself to a potentially “heretical” interpretation known as docetism. Although it came in a variety of forms, docetism can be understood for purposes of this book as the belief that Christ’s divine nature kept him from experiencing true pain and suffering during his life and death. Serapion (c. 199), the orthodox Bishop of Antioch, (c. 199), concluded that because the Gospel of Peter could be interpreted in a manner inconsistent with orthodox teachings (which held that Jesus suffered in the ordinary sense), it could not have been written by the Apostle Peter. 

While modern scholarship has confirmed that the Gospel of Peter was not written by the historical Peter, Serapion’s rationale for dismissing it should concern those who assert the Bible’s infallibility. Serapion discarded the book simply because he disagreed with it, not because he had any actual evidence or knowledge of forgery. Thus, in Serapion’s approach we see the beginnings of an orthodox “litmus test” for determining the authenticity of early Christian manuscripts—those that largely agreed with the orthodox position, or could be interpreted or easily edited to do so, were frequently held to be authentic, while those that outright contradicted orthodox views were always discarded as forgeries. 

Renowned scholar Bruce M. Metzger, PhD, acknowledges that the compilers of the Bible applied just such a litmus test. According to Metzger, for a book to be considered canonical it must have met three tests:

First, the books must have had apostolic authority—that is, they must have been written either by apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by followers of apostles.

[S]econd, there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the rule of faith. That is, was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the [orthodox] church recognized as normative? 

And third, there was the criterion of whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large. [Quoted in The Case For Christ at 66]

Other scholars have noted that the litmus test came in four parts rather than three, recognizing an additional requirement that the book be “ancient”. But regardless, it is the second test, the “rule of faith”, that is most intriguing to critical scholars. 

The “rule of faith”, sometimes called the "standard of faith" rested on the now questionable assumption that the orthodox view of Christianity represented the exclusive authentic tradition. Under this standard, any early Christian document that contradicted the orthodox understanding was considered by the orthodox Literalists of the second and third centuries to be a forgery. For instance, the Gospel of Peter met every prong of the orthodox litmus test noted above save one—the “rule of faith”. After all, it was ostensibly written by the Apostle Peter and it was widely used and considered authentic by a great number of Christians, proving itself to be even more popular than Luke or John. The simple fact is that we don’t read the Gospel of Peter in our Bibles today only because parts of it could not be reconciled with certain orthodox teachings and, as we shall see, it was the orthodox who compiled our Bibles. 

Perhaps this rationale for excluding the Gospel of Peter and other books is acceptable to those who take it on faith that the orthodox tradition was the true and complete one, but it is troublesome for those who know otherwise. After all, the reasoning employed by the early orthodox is circular: “We’re right and they are wrong”, contended the orthodox leaders who compiled our Bibles. “So those manuscripts that agree with us are obviously authentic, while those that do not are certainly forgeries. Therefore we shall create a collection of the ‘authentic’ teachings, and then we can point to the authenticity of this collection as proof that our interpretation of Christianity is the right one.” One doesn’t have to be a logician to find the holes in that reasoning.

The Letters

Not surprisingly, the debate over the Bible wasn’t limited to the Gospels alone, but included the New Testament letters (epistles) as well. Several of the epistles in our present-day Bibles were not well respected by important early Christians, even some Literalist ones. In Origen’s (c. 210) catalogue of New Testament scriptures, the Epistles of James and Jude are omitted, and Origen notes that many Christians were skeptical of 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John. More than a hundred years later, Eusebius (c. 315) states that some Christians of his time still doubted or outright rejected the authenticity of these same five books. Eusebius himself considered Revelation to be spurious. Jerome (c. 382) spoke dubiously of the epistle to the Hebrews. As late as the fifth century, the Syrian church venerated only 22 books, excluding 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. By contrast, the present day Ethiopian church accepts all twenty-seven books of our present day New Testament, but adds four more. 

The famous fourth century teacher known as Didymus the Blind was among those who believed that 2nd Peter was a forgery. Interestingly though, he cited the Shepard of Hermas and other noncanonical books favorably. 

The last book of the Bible, Revelation, is not included in the various catalogues of the New Testament offered by such notable early Christians as Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem (c. 340); the Bishops at the Council of Caudices (c. 364); Gregory Nazianzen, Bishop of Constantinople (c. 375); and Philastrius, Bishop of Brixia in Venice (c. 380). 

In short, as late at 400 CE there was no accepted, universal canon of Christian scripture. And, as we shall soon see, there still isn’t even today. 

Forgery, Forgery Everywhere

Forgery was commonly practiced in ancient times, so early Christians had reason to be skeptical when their opponents pointed to various manuscripts to "cinch" their argument. And as we shall see, we have even more reasons to be skeptical of these same manuscripts today. 

Arguing in support of the integrity of our modern Bibles, Literalists often cite the research of critical scholars who have proven many of the excluded texts, such as the once-prized Gospel of Peter, to be forgeries (i.e., it was not really written by the historical Peter). But, these Literalists overlook the fact that these very same scholars have also shown several of our New Testament letters to be forgeries:

Scholars have long recognized that even some of the books accepted into the canon are probably forgeries. Christian scholars, of course, have been loathe to call them that and so more commonly refer to them as “pseudonymous” writings. Possibly this is a more antiseptic term, but its does little to solve the problem of a potential deceit, for an author who attempts to pass off his own writing as that of some other well-know person has written a forgery. That is no less true of the book allegedly written to Titus that made it into the New Testament (Paul’s Letter to Titus) than of the book allegedly written by Titus that did not (Pseudo-Titus), both claiming to be written by apostles (Paul and Titus), both evidently written by someone else. (Ehrman, Lost Christianities at 9)

In fact, all of Paul’s New Testament “Pastoral letters”--1 and 2 Timothy and Titus--are now known to have been written long after Paul’s death, very likely in the late first century.  Among the New Testament books attributed to Paul, only Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, Romans, and Philemon are universally recognized by critical and “faithful” scholars alike as authentic. Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are sometimes disputed, but the definite consensus of critical scholars is that they are either fabrications or severely edited versions of some now lost originals. 

Although I cannot document here all of the various, compelling reasons why critical scholars are so sure that many New Testament epistles are faked, I will take a moment here discuss the Pastorals. 

In addition to the skepticism expressed by early prominent Christians and church fathers like those noted in the previous section above, the earliest extant catalogue of Paul’s letters makes no mention at all of the Pastorals. Indeed, there is no evidence of their existence prior to c. 190 when Irenaeus conveniently makes mention of them. And yet, even despite these references by Irenaeus, Eusebius (c. 300), the so-called “Father of Church History”, does not include the Pastorals in his catalogue of the books of sacred scripture, even though he definitely knew of them. 

But modern scholars have many additional reasons for doubting the authenticity of the Pastorals. For one, they curiously reference aspects of church structure and hierarchical governance that, although favored by the orthodox, did not exist during Paul’s lifetime. The structure of church governance discussed in the Pastorals (a top-down hierarchy) is in many ways inconsistent and irreconcilable with the organizational structure of Paul’s churches described in his authentic writings (which took a more democratic, bottom-up presbyterian approach).

Additionally, the vocabulary and tone of the Pastorals is curious. They use a number of words not found elsewhere in Paul’s authentic writings, and specifically contradict the teachings of the known authentic writings on many points. Not surprisingly, these points of contradiction typically advance an orthodox understanding of Christianity, with the Pastorals apparently serving to “clarify” those parts of Paul’s authentic writings that lent themselves to a Gnostic, "heretical" interpretation. 

For these and other reasons, critical scholars are in near unanimous agreement that the Pastorals are second century forgeries, and rather poor ones at that. 

Circumstantial Evidence of Forgery

Although the most “faithful” of Literalist attempt to dispute the direct evidence of forgery noted above--rationalizing, for example, that the unusual vocabulary of the Pastorals might be attributable to the fact that Paul may have dictated his various letters at different times to different scribes who sometimes paraphrased him (while nonetheless perfectly preserving his "divinely inspired" message, we are assured)--there can be no dispute on the following point: To advance their cause, certain highly educated proto-orthodox forgers authored letters in the names of the Apostles or their followers, letters that their descendants eventually excluded from the Bible for one reason or another. For example, as mentioned previously, some orthodox sympathizer forged a letter from Titus, now called “Pseudo-Titus” (meaning “false Titus”), that is not found in our New Testament. Extra-biblical documents forged in the name of the Apostle Paul include 3 Corinthians (created in the second century largely in order to undermine the docetic “heresy”, it was eventually accepted as canonical only by the Armenian church and certain Syrian churches), several letters from Paul to the Roman philosopher Seneca (designed to cast Paul as a great philosopher), and at least one to the church at Laodicea. Yet other known Pauline forgeries are lost to history—we know them only because they are referenced in ancient writings that have been preserved. 

Faithful readers should not be surprised that all these letters were being forged in Paul’s name. After all, 2 Thessalonians (2:2) records that Paul was concerned that people were forging letters in his name even in his own time. However:

In an interesting twist, scholars today are not altogether confident that 2 Thessalonians itself was written by Paul. And so we have a neat irony: either 2 Thessalonians was written by Paul and someone else was producing forgeries in Paul’s name, or 2 Thessalonians itself is a forgery that condemns the production of forgeries in Paul’s name. Either way, someone was forging books in Paul’s name. (Lost Christianities at 10)

Although these undisputed forgeries weren’t included in our New Testaments, to the relief of many Literalists, their mere existence casts additional doubt on many of the books that did. These extra-biblical forgeries prove indisputably that some early, highly-educated proto-orthodox sympathizers--members of the very group whose spiritual descendants ultimately organized and canonized the New Testament as Holy Writ (as we shall see)--were ready, willing, and able to employ deceit to advance their cause and to undermine the authority of their Christian opponents, going even so far as to forge letters in the name of key Apostles. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia admits as much: "Both Catholics and Gnostics were concerned in writing these fictions. The former had no motive other than that of pious fraud." Gnostic forgeries were then presumably "impious frauds." 

Combine this known and admitted propensity for forgery with the doctrine-based litmus test later adopted by their descendants for purposes determining the authenticity of ancient Christian documents, and it would be a divinely inspired miracle indeed if some forgeries didn’t make it into our New Testaments. 

So, even if we ignore the all-but-conclusive direct evidence of forgery within our New Testament, we have compelling circumstantial evidence as well: We know with certainty that the Literalist Church had the means to commit forgery, as evidenced by, among other things, their extant forgeries that did not make it into the New Testament. We also know that the Literalists had the motive to forge documents and include them in the canon (e.g., by forging documents in Apostles’ names and designating those documents as the infallible Word of God, Literalists would gain an advantage in the battles for the heart and soul of early Christianity). Finally, Literalists had the opportunity to include forged documents in the Bible: A century or two after these documents were forged, the spiritual descendants of these Literalist forgers attempted to "close the cannon" and adpoted a doctrine-based litmus test of authenticity that all but assured some forged documents would be canonized. 

In light of this evidence, it is only the most “faithful” of Christians who deny that parts of the New Testament are obvious forgeries. Sadly, such “faithfulness” borders on irrationality: It is not merely “evidence of things unseen” (as Paul defined faith), but the irrational rejection of things seen plainly. It is not merely an acceptance of the unprovable, but acceptance in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Why should anyone have such faith? More importantly, why would a benevolent, loving God have made such irrational faith a precondition of salvation? I can think of no reason at all, but I can, and have, identified many reasons why less than benevolent, power-driven humans did so. 

Bibles, Bibles Everywhere

Even if we ignore the known forgeries in the New Testament, there are many other problems with Literalist claims of the Bible's infallibility. One is that, as previously alluded, there is simply no such thing as the Bible. Over centuries what we now call the Bible has undergone numerous changes, and "the" church has never enjoyed a definitive version. For example, the identity of the books comprising the Old Testament has changed over the years, the Apocrypha was dropped from the Protestant Bible altogether after the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and, as we have seen, the books of the New Testament weren’t fixed until the late fourth century or early fifth century, and even then there still wasn’t complete unanimity in Christendom. The Catholic Encyclopedia admits, "The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning...has no foundation in history." 

Another problem with claims of biblical infallibility is that, even today (and ignoring disputes over which books are canonical) we have numerous versions of “the” Bible. Just since the King James Version was first published in the early 1600’s, English speaking peoples have seen more than three hundred English translations of the Bible alone! A trip to the local bookstore will acquaint the reader with some of these, and a somewhat more comprehensive listing can be found here.

So, why the need for so many Bibles?

Well, different versions exist for two primary reasons: (1) scholars disagree about which of the ancient manuscripts should be translated into our modern Bibles, and (2) translators disagree as to how to properly translate a given manuscript into a language understandable by modern audiences. Let’s discuss each of these disagreements, beginning with the last one first.

Difficult Translations

Jesus and his immediate followers, like most Jews of Palestine for centuries before them, spoke Aramaic, a language that is all but dead today. However, the oldest complete New Testament manuscripts still in existence are all written in an ancient form of Greek, called “Koine”, and all of these oldest manuscripts are “uncials”, meaning that they are written in only capital Greek letters with no spaces between words, no line breaks, and almost no punctuation marks—i.e., no periods, no commas, no page breaks, and no exclamation points. 

These facts are important for several reasons. First, they demonstrate that, with only a few exceptions, even the oldest existing copies of the New Testament capture the words of Jesus and the Apostles only in translated form. We do not know the actual words that were originally spoken by Jesus and his Apostles in Aramaic, rather we have only a Greek hearsay translation. And, unfortunately, something is always lost in translation: As Rabbi Judah eloquently stated, “He who translates a biblical verse literally is a liar, but he who elaborates on it is a blasphemer.” 

The translator’s job is to express in language understandable to his audience the meaning of words originally spoken or written by someone else using a different language. Given linguistic differences in grammar, syntax, punctuation and figures of speech, this is no easy task under the best of circumstances—but, Bible translators face additional complications. NAMELYTHEYARECHARGEDWITHACCURATELYTRANSLATINGANCIENTMANUSCRIPTSTHATAREWRITTENINALLCAPSDEVOIDOFPUNTUATIONORSPACESANDTHATWEREWRITTENTHOUSANDSOFYEARSAGOINLANGUAGEORDIALECTSTHATHAVEBEENDEADFORCENTURIES.

If that last "all caps" sentence didn’t make any sense, it is only because I wrote it in uncial form in hopes of giving the reader some appreciation for the difficult task of translating ancient uncials. Here’s what I actually said: “Namely they are charged with accurately translating ancient manuscripts that were written in all caps, which are virtually devoid of punctuation marks or spaces, and that were written thousands of years ago in languages or dialects that have been dead for centuries." If the reader had difficulty making sense of the "all caps" phrase above (even though it was written in modernEnglish), imagine how much greater the difficulty of interpreting a dead, foreign language written in such a manner. 

The first step in any translation of an ancient document is to develop an understanding of the original author’s intent. As anyone who has ever attempted to interpret a document knows, this is more art than science, especially when the original author has been dead for two millennia, came from a foreign culture, and spoke a dead language. Given the difficultly that each present day generation has in understanding the next one (and vice versa), imagine how much more difficult it must be for a modern translator to truly see the world through the eyes of a first century writer from another culture. 

In short, despite their best efforts, a translator’s presuppositions (paradigms) affect his or her understanding of the original writer’s intent, and therefore taint his or her interpretation of the original writer’s words. The Preface to the New King James Version of the Bible, which is itself “the fifth revision of a historic document translated from specific Greek texts”, is to be commended for acknowledging as much explicitly:

[T]he most important differences in the English New Testaments of today are due…to the way in which translators view the task of translation: How literally should the [original] text be rendered? How does the translator view the matter of biblical inspiration? Does the translator adopt a paraphrase when a literal rendering would be quite clear and more to the point?” [parentheticals and emphasis added]

In other words, as the preface to the New King James version makes clear, the meaning of the translated Bible varies according to the particular translator’s presuppositions, including whether or not the translator presupposes that the Bible is a spiritual book written by mortals, or a divinely inspired book of history. Or, said another way, the Paradigm of Historicity affects the translation! In this manner, centuries of translator bias (until very recently, almost exclusively Literalist ones) have been not-so-subtly incorporated into the substance of the most Bible versions available to us today. We will expose many of these as we proceed. 

Assuming a translator can overcome the first challenge of truly understanding the intent of the original writer, the second step in translation is to then render the that understanding in language comprehensible to the translator’s audience. The Christian William Tyndale was the first translator to offer an English Bible (c. 1526) derived from the most ancient Greek manuscripts available at the time (rather than later Latin manuscripts that had served as the basis for most previous translations). For this, he was eventually burned at the stake for heresy. Even so, many of his words survive to this day. It was Tyndale who, via artful translation, created from whole cloth many of the most memorable words and phrases found in our modern Bibles:

It was Tyndale who established …that the Bible should not be in the language of scholars but in the spoken language of the people. [H]e coined such words as “Passover,” “scapegoat,” “mercy seat,” and “long-suffering.”

Many expressions of Tyndale are also unforgettable, cherished by countless readers of the English Bible: “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 3:2); “the pinnacle of the temple” (Matt. 4:5); “the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13); “daily bread” (Matt. 6:11); “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow” (Matt. 6:28); “meek and lowly in heart” (Matt 11:29); “shepherds abiding in the field” (Luke 2:8); “eat, drink, and be merry” (Luke 12:19); “fatted calf” (Luke 15:23); “only begotten son” (John 1:14, 18); “in my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2); “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28); “God forbid” (Rom 3:4); “sounding brass” and “tinkling cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1); “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor. 15:52); “singing and making melody (Eph. 5:19); “office of a bishop” (1 Tim. 3:1); “the pleasures of sin for a season” (Heb. 11:25); “an advocate with the Father” (1 John 2:1); and “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev 3:20). (How We Got the Bible at 178-179)

Despite their familiarity, the above expressions do not appear in the original Greek, at least not in so many words: 

[I]t is noteworthy that these expressions could have been translated differently from the Greek text, yet because Tyndale had such an ear for the English language, these [para]phrases live on. [parentheticals added]. (How We Got the Bible at 179)

In short, as previously stated, something is always lost (and sometimes added)in translation. 

An Important Diversion to Discuss Misleading Translations 

Before moving on to discuss the second primary reason that there are so many versions of the Bible—namely, disagreements over which ancient documents to translate,--its worth pausing here to explore the significance of translator bias. Until very recently, virtually all Bible translations were overseen by committed Christians steeped in the Literalist, orthodox tradition. Even most of the so-called heretics of the last thousand years were, like William Tyndale, Literalists. Consequently, the Paradigm of Historicity, and all orthodox doctrines derived therefrom, weighed heavily on their efforts, and the biases of these original translators have influenced subsequent translations ever since. 

Translators who presuppose that the Bible is the “inspired” word of God naturally “view the task of translation”, if only unconsciously, as supporting this idea. Such translators assume that God’s inspired Word simply can’t contradict itself or contain error. Thus, centuries of translators have adopted interpretations and translations that seek to reconcile or downplay inconsistencies or discrepancies that are evident in the original tongue. For example:

All of the Gospels present but one view of Jesus, that he is the Son of God. Yet in presenting this view their individual descriptions of him and his sayings often employ different words. Through the years, these verbal distinctions, either intentionally or unintentionally, tended to be “harmonized” by the scribes. Thus it is a sound conclusion that in parallel accounts the text which preserves the minute verbal differences is generally the [more authentic] text. (How We Got the Bible at 93)

The result of this translator and scribal bias for consistency is that some parts of our modern Bibles appear to modern readers to be more of a coherent whole than they actually are, while other parts appear to less of a whole than they should. The following pages will provide numerous examples of the former, but here I will note one very basic example of the latter: 

“Jesus” is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew name “Joshua”, meaning “savior.” It was a very common name among first century Jews. And yet it has become customary among translators to render the name of the Old Testament hero of Exodus as “Joshua” and that of the New Testament hero of the same name as “Jesus”. Inconsistently translating these names adds to Jesus’ uniqueness while at the same time obscuring certain similarities in the lives and actions of the two biblical heroes that may otherwise be obvious. The differing nomenclature discourages the reader from drawing analogies between the lives of the two figures, analogies that the authors of the gospels almost certainly intended. 

Translator bias has also served to obscure some striking similarities between the New Testament and other Gnostic scriptures. The Bible is almost always rendered in the familiar “church speak” originally adopted by Literalist translators over the centuries. However, it’s important to understand that identical Greek words and ideas appearing in surviving Gnostic writings are typically rendered in unfamiliar “pagan”, heretical language, or simply left un-translated altogether, making these works seem more foreign, bizarre, and incredible than they should. To illustrate the point, let’s consider just how strange, dare I say Gnostic, parts of the New Testament sound if we translate them from the Greek using the same principles often employed when translating Gnostic manuscripts.

The Greek word for wisdom is “Sophia”, which is also the name of the Greek goddess that personified the same. In Gnostic mythology, Sophia was the companion and lover of the Logos (often translated as “word’, which we will discuss more below), which all Christians equate with Christ (thanks to the opening chapter of the fourth gospel). This may be one reason why translators almost always translate the Greek word “Sophia” as simply “wisdom” in the New Testament, but as “Sophia” in most Gnostic texts. But is such inconsistent treatment justified? What happens, for example, when we translate some familiar Bible passages using principals of translation traditionally applied to Gnostic texts? Let’s begin with words attributed to Paul in Colossians 1:8 (highlighted words are those that have been reworded using more consistently applied principles of translation, as is done with non-canonical books from the time):

We proclaim [Christ]…teaching every man in the ways of Sophia that each may become an initiated member of Christ. (Colossians 1:28)

Translated in this manner, and remembering that in Gnostic theology, Sophia was the lover of the Logos (Christ), Paul sounds…well…radical. In essence, Paul teaches that we become one with Christ (that is, “members” of Christ) by learning the ways (i.e., assuming the role) of his mythical lover, Sophia. Though strange, this lesson is actually consistent with orthodox doctrine that the church is the “bride of Christ”, and it is also indistinguishable from the Gnostic teaching on this subject.

Continuing: 

My purpose is that they may…become one in love, so that they may…experience the Gnosis of God’s mystery, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of Sophia and Gnosis. [emphasis added] (Colossians 2:2-3)

Here Paul teaches that mystical “oneness” is achieved through Gnosis (or experiential knowledge) of God’s “mystery”, which he defines as Christ. Christ is not discussed as an historical personage, but as a higher consciousness that, once identified with to the exclusion of our ego (i.e., once we become one with it), leads to spiritual insight—hidden wisdom (Sophia) and knowledge (gnosis). This is pure Christian Gnosticism, plain and simple. Only the common misleading translation keeps us from seeing it as such. 

Proceeding further:

We speak of Sophia among the initiated; not the Sophia of this aeon, nor of the rulers of this aeon, who are passing away; but we speak of God’s Sophia in a mystery. (1 Corinthians 2:6)

And:

It is central to our faith that in the end we will all attain Oneness through Gnosis of God’s Son, becoming fully initiated human beings, equal to nothing less than the pleroma of Christ. (Ephesians 4:13)

“God’s Sophia”, “initiated”, “mystery”, “aeons”, “oneness” and “pleroma”, all of these are quintessentially Gnostic terms, terms one would find repeated over and over in most any Christian Gnostic texts such as those found at Nag Hammadi. And yet, although they are expressed in the original Greek manuscripts of our Bibles, these terms are foreign to most Christians simply because bias, primarily the doctrine of divine inspiration and the Paradigm of Historicity, keeps translators from expressing Paul in this way. Rather than use the word “initiated”, which is a more proper and accurate translation of the original Greek, and one they surely would have used if translating the same word in a Gnostic text, translators substitute the word “mature.” Rather than use the Greek word “Gnosis”, which describes subjective, experiential knowledge (like knowing how to ride a bike) as opposed to objective, intellectual knowledge (like one plus one equals two), translators just use the more antiseptic (if somewhat misleading) English word “knowledge”, which has the added benefit of obscuring Paul’s Gnostic tendencies.

Another example of a translation that obscures the similarities between the Gnostic texts and the New Testament is the rendering of logos in many Gnostic texts as logos, but in the New Testament as “Word” (such as in John 1:1) The Greek word logos, which is the root of the English word “logic”, has no strict English equivalent. It can be alternatively translated as “word”, “reason”, or “idea” depending upon context, but it actually contains elements of all three, plus more. No one English word captures the true essence of the Greek logos. 

In the centuries before and immediately after Jesus, "logos" was a term of art used by pagan philosophers and adepts of the Mysteries Religions, including the Christian Gnostics. They generally used it to describe the thoughts of God’s Mind through which God created and sustains the universe, or said another way, the objects of God’s consciousness. To put it in terms readily understandable to most present-day Literalist Christians, before God spoke the words “Let there by light” (Genesis 1:3), God had to first have the idea (logos) of light in mind, else his words would have had no meaning or effect. Because thought, which is made manifest in words, must precede action, Gnostics came to view God’s thoughts/ideas/words as the true source and sustainer of all Creation, present with God “in the beginning”, for creation could not exist prior to God conceiving of it. These divine thoughts or ideas, which are separate from God and yet one with Him (in the same sense that our thoughts are separate from our minds yet have no existence outside of them) are the divine logos. It will serve our purposes sufficiently if we conceptualize the divine logos for now as God’s consciousness. 

In Gnostic mythology, which the reader will recall contains much figurative language, creation is the result of the one transcendent God becoming consciousness of Himself. Exactly how this happened is a mystery symbolized in numerous and varying myths, but Gnostics reasoned rightly that consciousness requires both a subject and an object—that is, there must be a witness (the person or thing that is conscious—i.e., the “mind”) as well as the witnessed (i.e., the person or thing of which on is conscious, or the “thought”). In the Gnostic allegorical myths that seek to encode this truth, Gnostics often referred to the original witness (i.e., the “mind” of God) as “the Father”. Likewise, they referred to the thoughts of that Divine Mind, the ideas which God’s Mind contemplates, as “the Son” or “the Logos” (Word). Thus, thoughts (the Son) were conceptualized as the “offspring” or “first born” or “begotten” of the mind (the Father), present with God at the dawn of creation. Before God thought, nothing was, for consciousness did not exist. Thus, Father and Son are as inseparable as thought is from mind. The Athanasian Creed expresses these ideas perfectly:

The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten, The Son is of the Father alone, neither made nor created, but begotten. [N]one is afore or after the other, none is greater or less than another.

And, as Origen once noted, “The Father did not beget the Son, but ever is begetting him.”

The experience of this simple idea was almost certainly part of the fundamental Inner Mystery taught by all Gnostic Mystery Schools in the centuries before and after Jesus. Centuries before Christ the pagan Gnostic Heraclitus (c. 600 BCE) wrote, “The Father and Son are the same.” According to Clement of Alexandria, the pagan Gnostic Euripides had years before “divined as in a riddle that the Father and the Son are one God.” The legendary pagan sage Orpheus, who lived, if at all, thousands of years before Christ, is quoted by the Christian Clement of Alexandria as having taught: 

Behold the Logos divine. Tread well the narrow path of life and gaze on Him, the world’s great ruler, our immortal king. (Quoted in The Jesus Mysteries at 83)

Clement of Alexandria himself writes:

The Son is the Consciousness of God. The Father only sees the world as reflected in the Son. (Quoted in The Jesus Mysteries at 84) [parentheticals added]

Continuing with this idea for a moment, it is important to note that Gnostics sought to explain the mystery of human consciousness by characterizing it as fragmented, dispersed pieces of the One Divine Consciousness—that is, of the Son or logos, which Christians specifically equate with Christ. How portions of the One Divine Consciousness came to be dismembered and encapsulated within each of us, how we lost our ability to “access” or “rely on” it in our daily lives, and how we can regain it, are all mysteries described allegorically in many Gnostic and Christian myths. For Christians, the most important of these myths are those describing the Incarnation of Christ (God’s consciousness becoming encapsulated in man), the Fall of Man (man losing his ability to rely on that consciousness and instead being ruled by his unconscious paradigms and passions, which Paul called “the flesh”), and Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection (describing the way back to union with God, or oneness with the cosmic consciousness). 

These Gnostic teachings about the dispersion of human consciousness, and its reunion with God, may seem quite strange to Literalists, so I will again remind the reader of just a few of Paul’s words on this subject:

For just as the body is a unity and yet has many members, and all the members, though many , form only one body, so it is with Christ….[i.e., the logos or Son]. For by means of one shared Spirit [or consciousness] we were all baptized into one [spiritual] body…. 

Now you (collectively) are Christ’s body [i.e., the Logos, the One Divine Consciousness], and individually members [i.e., dispersed pieces] of it. (1 Corinthians 12:11-27)

It is inherent in our faith that in the end we will all attain Oneness through Gnosis of God’s Son, becoming fully initiated human beings, equal to nothing less than the pleroma [fullness] of Christ. [Ephesians 4:13 as rendered in Jesus and the Lost Goddess at 149))

In Ephesians 4:25, Paul writes “[w]e are all parts of one body and members one of another.” In Colossians 1:25-28, Paul writes that his purpose in life is to reveal to us the Mystery that was hidden in past ages--namely, that Christ (i.e., the logos) is in us! In Galations 1:15, Paul writes that “God revealed his Son in me” [emphasis added]. Demonstrating that he had come to identify completely with this higher consciousness within him, and ceased identifying with his ego, Paul states, “[I]t is no longer I [i.e., my ego or "flesh"] who live, but Christ [the logos] lives in me; and the life I now live in this body I live by faith—by reliance on and complete trust in the Son of God….” 

As we have previously noted, Jesus offers the same teachings, most explicitly in the Gospel of John (17:19-26). There, Jesus prays that his followers will come to know their true nature. He prays that they will be “sanctified by the Truth” so that they:

all may be One--just as You, Father, are in Me and I in you, they also may be One in Us. [I] in them and You in Me, in order that they may become One and perfectly united....

And nowhere is this pre-Christian, Gnostic teaching of creation emerging from the oneness of God through the facility of the logos (which is then dispersed among all peoples) better illustrated than in the opening Chapter of the Gospel of John (v. 1-4): 

In the beginning was the Logos [i.e., Divine Consciousness, or thoughts of God, confusingly translated as “the Word”], and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things came into being by Him, and apart from him nothing came into being [i.e., nothing existed prior to God becoming conscious]. In him was the life and that life was the light [i.e., consciousness] of men.

I could continue with innumerable examples of how misleading translations, warped as they are by the Paradigm of Historicity and doctrine of divine inspiration, have served to obscure similarities between Gnostic and Literalist texts. But the above is hopefully sufficient evidence for now that, properly translated and freed of the Paradigm of Historicity, large parts of the New Testament support, indeed demand, a Gnostic interpretation. 

(to be continued in Chapter 5, Part 2)