Part1- The Ishaputra of The Ancients                   

[The discovery of Gnostic Gospels in Egypt as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls have challenged the very tenets of the orthodox Christian Church as well as the historicity of Christ. In this part we shall see how closely Christ resembles the ancient archetypal God-Son or Ishaputra and how his legend developed. In subsequent instalments we shall briefly survey these gospels and see how they were suppressed by the Church, the history of the early Christian church and how the present New Testament was created. In these discussions the word Church (with capital C) refers to the Orthodox Roman Catholic Church]

The One is incomprehensible

Perfectly free from corruption

Not "perfect"

Not "blessed"

Not "divine"

But superior to such concepts

Neither physical nor unphysical

Neither immense nor infinitesimal

Passage from an Upanishad? No, it is from the Secret Book of  John, a ‘Gnostic' gospel! The word gnosis will not appear to be unfamiliar to an Indian reader and quite rightly so. It will immediately remind him of the root word 'dyna' of Sanskrit which has given rise to dynana in Sanskrit, gnosis in Greek, znate in Russian and knowledge in English. Its literal meaning in Greek connotes "knowledge" or the "act of knowing". Gnosticism is the teaching based on Gnosis, the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means. It will immediately be apparent that here it refers to 'pradnya' or intuitive spiritual knowledge.

But the reader will certainly wonder in which context this word is mentioned with the Gospels of the Bible. As is well known the four gospels of the Bible- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, form the first part of the New Testament in the Bible. The first three of these are called the 'synoptic' gospels since their content and style is more or less similar and are believed to have originated from an unknown common source called Q. The organization and content of John is quite different from the other three. All four describe the life of Jesus and his resurrection.

The Gnostic gospels do not refer to these four. But before we look into them we have to first discuss how they were discovered. We also have to know something about the history of the Christian church during the first few centuries after the supposed birth and death of Christ as well as the historicity of Christ himself.

Discovery

Doubts about the historical existence of Jesus emerged after Renaissance when critical study of the Gospels developed in the 18th century, and some English scholars towards the end of that century are said to have believed that no historical Jesus existed. Attacks by the early Church on heretic writings lead to a suspicion that alternate gospels also existed in the early days. The first of these emerged in 1769, when a Scottish tourist named James Bruce bought a Coptic manuscript near Thebes (modern Luxor) in Upper Egypt. Published only in 1892, it claims to record conversations of Jesus with his disciplesa group that here includes both men and women. In 1773 a collector found in a London bookshop an ancient text, also in Coptic, that contained a dialogue on "mysteries" between Jesus and his disciples. In 1896 a German Egyptologist, alerted by the previous publications, bought in Cairo a manuscript that, to his amazement, contained the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) and three other texts which was published only in 1955. Some fragments of other texts like The Gospel of Peter were also discovered.

Last update : 15-01-2010 15:29

Keywords : The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus Christ, AP Joshi

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