Good News & Bad News

One of the many beautiful things about the four Gospels is how unique each of their beginnings are.

Matthew lays out the genealogy of Christ, listing a direct line of descendants that runs through Adam, Abraham, Moses, and David.

Mark hops straight into the action, starting with Jesus’s public ministry.

John pens a masterful poetic image of Christ as the Divine Word—who not only has been with God since the beginning but is God—taking on human flesh to offer Himself as the reconciliation between God and man.

While these three introductions are special in their own way, Luke’s is arguably the most satisfying, as we gain the deepest insight into the story of Christ’s birth and childhood. Everything from the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, Elizabeth’s interactions with Mary confirming her as the New Ark and Theotokos, Mary’s soliloquy known as “The Magnificat,” and the eventual birth of Christ provides readers with not only a captivating story but also important details about salvation history.

The second chapter details a young Christ at the age of 12, as he unsurprisingly amazes the teachers and scribes of the temple through His precocious questions and comments.

But this ultimately begs the question: what was Jesus up to before the age of 12?

The answer to this is nowhere to be found in scripture.

However, a peculiar work called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas from the mid to late 2nd century (between 140 and 180 AD) seemingly fills in the gap and details what the God-child was doing.

It starts off with some interesting stories that intuitively line up with what a young child would do once He discovered He had divine powers. First, Jesus, at just five years old, miraculously makes a dirty pool of water clean through His word alone. Next, He forms birds out of clay that fly out of His hand and join the rest of the flock in the sky.

But the so-called “gospel” immediately loses all credibility after these two stories.

Immediately afterward, a child comes to Jesus and “took a branch of a willow and dispersed the waters which Jesus had gathered together.” The young Jesus did not appreciate this, to say the least, saying, “O evil, ungodly, and foolish one, what hurt did the pools and the waters do to you? Behold, you will wither like a tree and not bear leaves, neither root, nor fruit.” After those words, the child died on the spot.

Soon after, another child was running and seems to incidentally bump into the child Jesus. Angrily, Jesus told him “you shall not finish your course,” and this child also immediately drops dead.

It’s safe to say that these stories are false, as they blatantly contradict Christ’s sinless nature. The early Church quickly condemned the writing, as St. Irenaeus, for example, labeled it as one of many “apocryphal and spurious writings” that are “forged” and “bewilder the minds of the foolish.”

What is most intriguing about the narrative, however, is that the image of Jesus molding a bird out of clay is found not only in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas but in the Quran as well.

The main difference is the phrase “by God’s permission,” as Islam emphasizes Jesus performing miracles not through His own divine power but through “Allah’s power.”

Islam’s inclusion of this story vindicates the popular Christian belief of Muhammad being influenced by Syriac or Arabic Christian heretics, thus leading to Islam’s incorrect Christology.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the only notable apocryphal work penned by “Thomas,” as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas often gets mixed up with the “ordinary” Gospel of Thomas.

This Gospel of Thomas was discovered in the mid 20th century in Egypt and is not a narrative but rather a collection of stories and sayings attributed to Jesus. Both “Gospels” were falsely attributed to the Apostle Thomas to gain credibility among early Christians, but based on the dates, they could not have been written by the “doubting apostle.”

In a similar way to Thomas’s other gospel, once reading through the work, it becomes painstakingly clear why it’s not canonical.

The last paragraph provides a clear example:

In addition to bizarre passages like this, the essence of Thomas’s gospel is contradictory to the real Good News mainly because it is fundamentally Gnostic.

Gnosticism is predicated on the idea of dualism, in which the spiritual realm is “good” and the material world is “bad.” Based on the Greek word of gnosis, meaning knowledge, the idea articulates that salvation is achieved through attaining a sort of secret knowledge that will help people’s souls—the “good” part of humans—escape their evil material body.

These concepts were heavily influenced by Plato’s ideas of imprisonment, in which the immortal and divine soul longs to be set free of its corrupted body.

The Gnostics view the material world as an evil creation of a lesser, ignorant god called Demiurge, which is linked to the Old Testament God that creates the Earth in Genesis to allegedly have us trapped in illusion and suffering.

Monad—on the other hand—is allegedly the true, transcendent, and unknowable god that was once hidden but is revealed by Christ. More importantly, it was this being that placed the “divine spark” in all of us that aims to be set free from the body.

Because of Gnosticism’s focus on secret information, Christ serves as the revealer of this secret truth, rather than the Sacrificial Lamb slain for the sins of humanity.

While the whole Demiurge and Monad story might seem a bit silly to us now, the heresy began to spread to different pockets of the Roman empire for a few reasons.

The official canon had not been solidified yet, undeniably helping the false teachings spread, as later heretical works suffered from the clear bifurcation of either being a part of the Bible or not. Contrarily, this work had to be merely condemned rather than bear the mark of being non-canonical.

Additionally, the appeal to exclusivity innately tied to Gnosticism will always be attractive, as many have a natural desire to be apart of a secret club where they possess the “real truth,” as compared with everyone else’s ignorance. The heresy’s dualistic nature of good and bad systems is also very easy to grasp, providing people with an extremely simple way of explaining an extremely complex world.

Among the many errors embedded within Gnosticism, one of the major flaws is the faulty Christology that is an inevitable result of its ideas, as to be a Gnostic, one has to necessarily reject the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ.

The Incarnation is inconsistent with its beliefs because Christ cannot be a perfect being while also taking on the “evil” flesh of mankind, let alone be borne in a material womb. Furthermore, if Christ could not take on the tainted human flesh, then he could obviously not be crucified. Similarly, it wouldn’t logically follow for Christ to ascend into heaven with His physical body if it was corrupted like the Gnostics believe.

Arguably the strongest example of matter not being inherently evil is the institution of the sacraments, as this clearly depicts God utilizing physical objects as a means of sanctification and transforming “mere matter” into instruments of a greater spiritual reality.

For instance, Catholics teach that the water of baptism is not merely a symbol but rather has regenerative powers received from the instant Christ was baptized in the Jordan River.

Unsurprisingly, Gnostics were known for their lack of morality, given their view of salvation rests completely on acquiring secret knowledge and is completely divorced from any sort of faithfulness to God and His commands.

This immorality is intuitive once identifying who is the source of this bastardization of the true faith: Simon Magnus.

Notorious for being the namesake of the crime of simony, or buying clerical offices for money, Simon makes an appearance in Acts 8 when he attempts to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit the apostles were recently imbued with.

After this encounter, Simon, according to legend, begins to instruct a handful of close disciples, who then begin to spread Gnosticism to as many people as they can.

However, by the 4th century, the sect began to dwindle as the canon became clearer and was eventually fused into other heresies like Manichaeism.

While these Gospels of Thomas are easy to reject as non-canonical, other texts seem much more plausible.

So the real question becomes: how do we know what belongs in the Bible? And how can we be certain that we’re not missing any or included some that don’t belong?

For many Christians, a vague appeal to the guidance of the Holy Spirit is the only answer that can be given.

For those belonging to the true Church of Christ, we are assured by His specific promise of the Holy Spirit preventing the gates of Hell from prevailing against the visible Church and maintaining its role as the pillar and foundation of the truth.

Through its God-given authority, the Church had the unique role of determining which writings were divinely inspired and which ones weren’t. We thank God for this gift, as we are blessed with certainty about the true Good News.

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Thanks for reading and until next time.

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