Can we separate The Christ of Faith from the Historical Jesus?

[SisterCoyote]

As I think I've mentioned already, this semester I'm taking a course on "Jesus in film, his life and works" (what a nice agnostic neo-shamanic neo-pagan girl like me is doing in this class is a long story). Thus far, it's been very interesting from a scholarship point of view.

One of our texts is The Jesus Quest by a gentleman whose last name is Witherington. Now, one thing about this text is that Sr. Witherington is so biased that I periodically want to find him, point at a passage in the book and say "Cite please". However, he raises a couple of times the idea that we cannot separate "The Christ of Faith" from the "Historical Jesus."

(The difference, of course, being that the Christ of Faith did miracles and generally behaved in the way portrayed in the Bible, coming down to earth so God could forgive us our sins, etc., and the Historical Jesus is the actual physical person who walked around and the things that it can be proven that he did.)

What I'm wondering is if other knowledgable folks around the SDMB agree with this assessment; that the two absolutely cannot be separated for purposes of study, not faith. Polycarp, Lib, Tris, tomndebb, I'd be very interested in your answers in particular...

[SisterCoyote]

Oops. There was supposed to be a line after all those names saying "...and any other Christians."

Sorry about that.

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

I don't know how they can be separated, as the New Testament is virtually the only source of info on Jesus. It's not like we have any other documentation, like his grade school report cards, or anything.

[Dinsdale]

Sorry I'm being dense here, but isn't Jesus' historical existence a prerequisite for a belief in Christ?

I don't see any difficulty distinguishing betwen Jesus the man and Christ the object of belief.

[SisterCoyote]

There is a difference in believing that Christ came to save us from our sins, and understanding (though the only "official" texts we have, including the hypothetical document "Q", the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas) the itenerant rabbi of history.

^{I am not capitalizing "he" in the sentences below because I am talking about Jesus the man as opposed to Jesus as part of God. No disrespect is intended.}

Some folk believe that the Historical Jesus was a rabble-rouser, out to make huge changes in his society. Others believe he was a first-century feminist. Others believe he was a Jew, marginalized from the culture of Judaism by the choices he made and the preaching he did. Still others believe he saw himself as a messianic figure. Most believe he was a wisdom teacher.

All are looking not at Jesus as the Christ of Faith, but are trying to figure out what the Historical Jesus was really about, using the texts listed above. There is even argument about which of the texts should be used - no physical example of "Q" has ever been found, for example, but its existance is hypothesized because of the similarities between the Gospels of Mark and Luke.

The idea is that the folks "questing" for Jesus are setting aside belief in a search for what fact can be determined. One of the arguements for or against a particular person's set of facts, however, is whether they are saying that ultimately the "Christ of Faith" is someone totally different from the "Historical Jesus" - in one case the researcher believes all the stuff in the Bible that's got any sort of faith background was added by the church, in another the guy just seems to be claiming a clear separation between the two as a way to make himself seem more neutral.

Dinsdale - there are those who would argue that Jesus never existed, or that if he did he was a rather minor figure that early Christians, having come up with their faith somewhere else, used to put a more "human" face on their God. The last article I read about this suggested some group of Jews were responsible but I've forgotten if it was the group at Qumran or not, and I don't have the article with me.

As a side note, the whole Jesus Quest started with Albert Schweitzer, who decided that the whole resurrection thing was an elaborate hoax by Jesus' apostles. Schweitzer left Christianity and spent the rest of his life in the jungle, doctoring to the poor!

[Dinsdale]

Originally posted by SisterCoyote
Dinsdale - there are those who would argue that Jesus never existed, or that if he did he was a rather minor figure that early Christians, having come up with their faith somewhere else, used to put a more "human" face on their God. The last article I read about this suggested some group of Jews were responsible but I've forgotten if it was the group at Qumran or not, and I don't have the article with me.

Well sure,but those people wouldn't believe in a divine Christ, would they?

OTOH, is it possible for a believer in Christ to deny the corporeal existence of Jesus?

I'll step back now and wait for Poly and the others to make it all as clear as mud for me.

Heck, today is my birthday! (41) I shouldn't be thinking hard! What am I doing at work? More importantly, where's the beer?

[SisterCoyote]

You know, I don't know if the people making that claim are Christians or not!

Hey, next time you're in Thousand Oaks I'll buy you a pint of your favorite.




_{beat me for flirting in GD later, please}

[Neurotik]

I don't think that it's impossible for most Christians to separate the two. In a history class I took at a fairly conservative Catholic University, the professor stated at the beginning of the semester that we would be dealing with the Historical Jesus, not the Christ.

I think that those who take the Bible literally would have a difficulty with it, but for those that don't see it that way, I should think there would be no problem in it.

[tomndebb]

[ nitpick ] Schweitzer published Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906. He went to Africa as a doctor, rather than as a pastor as he initially intended, in 1913. On being interned and brought back to France as a foreign national in 1917 (his hospital was in French Equatorial Africa), he resumed preaching in Europe following WWI, returning to Africa in 1924. While he eventually left the church, his attitude toward both Lutheran doctrine and Christianity, in general, displayed a certain ambivalence throughout the rest of his life, appearing atheistic in some contexts and devout in others.
[ /excessively long nitpick ]

- - -

You might want to go look up the Jesus Seminar at Rutgers or the Westar Institute Jesus Seminar to see a bunch of people who really take this seriously.

I think the Jesus Seminar people are doing interesting work, but I think that they have seriously stretched the boundaries of credibility. The good that they do is to collect a broad group of scholars from widely divergent fields in a forum which allows them to criticize each others' conclusions in an interdisciplinary way. This removes some of the complaints that some "religious guy" with a preconceived notion of what to find has missed the obvious (non-religious) objections to his "faith based interpretation" of the stories of Jesus.

Unfortunately, I find the consensus approach leaves me less than impressed. In one respect, I appreciate their approach. The best lecturer that I had on exigetical scholarship, when I was in school, followed a method somewhat similar to their approach. Taking any given passage, he ran down all the parallel passages, identified as much as possible of the cultural significance found in the language of each of the passages, tracked down historical information surrounding the original passage and all the parallels, drew further parallels between the historic events, considered the earliest commentaries that could be found regarding the passage and determined their historical context, and moved on to see if he could exhaust us with the further etymology of each word in the text.

However, when all that has been done to examine each word, one still comes back to a document that was written by one (usually) human in one place and time and we simply cannot know that we have identified the historical accuracy of any phrase. While I would not be surprised to discover that some of the texts have been "enhanced" by later authors, I find most claims for the massive re-writing of those texts by the early Christians to be a bit far-fetched. For one thing, we have multiple translations of those works into Syraic, Coptic, and other languages that are, themelves, quite old and which agree, both with the Greek and with each other. (Most of these translations are held by people bearing religious animosity toward each other, so the likelihood of a conspiracy diminishes--although, of course ::: sigh ::: it never disappears.)

The Jesus Seminar tries to side-step that problem by voting on the "likelihood" of any phrase or event based on their conception of what was likely. Each phrase is rated as "certain" through stages of "likely/unlikely" to "certainly not." I am afraid that I am not willing to grant these scholars (and they are scholars) that much credibility that they can actually parse out the historical from the legendary on a phrase-by-phrase basis. (For one thing, just as with the caricature of the "religious scholar" who is blinded by his beliefs, the majority of the Jesus Seminar members also bring their own prejudices to the forum--it is simply harder to identify their collective prejudices.)

- - -

So where do I stand? I suspect that we cannot ever truly identify the historical Jesus. I am not out in the realm of Rudolph Bultmann* who came to believe that nothing in the gospels ever had to happen because both the reality and the significance are entailed solely in the belief. However, I do not think that we have enough evidence to identify the actual historical events with anything approaching the certitude of either a biblical literalist on one side or a member of the Jesus Seminar on the other.

As to separating the "Christ of Faith" from the "Historical Jesus," if the latter is, ultimately, not knowable, how does one even attempt to separate them? From that perspective, I guess that they are not separable. On the other hand, I'd have to see specific statements from Witherington to know whether I would support him, choose to respectfully differ, or simply consider him a loon.

*Bultmann was an early questor after the historical Jesus who decided that we could never discover the Truth, and began to explore whether that Truth was a matter that required certifiable knowledge or whether the belief that sustained the stories was actually more important.

[TheeGrumpy]

Originally posted by Dinsdale
...is it possible for a believer in Christ to deny the corporeal existence of Jesus?

If they can't, it's only for lack of imagination. And there are a lot of "imaginative" people out there.

[Sam Stone]

I think the question is overly broad. I'd break it down further:

• Can you believe in an historical Jesus without believing he is the Son of God?
• Can you believe in Christ as the Son of God while not believing in all of his stated acts in the Bible?

I have to say that I think you can do both. So maybe I'm not getting the point, but I don't see any difficulty at all in separating the 'historical' Jesus from the Christ. How is this any different than, say, accepting that Pope John Paul lived while disputing whether or not what he said ex cathedra was in fact the inspired word of God?

Perhaps we could get further if you told us why the author believes the two cannot be separated.

[SisterCoyote]

Sam I'd love to.

Unfortunately, that's one of the things I want to ask him for a cite on. He states it as fact without ever backing it up.

[jovan]

There is the theory of the "jewish Jesus" which states that Jesus never meant to start a new religion. At the most he seeked to reform Judaism. Many of his contemporaries were trying to do the same, most notably John the Baptist. First-generation christians were a fairly marginal group it seems.

The theory goes on to argue that when the temple was destroyed in 70, many jews believed that this would spell the end of their religion. This is when christians decided to form a new religion, rather than simply reform the old one.

The gospels were written with the goal of providing a backbone to this new religion, rather than that of accurately portraying the life of Jesus. Thus we have the miracles.

So, in order to know what Jesus actually preached, one must look at the writtings of Paul because they are the only ones to predate 70CE.

Anyway, the reason I posted this theory is because I find it interesting, but mostly because I would like some input from people who are more knowledgeable than me on this subject. Sorry if this is too much of a hijack.

SisterCoyote wrote:
the two [the historical Jesus and Christ] absolutely cannot be separated for purposes of study, not faith.

Hmm, this may sound like a stupid question but, the study of what? I think that to a historian, whether Jesus was the son of God or not is not nearly as relevent as whether people believed he was. And regarding both study and faith, isn't Jesus' message (love) more important than whether or not he walked on water or changed water into wine? I can't help but finding the latter anectodal.

[SisterCoyote]

Originally posted by jovan
So, in order to know what Jesus actually preached, one must look at the writtings of Paul because they are the only ones to predate 70CE.

Not sure what your source for this is, but AFAICT it's incorrect.

I have heard the following two theories:

1. Mark came first, at about 40 CE. Matthew and Luke followed, around 50-60 CE. John was the last Gospel written, around 70 CE. (This comes more or less verbatim from my Religion Teacher, who did his doctoral study in the seminary on the New Testament.)

2. John came first, at about 40 CE. Then Mark (which I haven't heard a date on. Then Mt & Lk.

There's also the question of when "Q" was written (if it exists), the question of the Dead Sea scrolls (& the Gospel of Thomas in particular)...lots of questions, not a whole lot of answers.

Hmm, this may sound like a stupid question but, the study of what? I think that to a historian, whether Jesus was the son of God or not is not nearly as relevent as whether people believed he was. And regarding both study and faith, isn't Jesus' message (love) more important than whether or not he walked on water or changed water into wine? I can't help but finding the latter anectodal.

Ah, but what the historians are questioning is whether they can study the Person of Jesus as separate from his acts and the faith that he inspired (whether or not he intended to do so) or not.

[tomndebb]

1. Mark came first, at about 40 CE. Matthew and Luke followed, around 50-60 CE. John was the last Gospel written, around 70 CE. (This comes more or less verbatim from my Religion Teacher, who did his doctoral study in the seminary on the New Testament.)

Your religion teacher is one of a select minority, then. The most common dates are Mark, 60s, Matthew and Luke, 70s or 80s, John, 90s.

As for the notion that John was written in the 40s, I doubt that any serious scholar can be found to support that. (Gericke puts John before the time of Nero, but suffers a lot of laughter for his efforts.) Much of John incorporates liturgical songs that would have had a hard time becoming sufficiently established to have been included in a literary work in only 10 to 15 years from the death of Jesus. In addition, his theology is much more developed, indicating a later date.

[Playdeaux]

You might want to look at this PBS site, From Jesus to Christ, about why Christianity succeeded as a religion. This particular page is an excerpt from Elaine Pagels' book, The Gnostic Gospels.

Anyway, I believe in the historical person called Jesus although I am not a Christian, so it's definitely possible to separate the two. The really interesting thing about the From Jesus to Christ series is that it points out that early Christianity was not without its own disagreements about the actual person & events.

[AHunter3]

I have absolutely no difficulty separating the extraordinary mortal Jesus of Nazareth and his teachings from the Paul-Bunyanesque stuff that is generally attributed to him.

[SisterCoyote]

Originally posted by tomndebb

Your religion teacher is one of a select minority, then. The most common dates are Mark, 60s, Matthew and Luke, 70s or 80s, John, 90s.

Actually, this was my mistake - I checked my notes this a.m. and what you said is what he said.

[Polycarp]

I once read a wonderful myth, about a man with the personality of a bulldog who defied a tyrant with the aid of a compassionate aristocrat.

It was entitled A History of World War II.

My take on this is that Bultmannian "demythologizing" of Scripture is a very proper stance to take.

George Washington was treated by the best medical techniques of the day. Including bloodletting.

We have gotten beyond the theoretical bases for some of these practices.

What we have in the Gospels is an accurate narrative of what Jesus of Nazareth did. Presented in the mindset of First Century man.

I once saw a man cast out a demon from a teenage boy.

Not in a fundamentalist church. In a mental hospital. With a dose of thorazine. I knew the boy. He was plagued by his inability to live up to the expectations of his family and heritage. And he was in acute rebellion, and nearly unreachable by ordinary means. He had little control over his behavior. And he became able to deal with the world, stabilized his life, his family learned better how to deal with him, and he is now working and expecting his first child any day. (BTW, he smiles knowingly whenever we play "Committed to Parkview" by the Highwaymen, if any of you know the song.)

What we have in the Gospels is the narrative of a man who taught compassion, the adherence of a strict ethic within oneself, and the avoidance of judging over others. He healed -- not in the manner of the faith healer -- but by his compassion and insight into the human condition. And somehow he conquered even death, so that his followers, terrified and dispersed after his death, became stengthened to continue following in the model he had set.

Paul structured the entire thing in a salvation theology. Matthew saw him as the fulfillment of Jewish eschatology. Luke saw him as a compassionate healer and ethical teacher. Mark saw him as the Son of God, whatever he may have meant by that. John saw him as the philosophical embodiment of God's Love made human.

What do you see him as?

[Little Nemo]

In my opinion, it's virtually impossible to seperate the historical reality of Jesus from his role as a religious figure. I believe that Jesus was an actual person but all of the information we have on him was written by people who regarded him principally as a religious figure. It wasn't the intent of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John to describe a historical figure; they were openly proselytizing. Even the earliest sources we have that mention Jesus without accepting his divinity, describe him in terms of being the center of a religious movement.

And once you accept that the New Testament was written to serve a purpose, you have to accept that everything contained in it may have been intended to serve that purpose. It's pointless to believe Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount and was crucified because these things are "possible" but disbelieve that Jesus changed water into wine and rose from the dead on the third day because these are "impossible". If you admit that the New Testament is false when describing miracles, why should you think it's true when describing more mundane activities?

[Czarcasm]

I think that we should first look at all of the contemporary literature outside of the Bible that talks about Jesus. If half the events listed in the New Testament concerning his exploits are true, there must be dozens, if not hundreds, of verifications from other sources, right?

[tomndebb]

If half the events listed in the New Testament concerning his exploits are true, there must be dozens, if not hundreds, of verifications from other sources, right?

Why? We don't have that many documents from that period to begin with.

On the other hand, look at how little information is in general circulation regarding individuals in social minorities in our current society. Had not the Civil Rights movement spurred a minor cottage industry in spotlighting the works of many black Americans, many of their efforts would have been lost to history. (In fact, many of their efforts never made it into a published work until the 1970s or later, despite the fact that many of them had died as much as 50 to 100 years prior to any biography written about them.)

This is not to argue that Jesus was, indeeed, the wonderworker described in the Gospels, but the argument that he was most likely not because we have few writings about his life is flawed.

[elucidator]

So, if Meher Baba was born in Palestine?

Shit happens. So does God.

[The Flying Dutchman]

Originally posted by SisterCoyote
[However, he raises a couple of times the idea that we cannot separate "The Christ of Faith" from the "Historical Jesus."

(The difference, of course, being that the Christ of Faith did miracles and generally behaved in the way portrayed in the Bible, coming down to earth so God could forgive us our sins, etc., and the Historical Jesus is the actual physical person who walked around and the things that it can be proven that he did.)

What I'm wondering is if other knowledgable folks around the SDMB agree with this assessment; that the two absolutely cannot be separated for purposes of study, not faith. ]

Speaking as if I were a secular historian, any study of Jesus Christ should include all "contemporary" documentation, including those references that are presently canonized. The only really "non biased" source that I am aware of is the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus, wherin he reports that such a man as Jesus claiming to be the Christ performed miracles and has a following.

To ignore what Jesus claimed or was claimed to be as well as the miracles attributed would leave very little else to study.

[Captain Amazing]

Originally posted by Polycarp

What we have in the Gospels is an accurate narrative of what Jesus of Nazareth did. Presented in the mindset of First Century man.

How do we know we have an accurate narrative of what Jesus of Nazareth did, though? Every religion, every philosophy of life, and even every nation turns its founders into legends.

In 1800, just after George Washington's death, then again in 1806, Rev. Mason Weems wrote a biography of him, which included stories such as the famous cherry tree story, the "throwing a coin over the Potomac" story, and a bunch more, and Washington was made out to be a model of courage, piety, and intelligence. Much of the information in the book is false. Weems invents incidents, gives Washington speeches he never made, and portrays a Washington with a radically different temprament then those who knew Washington described him as having. All this comes from a book written only a few years after Washington's death! Of course, Weems' "Life of Washington" isn't meant to be a biography so much as it is designed to impart moral lessons and serve as a model for its readers. It sets up Washington as the individual with all the qualities we should emulate, but we know from a myriad of other sources, it isn't good history.

However, what if all the other information we had about Washington was lost to us, and the only sources we had were the "Life of Washington" and works derived from it? We would then, for lack of an alternative, have an inaccurate image of Washington that we would assume to be true.

[JubilationTCornpone]

Originally posted by Captain Amazing

How do we know we have an accurate narrative of what Jesus of Nazareth did, though? Every religion, every philosophy of life, and even every nation turns its founders into legends.

Well, legends did arise regarding Jesus, as recorded in the (highly apocryphal) Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, and others. These writings were rejected by the early church.

If you want 100% absolute assurance, well, that's simply not possible -- not even with modern historiographic techniques. In brief though, we do have writings from early church fathers, where they recognized certain writings and not others. We can also examine the NT documents for historical consistency.

In addition, we can consider the authorship of these writings. The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, for example, are generally attributed to the physician Luke, who was known to be a travelling companion of Paul. As such, he was in a favorable position to report what Peter, Paul and company said regarding Jesus and the early church. Ditto for the Pauline epistles, which are generally attributed to St. Paul.

[Triskadecamus]

I think it is possible to separate Jesus, the carpenter's son of Galilee, from the Savior of Man. I think that doing so is deliberately missing the point. If He was not the Son of God, and Savior, then He would be dead, and of no real importance. But the importance of the Lord is not that one can, or cannot prove His existence.

I am not a theologian, nor a historian. However, even aside from the life of Jesus, here on earth, away from the matter of faith, there is a body of works attributed to Him, a view of life, and a dedication to the love of all mankind. Don't get bogged down in historicity, bibliolotry, and dogma. None of that has much to do with Christianity. Proof that He lived is not available. Proof that he died is not available. Proof that He was resurrected from the dead is not available. For provable philosophies, you must be content with science, which isn't a philosophy at all. Sadly, history isn't even a science.

If you ignore the question of His life, and simply live your life as if His admonition were good advice, you would live a life dedicated to love, and compassion for all others, and respect for every soul you meet. Leave the God part of it to Him. You and I will be challenged enough just trying to be good people, and live good lives. Philosophy is too hard, just love everyone. Even if we are wrong, it will still be a good thing.

This being right thing is waaaaay over rated.

Tris
---------------------------
"He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh." ~ Koran ~

[Sofa King]

Just to follow up on Captain Amazing, there is another, roughly contemporary example which I think should be considered.

Did Alexander the Great really exist?

There is one source from which virtually all of our knowledge of Alexander derives. It's the Anabasis, by Arrian, and that link tells us pretty much most of what we know about him.

Arrian, in turn, tells us his authoritative biography of Alexander, four hundred years after the fact, was created by combining the narratives of Ptolemy and another guy who I can't remember who was a navigator for Alexander's fleet. In cases where the narratives differ, he defers to Ptolemy, because a head of state wouldn't lie, would he?

Worse still, Arrian loved the historical works of Thucidides and Xenophon, who coexisted with the flowering of ancient Greece. So, he wrote his history in the style of those already ancient writers, but apparently not as well as they did. There are complications in translation which may very well stem from Arrian's own mistakes the scripts.

And of course, the major repository of knowledge of that time, Alexandria (founded, of course, by Alexander), was sacked and destroyed. So, we don't have Ptolemy to refer to, directly. There is no firsthand account of Alexander the Great's life known to us.

And yet, we never questioned Alexander's existence. Later, someone noticed that a mole in the harbor of Tyre must have been the one that he had built in order to destroy the last vestige of Phonecian seapower, and we've found evidence of his outposts, and perhaps even his burial site. And of course there are a dozen cities named after him, and one or two even named after his horse. Nevertheless, the evidence is weak.

We're talking about a guy who might have been responsible for the death of one percent of the total world population in his time.

What we know about Alexander is mostly bullshit. Scholars agree upon it. What we are taught is carefully filtered, and constantly thought about, and reconsidered about every twenty years.

Alexander The Great died less than 250 years before Jesus was born. Jesus didn't have anything built, Jesus didn't command the resources of a regent of the "known world," Jesus didn't write.

But people wrote about him. And that's what we've got. If you're going to believe in the myth that is History, you have to believe in the existence of Jesus. And no, I wouldn't want to have to prove it in court.

[Polycarp]

There are standards for deconstructing the objective data from material known only from polemic or anecdotal accounts.

You presume (in the legal sense) the supernatural to be an invalid add-on. You convert terminology specific to the age, place, and/or culture to that more congenial to ours. You suppose material claiming to be verbatim dialogue (by our standards) to be indirect reportage of what was said if it was written at a time when that distinction was not drawn. You adjust as appropriate for a perceived bias in the reporter. And, in the absence of sound reason to think otherwise, you presume the remainder to be a quasi-factual account of actual events.

Given this, a reconstruction of the Historical Jesus seems quite possible, but extemely difficult to do, owing to the propensity for bias in the sources and in the analysts. (To what extent do you adjust? Is that not driven by your own views?)

And, of course, the presumption of the absence of supernatural occurrences becomes extraordinarily strained in the particular case of Jesus, since aside from the Feeding of the 5,000, the one series of events stressed by all four principal sources is the Passion/Resurrection story. (Note: I grant there are apparent contradictions based on the fragmentary reportage of specific occurrences during the time span covered; these need not concern us, since the claim that A., B., or C. was "first at the grave" and was accompanied by D., E., or F. is the sort of detail common to eyewitness accounts everywhere. Though the majority of us have seen the footage of the Kennedy assassination, I suspect seven persons describing it from memory would come up with seven different accounts, differing in minor details.)

However, my key point is that some event appears to have happened on the first day of the week following Jesus's death that caused major character changes in his former disciples, and which they report, variously phrased, as his return to life. Subtract this, and the "historical Jesus" question becomes one of identifying which of several interpretations (radical humanist, apocalyptic preacher, reformer of Judaism, etc.) to place on an itinerant Rabbi who spoke in figures of speech. But it is not true to the accounts. Supernatural in implication they may be, but what happened on "the first Easter" appears to be key to the accounts. Resolution of this question, whether it be by skepticism, faith, or open-minded reading of the original texts with an eye to "normal reality," is important to the question.

[tracer]

Here is Libertarian's favorite website on reconstructing the historical Jesus:

http://www.concentric.net/~Mullerb/index.shtml

It's pretty good, but I did have one concern: the site spends a lot of time discussing the books of the New Testament, but spends little or no time discussing those early Christian writings which did not make it into the New Testament (e.g. the Infancy gospels, the two gospels of Thomas, etc.).