For most people, the Christmas holiday is a quiet moment of reconciliation with whatever jarred against our sense of reason or reality during the autumn. This applies to personal disagreements as well as to professional disputes. Yet the question of what is true can often be deepened into something more fundamental: Does true knowledge even exist?
Politicians and religious leaders frequently claim to possess true knowledge, and one may argue that without a certain degree of consensus on this question, societies would lack the cohesion needed to function.
The question is therefore older than Christianity itself, but the history of Christianity is a particularly vivid example of how difficult the pursuit of truth can be. In the Christmas story, a cluster of values is, for the first time, gathered in a single person. But what these values actually are has been contested since the very beginnings of Christianity. The further back one looks, the greater the disagreement.
It is more than a dispute about honour. In George Orwell’s words: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” History is more than “just” memory — it is insight. How we articulate that insight shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world, and thus influences our thoughts and actions going forward.
A chance discovery in 1945 shook Christianity:
In 1945, an Egyptian farmer came across a buried jar outside the town of Nag Hammadi north of Luxor. The jar contained 13 papyrus books written in Coptic. The farmer burned a few pages for fuel before realising that the contents were rare and immensely valuable. The books later changed hands several times before being purchased by the Jung Institute in Zürich.
Their contents quickly sparked heated rhetoric within the Catholic Church. The books contained a number of Christian Gnostic texts from the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, writings thought lost forever. These texts presented early Christianity in a manner strikingly different from the four canonical gospels we know today. Perhaps most unsettling was that they represented entire intact theological traditions that the Church had attempted to erase.
Thirteen previously unknown codices, including several gospels, ...
It had long been known that many early Christian groups were condemned and executed as heretics by other Christians. But almost everything known about these groups came from what their opponents had written. One bishop in particular, Irenaeus of Lyon, was especially tenacious. In the year 180 he published five volumes under the title “Refutation and Overthrow of the Falsely So-Called Knowledge” (Adversus Haereses). In them, he condemned, among other texts, the “Gospel of Truth” as “filled with blasphemy.” Irenaeus insisted that only one Church could exist, declaring that outside this Church “there is no salvation.” Only members of this Church were orthodox (“right-thinking”) Christians. This Church had to be catholic, that is, universal. Anyone who challenged this belief was a heretic and should be punished accordingly.
Scholars estimate that in the 2nd century, between 20 and 30 different gospels circulated, perhaps as many as 40. Each offered its own account of Jesus or John the Baptist, its own understanding of true knowledge, and its own theological and liturgical tradition. The ecclesiastical landscape was therefore far more fragmented than it is today. Rome was not yet the capital of Christianity, but merely one important city among others, such as Ephesus, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
... which nuanced and partly rewrote Christianity
By the late 2nd century, the struggle over Truth was close to tearing Christianity apart. But from the end of that century, the faith was gradually homogenised, and by 381 imperial edicts ordered that all gospels except the four canonical ones be confiscated and destroyed. Archaeologists therefore believe that the Nag Hammadi library was hidden around 370–380 CE, and its gospels remained concealed, and thus apocryphal, until the discovery in 1945.
The discovery of the 200 Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 shook understandings of the diversity of Judaism. It also deepened the understanding of the intellectual and cultural climate from which Christianity emerged, including the social structures and the expectation of one or even two messiahs. The Jesus of the New Testament thus fit into several already existing narrative frames.
The newly discovered apocrypha presented, among other things, a duality within God
The Nag Hammadi texts themselves contained a number of very different portrayals of Jesus and of Christian values. Some of them even regarded John the Baptist as the primary religious teacher.
Many early Christian movements, including the Gnostics, believed above all that “there is another God besides the Creator.” The Gnostics thus perceived a duality within the divine: a further God who was the deepest source of all being, “the Depth.” In modern terms, their focus on inner knowledge can resemble psychotherapeutic self-exploration; self-knowledge leads to understanding. Gnostics believed that it is ignorance, not sin, that afflicts humanity. Whoever attains gnosis (deep insight) becomes not only a Christian but a Christ, one who has recognised the divine spark within. One can sense parallels here to, for example, Buddhism.
In the Gospel of Truth, Valentinus wrote that “Ignorance brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew dense like a fog, so that no one was able to see. Therefore error is powerful.” Valentinus believed that most people live unconsciously, in a kind of forgetfulness, and are therefore easily captured by “many illusions.” Another Valentinian, the author of the Gospel of Philip, noted that words and names can be “very deceptive.”
Other early movements, such as Marcionism and the last surviving Gnostic religion, the Mandaeans, believed that the God of the Old Testament was an evil and jealous creator (a demiurge). Accordingly, they viewed Jesus as a false messiah. They therefore found it necessary to create their own canon of scripture.
The struggle for truth has always existed
The struggle for truth has always been present. It is a struggle to interpret today’s facts in the light of the past, and to determine who holds the authority to make that interpretation. Language is one of our most powerful tools, as Churchill often demonstrated in the House of Commons.
For this reason, the battle over history will remain vital. It is existential, and therefore we first see what we want to see, only afterwards what we are able to see. The early Christians’ conflict over the gospels was not merely theological; it was a fight over the very lens through which the world should be understood and thus shaped.
Our present and future are influenced by our self-understanding. As Plato has Socrates express it: "The wisest person is the one who knows how little he knows".
