For those of you who have not read The Secret Gospel of Thomas, it is actually more about the cannonisation of John as the first step in creating orthodoxy than about cannonising Thomas. Pagels suggests that a linguistic analysis of Thomas and John is suggestive that John was actually based on Thomas, but that it encourages a slightly different emphasis in interpretation: Thomas emphasised that we are all the children of God and therefore have divinity within us, while John emphasised that Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, and hints at a unique divinity for Jesus. This is similar to the generally accepted theory that Matthew and Luke are both based on Mark and ‘Q’, while each emphasises different things about Jesus.

Beyond this, it appears that the author of John was aware of the existence of the Gospel of Thomas as a pre-existing competitor, denigrating Thomas three times, the most famous example inspiring the epithet ‘doubting Thomas’. No other source disparages Thomas.

Pagels claims that John was not even mentioned by most important figures immediately preceding Irenaeus until he began the battle for the cannon, identified the four Gospels, and made John the principle Gospel and lens through which the others should be read. This primacy for John was necessary as the synoptics did not suggest that Jesus was God in the way that John does.

Pagels then uses this as the prototype for two subsequent entrenchings of orthodoxy. First, a prototype creed was placed above the Gospels to control their interpretation, and then this creed was refined to only allow a very narrow orthodoxy at the (in?)famous council of Nicea.

The following are conclusions are my own and are not presented in the book.

Amputating errant belief disfugures the whole church

The first thing I learnt was that although a restrictive orthodoxy may have been useful at the time, a significant price was paid. Pagels presents the target of some of the procscriptions as mystics and pentecostals. If this is accurate, it has taken the better part of 2000 years for that aspect of Christianity to begin to be reintegrated into the Christian main stream. Even if there were errors in Gnosticism, maybe the best solution was not to kill the Holy Spirit for 2000 years! Although Iraneaus did not have the benefit of hindsite, we do, so maybe we can take this lesson for how define our faith and deal with ‘heretics’.

The cannon is irrelevant!

The second thing I found was that although control of the cannon went some way towards creating orthodoxy, it was ultimately ineffective. New texts needed to be written to control belief, and these new texts were actually placed above the cannon. They provide the only lens through which we are permitted to read the cannon. Questions over which text was written when and by whom pale into insignificance. This second dominant cannon of councils and creeds was written hundreds of years after Jesus lived, sometimes in a highly charged atmosphere not conducive to true consensus. The power of this second cannon is magnified by the fact that its influence is mostly concealed: people read the creeds into the text and then attribute the result to the text itself.

What is the role for the emergent church?

If we are to undo the damage of overly proscriptive definitions of belief, maybe the first thing we need to do is change not the content but the very nature of our creeds. Given the highly charged and divisive religious atmosphere in many parts of the world, how can the emergent church begin to bring about this healing?