Talarico and the Zombie Gospel of Thomas
In a sermon clip posted last week, U.S. Senate hopeful James Talarico said:
In the Gospel of Thomas, which was later omitted from the Bible by Church officials, the Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying, “When you make the male and female one and the same, when the male is not male, and the female is not female, then you will enter the kingdom of God.”
His is what might be called a “Zombie argument;” a claim which, like a monster in movie, keeps getting up and shambling around, no matter how many times it’s killed. It’s like calling an unborn child “just a clump of cells,” though sonograms and ultrasounds have shown for years that it is not true. Or that the same-sex attracted are “born this way,” when even advocates abandoned the slogan years ago.
Most scholars have never considered the Gospel of Thomas as being on par with the actual Gospels. And yet, those seeking a feminist revisioning of Christianity continue to claim it is a legitimate source of what Christians believed before it was suppressed by authorities. To borrow Voltaire’s quip about the Holy Roman Empire, the Gospel of Thomas is neither a Gospel, nor of Thomas, nor Scripture. It’s also neither Christian, nor feminist.
First, despite Talarico’s claim that the Gospel of Thomas was kicked out of the Bible, that just isn’t so. In fact, it was never in the Bible in the first place. It’s a second-century document, which, despite being named after an Apostle, was written by people who never knew Jesus, nor even by a friend of a friend of His. As someone commented on X, this is like a fan fiction of Jane Austen written today, being described as “kicked out” of the Austen canon centuries from now.
The Gospel of Thomas is not a Christian document. It was discovered in the twentieth century in Egypt as part of an ancient library of Gnostic sources. Though Gnosticism borrowed Christian, Jewish, and pagan terms and concepts, it was its own religion with diverse beliefs. Gnosticism comes from the Greek gnosis, which means “knowledge.” The basic idea of Gnosticism is that the physical world is an illusion, or even evil. Some strands even described creation as the result of an abortion of a higher being. Salvation is acquired by rejecting the material world and securing secret knowledge. From the beginning, for these reasons and others, Gnosticism was condemned as heresy by Christians.
It is also odd for those hoping to advance feminist ideas to appeal to The Gospel of Thomas. From Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code a generation ago to Talarico today, the Gospel of Thomas is portrayed as an alternative, more feminine-friendly source about Christ. But in Line 114, Peter asked Jesus to send Mary away “for women are not worthy of life.” Unlike the Jesus of the Gospels, this version of Christ does not affirm her worth but instead promises to give her an upgrade:
Look, I will draw her in so as to make her male, so that she too may become a living male spirit, similar to you. But I say to you: Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.
In other words, the context for erasing male and female is flatly misogynistic. While it’s puzzling that critics of Christianity continue to resurrect this zombie, Dr. Glenn Sunshine has noted that people like Talarico, who attend theologically liberal seminaries, never read conservative books. They simply do not know that their institutionalized reinterpretations of the faith have been rejected
Because the Bible affirms the beauty and goodness of God’s Creation, so does Christianity. That includes the creation of His image bearers as male and female. Contrary to the Gospel of Thomas, women don’t need to become men to be saved. If they did, that certainly would not be good news.
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John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
