The Gnostic Gospels

Although it was included in the New Testament, The Gospel of John was an important text for many gnostics. However, both the gnostics and the orthodox drew different conclusions from the stories of John. The orthodox interpreted the verses John 14: 5-6, in which Jesus says to the apostle Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Oxford University Press, 1991.), as saying that Jesus (and by extension the orthodox church) was the sole source of truth, while the gnostic Gospel of Thomas instead reworked the same passage as saying that truth could belong to anyone.

As the orthodox church grew and became more organized, it could accept “many contradictory ideas and practices as long as the disputed elements supported its basic institutional structure” (120). For resistant groups like the gnostics, the orthodox church treated them as rival institutions.

The orthodox themselves argued that the institutional church was necessary to “approach God” (121). However, some gnostics like Valentinus went so far to argue that the divine itself is generated by humanity in the sense that humans “created the whole language of religious expression” (123).