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the concept of orthodoxy has a cruel history

The Missing Gospels appears to be the flagship of the Christian Traditionalists' defence against the growing impact of the Nag Hammadi gospels and other recently rediscovered early Gnostic Christian texts.

In The Missing Gospels, Darrell Bock attempts to show that Traditionalist Christianity has its roots securely in the first century with Christ, and that the Gnostics were simply an aberation that appeared in the second century.

However, Darrell Bock's The Missing Gospels will not be quite as successful in containing true Christian Gnosticism as his predecessor Ireneus was in the Second Century.

Ireneus and his accomplices achieved success against Christian Gnosticism largely  through the establishment of a massive centralised power structure under the Bishop of Rome.

Ireneus put it this way:


Bock and his traditionalist Christian compatriots no longer have the option of such a declaration of 'Martial Law' and have to rely on works such as The Missing Gospels to get their point across.

Of course the missing Gospels that the work refers to, were only missing thanks to the actions of the predecessors of the modern Christian Traditionalists who followed Ireneus in the fourth Century. Actions that included both the destruction of Gnostic Christian texts and disinformation about their content.  There are of course other texts that are still missing thanks to their actions!

Missing texts did not go missing because they offered support for the Traditionalist Christian position!

A good illustrative point is the Apology of Aristides that went "missing" until the late 19th Century.

Of course Bock doesn't ask why we are missing so many dissenting texts, but to give him his due, he does admit to the early Traditionalists disinformation campaign - in the nicest possible way.

Missing the Point

In what way does Bock miss the point?

Christian Traditionalists claim Christian Gnosticism appeared from nowhere in the second Century, and the Nag Hammadi Texts provide no light on the first century, and only inform us of Christianity in the Second and Subsequent centuries of the Common Era.

This is naive.

There are NO extant Christian manuscripts dated earlier than 200 AD neither Gnostic or Traditionalist. NONE.  The Nag Hammadi find informs our understanding of the first century in the same way the Traditionalist texts do.

It was the Christian traditionalists who had the temporal power over texts from that time until the late 18th Century., power they have clearly been prepared to wield to butress their position.

With the information provided by Nag Hammadi, we can now see the earlier so called "traditionalist texts" in a fresh light.

Valentinian Gnostics saw themselves as the true successors of Paul.  And we can now see that they were the only people in the Second Century who had any real understanding of Pauls theology.

Reading Valentinian texts from Nag Hammadi such as the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip has allowed me to see the New Testament not as a seamless whole, but as a syncretism of very diverse texts.  How this has not been obvious for the last 2000 years is thanks to the controlling paradigm fashioned by Ireneus and his compatriots.

If this seems extreme to you, I challenge you to address the conflicting accounts of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 14 and Galatians 2.

Whether deliberately or not, The Missing Gospels is missing any realistic treatment of the Chasm between the positions of Paul and James in the first Century, and it has created a straw man argument to deal with the contributions of Elaine Pagels.

It also has missed the key point - "What is Christian Gnosticism"

Read the Gospel of Truth for yourself and you will see that for Valentinus, Gnosticism was direct first hand knowledge of the Father.  

Quoting Ireneus again:


I recommend Christ as your source and the entrance to life.  Not a 'deposit of faith' handed on and handed down through men in authority in a temporal church - 'Waterless Canals' as a later Gnostic so aptly put it!