Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

Understanding Gnosticism Today Two analogies or comparisons may help us assess Gnostic claims about Jesus. The first is about historical proximity. The church’s gospels are written about thirty to sixty-five years after Jesus’ life. This span of time would be comparable to the relationship of a fifty-five-year-old professor in the year 2010 to the Vietnam War or the Korean Conflict, which occurred in his lifetime. This professor can assess what he reads about these conflicts with his own living memory and that of his eyewitness contemporaries. By contrast, the earliest Gnostic gospel is probably written 140 years after Jesus’ life (and much later for all except The Gospel of Thomas). This span of time would be comparable to our professor’s relationship to the Civil War. Our professor would have no living memory of or connection to these events. Fortunately, the Civil War is remarkably well-documented. Without its many eyewitness accounts readers would be left to depend upon retellings by people with no memory of the events they report. Another comparison centers upon the difficulty of offering historical reconstructions of events and persons. There have been a great many books and movies that reconstruct the life and work of Abraham Lincoln. These typically share some general consensus about the outline of his basic life story, family, and service, but they still vary about his motives, religion, and person. But a very different reconstructing of his life emerges from the ...