The Gospel Truth

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Elaine Pagels was recently given op-ed space in the New York Times to opine on the relevance of the Gnostic “Gospel of Judas” recently unearthed. In describing why the Church forgot about such heretical texts, she mentions Ss. Irenaeus and Athanasius:

Many scholars who first read these gospels had been taught that they were “heretical,” which meant they were the wrong gospels. When I was introduced to them as a student, we called them “Gnostic” gospels, the name given to them nearly 2,000 years ago by Irenaeus, one of the fathers of the church, who denounced them as false and “heretical.”

(Read more: The Gospel Truth – New York Times)

St. Irenaeus, and Church fathers after him, hold the early Gnostic texts to be heretical because they offer a merely human religion in place of the revelation of God. In his Treatise Against Heresies, Irenaeus, a second century bishop in Lyons, France, insists that the true Gospel unites the vision of God in the Old Testament with that revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Most of the Gnostic sects fabricated fantastic myths explaining the schism between old and new covenants, invoking a multiplicity of gods and demigods. Sycretism at its best. Irenaeus and every orthodox bishop and Church father after him insist that the new revelation in Jesus Christ does not conflict with the old revelation to the Jews. The true Gospel teaches that there is only one God, just as the Jewish faith taught.

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