Resources > Bible Studies The OTHER bible Posted by CCC CyberMinistries on Apr 25, 2006, 10:05

The “Other Bible”

There's another bible you can buy in your bookstores. It is the Gnostic bible. This bible has books in it like The Revelation of Adam, The Sermon of Zostrianos, The Gospel of Truth . Some people like this alternate bible better than the one you may be acquainted with. They like what it teaches about God, Christ, and women.

The reason…

This bible permits us to make God into whoever or whatever we want him or her to be.

This bible refers to the divine feminine and personal

esoteric knowledge.

At last we're free from restricting doctrines such as the Virgin Birth, the unique deity of Christ and his resurrection.

This other bible is broad enough to embrace our culture and lets us believe pretty well whatever we wish.

Now, that surely helps you see the appeal of the “other” bible.

With the release of the DaVicni Code we have a new source that is popular and entertaining where people hear these old arguments and old information in a brand new way and format. Lost...The Lost Gospels that "Lost" Out!

That word Gnostic comes from Greek gnosis , which means knowledge. More precisely the word is used to refer to hidden knowledge available only to the enlightened. The Gnostics believed they were privy to spiritual experiences that gave them an inside track on a religious interpretation of the world. Their version of Christianity was among other things, pro-feminine. Male and female were blended together. Some of the writings speak of sexual rituals, and others make reference to new teachings about Jesus and the disciples. Understandably this Gnostic bible is being used in feminist literature to promote the feminist agenda, and supposedly tell the real story of early Christianity.

Listen to what Time magazine said about the book: "Dozens of Christian Scriptures were holy writ, then heresy, then forgotten. Why are we looking at them again?" These gospels "fill a perceived need for alternative views of Christ." And on the part of New Age seekers and mainline believers people are finding there's "a new way to be Christian." Since these gospels are frequently appealed to in The Da Vinci Code and are widely used in various occult interpretations of the New Testament, we must take a close look at their origin and content.

As of this moment we are engaged in nothing less than the battle for the real Bible.

When were the Gnostic writings found?

In 1945, various documents were found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

A man who was trying to fertilize his crop came across some jars that contained writings. He did not realize he had found an important trove of documents. Those are the documents that primarily comprise the Gnostic Bible.

These Gnostics were a group of thinkers who were highly influenced by Plato. They differed among themselves about many things. Thus it is difficult to summarize in a few sentences what they believed. Let it be sufficient to say they denied that God came in the flesh because matter was regarded as evil. Hence, God could not have become a man. They believed that humanity created God. Man's problem, therefore, is not sin but need for self-knowledge. They denied the resurrection. Others taught that Jesus did not die on the cross but a substitute died for him. Though they differed regarding how salvation was to be attained, they did agree that redemption is within our power, and that it could be achieved by encountering God directly without the mediation of Christ or the church.

Time magazine is right when it says the recovered texts feed America's ever sharpening appetite for mystical spirituality. People are seeking a relationship with God that is not tied to doctrine. The Gnostics will allow you to find God in your own way.

How credible is the Gnostic bible?

For openers, not even the most radical liberal scholar seriously believes that The Gospel of Thomas was written by the Thomas of the New Testament or that The Gospel of Philip was written by Philip of the New Testament. And the same can be said for other gospels that bear the names of the early apostles. Everyone agrees that the names of the apostles were attributed to these documents to give them respectability and to pretend that they are Christian. Any writer who attributes his writings to someone more famous in order to get acceptance, such a writer's ethics are suspect. Paul the apostle was already aware of such writings in his day and wrote, "We ask you brothers not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by some prophecy, report, or letter supposed to have come from us, saying that the day of the Lord has already come" (2 Thessalonians 2:2).

Second, these documents are not eyewitness accounts of the events of the New Testament. While one of the earliest documents may date to about a.d. 150, that's about a 100 years after the time of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, but others come to us from the fourth and the 5th and the 6th centuries. We're talking about a huge gap of time between these authors, whoever they were, and the actual events of the New Testament. Contrast this with the writings of the canonical Gospels, our Bible, written by eyewitnesses and completed before a.d. 60. Think about how different our Bible is from these documents.

Third, if you read the Gnostic gospels you will not be impressed with their similarity with the New Testament but rather the striking differences. These gospels are non-historical and even anti-historical. They contain little narrative and have no sense of chronology. They show no interest in research, geography, or historical contexts. These documents make no serious pretense of actually overlapping with the canonical Gospels. They are filled with garbled New Testament quotations along with foolish sayings that are put in the mouth of Jesus.

In order to give you the flavor of some of these books, here are a few of the sayings of Jesus found in the famous Gnostic gospel, The Gospel of Thomas.

"Jesus said, 'Blessing on a lion if a human eats it, making the lion human. Foul is the human if the lion eats it, making the lion human.'"

Here's number 56 of the 114 sayings in The Gospel of Thomas: "Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass. And whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy."

But wait…there is more

When you make the two into one and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner and the upper like the lower and when you make the male and the female into a single one so that the male will no longer be a male nor the female be a female, and when you make the eyes in place of an eye, a hand in the place of a hand, a foot in the place of a foot, an image in the place of an image, then you'll enter into the Father's domain.

(the three quotes above are from the Gospel of Thomas)

The simple fact is that the Gnostics tried to use Christianity to give their writings credibility, but they are essentially pagan documents and Christianity stood against paganism.

Reasons why the Gnostic bible is popular

Why would anyone believe the Gnostic gospels whose history is basically a house of cards hung together with ropes of mist?

Why would anyone accept those gospels rather than the eyewitness accounts of the New Testament, which can be checked out in so many different ways?

Let me give you a couple of reasons.

First of all, because the Gnostic gospels allow radicals to support radical ideas like the notion that Mary Magdalene was to be the one upon whom the church is built, but Peter and these male dominant, money hungry, power hungry men came along and usurped the church from the hands of the women.

Second, because in the Gnostic gospels, at least in one of the texts, sex is a sacrament. The Da Vinci Code teaches, as do these other occult revelations, that you encounter God through sexual ecstasy. The church is viewed as the sex-repressing church that has stood against this glorious experience by which we encounter God. It's a message fit for the times.

However, it is important to remember…that just like the DaVinci Code, the “other” bible is just a work of fiction. Not even good fiction at that. The “other bible” is not even entertaining, mind engaging, thrilling, or fun to read. Now that it has been incorporated into another fictional story, The DaVinci Code…we have an entertaining format in which these fictitious accounts of nothing are presented. They are presented under the fictional statement that they are fact. Which of course in a fictional book is fiction!

So it goes…it really is a no brainer as to why people would rather believe and live their lives on fiction rather than fact. It is because the truth is too tough.