The Changing Face of the Jesus Movement: Then and Now

We are privy to history in hindsight: we know how the race to the finish turned about between the varieties of early Christianity, and that the proto-orthodox eventually formed into an “orthodoxy.” But a question arose when reading David Brakke’s The Gnostics (2012): how differently would the face of Christianity look today if the Gospel of Judas (or any non-canonical work) had been accepted into the canon? Would this have eliminated the inclusion of the Synoptic Gospels and John, or would the passages about Judas’ betrayal in the canonical gospels have simply been redacted or taken out entirely to make room for this different perspective on the figure of Judas? How differently would Christianity be if none of the canonical gospels ended up in the New Testament, and if we only had the Gospel of Judas?

As Brakke notes, the Christianity of Irenaeus “was not the Christianity when the Gospel of Judas first appeared… [those] who produced and read Judas were doubtless sincere in their beliefs and considered themselves the true Christians…. The failure to include Judas in the eventual canon of the New Testament was [not] historically inevitable” (2). Imagine if this gospel had prevailed: in modern culture, and through portrayals in art, literature and other media, a person branded as a “Judas” would not be a betrayer, but an enlightened one. This hypothetical can only be carried so far, to be sure, and one could hypothesize the point using any of the apocryphal texts. What if the Gospel of Peter had “won out,” or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, or if the narratives about child Jesus in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas replaced the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke?

What if, as another example, the Acts of Paul and Thecla had been included in the canon? Although Christianity has and continues to see its fair share of ascetics - Stylites, monks, nuns, friars, and other anchorites and monastics - what if this Acts had been in the canon? Would a life of celibacy / chastity / asceticism have become the norm in all of proto-orthodox practice, and then “orthodox” practice? Would Christianity still even exist today as a living religion, or would it be another dead religion studied in textbooks? If there was no one to continue to spread the early Jesus movement (due to a group of celibates), would proto-orthodoxy have died out, and (Christian forms of) Gnosticism or another Christianity have become dominant, and would that have lasted into the 21st century?

These are merely thought experiments and hypotheticals. The Gospel of Judas and the Acts of Paul and Thecla were not included in the canon (although the figure of Thecla attained a revered status), but they also raises another relevant question. Since the 1945 recovery at Nag Hammadi, and as texts such as the Gospel of Judas are recovered, these other varieties of Christianity are brought to the forefront of public attention. Will continued discussion and discoveries lead to a revision of canon(s) for Christianity? Will these texts continue to be used only to complicate the picture of the early Jesus movement, or will they be appropriated and utilized by religious adherents? In the New Age community, for example, some call themselves Gnostics, and others have taken up recovered texts in their personal canons. But will these texts lead to changes in Christian theology and practice, or again, be used primarily be scholars and historians? Over the next few centuries, one wonders just how far the canon(s) and the face of Christianity could evolve in light of these other early varieties.