Why Religion? Read online

  How could I find out what really happened, and why it matters? Or does it matter? Stanford offered courses from anthropology to zoology, but at the time had no religion department. Instead, the faculty treated religion as a subject unfit for study, except perhaps for Buddhism, which seemed exotic enough not to count as a religion.

  Anyone asking questions about Western religion—anyone with a “religious problem”—would be steered toward Stanford’s chaplain; but I never went to the office of the Reverend Theodore Good. Religious professionals seemed to be selling different brands of Christianity, nearly all of them insisting that only theirs was right, all others wrong—let alone non-Christians and atheists! For the first time, though, I began to read Greek, and loved the sounds and subtleties of its poetry and drama, which opened a world of gods, goddesses, and monsters that I could never have imagined.

  When I visited Stanford, the year after graduating, to talk with my former adviser in Stanford’s history department about possible choices, he told me about the Harvard doctoral program in the study of religion, and encouraged me to apply, especially to study with Krister Stendahl, professor of New Testament. I eagerly did so, and, months later, received this response from the professor:

  Our admissions committee has read your application with interest.

  Ordinarily we would admit an applicant with your qualifications. However, we are not able to offer a place in our doctoral program to a woman, since we have many qualified applicants, and are able to admit only seven to our doctoral program. In our experience, unfortunately, women students always have quit before completing the degree.

  However, if you are still serious about pursuing a doctorate next year at this time, we have agreed to offer you admission to our doctoral program for the following year.

  I read that note over and over. “Still serious?” They hadn’t granted me an interview. Because I’m a woman, did they assume that I’d simply give up? Although deeply upset, I couldn’t find another program that looked so promising, and decided to spend another year completing a master’s degree in classics at Stanford, continuing to read advanced Greek and Latin, essential for the work I anticipated at Harvard. My father scowled, warning that going to graduate school was a crazy idea for a woman. “If you’d been admitted,” he warned, “you’d never get married—you’ll turn into one of those lonely women who carry a briefcase and go to the movies alone! No, do something that really makes sense: take typing and become a secretary, or teach in an elementary school.” Distressed and discouraged, I stubbornly held to my plan. My grandparents, alarmed at what my parents told them, and knowing nothing of Harvard, much less why anyone would want to study religion, invited me to visit their home among the orchards of Saratoga. They asked many questions, skeptical at first, but listened intently. Finally, my grandfather said, “We don’t understand, but you seem to know what you’re doing, and you have our blessing.” After dinner, when I picked up my plate to take it to the kitchen, I found under it the gift of a hundred-dollar bill.

  The following year, I arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything.

  Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest.

  We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies.

  What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars.

  This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions. When I heard of them for the first time, I was tremendously excited, like all of us who were allowed to work on these discoveries, faculty and graduate students alike, in only two universities in the United States: Harvard and Claremont University in California. Historians of Christianity had complained for nearly two thousand years that “heretics,” annoying as flies, destructive as killer bees, had plagued the early movement, but nearly everything we knew about them was what their hostile critics wrote. Now, for the first time, the heretics could speak for themselves, and that changed everything.

  When I began to read the Gospel of Thomas, a list of a hundred and fourteen sayings that claims to reveal “the secret words of the living Jesus,” what I found stopped me in my tracks. According to saying 70, Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Struck by these words, I thought, We’re not asked to believe this; it just happens to be true. Whether Jesus actually said this, we can’t know for sure, but to me that didn’t matter. What did matter was the challenge. Before, we had seen only a few fragments of this text, written in Greek; now, for the first time, we could read a complete copy, translated from Greek into Coptic, the language of Egypt nearly two thousand years ago. As I dived into this text, and others, I knew that now I’d have to bring forth—whatever there was to find.

  When I first arrived in Cambridge, having arranged a student loan, I’d rented an attic room in an old house on Trowbridge Street near campus, and loved walking through the bizarre jumble of Harvard’s architecture. In the seminars, though, I felt somewhat out of place. Nearly every graduate student of religion was male, many of them earnest young ministers, or seeking to be ministers, seriously engaged in academic pursuits. Almost all were safely married—often married young—to women who remained largely invisible, working as secretaries and teachers to support their husbands’ graduate school education. The only other woman admitted to our section of the doctoral program, Pheme Perkins, was clearly brilliant. She had previously studied physics, and her no-nonsense exterior suggested that she had rejected traditionally feminine roles to follow her intellectual passion. The ancient university breathed a spirit of having been designed by men and for men, as, of course, it was—not for anomalies like ourselves.

  Although feeling lucky to be among the very few women admitted to the doctoral program, I quickly discovered its hazards. Since many
of our seminars, even for university students, took place in the Divinity School, where arched ceilings and high windows suggested high-minded and religious thoughts, I often felt like a Dionysian trapped in a church camp. Sometimes, under my breath, I would hum the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”—and also for heretics, since women, too, were cast as outsiders. Then we discovered that several Harvard professors, each of them married, and each with a flock of children, also cast us as sexual targets.

  Four weeks after I arrived from California, still awed by Harvard, the short, balding German professor of divinity and reverend minister in the University Lutheran Church, who smoked cigarettes while he taught our introductory class, brusquely informed me that he wanted me to babysit for his four children. Although I had heard that European professors often treat graduate students as unpaid servants, I dared not refuse. That Friday, he picked me up for the thirty-mile drive to the suburb where he lived, then went out with his wife for the evening. When they got back at midnight, he announced that it was too late to drive me back to Cambridge; I’d have to spend the night on a couch in the basement. Cold and unable to sleep, I was startled, two hours later, to hear the door open. The professor crept in toward the couch, groping for my breasts. Suddenly wide awake, I fended him off and ran upstairs to the kitchen—but how to call for help? The only people who could hear me would be his wife and children; calling the police would wake everyone in the house, and he’d simply deny what had happened. There were no cell phones then, and I realized that even if I ran outside at two A.M. into those dark, silent suburban streets, I wouldn’t find a taxi or bus, or any way to walk the thirty miles back, even if I’d known which way to go. I stayed awake all night, and in the morning pretended everything was normal. He drove me back without speaking. What shocked me most was to realize how carefully he’d planned his trap. After that, he insisted on being my adviser, and although his predatory attempts continued, I avoided being alone with him.

  In the years that followed, this professor became an enthusiastic advocate for admitting women graduate students, on many of whom he honed his new, secret specialty in sexual assault. Decades passed before I dared speak about it. When finally I confided in two women who had been graduate students after me, both, to my surprise, had similar stories about that professor, and another one. After I publicly reported his behavior to a dean in the president’s office, I learned that therapists at the Harvard Health Services, themselves bound to confidentiality about what distressed students reported, called him Koester the Molester.

  Meanwhile, I struck up a friendship with another oddball—a tall, rakish Texan studying to become an Episcopal priest, who earned money at night and on weekends as a jazz drummer in Boston clubs. His enthusiasm drew me to his church, Boston’s Church of the Ascension, an Episcopal church with a dramatic liturgy, framed by the choir singing the ancient anthems of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, and led by a charismatic priest whose simple, powerful sermons communicated deep engagement with his faith. I approached this kind of worship cautiously, leading at first with the intellect: What is this weird ritual cannibalism, eating bread and drinking wine as if they were body and blood? As the strangeness wore off, I was moved to see hundreds of people of every shape, color, size, and disposition, young, old, families, some in Sunday best, others in jeans and sneakers, walk up at the climax of the service to receive a wafer and a sip of diluted wine, until I requested confirmation, and stood up to join them.

  Standing in line, I wondered, What kind of hunger drives us to come together, sing, pray, and share a token meal? Are we simply acknowledging a common need? Participating added unspoken depth to what we were learning at the university, from each other and from some of the secret texts we were now reading, written by anonymous Christians who themselves had shared sacred meals thousands of years ago. The anonymous author of the Gospel of Truth, another gospel found in the same collection with the Gospel of Thomas, says that eating what Jesus offers in that meal—himself—brings joy, as “he discovers them in himself, and they discover him in themselves.” Here we found powerfully compelling poetic images of what the Gospel of Philip calls “a mystery.”

  Diving into the secret gospels, though, was exciting: Who wrote them, and what’s in them? The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, found two years later, in 1947, already had shaken and radically changed the landscape of the world we hoped to explore. During the first century CE, devout Jews called Essenes (perhaps from the Hebrew term Hasidim, or “holy ones”), some of them Jesus’s contemporaries, had stored their precious collection of Bible scrolls, prophecies, and sacred texts in caves in Israel, near the Dead Sea. There they’d remained hidden for nearly two thousand years, after Roman soldiers, suspecting the “holy ones” of fighting against Rome, swarmed into their settlement and slaughtered them all. Some of our professors, including Krister Stendahl, along with an international group of scholars, showed how this discovery opens up a much wider, more complex world of radical, devout Jews who, for nearly a hundred years before the first century CE, were predicting the end of time in ways that likely influenced John the Baptist and Jesus.

  The nearly simultaneous discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt came as an even more spectacular surprise. The story we heard told how an Arab farmer named Mohammed Ali, who lived in Nag Hammadi, an Egyptian village about an hour’s drive from ancient Thebes (today’s Luxor) was digging for fertilizer near a cliff honeycombed with ancient burial caves when he struck something underground and dug up a sealed six-foot jar filled with a stack of ancient books, bound in tooled gazelle leather. Since Mohammed Ali could not read his own language, Arabic, much less the strange script of these books, he took them home and dumped them on the ground near the stove, where his mother later admitted she’d thrown some of the pages into the fire for kindling while she was baking bread. Not long after, while Mohammed Ali and his brothers were in jail, arrested for killing their father’s murderer to avenge a blood feud, a local teacher took the texts to Cairo, hoping to sell them on the black market for antiquities. When a dealer there showed the Gospel of Thomas to the French scholar Jean Doresse, he began to trace out the first line and was astonished to read, “These are the secret words of the living Jesus, and the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote them down.”

  Could these be an authentic record of Jesus’s sayings? Did Jesus have a twin brother? Behind these questions loomed larger ones. We’d heard of secret gospels, but what we knew—or thought we knew—was like what medieval mapmakers imagined beyond familiar continents, where they pictured dragons lurking in uncharted seas. Before this time, none of us had ever seen the Gospel of Thomas, except for a few fragments written in Greek, the language of the New Testament. Now, as we investigated these texts for the first time, and struggled to translate them, we graduate students, along with our professors, felt like detectives. I was amazed to find that some of these texts spoke words I’d never heard before yet longed to understand.

  Previous generations of historians who’d heard of such secret texts called them “gnostic,” since instead of prescribing what to believe, they encourage us to seek gnosis. This Greek term, often translated as “knowledge,” actually means “insight,” or “understanding,” since it refers to “knowledge of the heart,” which spiritual teachers usually encourage. But as graduate students, we’d already read the writings of Bishop Irenaeus, a Syrian missionary working in rural Gaul (c. 160–180), who warned that Christians offering “gnosis” were Satan-inspired heretics. To stanch the flow of their diabolic poison into his congregations, Irenaeus turned gnosis into an insult, writing five massive volumes he called The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-Called Gnosis, which declared that “the heretics say that they have more gospels than there really are; but really, they have no gospel that is not full of blasphemy.”

  “So-called gnostics,” he charged, lure naive Christians into “unauthorized meetings”—meetings that he, as bishop, hadn’t authorized—promising to tell them what
Jesus and Paul taught in secret. When the bishop accused these Christians of being “evil interpreters” who simply made up the “secret mysteries” they claimed to offer, they infuriated him, saying that he lacked spiritual insight. Irenaeus retorted that “if someone gives himself up to them like a silly sheep, and follows their practice and their ritual, he gets so puffed up that he walks around strutting, looking superior, with all the pomposity of a cock.” They even put forth their own inventions, he says, including “something recently written that they dared call the Gospel of Truth, although it’s nothing like the New Testament gospels—nothing but an abyss of madness, and blasphemy against Christ!”

  When I first read his attack on heretics as a graduate student, knowing Irenaeus’s reputation as a respected “father of the church,” I assumed that he probably was right. But then I noticed something else: although Irenaeus insists that Jesus and Paul never offered secret teachings, the New Testament writings say the opposite. Mark’s gospel says that Jesus, like other rabbis of his time, spoke a simple message in public, but explained its meaning only to his closest disciples when he was alone with them, saying, “the secret of the kingdom of God is given to you—but to those outside, everything is in parables,” so that “they may listen, but not understand”—although Mark tells nearly nothing of what he taught in private.

  Are the books we’re now reading the same ones that Irenaeus denounced? Although we can’t know for sure, he does mention a Gospel of Truth, like the one we now have, which was found at Nag Hammadi in the same collection with the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. Those who loved and treasured such books, however, didn’t think of themselves as “heretics,” but as people blessed to have received not only Jesus’s public teaching, known to Christians in common, but also his secret teaching, which, as we’ve seen, the Gospel of Thomas claims to offer. Many of the texts found with it make similar claims; the Gospel of Truth, for example, offers to reveal the secret teaching of the apostle Paul.