FOLLOWERS OF THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
The gnostics were élitist-most felt that only a fraction of humans were capable of their kind of salvation-but among themselves they were democratic, abandoning titles like bishop or deacon for a kind of commonwealth of individual inspiration. Some accepted the testimony of anyone who felt moved to prophesy in God's voice, with women participating equally with men. This irked critics who were building a church with the hierarchy and discipline to withstand Roman persecution. Attendees at Gnostic services "all have access equally," grumbled Tertullian, a church father who helped consolidate the Christianity we know today. "They pray equally ... they share the kiss of peace with all, for they do not care how differently they treat topics. All are arrogant. All offer you gnosis!"

Tertullian loathed the preference of "heretics" for personal knowledge and experience of God over the great communal truths of the faith. One of the most intriguing manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi is the Gospel of Thomas. In it the dual-world thesis fades so far into the background that some scholars have suggested it isn't even Gnostic. Either way, it provokes thought. It consists of 114 sayings, most attributed to Jesus. Some are nearly identical to verses from Matthew, Mark and Luke. But others, notes Ehrman, "take a twist." For instance, Saying 2 begins, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds" (which sounds a lot like "Seek and ye shall find"). But it resumes, "When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all."

Several other verses extol knowledge, frequently self-knowledge, in terms that would not be out of place in a therapist's office. "That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves," reads Saying 70. Thomas, writes Pagels, "encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus, as to (try) to know God through one's own, divinely given capacity."

She contrasts this pointedly with traditional Christianity's emphasis that salvation depends on, among other things, accepting Christ's divinity and his exclusive claim, expressed in the Gospel of John, that "no one comes to the Father except through me." There can be little doubt as to which she prefers. Having "moved away" from a youthful Evangelicalism she calls "very exclusive and hostile," she writes of being drawn back to Christianity after a series of personal tragedies, but of tempering her faith with ideas she had been studying in the Nag Hammadi trove. Her exposure to Thomas, she told Time, "was like opening a window, allowing more room for openness, for possibilities."

A GNOSTIC NATION?
By the late 300s most of the alternative Christianities had disappeared. Liberals tend to see this as a straightforward consequence of imperial laws against possession of "heretical" texts, instituted after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted and proto-orthodox bishops became the shepherds of their former persecutors.

Conservatives, however, regard the lost Christianities' eclipse as guided by God's hand. The Catholic historian Raymond Brown's review of one of Pagels' early books called her topic "the rubbish of the second century," adding that it was "still rubbish." Others argue that long before the creeds were written or the canon set, there was a recognized core of Christian belief and that Ebionites, Marcionites and Gnostics were on its dubious fringes. They ask how widespread Gnosticism could have been given the absorption of detailed secret lore involved. "It was insider-trading knowledge and only for those capable of understanding," says Ben Witherington of Kentucky's Asbury Theological Seminary.

Orthodoxy, by contrast, was "good news and salvation for everyone, and you didn't need a Ph.D. to understand it." Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation, suggests that the lost variants' new enthusiasts are guilty of theological cherry-picking. "They take the parts they like and reject the rest," she says. And the parts they take, most critics agree, do little but add to Americans' accelerating spiritual narcissism.

It is said that no idea, once conceived, ever really disappears. And echoes of the early Christianities, either intentional or subconscious, resound all over the country today. Literary critic Harold Bloom has claimed for years that Americans' intense emphasis on personalized contact with the divine exceeds the bounds of Christianity proper and tends toward Gnosticism. What are the Jews for Jesus if not a modern attempt to try to square the Judeo-Christian circle that preoccupied the Ebionites? When congregants in a modern Pentecostal church, both male and female, stand up and prophesy, the free-flowing movement of the Spirit is one that might have reminded church fathers like Tertullian of the Gnostic meetings they criticized. And the New Age impulse, which becomes more a part of our mainstream each decade, is about nothing if not the attainment of personal enlightenment outside a conventional context. Indeed, thousands of Americans follow Gnosticism avidly in New Age publications and actually re-create full-dress spiritual practices from the early texts and other lore. Some attend the Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum sanctuary in Palo Alto, Calif., where the bishop, or tau, is a garrulous Frenchwoman named Rosamonde Miller. Miller's Sunday Eucharistic service honors Sophia, a wisdom deity in some Gnostic mythologies, as well as Christ. Her creed that "each soul is born on a mission, but somewhere along the way we forget what it is" is classically Gnostic.

A LATTER-DAY THOMASINE
And then there are folks like bill Coffey, who would be an unlikely visitor at the Ecclesia. Coffey, 82, a former research scientist at General Electric, has been a Methodist from his youth. He is secure in his faith-in the Trinity and the Ten Commandments and Jesus' ethics, whose rules for living, he says, "stand strong." But since his teens, he says, "I looked upon certain things that were presumably orthodox and taken on faith to be a little hard to swallow." The scientist in him had trouble with the virgin birth and miracles and the physical resurrection of the dead. He found some of John's vision of Christ a bit much, "all dolled up and high-level, saying 'The only way you're gonna know God is through me.'" Coffey thinks non-Christians may be able to find their way to God too.

Coffey did not share these "reservations" with anyone outside of family. But recently he heard them aired in a public forum. For six Sundays this fall, he arrived 90 minutes before services at Burnt Hills United Methodist Church in Burnt Hills, N.Y., to attend an adult-education seminar offered by a fellow congregant on the Gospel of Thomas and Pagels' latest, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Coffey was fascinated. Thomas' image of the Saviour seemed less like God on earth and more like someone whom "the knowledge of the infinite was passing through." It offered no miracles. At one point its Jesus even rejected the title "master" and suggested that his followers were simply "drunk" on the same heady wisdom as he. When the six weeks were up, Coffey felt that both Thomas and Pagels were saying, "It's sort of a do-it-yourself kit you're endowed with. You've got to grab the stuff in your own soul and work on it to realize your relationship with God."

He pauses for a moment, a man a long way from a talking cross or The Matrix but nevertheless touched by a text most thought had disappeared long ago. A man who feels he has been granted a certain reassurance but knows it is not one that everybody would accept. "This is probably heresy among certain people in the Christian faith these days," he says. "They would take objection. But my picture of Jesus is more plausible now; it made my faith a little more believable, a little more genuine. I think my faith is enriched."

—With reporting by Maggie Sieger/Chicago and Chris Taylor/Palo Alto

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