A New New Testament: A Bible for the Twenty-first Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Preface to the Translations

Introducing A New New Testament

How to Read A New New Testament

The Books of A New New Testament

AN ANCIENT PRAYER FROM THE EARLY CHRIST MOVEMENTS

The Prayer of Thanksgiving

GOSPELS FEATURING JESUS’S TEACHINGS

The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel of Mark

The Gospel of Luke

The Acts of the Apostles

GOSPELS, POEMS, AND SONGS BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

The First Book of the Odes of Solomon

The Thunder: Perfect Mind

The Gospel of John

The Gospel of Mary

The Gospel of Truth

THE WRITINGS OF PAUL AND AN INTRODUCTORY PRAYER

The Prayer of the Apostle Paul

The Letter to the Romans

The First Letter to the Corinthians

The Second Letter to the Corinthians

The Letter to the Galatians

The Letter to the Philippians

The First Letter to the Thessalonians

The Letter to Philemon

The Letter to Philemon

LITERATURE IN THE TRADITION OF PAUL, WITH A SET OF INTRODUCTORY PRAYERS

The Second Book of the Odes of Solomon

The Letter to the Ephesians

The Acts of Paul and Thecla

The Letter to the Colossians

The Second Letter to the Thessalonians

The First Letter to Timothy

The Second Letter to Timothy

The Letter to Titus

DIVERSE LETTERS, WITH A SET OF INTRODUCTORY PRAYERS

The Third Book of the Odes of Solomon

The Letter of James

The Letter to the Hebrews

The First Letter of Peter

The Letter of Peter to Philip

The Second Letter of Peter

The Letter of Jude

LITERATURE IN THE TRADITION OF JOHN, WITH AN INTRODUCTORY SET OF PRAYERS

The Fourth Book of the Odes of Solomon

The First Letter of John

The Second Letter of John

The Third Letter of John

The Revelation to John

The Secret Revelation of John

A Companion to A New New Testament

BASIC HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THIS NEW BOOK OF BOOKS

A Preamble

1. The Discoveries of New Documents from Old Worlds

2. The Books of A New New Testament: An Overview

3. Two Surprising Stories: How the Traditional New Testament Came to Be; How A New New Testament Came to Be

4. What’s New in A New New Testament: Claiming a New Vision of the Early Christ Movements

5. Giving Birth to A New New Testament and Retiring the Idea of Gnosticism

6. A Rich Explosion of Meaning

Epilogue: What’s Next for A New New Testament?

The Council for A New New Testament

Acknowledgments

Appendix I: Sixty-seven Major Writings of the Early Christ Movements

Appendix II: The Books of the Nag Hammadi Library

Appendix III: Study Guide

Appendix IV: Recommended Reading

Subject Index

Scripture Index

About the Author

Footnotes

First Mariner Books edition 2015

Copyright © 2013 by Hal Taussig

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

A new New Testament : a reinvented Bible for the twenty-first century combining traditional and newly discovered texts / edited with commentary by Hal Taussig ; with a foreword by John Dominic Crossan.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-547-79210-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-544-57010-8 (pbk.)

1. Bible. N.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Christian literature, Early—History and criticism. I. Taussig, Hal, editor of compilation.

BS2361.3.N467 2013

225.5'208—dc23 2012046359

Cover design by Hsu and Associates

Cover illustration © Dae Yoo

eISBN 978-0-547-79211-8

v2.0815

Photograph of Papyrus P52 courtesy of John Rylands University Library of Manchester.

Translation of the traditional New Testament (except for the Letter to the Colossians) from the Open English Bible, with permitted revisions by Hal Taussig. Courtesy of Russell Allen, holder of copyright, and under Creative Commons Zero license, http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0.

Translation of the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Truth, the Letter of Paul to the Colossians, the Letter of Peter to Philip, the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, and the Prayer of Thanksgiving by Celene Lillie. Permission granted to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Translation of the Odes of Solomon by Elizabeth Ridout Miraglia. Permission granted to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Translation of the Gospel of Thomas by Justin Lasser. Permission granted to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Translation of The Thunder: Perfect Mind by Hal Taussig, Jared Calaway, Maia Kotrosits, Celene Lillie, and Justin Lasser. Permission granted to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt by Hal Taussig.

Translation of the Secret Revelation of John by Karen King. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Secret Revelation of John by Karen L. King, pp. 28–81, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Introduction to the Secret Revelation of John by Karen L. King. Permission granted to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

For

Robert Funk, who first thought about A New New Testament

Candice Olson, who seized the idea with passion

Russell Allen, who handed the New Testament to the public

Foreword

THE TRADITIONAL NEW TESTAMENT was already established by the end of the fourth century. The pressing question, then, is why suggest A New New Testament—even with A, not The—after a millennium and a half have passed?

It is not—emphatically not—that all or most of what is inside that traditional New Testament is bad or deficient while most or all of what is outside it is perfect and preferable. But why, then, entitle this book A New New Testament rather than, say, Other Early Christian Texts?

For myself, I see two reasons why this particular book and this precise title are necessary and needed. I put them to you as challenges, maybe even as principles, and in aphoristic format to facilitate memory and thought.

My first reason is a rather simple redundancy with regard to the traditional New Testament: to know what is outside it, you must know what is outside it. In other words, it is a matter of adult education because education affirms options while indoctrination denies them. Since that is probably obvious, I offer only one example.

You open your standard New Testament and find four versions—four according tos—of the gospel. Stay inside that volume and you could easily conclude that all existing versions had been gathered and presented. Go outside to A New New Testament and you realize immediately that many other versions—and indeed types, modes, and styles—of gospel were available—and avoided.

What you do with that knowledge, and how you judge between texts in or out, is a separate issue. But you should know that all gospel versions were not taken, that a selection was made, that some were accepted and others rejected. And that knowledge is, to repeat, an education, and education is about knowing options.

My second reason for A New New Testament is that, with regard to the traditional New Testament, to know what is inside it, you must know what is outside it. I offer you two examples of that principle, two cases to illustrate that, even if you are exclusively focused on the traditional New Testament, you cannot do so. You must know what was rejected to understand what was accepted. And why, and when, and where. Both of my examples involve images to remind us that we do not live in a world made only of words—be they old words or new words.

A first example. High on the northern slopes of the Bülbül Daği, off the mid-Aegean coast of Turkey, is a small flat clearing on the hillside with a stone frontal for a small doorway. This opens into a cave carved in antiquity to an eight-by-eight-by-fifty-foot passageway shrine called the Grotto of St. Paul by excavators from the Austrian Archaeological Institute in the 1990s. Beneath later plaster they found frescoes from around the year 500 CE.

On entrance, to your immediate left, is a scene almost completely obliterated but still residually recognizable. A standing man holds aloft a large knife above a much smaller kneeling figure whose tiny feet are about all that has been left by time the destroyer. It is, of course, the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis 22.

You turn next to the fresco on the wall at entrance right. It is much better preserved, with the upper half almost totally untouched by decay. But it is not a scene you recognize from either the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament. Of its three figures, the central one is definitely Paulos—bald-headed, double-goateed, named, but not haloed. He is seated and reading from an open book on his lap (A New New Testament, maybe?). His right hand is raised in the teaching-and-blessing gesture of Byzantine iconography—fingers separated into two and three, for the two natures in Christ and the three persons in the Trinity.

To viewer right of Paul is a standing woman named Theoklia, coiffed as a matron by the veil around her hair. She is slightly taller than Paul, and her right hand is raised in a gesture identical to his. But her dignity, importance, and teaching authority are all negated by having her eyes blinded and her hand scraped and burned off the wall (not iconoclasm, by the way, as only her eyes were obliterated).

To viewer left of Paul is a second female figure iconographically designated as a nubile virgin—her hair is unveiled and she listens to Paul’s message, not with others out in the open but from a window in a red-brick house that encases her completely. Her name, Thekla, is still—but barely—discernible to the left and right of her head.

Those three figures present a scene that summarizes a story which you, as viewer, are supposed to recognize. But you do not do so because, whatever about Paul, neither Theoklia nor Thekla—and Thekla, by the way, is the focal point of the fresco—is anywhere in your traditional New Testament. The textual version of that dramatic scene is in the Acts of Thecla, which is still extant as the opening chapters of the second-century Acts of Paul—hence it is often called the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

In those Acts—as in all the other second- and third-century Acts of the Apostles from outside the traditional New Testament—the challenge is celibate asceticism and most especially for women in a patriarchal world. Thecla, for example, is about thirteen years of age and would have been speedily married soon after her first menses. She would have passed, with or without her ultimate consent, from the power of her father to that of a husband at least twice her age.

Image and text visualize the dramatic moment when Thecla, having heard Paul preach the challenge of ascetic celibacy, decides to reject Thamyris, the man chosen to be her husband by parental authority. But such a decision—by a teenage girl—designates not just domestic disturbance but social subversion. Thecla ends up condemned to death in the arena but is saved by divine protection with not only all the women—pagan and Christian alike—on her side but even with a lioness fighting on her behalf against bear and lion.

You will, of course, find that Thecla story in the unit entitled The Acts of Paul and Thecla in this book, A New New Testament. But why is that inclusion important? Because if you do not know Thecla, you will not know Paul. You will not understand the thirteen letters attributed to him and making up half the texts inside the traditional New Testament.

Focus, for example, on the one text among those attributed letters that people seem to know even if they know nothing else about Paul. It is this sweeping indictment of what was clearly already in practice: A woman must learn, listening in silence with all deference. I do not consent to them becoming teachers, or exercising authority over men; they ought not speak (1 Timothy 2:11–12).

There is a massive scholarly consensus—based not externally on political correctness but internally on linguistic differences—that the three letters, 1–2 Timothy and Titus, were written well over a half century after Paul’s death. They were post-, pseudo-, and even anti-Pauline compositions created in his name but reacting flatly to his radical views on equality for all those in the Christian community—whether they entered as Jews or gentiles, females or males, slaves or freeborns (Galatians 3:26–29). But what caused that reaction to female teaching authority?

The obvious answer is patriarchal dominance—men did not want women to be equal to them, let alone have any authority over them. That certainly explains those negative commands in 1 Timothy 2 that leaders cannot be female. It also explains those positive commands that Christian leaders must be male. But why does 1 Timothy also insist that those male leaders—be they first-level or second-level ones—be married and have children (3:2, 4, 12)?

The deeper problem for 1 Timothy is not just female pedagogy but ascetic celibacy. That is why it warns, in thoroughly nasty language, about those who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from certain kinds of foods (4:3). What frightens 1 Timothy’s anonymous author(s) so profoundly is the challenge to Roman normalcy represented by Christian celibacy—especially by female celibates thereby out of male control and, most especially, by female teenagers thereby out of parental control. Thecla is the specter that haunts 1 Timothy.

In other words, to understand 1 Timothy you will have to look both inside and outside the New Testament: inside it, by looking at Paul’s challenge of celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7; and outside it, by looking at Thecla’s challenge of celibacy in A New New Testament. That is just a single case, but it touches on Paul, and, in action by him or reaction to him, he makes up half the traditional New Testament.

All Christians should know how important that challenge of ascetic celibacy was in our earliest traditions—and especially how it proclaimed the right for women to choose their lives despite patriarchal ascendancy. (Today and here we might not consider celibacy as a badge of freedom, but today and here are not normative for always and everywhere.)

I test that general principle concerning the traditional New Testament—that you cannot know inside without knowing outside—with one further example, from A New New Testament. It concerns the resurrection of Christ and therefore touches on the very heart of Christianity itself. I begin, once again, with an image—not a single instance in a hidden cave but one found on icons, frescoes, and mosaics from the Tiber to the Tigris and the Nevsky to the Nile. From ancient psalters to modern churches, among scenes of the life of Jesus, icons of the Twelve Great Feasts, and banners of Easter celebration, this image is how Eastern Christianity imagines The Resurrection of Christ. But you will not understand, will not even recognize, that image from anywhere in our traditional New Testament.

On the one hand, Western Christianity imagines the resurrection by showing Christ arising in muscular majesty—think Titian or Rubens—above sleeping or cowering tomb guards. He is magnificently alone and individual—as if to forget that he is not the first or last Jewish martyr to die on a Roman cross. You might be able to get that scenario by reading, say, Matthew.

On the other hand, Eastern Christianity depicts not an individual but a communal resurrection of Christ. It shows Christ, wounded, haloed, robed, and carrying a scroll in earlier examples but a cross in later ones. He is surrounded by a mandorla of heavenly light, stands on the bifold gates of Hades shaped into cross format, with broken locks and shattered bolts all around. He reaches out, grasps the hand of Adam—or Adam and Eve—and drags them forcibly to himself inside that aureole of radiant divinity.

You will never understand or even recognize that Eastern Christian iconography through studying the traditional New Testament. But you could do both from reading A New New Testament if you turn to Ode 42 in the section entitled The Fourth Book of the Odes of Solomon. Read that Syrian Christian hymn from possibly as early as 100 CE. Read it slowly and carefully, thoughtfully and prayerfully, until you can see Christ’s resurrection as communal rather than individual and as God’s great peace-and-reconciliation covenant with our violence-scarred humanity. I would almost rest my case for having A New New Testament on the presence of that single early Christian Ode 42 within its covers.

I conclude by thinking—and asking you to think as well—about gain and loss. I gave you only two examples where I think our traditional New Testament has lost something precious. It would have been better, for example, to have both Timothy and Thecla in there as confrontational challenge rather than Timothy alone. Better for the New Testament, better for Christian history, better for women, and, yes, better also for men. That, surely, was loss.

Again, none of the Odes of Solomon are in the New Testament, and without their poignant poetry our Western vision of the resurrection of Christ has become severed from that of Eastern Christianity. That, too, is loss. As you read each single text in A New New Testament, ask yourself that same question: What has our traditional New Testament lost when it lost this text? At the end we may mourn, with apologies to Thomas Wolfe, like this: O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. There may yet be other texts lost to us still, but here, in A New New Testament, at least we have the opportunity to consider that loss and, possibly, to move beyond it.

JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN

Preface

WEEKNIGHT BIBLE STUDIES usually see groups numbering from five to twenty people. But on a Tuesday night in May 2012, some four hundred people sat together in the sanctuary of a Baptist church in a New York neighborhood eagerly awaiting the night’s discussion. Many of those attendees were under the age of thirty-five; they were from various walks of life. They were all there to talk with me about scripture, but not a piece of familiar scripture, rather a book that wasn’t even part of the New Testament. They had come to learn about the Gospel of Thomas.

Like many, most of those people had only recently learned that there was such a thing as the Gospel of Thomas. I began with the story of how it had been discovered in the sands of Egypt in the 1940s and then took what I knew from twenty years of introducing this and other discoveries from early Christianity to be the best next step. We simply read together parts of this new gospel, a gospel that was written in the very same century Jesus lived and died.

I asked that someone read a few verses, and a young woman in her thirties volunteered. She began: Jesus said . . . What followed was a teaching no one in the room had ever heard, let alone in church. She read only three sentences, but by the time she was midway through the passage, people were gasping, clapping, and shouting Amen!

As the night continued, we read numerous passages from Thomas’s collection of Jesus’s teachings, each one inciting delight, puzzlement, inspiration, and even tears of joy. Attendees questioned why they had never before heard this book and asked for more information about its discovery, provenance, and historical context. I had expected at least some people to be confused or offended, but of those who spoke, no such opinions arose. At the end of the evening there were three standing ovations, a prayer of blessing given over me by the pastor, and a reception line that lasted almost as long as the study.

It was this experience and some two hundred like it that made me ever more certain that the world needed to be made more familiar with many of the scriptures that had been, for one reason or another, excluded from the New Testament. We needed a new New Testament, one that benefited from the discoveries of the past century and that reconsidered the choices made (or not made) by bishops and councils of the fourth through sixth centuries. The Gospel of Thomas is in this New New Testament, as are nine other documents never before included in the traditional collection of Christian scripture. They have been added to the twenty-seven books in the New Testament to form A New New Testament. Each of them has freshness and depth that would make that Baptist church shout Amen!, make those who left church long ago perk up and listen, and signal hope to those eager for their spiritual longings to be addressed.

Over the past 160 years, more than seventy-five previously unknown first- and second-century documents from the Christ movements have come to light. These manuscripts have been scientifically verified to be almost certainly as old as the manuscripts of the traditional New Testament. The titles alone pique one’s curiosity: the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), the Gospel of Truth, the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Odes of Solomon, the Letter of Peter to Philip, the Secret Revelation of John, and The Thunder: Perfect Mind.

There are very few texts more influential on humankind than the twenty-seven books that we know collectively as the New Testament; the brilliant teachings, well-worn truths, and revolutionary stories they contain are still powerful today. But when placed in A New New Testament alongside ten new books from the early Christ movements, this traditional literature springs to life in new ways, sparkles with fresh comparisons and contrasts, and is supplemented where it has been found lacking.

This New New Testament opens the door to reciting the sermon on the mount alongside the newly discovered Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalene courageously comforts all the disciples and teaches them things Jesus had taught only her. In addition to the traditional Revelation to John, it offers a very different Secret Revelation of John in which Christ also rescues the world from a vicious empire, not by end-of-the-world battles and curses that set the earth on fire, but by straightforward teaching about God’s light and compassion. This New New Testament enables Jesus’s words in the Gospel of John, I am the good shepherd, to be read in the same sitting as the recently discovered The Thunder: Perfect Mind’s assertion that I am the first and the last. I am she who is honored and she who is mocked. I am the whore and the holy woman. I am the wife and the virgin.

The dilemma of the traditional New Testament in the twenty-first century is not just about people yawning in church, bored by the familiarity of the readings. In some ways the traditional New Testament’s binding has broken open and is not coming back together easily. Every discovery of a previously unknown ancient scriptural document stretches the authority and strength of the traditional New Testament. Its contents spill sloppily onto its readers, staining and straining their lives with offensive and outmoded information: instructions for slaves to obey their masters, for wives to submit to their husbands, and for readers to think of Jews as coming from Satan.

It is not time to throw out the traditional New Testament, or to excise those parts that offend. Rather, the moment has arrived to add to it and rebind it. Without attempting to remove the ancient social prejudices from the lived fabric of the traditional New Testament texts, A New New Testament offers twenty-first-century readers a chance to reconsider, rethink, and reimagine the spiritual and historical content of early Christianity by expanding the writings.

This fresh mix of early Christian* books comes just in time. A deep spiritual longing has emerged over the past twenty-five years that can take great advantage of A New New Testament. Innumerable people are searching for alternative spiritual paths while still holding on to traditions of the past. Generations that have come of age in the past two decades want to integrate the traditional and the new. They seek something grounded in the familiar that they can nonetheless reinvent to call their own.

A New New Testament allows new perspectives on Christian beginnings, with all its values and its flaws. Like the works in the traditional New Testament, the added books of this New New Testament do not exhibit one particular point of view, nor were they written by one individual. These new works neither revolt against the contents of the more established gospels and letters, nor do they blandly mimic them. They tell new stories, from new perspectives, but they pulse with familiar passion and power in their depiction of spiritual experiences and deep quests for meaning.

A New New Testament invites the reader onto a serious, inspiring, and well-informed journey into the very early writings of those in the legacy of Jesus. It offers the chance to form new opinions about the earliest traditions of the Christ movements without the demands of later Christian doctrine or church organizations working to overwhelm with dogma or formal interpretations. Selected by a council of spiritual leaders—pastors and scholars, bishops and historians—it also includes new prayers from the first and second centuries, beckoning twenty-first-century readers to encounter and inhabit the meditations and practices of their predecessors.

As both a professor of the New Testament and a pastor to an active, engaged congregation, I have come to realize that the spiritual thirsts of our day need more nourishment. More than seventy-five books from the early Christ movements were discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I reject the romanticized notion that the new discoveries always provide the best answers just as much as I worry about churches’ strangleholds on what they deem unarguable truth about a certain kind of Jesus. Here, then, is a supplement to the usual fare. Here, thanks to the wise decisions of a twenty-first-century council, is a winsome—although not definitive—combination of the traditional New Testament and some key new additions. Here is a new New Testament, rich with all the treasures and foibles of the traditional collection and enriched by many new and occasionally flawed stories, teachings, songs, prayers, letters, and meditations. Here, then, is one new way of experiencing scriptural heritage, a project conceived in response to genuine yearning, created by a group of wise and concerned leaders, and brought now to be made new again by you.

Preface to the Translations

OUR PRIMARY TRANSLATION FOCUS has been on the new books included in A New New Testament. Up to now these works have been primarily translated in ways that align them with the categories of heresy and gnosticism. This established approach uses esoteric and complicated terms that distinguish the new books from orthodox Christianity and portray orthodox Christianity as plainspoken and clear, but the new documents as secretive and obscure. One of the features of this process involves transliteration—the use of Greco-Coptic words, written in our Roman alphabet, that remain untranslated.

For this project we have avoided any assumptions that the new literature is somehow inferior or obscure. Throughout the translation of these texts we have tried to make sure that all words are rendered into English, both to make them more accessible and to bring them into a more direct relationship with their traditional New Testament counterparts. To this latter end, we have tried to use consistent language, where possible, among all the books in A New New Testament. In only one case, the translation of certain names of (usually) heavenly figures, have we kept both the transliteration and the English translation, in order to strengthen the real persona of these figures and, at the same time, to keep the actual meaning of their names in English.

All but one of the previously bound New Testament texts presented here are edited versions of the Open English Bible—a translation based on The Twentieth Century New Testament. We are deeply indebted to the innovative, public-oriented, careful translation and legal work done by the chief architect and copyright holder of the Open English Bible, Russell Allen. His devotion to making the works of the New Testament available to the larger public without constrictions of publishers’ rights is heroic. In addition, the careful and collaborative way that Mr. Allen and the Open English Bible ensure that users of this translation can change it according to their own wisdom and translation skills makes the Open English Bible the most innovative biblical translation project in more than a century.

One of our major translation considerations has been how to address gendered language in both these ancient documents and our contemporary world. We have attempted to hold two values in creative tension throughout this work. First, we share the value of many translations of the New Testament from the past fifty years to make these texts more inclusive of women’s experiences. Historically, everyone was signified by the male universal he, a move that effectively wrote much of women’s experience out of both history and texts. And the authors of the male universal—while making everything look masculine—did realize that their male universal did include women. We have resolved that those women of the past need to become more visible, and women today must be able to find themselves in these works. However, we have not rescued the ancient text in every case from the discrimination against women in which it participates. Where parts of the text explicitly discriminate against women (for instance, when 1 Timothy goes out of its way to say that only men can be elders and bishops), we have not translated words like man with any implication of inclusion of women. On the other hand, in the many cases where obviously generic words or phrasing has used a male term to characterize a group of men and women, we have changed that term to something inclusive such as human, person(s), or people. So while making explicit efforts to uncover the women in the text, we also felt it important to show the language, experience, and expression of gendered experience in the early Christ movements. This has included a conscious effort to let the language of these people live in its innovation, prejudice, and compromise. This complex and nuanced translation in relationship to gender has had implications for the ways we used pronouns in the translation of the Coptic, Greek, and Syriac. In consultation with the publisher’s senior editor, Jenna Johnson, we have chosen in our translation of pronouns to represent the implicit inclusion of women in the places where there are other indications that it does indeed include women with alternating masculine and feminine pronouns.

Much gratitude is extended to our translators—Karen King, for the Secret Revelation of John; Justin Lasser, for the Gospel of Thomas; and Elizabeth Miraglia, for the Odes of Solomon. Additional thanks to Alexis Waller for her work on the OEB, particularly the Gospel of Mark and 1, 2, and 3 John. My special thanks and immense gratitude go to Hal Taussig—for inviting me to be a part of this project, for his years of work on these texts, and most of all for his mentorship and conversation. I would not be doing this work without him.

One other complexity of translation needs to be explained. In the case of three of the new documents added to A New New Testament, no version of the otherwise standard chapter and verse format exists, so we have had to add our own chapters and versification to this edition. These three documents (the Gospel of Truth, The Thunder: Perfect Mind, and the Letter of Peter to Philip) have been made available to the public in various formats and translations without chapter and verse. In keeping with prior scholarly practice for such manuscripts, the reference system for these documents has generally been according to the column of the ancient manuscript accompanied by the line number of that column. So, for instance, a citation from the Gospel of Truth such as 18.36 has represented the eighteenth page of its Nag Hammadi manuscript and the thirty-sixth line. Since it seems quite possible that the readers of this New New Testament may have occasion to read these three documents in other publications and translations, we regret that our attempts to present both this column and line reference system and our new chapter and verse references on the same pages of these new documents have not been successful. We do think it very important that there be a chapter and verse system, because it breaks up the text into units that belong together rather than just the page/column and line, which do not really cohere with any organization of the thought of the text. So in these three documents we have forgone the more primitive column-and-line references in favor of the very first chapter and verse references.

CELENE LILLIE

Director of Translation

A New New Testament

Introducing A New New Testament

IT IS TIME FOR a new New Testament. A New Testament that causes people—inside and outside church—to lean forward with interest and engagement. This is meant to be that book. It contains astounding new material from the first-century Christ movements and places it alongside the traditional texts. Among its offerings are a new gospel whose primary character is a woman, a previously unknown collection of songs in Christ’s voice lifting to God, another gospel with more than fifty new teachings from Jesus, and a prayer of the apostle Paul discovered in the sands of Egypt less than seventy years ago.

This New New Testament is not simply the product of one author. The ten added books have been chosen by a council of wise and nationally known spiritual leaders (listed on pages 555–558). An eclectic mix of bishops, rabbis, well-known authors, leaders of national churches, and women and men from African American, Native American, and European American backgrounds have studied many of the recent discoveries from the first two centuries, deliberated rigorously together, and chosen those new books.

What have these deliberations produced? Where did it come from? And what do readers need to know before immersing themselves in this new New Testament experience?

Where did these new books come from?

How could new books from the first centuries of Christianity, ones not in the New Testament, just suddenly appear? Where did they come from? And why aren’t they in the New Testament to begin with? There is no simple answer to these questions. And these are not questions that need to be in the foreground of our experience of A New New Testament. So, they are addressed in a number of chapters that follow the scriptures included here, as a "Companion to A New New Testament: Basic Historical Background for This New Book of Books."

But there is a short answer to these important questions that can be summarized here. In the past hundred years a number of new works from the first centuries have been discovered in the desert sands of Egypt, the markets of Cairo, and the libraries of ancient monasteries. In some cases, scholars already knew about the existence of these books because they were mentioned in other, more familiar ancient texts, but the books themselves had never been found. In other cases, these newly found documents from the beginnings of Christianity had never before been heard of at all. In still other cases, some of these new documents have actually been in hand for quite a while but have been ignored, repressed, or known only to scholars.

There is no reason, then, to think that the Gospel of Thomas, which is not in the traditional New Testament, was read any less in the first and second centuries than the Gospel of John, which is in the traditional New Testament. Indeed, in the ancient world the Gospel of Thomas was distributed widely and translated into at least two languages. Early Christian writings that did not make it into the New Testament had, in their time, similar status to the works that did find their way into it. There was no stamp of approval until at least three hundred years after Jesus’s birth.

Wait a minute! Wasn’t the New Testament written, selected, and collected very soon after Jesus?

No. The New Testament did not exist for at least the first three hundred, if not five hundred, years after Jesus. Some of its books appear to have been written some twenty to thirty years after his death, but others probably not for at least 140 years after Jesus.

In the early centuries of Christianity the only hints of a sacred collection of texts are several lists of some gospels, letters, and apocalypses suggested for reading, with different Christ communities following different lists, and many communities not following any list. The second through fourth centuries after Jesus did see some actual bound books of collected early Christian works, but none of them are identical to, or even progenitors of, the New Testament. In other words, as is shown in more detail in the "Companion to A New New Testament at the back of this book, these new additions to the New Testament existed for many years and during the crucial early period of Christianity alongside the books we know, without any privilege of one over any other, for a very long time. This new" New Testament, then, in a very real way restores the kind of mix of early Christian documents about Jesus that existed in the first centuries.

The assumption that the existing New Testament was always the privileged, authorized book about Jesus is not true. The New Testament did not somehow descend from God after Jesus was gone. Christian churches spent centuries engaging in arguments and political deals to decide which early books would be included in their most sacred collections. This, of course, does not mean that the New Testament is fraudulent or less meaningful. It simply means that the historical record shows that collection to be a product of complex human negotiation over a long period of time.

So, if the New Testament as a collection of early Christian books did not come into existence in the first century, where did all these different books from the traditional New Testament and beyond it come from? And when were they written?

The introduction to each ancient text in A New New Testament gives an approximate date for when it might have been written. But it is difficult to know these dates exactly. None of these individual books make note of when they were written, and historians are left with many imponderables in dating them. It is reasonably clear that Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Corinthians were written in the 50s CE (AD).* On the other hand, the Gospel of Luke could have been written anywhere from 60 CE to 140 CE, according to different historians. Many scholars now argue that the Gospel of Thomas (not included in the traditional New Testament but included in this New New Testament) was written much earlier than the Gospel of Luke. Later, we will look more closely at the difficulties and approximations of when the books in and outside of the traditional New Testament were written, in both the individual introductions to each ancient text and in the "Companion to A New New Testament."

The books inside and outside the traditional New Testament specify little about the conditions in which they were written, though from their hints at times, places, and real-life circumstances it is clear that they were written by and for particular people. The precise origins of the individual works of the traditional New Testament are in many cases just as elusive as the new additions to this new New Testament.

It can be shocking to learn just how many ambiguities and unknowns surround the origins of these documents, both familiar and new. However, it is worth stepping back from specific questions about individual texts to look at the bigger picture of the things we do know about them—because all of these documents have much in common. For instance, none of the traditional New Testament was written after 175 CE; so the 2012 council that chose the new books also did not allow books definitely written after 175 CE. Although there is little certainty about when, by whom, and for what these individual works were written, there are some general similarities in all of them. They were all—traditional and new—composed by and for people between 50 and 175 CE, somewhere around the Mediterranean Sea, with certain similar themes and within certain realities of life. All these books had a life of their own long before they were in the New Testament—not unlike the new books added to this new New Testament.

Why are certain books in the traditional New Testament and others are not?

Many people acknowledge that the books of the New Testament were written and assembled by humans, but they still assume that some sort of reasonable criteria must have been in place to determine which books were included and which were not. The common assumption holds that the books that became the New Testament must have been in some way more true, more divinely inspired, or more historically accurate than the ones that weren’t. One goal of A New New Testament is to rethink that misconception. The Gospel of Truth contains poetry about Jesus that is as beautiful as anything found in the traditional New Testament. The Gospel of Thomas records sayings of Jesus found nowhere else that are every bit as likely to have come from his lips as any of those in the New Testament. The Odes of Solomon provide us with more material from early Christian worship than the entire existing New Testament.

This New New Testament means to assist both the general public and scholars in getting beyond the overly simplistic readings of the existing New Testament and the new early Christian documents as either orthodox or heretical. Based on my experiences teaching the new documents and the existing New Testament side by side in churches and seminaries for the past twenty years, this project embodies a new way of thinking about what belongs in the heritage of early Christianity. It invites the reader to see how this new mix illuminates spiritual seeking, ethical issues, patterns of belief, and social practice. It calls for scholars and religious leaders to listen carefully to the way the public receives and responds to this new mix, and to provide fresh and solid ideas about how to make sense of the ways the various documents belong to each other and to the contemporary world.

What is in A New New Testament?

A New New Testament offers thirty-seven works of scripture from the early centuries of Christianity. It places new discoveries alongside familiar texts and groups them into six sections in an effort to create further contact and contours to their reading. These books include gospels, teachings, prayers, and prophecies.

A New New Testament also offers key summaries and introductions to each ancient book. These include discussions of their inspirations, important historical background, suggestions for ways to use the texts with and against the others in the collection, and potential meditations for broader and deeper understanding of the texts on a spiritual level.

Finally, after the last ancient book—the Secret Revelation of John—we present "A Companion to A New New Testament." These six chapters help the reader with major questions about how the new books were found, how the traditional New Testament came into being, what the new books have in common with each other and with the traditional ones, the specifics of how A New New Testament came into being, what twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship says about the new books, some of the meanings produced by reading the recently discovered and the traditional books together, and what the future of A New New Testament might be.

How was this new New Testament brought into being?

In the second through eighth centuries, early synods and councils often brought a group of spiritual leaders together to decide important issues.* In honor of this tradition, I invited spiritual leaders from across North America* to form a council that would decide which of the seventy-five or so additional early Christian documents should be collected together to create A New New Testament.* After more than six months of preparation, a group of nineteen such leaders convened in February of 2012 in New Orleans; the results of that invaluable discussion and decision-making process are what you hold in your hands. The names and brief biographies of the members of that council are listed in the back of this book, and the process of the council’s deliberation is described in the "Companion to A New New Testament," also at the end.

As the bishops, authors, rabbis, and scholars of the New Orleans Council finished their work on a windswept day in 2012, they were tingling with excitement. They were confident of the integrity of their conversations and the literature they had just added to the traditional New Testament. Several worried that they had not added enough new books. All were certain that more discussion lay ahead and that this contribution would provide many opportunities for reconsidering how we imagine and encounter the story of Christianity. May your reading help this ongoing deliberation, as this new world of possibilities unfolds.

How to Read A New New Testament

BY AND LARGE, we can look to the ways in which people have approached the traditional New Testament as the best guide for coming to this new collection of books. But there are two problems with treating this new assemblage of texts in the usual ways. First of all, many people have never actually read the New Testament. They think they know what it says, or, in some cases, they have resisted reading it because of the way it has been preached at them. A vast number of even devoted Christians have never really read the New Testament and so have not accumulated the experiences and skills of reading any Bible to bring to reading A New New Testament.

Second, even those who have spent time reading the traditional New Testament sometimes find it quite difficult to understand its meaning or interpret its messages. The meanings of these texts are phrased in terms of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean in which the books were written, and so they can sound to twenty-first-century readers as if they were written in somewhat of a foreign language. A huge gap lies between how people in this century and those in the first and second centuries understood themselves and their world. And perhaps the exalted status of the New Testament coupled with its inscrutable qualities make the reader feel less insightful or entitled to interpret the text.

Here are suggestions for four independent ways to read A New New Testament. Each kind of reading can draw out different dimensions of the texts, each of them can bring out a different feeling or meaning, so we should take each of them seriously.

1. Read personally. Read as if these documents matter deeply and immediately to you. Even if you are confused by some of the language, read as if the words might bring something to your friendships, your work, your family, and your inner life. Where there are stories, put yourself in them as a character, and see how they feel. Where there is a letter, imagine that it was written to you. If the document is a poem or a song, see what feelings and memories it conjures in you.

Reading personally does not necessarily mean that you have to agree with the document or that its instructions need to be followed. Nor does it mean that you should try to wring meaning out of every sentence or word. Reading personally can involve gratitude for the beauty and wisdom of the document or a dislike for what is being said, sometimes both, even within the same text. Most of all, this kind of reading simply invites us to respond through actively making connections to parts of our lives.

Reading personally does not necessarily produce solutions. But it does help us engage and seek meaning and to apply the text to our lives in ways that we might otherwise ignore or repress.

2. Read thoughtfully. Think about the time and social setting in which the document was written, who might have written it, and why. When these questions come up, stop to read other sources that reveal what life was like in the first and second centuries. Consult the introductions to the ancient texts and the Companion near the end of this book; all have been written with just these questions and issues in mind. A list of additional readings can be found both at the end of each introduction and in the larger list of recommended readings at the end of the book.

Ponder why the particular document was written. Think about what kind of person might have written each document.

Muse about the similarities and differences between the circumstances of our world and those of the ancient world. Notice how they affect what the particular document might have meant in the first century versus what it means in our time.

3. Read imaginatively. Open your memory, heart, and imagination to these texts. Let them affect you; let them surprise you. Let them trigger not so much your opinions but your curiosity, and let them send you into fantasy. Engage these texts the way you would read a good novel or watch a powerful film; let yourself be entertained by worlds that are different from yours. Give yourself freely to each text with the awareness that you can stop anytime if it becomes too powerful or takes you into territory that feels unpleasant or offensive.

Let the pictures in the text live in your mind or heart. If a document presents God as feminine or masculine, imagine how God might be as a female or male. Hear how the feminine God talks. Imagine how the masculine God feels about children. Think about how the masculine or feminine God relates to the elderly. If one of the documents has a story about a trip to a high mountain, picture the mountain for yourself or imagine yourself walking on it. If another document tells the story of someone being tortured, think of what twenty-first-century torture might correspond to it.

As you take in the text imaginatively, notice how it makes you feel. To what images or stories are you drawn? Which ones make you afraid? What in the text makes you feel joyful?

4. Read meditatively or prayerfully. Dwell on the words of the text that attract your attention. If certain words make you feel gratitude or warmth, go back over them and the ones around them again, lingering on them. Let them sink in. Similarly, if certain words are upsetting or offensive in the text, return to them and ask why they stir you up in this way. Notice what ideas in the document hold you or make you feel loved. Do not read further until you have received those feelings and acknowledged their place in you. Whether the words hold, repel, inspire, or confuse you, stay with them long enough to acknowledge their impact. Then let them go by giving thanks or releasing them into the universe. Let this release be an opening to a larger reality beyond you. Or, in the case of a challenging or frightening text, after acknowledging its impact on you, ask for safety or send the words of the text beyond you so that you feel safer.

In the case of the new texts that are explicit prayers, consider saying them out loud to help you linger over them.

Choosing Which Texts to Read When

Rarely does anyone read scripture from cover to cover. As you turn to the actual documents of this collection, do not expect to read them all either in their given sequence or without detours. They are too different, too demanding, and too rewarding for anyone to approach them in such a unilateral way and still reap their maximum benefits. You should anticipate coming back to some of the documents at a later time, reading various texts in alternate combinations, finding yourself at a stopping point, or wanting to ruminate on a particular text rather than forging ahead.

The power of this New New Testament comes in large part from the experience of reading new books and old books together. You might try this out near the beginning of your encounter with A New New Testament by first reading the opening sequence of the Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Gospel of Mark. Each time you return to the collection, it is closest to the spirit of the project to read both old and new books in the same sitting. So you might read the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Matthew together, or the Prayer of Thanksgiving and the Gospel of Mark. In each case you might notice some of the ways the books seem to belong together and some of the ways that they create tension with each other.

As with the traditional New Testament, it helps to be patient with yourself when material seems strange. Encounters with texts—old or new—that seem bizarre or outside your frame of reference can be negotiated in three basic ways: stop and think about the strangeness, make note of the strangeness but keep on reading, or skip the strange parts. A similar set of approaches can apply to material that seems so familiar that it is no longer engaging: stop to notice that it is boring or difficult to get excited about, make note of the boring sections, or skip the material that is too familiar.

The short introductions positioned right before each document are meant to give you background and context. Occasionally it also may be helpful to consult some of the material in "A Companion to A New New Testament" at the end of the book; keep in mind that these are available to fill out your reading.

When making longer-range choices of which documents to read and which to postpone reading, it may be helpful to note the overall organization of this book. The actual texts of A New New Testament are grouped and ordered more or less according to the conventions of the traditional New Testament—gospels, acts, letters, poetry, and revelations. (These specific groupings of documents are explained in more detail in chapter 1 of the Companion at the back of the book.)

Although this book is structured similarly to the traditional New Testament, I have made two significant shifts to help readers who are interested in turning their reading into a spiritual process. First, each section of documents begins with a real prayer from the first two centuries of the Christ movements. I have split up the Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, and the four books of the Odes of Solomon so that each section of books is framed by one part of these prayers. Second, I have made sure that the traditional and the new books occur alongside each other and are not segregated into the old and the new. On one level, of course, this underlines the larger project of reading these texts together and giving them similar authority. But there is also a specific spiritual dimension of making sure they all stand together. Very often the old and the new interrupt one another in ways that draw attention to aspects of each text that had not been noticed before. When this happens, the new meaning of these documents is especially close. In the same way, the new and the old often reinforce one another to underline meanings that need to be emphasized.

Finally, in deciding what texts to read when, the overall structure of the whole book helps make note of particular kinds of literature. The way the books are divided up and grouped together can allow you to concentrate on material in which you have special interest or about which you have particular questions. For instance, if you are especially inclined to stories, the first two sections (Gospels Featuring Jesus’s Teachings and Gospels, Poems, and Songs Between Heaven and Earth) might best be read first. On the other hand, if you are drawn to the writings—both traditional and recently discovered—close to the figure of John, you might turn right away to the last section of A New New Testament: Literature in the Tradition of John.

In the end, all advice for reading anything falls aside, and each of us brings particular gifts, insights, and inhibitions to what we read. So the final advice on how to read this book is to be open to the fresh spirit that brought it together and that stood behind so much of this powerful literature. With a light and open heart, approach this reading with joy, anticipation, and what beckons to you in the process.

The Books of A New New Testament

AN ANCIENT PRAYER FROM THE EARLY CHRIST MOVEMENTS

An Introduction to the Prayer of Thanksgiving

THIS PRAYER SPARKLES with evocative imagery. Pulsing with spiritual intimacy, its voice likely belongs to a very early layer of Christian spiritual practice, that of a community gathered for worship around a festive meal. For Christ followers—like most other groups of that day—such a meal contained a number of prayers, said at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the gathering. The New Orleans Council, which selected the ten new books for this collection, enthusiastically proposed that the Prayer of Thanksgiving should be included as the very first text in the volume. This would fulfill the council’s wish that the reading of A New New Testament begin with a spiritual entrance into the world of the early Christ movements. There are very few prayers at all in the traditional New Testament, and the council felt strongly that the spiritual practices of these early Christ movements provided vital new perspectives on the beginnings of Christianity. With their emotional language and first-person expressions, prayers—and other spiritual practices—often provide more access to the felt dimensions of life than professions of belief and theology do.

This Prayer of Thanksgiving comes from the 1945 discovery of fifty-two documents, nearly all of them Christian, in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Like all of the Nag Hammadi collection, it was written in the Coptic language. It is the only known manuscript with this exact text, but there are a number of other first-through-third-century Christian prayer texts that contain some of the same sentences and phrases. Neither its location nor its exact date of composition can be known. Its author is also unknown. The title affixed to the document, like many other titles of the ancient world, was added during the copying of the document for users much later.

The prayer does not explicitly refer to Jesus, but it does refer to the eating of a bloodless meal after the prayer, a practice that the Christ movements had in common with the traditions of Israel of that era. The theme of the prayer is thanksgiving, and some of the early Christ meals themselves were explicitly called eucharists, which is one of the Greek and Coptic words meaning thanksgiving.

The language used to refer to God in the prayer is breathtaking for the modern ear: God is called O name untroubled, light of life, womb of all that grows, womb pregnant with the nature of the Father, and never-ending endurance. This language demonstrates the fascinating openness of the nascent Christ movements in