April DeConick held in her hands something few people in the world will ever touch, let alone read.

"When I held the papyrus in my hand (encased in glass), it was overwhelming, the feeling of a pilgrim touching gently a relic," said the associate professor of religion at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. She was explaining her feelings about her opportunity to read the Gospel of Thomas.

DeConick continued, "There is a power in the antiquity of the document alone, but also in its 'hiddenness.'

"For almost 2,000 years, it was buried beneath the sands of Egypt. The knowledge that I am one of only a few people in history who have touched and read the original pages of this sacred book was staggering, a moment of reverence for sure."

DeConick was able to read the actual text since she reads Greek and Aramaic, as well as Coptic, in which the Gospel was written. She believes the text dates to about 120 A.D. and, after surviving 20 years of oral transmission, evolved first in Aramaic, then probably the Syriac dialect and finally the Coptic version.

Now she has published a scholarly work based on her chance to read that text: "Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and its Growth."

The Gospel contains 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Some of those closely parallel sayings in the four Gospels of the Bible, such as Saying 54, "Blessed are the poor, for the Kingdom of Heaven is yours."

Bill Keagle, professor of history at Millikin University in Decatur, said the Gospel of Thomas encouraged people in thinking for themselves, making up their own minds. Keagle, the holder of two degrees in religion and an ordained minister, teaches a course at Millikin titled "The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith."

The Thomas Gospel was, Keagle said, among many, many texts not included in the Bible after the Council of Nicea, called by Constantine the Great; that was in the year 325 A.D. After arguing out seven differing views of who Jesus was and accepting one, the council rejected at least 15 Gospels and at least 10 books of the Apocalypse, as well as letters, he explained.

"The Gospel of Thomas was one of those rejected."

"Recovering" will be available in paperback by the end of the month, said DeConick. By fall, DeConick will have another academic book publication, "The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation."

But by the end of the year, she hopes to publish a version geared for the average reader.

In light of DeConick's book, recent publicity surrounding the Gospel of Judas and the soon-to-be-released movie based on Dan Brown's book "The DaVinci Code," DeConick agreed to respond to some questions.

Q: Why do you think that -- as a society -- we are so enamored of trying to prove or disprove the connection of faith and science?

DeConick: "I think one of the reasons that some people in our society are so caught up in trying to prove or disprove religious belief and/or experience is because we live in a time when our modern scientifically proven cosmology does not match the one we find in Scripture, and our knowledge of the historical development of the Christian tradition does not match those taught in most churches today.

"So people are experiencing what psychologists call 'cognitive dissonance,' an uncomfortable state where our beliefs or expectations do not match reality. This psychological state is so uncomfortable that we as human beings will try to do anything to pacify it.

"Usually we turn to some form of rationalization, reinterpretation or denial of the reality. In the case of the current debate over evolution, for instance, this is what is happening when people try to soften our science (i.e. intelligent design) or deny science (i.e. creationism).

Q: Do such books as "The DaVinci Code" and its upcoming movie help or hurt such discoveries as yours?

DeConick: "There are two sides to this. On the one hand, it is thrilling because people who otherwise wouldn't be exposed to alternative knowledge and 'histories' are. People who didn't know that there are more Gospels than those in the New Testament read 'The DaVinci Code' and suddenly begin to want to know more about these. So this is wonderful.

"But (and this is a big 'but') because Dan Brown wrote in the beginning of his book that all information about the texts and rituals and history were accurate, people have been duped into thinking that he has written historical fiction that they can trust.

"In fact, Dan Brown has not based his book on scholarly knowledge and does not have the simplest facts straight. Because Americans have been taught nothing about the history of religions in public schools (a result of the separation of church and state), unless they have taken college courses on the subject or worked hard to educate themselves by reading scholarly publications, Americans are largely ignorant about the history of Christianity. So they have had no way to critically judge Dan Brown's account, and many think it represents scholarly knowledge. It does not.

"Here are a few simple facts that Dan Brown has completely wrong:

n "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi collection are not the same thing. The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish documents having nothing to do with early Christianity.

n "The Nag Hammadi collection does not contain gospels that predate those in the Bible. In fact, the literature in the Nag Hammadi collection comes from the third century, with the exception of the Gospel of Thomas.

n "There are not 80 Gospels in addition to those in the New Testament. There are between 30 and 40 Gospels or fragments of Gospels, most of them written post-150 A.D. Those that might have been written as early as the New Testament Gospels include only the Gospel of the Hebrews and an early form of the Gospel of Thomas.

n "The Nag Hammadi collection (which includes the Gospel of Philip, which Dan Brown quotes) does not contain Gospels' 'unadulterated' history that has been covered up by the church. In fact, these texts are just as 'theological' as any in the New Testament, most attempting to reconfigure the story of Jesus in terms of Gnostic beliefs. Most of these texts were lost to us from about 350 A.D. when they were buried.

n "The idea that Jesus was elevated to divinity at the Nicene Council by Constantine is completely fabricated. Jesus' 'divinity' was being discussed as early as Paul's letter to the Philippians (circa 60 A.D.), where Paul records an older hymn in which Jesus is said to have been in the 'form of God' and 'did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped' (Phil. 2:5). Colossians (circa 80) calls Jesus 'the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation' and in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell' (Col. 1:15-20).

n "The portrayal of the 'cover-up' of the worship of a female goddess by the early church is also nonsense. Jesus and the first Christians were worshiping Yahweh, the male (and only) god in Judaism.

"This is not to say that there wasn't a time in the history of ancient Israel when the Israelites appear to have been worshiping Yahweh's consort as well, but that was a long time before the Christian church came on board! Some of the Gnostic Christians thought that God was androgynous, having both male and female aspects, an idea that they seemed to have based on Genesis 1:27.

"Although it is fun to speculate about the possibility that prehistorical societies were matriarchal, this hypothesis has very little evidence to support it, even though it was charming 30 years ago."

By Arlene Mannlein
www.jg-tc.com