Featured photos by H. Michael Karshis and Antonioaesparza. CC BY-SA 4.0j
Texas state representative James Talarico, the Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate, recently found himself in hot water with American Christians, and rightly so. His controversy highlights a growing trend among progressive so-called religious voices. Talarico and his leftist cohorts are reinterpreting Christianity, either by appealing to ancient non-Biblical texts or simply fabricating doctrine.
Talarico recently justified some of his far-left principles of on abortion and transgender identity by pointing to the “Gospel of Thomas” as evidence that Christianity has many competing “gospels” and that the church arbitrarily chose the four found in the New Testament. But this claim misunderstands both history and theology.
The Gospel of Thomas is not one of the canonical Gospels accepted by the early church. Instead, it is a much later text associated with Gnosticism, a belief system that taught salvation through secret knowledge rather than through the death and resurrection of Christ. Unlike the Biblical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas does not contain a narrative of Jesus’ life, crucifixion, or resurrection. Rather, it consists of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus and centers on mystical self-knowledge as the path to salvation. The early church rejected the Gospel of Thomas as inconsistent with the teachings handed down from the apostles. The canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were accepted because they were tied to eyewitness testimony and preserved the historical story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Reviving texts like the Gospel of Thomas is not new. Throughout history, alternative “gospels” have periodically resurfaced, often promoted by those who prefer a version of Christianity that removes the central claims about sin and redemption. That’s why many are calling these revelations by leftist politicians the “zombie gospels.” Just like a Hollywood zombie, the arguments keeps coming back to life even though it has already been thorough examined and rejected by historians and theologians alike.
At stake here is not just a political election, the very meaning of the Christian faith and American tradition itself. Voters and spectators alike should not fall victim to the left’s distortion of the Bible to justify their own cultural evolution. Not only does it pervert the faith handed down to us over the centuries—it may just seal our nation’s demise.
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