The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels, is a series of essays on the aforementioned texts: their origin, their contents, and the political struggles in early years of Christianity.#

The most concise summary of the differences:#

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. BUt some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical. [p. xx]

An interesting interpretation:#

And when he saw the creation which surrounds him and the multitudes of angels around him which had come forth from him, he said to them, "I am a jealous God, and there is no other God beside me." But by announcing this he indicated to the angels that another God does exist; for if there were no other one, of whom would he be jealous? [p. 29]

The Gnostics interpreted this quote from the Gospel of Thomas as supporting the idea of gnosis:#

"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." [p. 126]

I think a better interpretation of this is that we must do our best and bring everything we can to the table, and that Christ will make up the difference to God. The second part means that if we are dishonest in giving our all, then the omniscient God knows our transgression.

Pagels reasons that one of the main reasons that the orthodoxy `won' is that they were able to create an incredibly accessible organization, rather than one that was closed and only for the elite and elect.#

According to Professor Helmut Koester, "the test of orthodoxy is whether it is able to build a church rather than a club or school or a sect, or merely a series of concerned religious individuals." Origen, the most brilliant theologian of the third century, expressed, although he was himself brought under suspicion of heresy, the orthodox viewpoint when declared that God would not have offered a way of salvation accessible only to an intellectual or spiritual elite. [p. 147]