This difference is not theologically or religiously accidental. The gnostic gospels, by and large, do not believe that anything has happened that has changed the world. They are not actually interested, as the canonical gospels are, in the events as events, in Jesus’ biography as biography. (One of the great gains of New Testament scholarship in the last generation has been to reestablish that the canonical gospels certainly were intended, and certainly are to be read, within the framework of ancient