The Encyclopedia of World Religions

322 S New Thought movement

books of Acts tell tales, some of them rather tall tales, about the apostles; among them, however, are traditions that are rather widely known, such as the story in the Acts of Peter that he was cruci fied upside down. One epistle, ascribed to Titus, urges Christians to avoid sexual relations alto gether, even if they are married. (Sexual abstinence was, in fact, common among early Christians.) The Apocalypse of Peter contains vivid descriptions of heaven and hell. Although Christian churches today do not accept these books as authoritative, they cast inter esting light on the diversity of views that counted as Christian before Christianity defined itself offi cially during the fourth and fifth centuries. New Thought movement A popular American spiritual movement emphasizing the fundamental importance of the mind in creating what each of us sees as real and the power of thought to affect healing and success. Beginning as a distinctive movement in the late 19th century, New Thought had roots in the long-standing idealist tradition of philosophy, which says that mind or conscious ness is the basic reality. What we call the world is, for the idealist, a projection out of consciousness, whether from the mind of God or from that of the individual. New Thought’s immediate background was the 19th century revival of this tradition by German idealist philosophers and their counter parts in New England Transcendentalism, espe cially Ralph Waldo Emerson. The New Thought spiritual movement, some times called “mind-cure” or “metaphysical” reli gion, went a step further. Its founders, including Phineas Quimby (1802–66) and Emma Curtis Hop kins (1853–1925), were not content just to say the oretically that mind is all but wanted also to show how the supreme power of mind can be employed on behalf of health, happiness, and prosperity. It was a time when America was changing, grow ing, and prospering as new technologies and new opportunities appeared. To some, it seemed that ways of thinking should change too, in order to be open to new endless possibilities and unleash

Teaching of the Twelve Apostles were once quite popular. They simply failed to meet the require ments for being included in the New Testament. For example, 1 Clement was written by an early pope ( see PAPACY ), not an APOSTLE . Other books come from communities whose teachings are quite different from what we now consider C HRISTIANITY . Some represent views known as G NOSTICISM , an ancient religious movement that stressed salvation through secret knowledge, not FAITH . Others come from communities that we can no longer easily identify because they have been largely forgotten. Christians today may find the contents of these books odd, such as the stories they tell about J ESUS and the sayings they attribute to him. Nevertheless, some people who considered themselves Christians at other times thought of these books as containing religious truth. Like the New Testament itself, the New Tes tament apocrypha include many kinds of books: gospels, A CTS OF THE A POSTLES , epistles, sermons, apocalypses, and other kinds of writing thought to reveal divine truth. Many are ascribed to familiar apostles, such as James, John, Paul, Peter, Philip, and Thomas. Others are, unlike any of the books of the New Testament, associated with the names of prominent women: the Gospel of Mary (meaning M ARY M AGDALENE ), the Acts of Thecla (a compan ion of Paul), and even a gospel written by E VE . Still other books name the communities that used them, wrote them, or to whom they were addressed, such as the gospels of the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and the Ebionites and Paul’s Letter to the Laodiceans and Third Letter to the Corinthians. Scholars today think that most if not all of these names are wrong. (That is true for many books in the New Testament, too.) They were most likely given by the writers to make the books seem authoritative. Most of the writings date to the second century C . E ., although some scholars have placed the Gospel of T HOMAS in the first century. It is difficult to generalize about the con tent of all of these books. They allegedly recount the childhood of Jesus or the secret teachings of Jesus, or they simply portray a different Jesus than is described in the New Testament. The various