Christianity
The Gnostics 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 23 October 2002
Gnosticism
Gnosticism, in the middle of the second century, was an important doctrine, with many followers rivalling the Catholic Church. Polycarp, Justin Martyr, and others inveighed against it, and some of the Fathers of the Church were converts from Gnosticism.
Gnosticism was an esoteric and theosophist religion. Its doctrines were “Mysteries” into whose real meaning only the most learned and most worthy were ever initiated. The stories the Gnostics told were allegories, and not meant to be accepted as history save by the ignorant, who were not regarded as capable of understanding the mysteries. There is nothing unusual in the gradual personification of an abstract idea. Greek mythology was built up by such processes. How it happened in Christian doctrine has been carefully concealed by theologians in control of Christian education.
Students of Christian origins must know about Gnosticism, for the real problem which confronts them is to determine whether the first Christians believed that a man, Jesus, became Christ by inspiration, adoption, or some other method, or whether they believed that Jesus was God, who became man by a miraculous conception or by some other means. They will have to determine what was meant by the authors of our New Testament when they identified Jesus with Christ, or with the “Word”. Knowing Gnostic theories teaches us what the doctrines of some sects of Christians were, and that these doctrines influenced some of the New Testament authors. Catholic doctrines are a blend of Gnosticism with some other form of Christianity.
The origins of Gnosticism, like that of Judaism, were in the Persian religion, which was destroyed as a centralized institution by Alexander in about 330 BC. Before then, besides setting the Greeks thinking, the Persians had set up the temple state of Yehud based on Jerusalem. The social and psychological disruption that accompanied the collapse of the Persian empire and the spread of Greek culture within warring kingdoms in the next 400 years seems to have led to the feeling that evil had totally taken over the world. Many people who knew little or nothing of Greece suddenly came within the Greek cultural sphere and were frightened and confused.
Magi to Magicians
Fall of empire and destruction of religion left large numbers of Persian Magi unemployed—clever men having to find a source of income. These Magi, did not come from Iran alone. The collapse of the Persian empire left many stranded in Egypt and Asia Minor, Persian families usually having their own Magus as a sort of family pastor. Abandoned by the displacement of the Persians from power, they had to earn a crust and were thrown on their own skills and inventiveness to do it.
The Magi knew a lot of tricks they had used to impress the Persian faithful, and they adapted these to their wider Greek, and then Roman audiences. These were the foundations of magic—conjuring tricks and sleight of hand used by the Magi to attract audiences in the market places where they would then explain to a gawping crowd their popular distortions of Zoroastrianism. They became travelling magicians but they were lucky enough to have a mass of increasingly superstitious people to gull, and attracted small groups of disciples.
These unemployed Magi would have spread the dark idea that the world was evil, based on their own background religion, and their fall from grace. Their disciples, influenced then by Greek culture over subsequent generations, founded Hellenistic Magic, Gnosticism, the Hermeneutica, perhaps Essenism and ultimately Christianity. Hybridization of them in the first two centuries AD gave a variety of Christian Gnostic cults that the Roman Church picked on as its first heretics and drove into impotence if not extinction by the end of the third century.
Who is God?
So, for Gnostics, the world was evil and must have been made by a wicked God. Gnosticism therefore rings a change on the struggle in Zoroastrianism, and perhaps Aryan religions generally, between two gods, one Good God and one Evil God. The Zoroastrian idea does not give either of them a sole dominion. The Good God, Ahuramazda, created a perfect world with both material and spiritual dimensions, and then the Wicked God, Ahriman, deliberately corrupted the Good Creation with his evil creations. God’s (Ahuramazda’s) Creation was good, so the world was good, but wickedness and corruption had been introduced to it.
In Persian religion, the element of free-will was pronounced. Zoroastrianism was a profoundly moral religion that placed the burden of choice on the individual. The purpose of good people was to fight evil, joining the side of the Good God in the cosmic battle against His practically equally powerful enemy. Men chose between the two spirits, and their decision clearly decided their outcome, on the basis of the balance of good and bad deeds accomplished in their lives. In Essenism, men were born with varying degrees of goodness and wickedness within them but could achieve salvation—entry into god’s kingdom—by good works and submission to the grace of God. God decided, but he was just and a life of good works could overcome one’s intinsic badness.
In Zoroastrianism, the holy angels kept a Book of Life with every man’s good and wicked deeds listed, to be weighed in tha balance at Judgement Day. This very idea appears in the Christian Book of Revelation, showing that Christianity owes it to Zoroastrianism, and that the authors of the book can have had no notion of salvation by God’s grace alone, or by faith alone. Now, in Christianity, men are intrinsically bad because of the original sin of Adam, and works do not save them, only the acceptance of a faith in Christ. Gnosticism was similar. Men are intrinsically wicked but some of them have a spark of the divine and therefore can be saved. Gnosis—mystic knowledge—would reveal it to them.
Both Good God and Evil God in Zoroastrianism battled in the material and in the spiritual worlds, but the Gnostic idea separated the two domains. The Good God was in charge of the spiritual world, but the material world was the creation and domain of the Evil God, called the Craftsman or Demiurgos, because he, not the spiritual God, made the material world himself. He did not conceive of the material world himself, though. The conception or idea of the material world was in the mind of the Good God, and it was the imperfect and corrupt way that the Wicked God made it that caused it to be unpleasant. The Supreme God did not seem to realize that His idea had been stolen and made imperfectly, but quite how that ties in with the omniscience of God is hard to understand. The excuse seemed to be that the Good God was away in distant parts of the cosmos preoccupied with other things.
All the cults which were contemporary with primitive Christianity had their occult mysteries. Simple adherents and the public knew only the mythologies connected with their particular religion. Mystery dramas which represented the story of the life on earth of the god were only understood by the more cultured members of each society who had been initiated into the hidden allegorical meaning of the story—the secrets of their faith—the knowledge of things seen and unseen, once revealed by the divine founder of the religion, and thereafter handed down by the hierophants to those fitted to receive it.
These initiates alone understood the real meaning of the various symbols exhibited, and of the various words and phrases used in these dramas, and to the initiates alone were fully explained the cosmological, transcendental, and ethical theories of the learned professors of the faith. The ignorant thought only of the spectacular appearance of the mystery plays, the initiate studied the more significant inner meaning of the characters and actions represented. The vulgar revelled in the rites of the cult, the intellectually inclined sought for knowledge in its secrets.
This knowledge was the Gnosis of the pre-Christian, and then the Christian, Gnostics. Through the mystic knowledge called Gnosis, the soul was freed from its prison in the body and protected in its advance to heaven and unity with God. The planets exercised an evil influence, and Gnostics needed to know how to handle the harmful guardians of each of the planetary spheres to attain to the highest heaven. Gnostic knowledge included that of the names of these guardian demons, for by naming them they lost their power, just as Jesus showed in driving them out in the New Testament.
The Gnostics, however, though they had their occult mysteries, were not worshippers of gods or demi-gods like those worshipped by the adherents of other cults. Knowledge and wisdom were their aims. To understand all things—visible and invisible—and to learn how to live wisely were the objects of their studies. Some of them were followers of Plato, or of Pythagoras, or of Aristotle, or of some other human and historical philosopher. Plato was unwittingly one of the founders of Gnosticism and thence Gnostic Christianity, and is referred to by orthodox Christian Fathers such as Justin Martyr and Clement as a “Christian before Christ”. But, the Catholic Fathers lumped Gnostics together as as the “first-born of Satan”!
Now, for the Jews, the High God was Yehouah, whom the Greeks called Iao, and the Jewish scriptures, originally based on the Good Zoroastrian God, said that Yehouah had made the material world. But a pre-Christian Jewish sect, the Magharians, reasoned the God of Genesis was not omniscient because Adam could hide from him, and he was anthropomorphic. They deduced that Yehouah was not the Creator. God must have sent an angel to create the world and mankind. It was the angel that Adam and Eve disobeyed. Here is an aspect of Gnosticism already within Judaism.
Instead, the Gnostics concluded that Yehouah was the angel sent by a supreme God. Jews had mistaken the angel for the proper God. Yehouah was the Demiurge and therefore the Wicked God. Human beings are left at the mercy of the Demiurgos, and having to try to attract the attention of the remote supreme Good God. Others called the High God Serapis, Aion meaning “The Eternal One”, and simply “The One”. These names or titles became interchangeable. Jews and Christians, however, for whom Yehouah/Iao was the High God, called the lesser god, Satan, Hebrew “accuser” but looking suspiciously like a variant of the wicked Egyptian God, Set, or the Devil—derived from the Greek “diabolos” (“Plotter”) of the Septuagint, but looking uncannily as if it is a variant of “deva” being the Persian name for wicked gods and spirits.
Twin Gods
In the Zoroastrian scheme, the two gods were created as twins, possibly out of the entity Zurvan who is Time or Eternal Time. Since Alexander destroyed the huge Zoroastrian corpus of holy works, the details of the myth are uncertain. It was certainly the later belief, called a heresy of Zoroastrianism, but it seems likely that it was original because twin gods pop up in the Aryan founded countries of Europe. The best known are Prometheus and Epimetheus, the clue being that Prometheus had foresight but Epimetheus had none. Another form of the same idea is the twin-faced god Janus, from which we have the month January, the god looking forward in time and backwards in time at the start of the year. In the Christian myth Jesus is twinned with Thomas, Jesus having foresight, but Thomas being a doubter, meaning that he did not know until something had happened.
The twins therefore are the two divisions of time—the future and the past. Ahuramazda differed from Angra Mainyu only in having foresight like Prometheus and Epimetheus. He knew what would happen while the Evil Spirit knew only what had happened. Ahuramazda was therefore able to get his enemy twin to agree to a fixed period of contending together of 12,000 years, knowing that in this time he would be victorious. Since the Persians and evidently the Babylonians and Jews celebrated an annual New Year ceremony, it was obviously an annual celebration of the whole of history from Creation to Eschaton, each month being a millennium. The celebration was of the ultimate Judgement and the re-establishment of the original unblemished Creation, and naturally the celebration of that Creation itself as the start of the year. Thus the old year, represented wickedness defeated, and the New Year was pristine and unblemished before the Evil Spirit began corrupting it.
The Greeks regarded the Jewish God, Iao, as the whole year, each season having the characteristics of a different major Greek god, Apollo, Dionysus, Hades and Zeus being summer, autumn, winter and spring. Plainly, this is a very great god, not surprisingly dubbed “The One”. The Gnostics thought similarly. Basilides considered the Supreme God to be so ineffable as to be nonexistent, but he had seven powers, which did exist—Mind, Reason, Thought, Wisdom, Power, Holiness and Peace. Besides these seven, there were 365 angels dwelling in 365 mansions en route to God. Some Greek letters adding up to 365 spelled out Abraxas, and this was the name of God.
Gnostic gemstones (illustrated above) have been found inscribed with the word Abraxas or Iao or Sabaoth, or Adonai, and the images of a cockerel, or a human figure with the head of a cockerel, and serpents as legs, and carries a sword or a whip, and a shield. Interestingly, Christ said he came with a sword, and in John he wielded a whip. A cockerel is a sun symbol, because it crows to the sun at dawn. A serpent with the head of a lion, or a hawk or a cockerel also represent the God. Some have the name Mithras, a sun god. Some have a lion, the midsummer constellation, an image of Serapis. Others have animals or sphinxes or monsters, but some just have inscribed words. Abraxas was a sun god, and therefore a time god, being the god of the solar years of 365 days. Iao (Yehouah), and other names used for Him, Adonai and Sabaoth seem to be identified with Abraxas.
Angels and Emanations
Zoroaster had declared the seven planets as wicked spirits but had introduced the seven Amesha Spentas as good spirits which became the Jewish archangels. But both Judaism and Zoroastrianism had a plethora of additional spirits, or “emanations” in gnostic terminology which were also sacred.
According to Plutarch, in Persian religion Ahriman creates six more minor gods (angels) hostile to Ahuramazda, making up seven including himself. Ahriman is darkness and ignorance, and opposes everything that the good god does in the world, so the seven wicked spirits are the evil reflexions of the seven good ones. In the Apocryphon of John, Ialdabaoth is the First Archon of Darkness, an ignorant god with the form of a lion and a snake. The evil god, Ahriman, was always depicted in Mithraic imagery as being a lion headed figure in the coils of a snake. The Apocryphon says Ialdabaoth set the seven spirits to rule over the planets and the days of the week. Curiously, the spirit of the archangel Michael, being the Angel of Judah, was associated with a lion, and that of the archangel Raphael with a snake.
In Zoroastrianism, an important power was arta or asha meaning “order”. When the Persians first made their entrance as a top billing in the world drama in the sixth century, their religion with its good order and logical structure evidently deeply impressed the Ionian Greeks, who were not inspired to accept it as a religion but did admire its attempted explanation of the nature of the world. It stimulated them to improve on its descriptions of the world, and began the invention of Greek philosophy and science.
Several attempts were made over a few hundred years to improve on the Zoroastrian scheme, but Plato drew on them all and gave them his own stamp of authority. In the Greek philosophic religion of Platonism, the seven planets are gods and an eighth force is a “power from above” which enfolds the others. Plato’s Supreme God was perfection and the ultimate good, who had the perfect “ideas” of all the things that were created imperfectly in the world. An “idea” or “form” was a perfect object created by God’s thought, and which was the mould or model of the material instances of it that were subsequently created.
Imperfection is in the material world, but the spiritual world of God and “forms” is perfect. Plato retains the duality of Zoroastrianism but rejects the idea of an evil god. Plato had a Demiurgos, but he was simply the maker of the real world, who tried his best to make as good a world as he could out of poor non-spiritual materials. He was not therefore evil at all. In classical Greek, “demiourgos” means a working man—the “demiourgoi” formed one of three classes of the population of Attica, along with the nobility and the farmers. Because he was a builder the name “demiurge” was given to the creator of the world, and so he was named in Plato’s Timaeus. In it, the Demiurge does not make men because, if he had, they would have been immortal, so he leaves it to lesser spirits who make men out of the four elements. The Demiurge sends immortal souls down for them, but the material being of mankind is corruptible and the seat of pleasure and pain.
It is not far from Plato’s imperfect world based on perfect ideas with no intervening wicked principle needed to the re-assertion of a wicked principle. Plato had set up the basis of Gnosticism. The Gnostics revived the Zoroastrian Evil Spirit and made him the Demiurge. The Gnostics believed like Plato in a Supreme God utterly transcending human comprehension, unknown and unknowable, but not responsible for the imperfections of matter or for the evil which exists in the universe because the High God is perfect. The High God was not active in this world, which was the creation of lesser divinities—“powers”, “archangels”, “elements”, “æons”, and “rulers of this darkness” (archons)—which had emanated from the Supreme God himself, and the government of the world was their business.
Others were logos (the word), sophia (wisdom), nous (mind), phronesis (judgment), and dynamis (power), all attributes of the Supreme God, but emanating from Him as separate entities. These and other “æons”, together with the Supreme God himself, formed the “pleroma”, or “fullness of the Godhead”, as it is translated in our New Testament.
In most Gnostic cosmologies, the last æon or emanation, Wisdom or Sophia, wanting to know the unknowable Supreme Being, tried to succeed in her own creation, but it produced an inferior emanation, an evil god. It was Plato’s demiurge written as wholly bad. In creating the material world, this Demiurge trapped the human spirit, which then had to be recalled and redeemed to the higher order of existence to which it belonged.
The original source of these ideas is Persian as modified by Plato. The Greeks seemed to base all of their speculations about logos (reason), nous (mind), ideas (forms) on their interpretations of that cosmic order that the Iranians called “arta”, which is the Indians’ “rita”. The Gnostics “explained” these abstract notions as “emanations” of God. The Gnostics eventually added Christ to them.
Gnosticism did not differ from orthodox Christianity of today in placing humanity among the gods—in the sense that they are immortal, or potentially so—and not on earth. It rejected the real world even more comprehensively than Christianity does. Rejection, however, is rejection, however fervant about it anyone is, and all speculations that reject the world we live in must be wrong and dangerous.
Gnostics and Essenes
Gnosticism was widespread and must have been influenced from several sources. Besides Platonism, Gnosticism used as a source another derivative of Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Jews.
Judaism is unquestionably a derived form of Zoroastrianism, though modern clergy, who are obviously not disinterested, and even philosophers and historians, will deny it—mainly not that they have thought about it themselves, but because it has just become an ingrained habit they have been taught by their Christian schoolteachers. The plainest evidence of it is that Judaism has things that are unclean with no theological explanation. Zoroastrianism has clear theological reasons for declaring some things unclean—they are of the Evil Creation. Judaism was imposed, and either was not fully understood, or was arbitrarily changed later without making appropriate changes in theology.
What is more, scholars, who cast out the beams from their eyes first, can see from the Dead Sea Scrolls that first century Judaism was much more Persian, at least in some of its manifestations than it became. The Rabbis in the second century purged the religion comprehensively of its Persian apocalypticism to leave the passive scholarly religion which has come down to us.
Judaism, Christianity, Persian religion and Greek philosophy can all be seen in Gnosticism, but its fount was in alienation and pessimism with the world and God. The place where these strands meet is in Essenism, an apocalyptic sect. Nearly all the ingredients later found in Gnosticism were already present in the life and literature of the Essenes. The dualism of Gnosticism is present in the scrolls.
Alienation from God
The heart of apocalyptic belief is the Zoroastrian one that Good and Evil forces were engaged in perennial conflict. The world is corrupt or even evil. God would destroy it and thus destroy all evil but then renew the world, resurrecting righteous people into this renovated world—a perfect world, a heaven on earth. Essene belief was that the End Time eventually would come, preceded by identifiable signs. Then would begin Armageddon, a forty year battle, on earth and in the heavens, which concluded when God intervened on the side of the righteous. A messianic prince on earth would lead the fight and God would send his archangel Michael with a host of angels to end it.
What links the Essenes to Christians and Gnostics is the failure of God to fulfil His promises. The apocalypse which would save the Jews from oppression, and turn the tables to make them the emperors of the world, never came. The cosmic battle the Essenes expected to start by engaging the Romans, the men of darkness, never started. They felt they had tried repeatedly to show to God that they spurned the invaders but God refused to act. They concluded that if they, the Righteous, had done what was needed to trigger the battle, but no hosts of angels had arrived with the archangel Michael to defeat the evil hosts of Belial, despite repeated revisions of their interpretations, then the only explanation was that there were no good angels—all angels were evil and manipulated men for their evil ends. Essenes had seen the calendar as of vital importance, and remained sure that the escape route for good men must be in the heavens.
The Essenes were experts in seeking hidden things in the scriptures, and in their despair and disillusion might have used their skills for radical re-interpretations. Instead of heaven coming to earth as the kingdom of God, it was up to individuals to seek it in another space or level—a spiritual place. There was no hope on earth. The Zealots, according to Josephus, came to doubt that God had ever lived in His house—the temple. Since Zealots seem to have largely been a branch of the Essenes, they were already part way to rejection of Judaism in believing that the priests of the Jerusalem temple were delinquent or froward priests. In their disappointment it was perhaps only a small step to believe that the priests’ employer, God, was a delinquent god. The failure of their expectations led to their disillusionment with their former beliefs and then a reaction against them.
The destruction of the temple in 70 AD and then its razing in 136 AD led the despairing apocalyptic Jews to reject their god. He had rejected them proving that he was a false god after all. When continual destruction led to no renewal or resurrection, it required merely an extension of the evil into the realms of the spirit world to explain that God had failed because he was deceitful. They became Gnostics.
The Christ
Judaism had a strongly dualist tendency which appears most strongly in the scrolls. In Persian religion the Supreme God had an aspect called Mithras, apparently equal to Spenta Mainyu, the Holy Spirit, who was effectively the God in appearance and in action. Ahriman, as darkness and evil was the adversary of God, but in practice was the adversary of Mithras who was the sun and therefore goodness and light, and could be seen, whereas Ahuramazda was invisible and distant. Here was the model of the Redeemer.
Gnosticism accursed the God of the Jews because he created the world full of difficulties, tragedies and hurts, and because he sent tedious laws that had to be obeyed, just to make life difficult. Jewish Gnostics had lost faith in Yehouah as the Most High God and abandoned the law of Moses. They even denied resurrection, suggesting these had their origins in the temple priesthood, the Sadducees, and turned to belief in the immortality of the soul. The messiah, who was to redeem or save, that is free, Israel from foreign bondage, became a mystical Saviour or Redeemer like Mithras.
Some ignorant converts of the Essene leader, Jesus, actually thought their crucified leader had risen from the dead as the first of the dead to be raised in the general resurrection that accompanied the coming of God’s kingdom. Hellenized Jews particularly were impressed by this and were the first to be Christians. They returned to their homes in the Roman empire telling their Hellenized friends that a messiah had arisen, and the End was nigh.
The messiah, meant to the Jews one selected to do the work of God. Translated into Greek, it was the “Christ”. In Greek circles, the title “Christ” got a new meaning from the Jewish notion of “messiah”—that of a pre-existing spirit, an æon. This was a Gnostic concept and so Gnosticism influenced the metamorphosis of a Jewish sect into Christianity. To the Jews, “christiani”, the Latinized form of a Greek word meant nothing.
Among Essene splinter groups, some recognized Jesus as a saviour, and some came to reject the Jewish interpretations of scripture. The Jewish Christian writer Hegesippus, according to Eusebius, says James the Just discussed Jesus with seven Jewish sects, Essenes, Galilaeans, Hemerobaptists, Masbotheans, Samaritans, Sadducees and Pharisees. Mostly they rejected Jesus’s resurrection and his return as the Melchizedek. Justin of Samaria, an early Christian writer, lists—as well as Sadducees and Pharisees—Galilaeans as a Jewish sect related to Baptists, Genistae, Meristae, and Hellenians. The Genistae and Meristae seem to have been dualistic sects, presumably influenced by Persian religion and the Hellenians must have been those influenced by Greeks like the Hellenistic camp of the Nazarenes. James fought a constant battle against the Hellenists in the Nazarene movement, who certainly believed the resurrection.
Ultimately, in this confusion, Jewish Christianity factionalized and out of it came gentile Christianity and Gnosticism, both of which grew, especially when they attracted gentiles who had no cultural attachment to the Hebrew god. The seekers of hidden things sought to reinterpret scriptures such that a redeeming figure (æon) identifiable with Jesus came into a wicked world to save it from those that had made it wicked and held mankind in bondage in it. The redeemer of every Gnostic sect is Jesus Christ or someone similar, apparently confirming what Hippolytus had asserted—Gnosticism came out of the sect of the Nazarenes.
Considering matter wicked meant that some believers could not accept that the Redeemer had ever been a man. In Docetism, the Gnostics repudiated the history of a living Jesus of flesh and blood, and regarded him as a phantasm (dokesis). Their Jesus was a spiritual being who had appeared on earth in a spectral body, like a ghost, that only looked like a man. This was the first heresy, according to S Jerome, which arose while the apostles were still living and “Christ’s blood was still fresh in Judaea”.
Later, but still at the beginning of the second century, another sect of Gnostics known as the Adoptionists believed that the Christ spirit entered the Human Jesus at his baptism, and sometimes enters other men similarly—a sort of avatar. They believed that Jesus had become a Son of God, or had been “adopted” by God as his Son when he was baptized by John in the wilderness. The Adoptionists believed that Jesus was the temporary abode of the Christ spirit, and that this spirit left him shortly before the Crucifixion, subsequently visiting the disciples who had fled to a cave on the Mount of Olives. Apart from these two sects, the Gnostics believed generally that Christ was purely a spirit, a celestial being and not a human being.
The New Testament has evidence of the waning faith in the apocalyptic shared by the Christian mission and the Gnostic one, and the move towards a mystical redeemer. In 2 Thessalonians 2:2, Paul is apocalyptic, telling the Thessalonians not to think that the Day of the Lord had yet come. In later writings, both Paul and John dilute the apocalyptic idea of the coming of the kingdom of God in favour of individual spiritual salvation like that of the Gnostics.
Like Christianity, the Gnostic sects became strongly anti-Jewish, but Christianity retained the Jewish scriptures as they were—even finding far more messianic prophecies than the Jews had ever noticed—whereas the Gnostics reinterpeted and re-wrote the legends to suit their new pessimism.
Did Evil Rule?
After the disappointments of the failed apocalypses, some of the sages looked again to reinterpret the scriptures. In Jewish dualism, God stood above the conflict of light and dark below, because he had created them. The ethical dualism between good and evil of the Essenes which led to the victory of good and the kingdom of God was replaced in Gnosticism by the notion that the lower levels of the world were themselves dark and evil and the enemy of God. There are hints that mankind is an angelic creation, and that angels had handed down the law (Jub 1:27; see also Gal 3:19, Acts 7:53, Heb 2:2). In Ezekiel 40:3, Zechariah 1:9 and Daniel 9:22, there are angels which inspire prophecy.
Gnosticism has seven spirits which seem to echo the wicked planets more than the Amesha Spentas of Zoroastrianism, or the seven archangels of Tobit, the Testament of Levi, Enoch and the Apocalypse of John. Like the seven spirits in Gnosticism, the seven planets in Zoroaster’s scheme were antagonistic to mankind. In Enoch, favoured by the Essenes, the seven planets transgress the commandments of God and have to be punished, and in the Testament of Reuben seven spirits appear which seem to oppress man. This is Zoroastrianism.
Persian Ahriman was the model of the Jewish Satan or Belial, as the Essenes knew him. In the Jewish religion, he is not now the equal of God but a rogue angel acting in defiance of God, but, in the scrolls, his challenge is serious enough to lead to a cosmic conflict which is only defeated by God’s will. Belial leads all the sons of darkness and in the New Testament opposes Jesus, tempting him. Paul (2 Cor 4:4) calls Satan “the god of this age”, and John (12:31; 14:30; 16:11) calls him “the Archon of the world”. In John’s gospel, Jesus can tell the Jews that their Father is not God but the devil, apparently identifying the Hebrew God with Satan.
There seems to be some justification for this in the Jewish scriptures when 1 Chronicles 21:1 is compared with 2 Samuel 24:1. The scribe of Chronicles has realized that the people were not to be numbered and so has Satan not God telling David to number the people. The scribe of Samuel has the original story, the rule against numbering the people being a much later introduction than the supposed time of David anyway. When the two are seen side by side it seems that God is Satan, just the sort of discovery relished by those who were seeking hidden things.
Furthermore, Jubilees, beloved of the Essenes, seems to make God the pawn of the evil angel, Mastema. The writer is trying to save God the responsibility of some hostile acts in the scriptures but only succeeds in leaving opportunities for Gnostic exegesis. Jubilees also tells us that Moses wrote the Torah under the influence of an angel. Finally the many names of God in the scriptures, partly the result of the merging of different religious traditions in ancient times, leaves a perfect opportunity for reinterpreters to see them all as different entities—the recreation of an angelic pantheon from the one god.
Since the authorities of Judaism had been scattered after the uprising, there was no adequate way of controlling the speculation that became rife. For the despairing, the world was evil because its creators in heaven were evil. Creation stories refer to Yehouah and Elohim, and elsewhere they are called angels, not names of God. In Exodus 4:4, Gnostics thought Yehouah tried to kill Moses with a serpent, so seemed hostile. So, the world was created by angels and at least one of them seemed to be unfriendly. This one fooled the Jews into believing that he was their god, but really he was Satan as the scriptures prove.
The Gnostic, Cerinthus, was a Jew who identified Yehouah as an angel, the Supreme God being unknown. Thus the good God is disassociated from the evil world. Cerinthus was contemptuous of the Jerusalem Church of Christians who retained circumcision and the Jewish sabbath. Jesus was a natural man, the son of Joseph and Mary, who had the special power of the æon, Christ, which descended on him as a dove at his baptism. It left him before the crucifixion, so only the man Jesus suffered.
Jesus had not yet been resurrected. He would be resurrected along with other righteous people at the general resurrection, begin his reign on earth in Jerusalem where the Elect would enjoy banquets and marriages, pleasures and sacrifices. The kingdom would last a thousand years whereupon everything would be restored in some way (Irenaeus). This system has many features in common with Revelation and is quite close to the beliefs of the Essenes. Indeed, Eusebius says Cerinthus, not John, was the auther of Revelation. The Jewish God is only an angel and the future king is Christ not God. It sounds like an intermediate step between Essenism and Gnosticism.
Ascent of the Spirit
The Essenes had seemed to believe that the soul would be resurrected into a renovated body when the kingdom came. In Baruch, the body was a new one. Once dreams of God’s kingdom on earth were dashed, dreams of resurrection had to be abandoned.
Josephus said the the Essenes believed the soul was immortal and glad to be free of the confines of the body, the Greek idea. The immortal soul had to aspire to something other than resurrection. The Supreme God lived at the highest celestial level. The Gnostic soul was the spark of divinity, and the believer waited for it to ascend into the highest heaven to unite with God. The aspiring soul had to return, following the route of the Saviour, to the level of God, whence it came. The Testament of Levi, 2 Enoch and 2 Baruch all have this idea. The highest heaven in 2 Esdras 7:88-99 is the seventh where the spirit can see the face of God. In Plato, it is at the eighth level, one beyond the planets, among the stars, regarded in Zoroastrianism as good. Paul claims, with false modesty, in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, to have ascended to the third heaven.
The Greek word “archons” simply means governors or rulers but in Gnostic mythology they are the evil rulers of the lower levels of existence. Philo says that the planets were archons of the heavens. The psalms speak explicitly of archons and says that they are hostile to God. In the Greek of Psalms 24, archons seem to be lifting up eternal gates to let the king of glory enter. The aspiring soul had to avoid being controlled by the planetary demons as it passed through their celestial gates.
Ascending spirits had to know the archons of the various heavens so that they could be addressed by name. Josephus tells us that the Essenes had to know the names of the angels. Magical passwords were also needed and some Gnostic sects like the Ophites took with them to the grave Gnostic jewels with magical inscriptions. To even begin the journey, those aspiring to heaven had to remain celibate, free of the taint of women, and many avoided meat like the Orphics. Jewish thought and Greek thought met in Gnosticism, just as Persian thought and Greek thought met to produce Mithraism.
Why was there a belief that Christ had descended from the higher spheres? Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 says he would descend again in the future (cf Phil 3:20) presumably because his resurrection and ascension had placed him in heaven. In Ephesians 4:8-10, in an exegesis of Psalms 68:18, the descent is taken to be implied by the ascent. John 3:13 also says the Son of man has descended. In the scriptures, emanations of God dwell on earth—the name of God (Jer 7:12; Ezek 43:7; Ps Sol 7:5) and the Wisdom of God (Sirach 24:3,8; 1 Enoch 42:2; the Book of Wisdom 7:27). The Jews call these the Shekinah or the Presence of God which in the Rabbinic tradition appeared ten times on earth. These notions explain John and Paul’s belief that Jesus as an aspect of God could descend to earth. Jesus was commonly considered the “Name” in the first century as the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas show.
But pre-Christian Jewish literature does not have the idea that the messiah will descend from heaven. For the Essenes there was perhaps an implication that because heaven and earth became one, the messiah as the leader of the earthly hosts would conjoin with the archangel Michael as leader of the heavenly hosts to form the Melchizedek.
The Hermetica
Hellenistic Magic, Hermetica and Gnosticism share a lot of features. These are said to be Platonic, and indeed many are. But this ignores that all of them were sports off the same Zoroastrian plant. The basic duality and conflict in these philosophies suggest they come from Zoroastrianism, the origin of dual philosophic systems because it was the earliest of them. Modern philospohical dualism is the distinction between mind and matter, and is therefore Gnostic in essence. Zoroastrian dualism was the separate existence of good and evil principles. Declaring the material world to be evil was the link between them.
The Hermetica were the revelations of Hermes Trismegistos who had explained in his various writings how humanity could aspire to God. There never was a Hermes Trismegistos. It is the pseudepigraphic name of a lot of Magians or their disciples who wondered about the problem and wrote down in brief essays their conclusions often under the pseudonym of Hermes. These are often like Revelation and the Shepherd of Hermas, an early Christian non-canonical work, in that a guide appears in a vision to explain how heaven can be reached. Since Hermes in later classicism was the messenger of the gods, rather than a phallic god as he was originally, it seems that the guide was generically regarded as Hermes. The first book of the Corpus Hermetica is the Poimandres, The Shepherd of Men, who is the guide and therefore Hermes, but he also identifies himself as the High God, so he is a type of the Angel of the Lord of the Jewish scriptures, and Mithras of Zoroastrianism.
Hermes Trismegistos means the Thrice Great Hermes, but it does not imply that he is great for three separate reasons. Really it means the Great Great Great Hermes, emphasising his greatness. The collected writings of the philosophic groups were attributed to him and so he was considered a writer and, as they are thought to come largely from Egypt, where the god of scribes was Thoth, Hermes Trismegistos is often considered to have been the same as Thoth. He was not.
The origin of all things in the Poimandres is the Primal Mind who made the Demiurge who in turn made the cosmos. The seven planets were set in motion in their spheres as Governors of humanity through Destiny. Primal mind also made the Primal Man in his own image so that he was a spiritual being dwelling in the highest heaven with his Father, the Primal Mind. But the Primal Man also wanted to make things, so his Father granted him permission and he descended through the spheres collecting a characteristic from each of the Governors as he descended.
At the level of the material world, Nature saw him as the image of God and fell in love with him, while he saw the image of God—himself—reflected in water and projected as a shadow on the earth, and he fell in love with the the natural world. Out of the union of the Primal Man and Nature came the human stock of the world we know. This explains why humans are mortal, from their mother and yet are immortal from their father, the primal Man, from whom they have an immortal soul. A human that attained to God had to traverse the opposite path, assisted by the angel Poimandres, who is the Highest God himself, but God only helps those who are of the purest nature. Those can ascend, giving up the faults collected from the Governors on the way down as they pass each of the celestial spheres until they reached the Highest Heaven and reunite with God.
The Cainites and other Gnostic Sects
In the doctrine of the Cainites, Cain and Esau were seen as victims of the evil angel which favoured his own. Thus they were good while Abel and Jacob were wicked. Yehouah was a jealous and irrational god, also called Hystera or Womb because Isaiah 49:15 describes him as a woman who will not forget the child of her womb and as crying out like a woman in the birth pangs (Isa 42:14). Looking for confirmation in the Torah in the fashion of an Essene, looking for puns or other esoteric means of exegesis, they found at Exodus 34:6 Yehouah describing himself as “compassion” a word similar in Hebrew to the word for “womb”.
The Cainites considered it a duty to break the laws of the Hebrew God because he was an oppressor of mankind. Cainites sought to experience everything in order to gain “perfect knowledge”. The Carpocratians also wanted to experience everything. Since it was not possible in life to experience everything they believed in transmigration of souls so that everything could be experienced. They believed that the law was oppressive and was despised by Jesus but, because of divine power, he was not troubled by it. Thus their duty was to defy it. They cited Matthew 5:25,39,42.
Clement of Alexandria informs us that the Antitactae were “by nature” children of the Father of All who made only good things but acted deliberately against the will of the “Second One”. Whatever commandments he gave they opposed so as to purposely negate it.
