Christianity
The Patristic Age 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 30 May 2008
Gnosticism
Early Church Fathers, like Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Tertullian, found themselves confronted with a variety of Gnostic sects, whom they all regarded as types of Christian heresy. It suggests they all had the same Essenic roots as Christianity, or had drawn considerably upon the same Essenic ideas that had emerged as Christianity. Irenaeus and Tertullian both considered Gnosticism as an admixture of Paganism with apostolic Christianity (Essenism), while Hippolytus specifically saw them as mixing astrology and the mystery religions into apostolic Christianity. Irenaeus blames it on to the Simon Magus of Acts, and, if Simon Magus was originally the apostolic name for Paul (Saul), the self-styled apostle to the gentiles, perhaps he was right.
Some kinds of Gnosticism were closer to Christianity than others which were only superficially Christian. In some, Jewish elements of an allegedly unorthodox type were more prevalent than Christian elements, though how anyone can distinguish unorthodox from orthodox Judaism of that time is anyone’s guess. It certainly suggests that a non-Christian but Jewish type of Gnosticism existed before Christianity. It was more definitely Persian (Oriental), and perhaps also more Hellenized, than the Rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the fall of Judaism when the rabbis pruned it of those features.
Like the neo-Platonists, Gnostics were fond of the idea of hypostasis, that everything consisted of emanations from God, but some of the Gnostic schools took it to extremes. Among their many emanations were Thought (Ennoia), Monogenes Nous (Born of One—or Only Begotten—Mind), Aletheia (Truth), Logos (Reason), Zoë (Life), Anthropos (Mankind), Ecclesia (Assembly, Church), The Five Aeons (Continuous Time Periods), The Six Aeons, various pairs of Aeons, Sophia, and so on. They add up to thirty and these thirty are the Pleroma (Fullness) of God, but only the falsely called Only Begotten Nous knows, and so can reveal, the Father who is Unbegotten. The guardian of the Pleroma is Stauros (Cross), also called Horos. Nous and Aletheia produced a new pair of Aeons to instruct the Pleroma about the Father. They were Christ and the Holy Spirit. Then, the Saviour Jesus emerged as the Perfection of the Pleroma.
And it goes on! Sophia the lowest hypostasis of the Pleroma eventually becomes the Demiurgos, or Creator of the World, which was made of matter, psyche and pneuma, giving rise to three distinct types of man, the pneumatic or spiritual man, who only needs to be aware of the Saviour to be saved, the carnal or material man, who cannot be saved at all, and the psychic man who has to imitate Christ in life to be saved. It followed that anyone’s best bet for salvation was to practice the life of a psychic man! This is what the later Cathar perfects attempted to do.
The disciples of Valentinus elaborated this speculative mythology, though the original scheme of Valrntinus seemed simpler, and had much in common with the Christianity of John. The common stock of ideas among the Gnostic sects include:
- Dualism—Good and Evil are opposites, the material world being evil and the spiritual world being good
- The prime God, being purely spiritual, could have had no role in making the material world. A lesser and evil God, the Demiurge, was the Creator, and, as the Jewish scriptures said their God was the Creator, the Demiurge was the God of the Jews
- Mankind, or at least the best among them, have a spiritual spark, a spark of the divine, within them. It is distraught in its alien, material, environment and yearns to return to the spiritual level and be with God
- A Saviour had to descend from higher levels of hypostasis to show the souls of spiritual humanity how they can return to heaven. This is what the “gnosis” or “knowledge” in Gnostic religions is.
Gnosticism and Persian Religion
The first and fourth of these four are unquestionably Persian, as is the notion of emanations or aspects of God. Ahuramazda had at least seven forms, but we must remember that 90% of Persian literature has been destroyed forever, so other oriental, philosophical and Gnostic ideas quite probably came from lost details of Zoroastrianism, and the even lesser known Zurvanism. Judaism has Persian roots, and the different systems of Greek philosophy were inspired by Persian religion, so it cannot be discounted that the main aspects of Gnosticism were also originally Persian.
The conquest of Persia by Alexander not only destroyed the literature of Zoroastrianism, but left the large Persian caste of the Magi, the administrative and religious caste of old Persia, unemployed and destitute. These men were clever and well educated, and, left to their own devices, made their way in the changed world they found themselves in the best way they could, by becoming teachers and religious gurus—Goëtae. But the lack of any central church meant they were free to do as they liked, tailoring their teachings to the likes and dislikes of their audiences, so Persian Zoroastrianism became adulterated and spallated. The world had become Greek, and Greeks had put their own emphases on the Zoroastrian speculation they had met. So the Magi were able to make use of the bits of Greek teaching they saw as compatible with their own beliefs.
Much of Judaism was already compatible with Magian ideas, Judaism having been set up by the Persians as a religion suitable for the subjected nations of the Persian empire, the Juddin. It gave the Magi another acceptable source for their attempts to reconstruct a working religion from what they remembered of the Persian religion. These were the reasons for and the sources of Gnosticism. The gnosis being taught was the knowledge the Magi had of their old religion.
In the Patristic Age, four hundred years after Alexander, gnosis of the Persian religion survived in a much distorted form in the various schools of Gnosticism and Greek philosophy competing with each other for an audience of “hearers” mainly in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. Christianity was only one of them, but it is a truism that history is the story of the victors, and it is because Christianity was eventually adopted by the Roman state that it was ultimately successful above the others, and so that they can now be depicted as incidental distractions from what was always the superior form.
Christians say that salvation is by faith (pistis) not knowledge (gnosis), but it is self evident that no one can be saved by the Christian theory unless they know it! They have to know that faith saves them before they can have faith in it. Christianity is a type of gnosis, and John and Paul are clear about it. The whole idea of the New Testament was to spread gnosis—the Good News is gnosis—gnosis of pistis! As in gnosis, so in Christianity, the pneumatic or spiritual man is saved, while the rest remain Godless.
The Gnostic teacher, Basilides, said that “the gospel is knowledge of otherworldly things”. Once anyone knows their situation and what is required of them to escape it, then they can begin to do it, but it is not easy, as merely professing faith is. It was set forth by teachers as a long journey, even after death, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, full of hazards to be overcome at the various hypostatic levels en route.
Modern Christianity in the USA is successful because salvation is a cinch. All they have to do is be “born again” and be a good giver to the redeeming church, and that is it. Christ, the supposed God of the Christians, in the Christian holy books called The Gospels said something quite different. It was hard avoiding perdition. Modern Christians are cash cows to be milked by insincere scheming evangelists.
Essenism and the Gnostics
Much of early Christianity was a Gnostic variety, as 2 Clement and John show, teaching that eternal life is knowledge of Christ and God. Other Church fathers made the same distinction between simple Christians who just heard and believed, and Gnostics who had a philosophy beside their faith. Many teachers accepted as Gnostics in the early years of Christianity were preaching Christ as a salvific figure, but sought to place the whole notion of salvation in a more “scientific” context. They were seeking the roots of the idea, which was Zoroastrianism, via the Greeks rather than via the Jews.
The Jewish religion was originally a version of Mazdayasnaism much simplified to be easy to grasp and proselytize among people ruled by Persia, but the original Zoroastrianism itself was a considerably philosophical system of broad compass. Alexander acted untypically vandalously destroying the Persian books because he realized the indebtedness of Greek philosophy to them. Alexander’s teacher was Aristotle.
We have seen that the destruction of the bulk of Zoroastrian teaching and simultaneously the social and economic system that maintained it gave rise to the large class of travelling preachers and magicians that brought magic to Hellenism, and fresh mysteries to religion. When the earliest converts of the Nazarene emerged from Judaea with stories of a crucified redeemer, it was natural that some Gnostic Goëtae attached the tale to the story of a redeemer they already had, and gave the Jewish redeemer the characteristics they expected of him. Gnostics saw the world as evil, and out of touch of God.
Many of the Essenes, scattered by the Roman victories in Judaea were ready to accept the same view. Had God, who had declared the Jews and Judaea as His own, abandoned the Jews, and even His Chosen Ones, His Elect, the righteous remnant of Israel, the Essenes? The answer was, “Yes!”. Rome was contrary to the good God, but the tool of the wicked God of this world, determined to harm, torture and scatter those who were truly good. Rome kept on defeating the True God’s children, and the wicked God of the Jews was indifferent. The Jewish God had indeed abandoned them, so was not the True God. The Gnostics were right.
Gentile Christians had the same argument but blamed the neglect of God for His own people on God having changed His mind, having repented about his Elect, who had been so faithless and wicked themselves. Now God had appointed the Christians as His new Elect, and so they still suppose until this day. The Gnostics said the Jews had mistaken the wicked Demiurge as the True God, and He had taken advantage of them, punishing them gratuitously like a small boy picking the legs off of a fly. The Jewish Creator God was a rogue hypostate of the Truly Spiritual God. The world was therefore Satanic, and the influence of this idea on Christianity remains.
Christian Doctrine as Catholic Doctrine
Protestants are faced with a problem that few of them are clever enough to notice. Christian doctrine comes down to us as the doctrine of the Catholic Church, yet they label the Catholic Church as a shocking hybrid of “true faith” and Hellenistic Paganism. How then do they know what “true faith” is? Paradoxically, they themselves venerate Paul, and cite his epistles endlessly, but Paul was the earliest named person to have mixed Hellenistic concepts with the Jewish Christianity of the Jerusalem Church. Proof is that he decried as “Judaizers” the envoys of James who sought to stop his Hellenizing antics.
What we have, in the Christian story, is that the Christian Saviour, Christ, God Himself, came to earth as a man, selected a group of men as apostles and witnesses to his message, and these apostles passed on the message to the Church. Thus we read of:
The actual original tradition, teaching and faith of the Catholic Church, which the Lord bestowed, the apostles proclaimed, and the Fathers safeguarded.Athanasius
So, the Church, the Roman Catholic Church, was the guardian of the message of God, and this message is now embodied in the books of Christian scripture, the New Testament, which the Church published, and in its own corpus of tradition and expertise through its “doctors”, all inspired by the “Apostolic Succession”, the spirit notionally passed from generation to generation. That is the outline of the transmission of the Holy Kerygma of Christ. The Church is indeed the guardian of this tradition, so it, the Catholic Church, has passed to the Protestants whatever they know about doctrine.
Questions remain, of course. What happened to the apostles? Of the original ones only the fate of Judas is certain, if we are to believe the gospels. Peter is partially remembered in Acts, but otherwise it is exclusively about Paul, a belated and self-apointed apostle, apparently an afterthought of God because the others were all lazy skivers who were not up to the job. God had gone through the inconvenience of appearing as a man to transmit His message in person to a chosen twelve, but then had to appear again after He had ascended to heaven because his twelve appointments were inadequate. This late appointment was, it turned out, keen on preaching, travelling and writing letters, so was up to the task, except that the message he told was not the one God had told Himself.
Paul extemporized doctrine on the hoof. To what extent did the early bishops of the gentile church do the same? Did their extempore musings come to represent Church tradition? Tradition is the doctrine of the Church besides that written in the scriptures, and sometimes apparently contradicting them. The Trinity is the most obvious example. How did such traditions arise?
So far as we can judge, the gospels were written from about the time of the Jewish War (Mark) to some time early in the second century (John), but they were not published or generally available until after the middle of the second century. So, for well over a century after the crucifixion, Christians relied on tradition—what Clement called “the rule of our tradition”, and what Justin Martyr called “following God and the teaching derived from Him”. The source of the teaching was said to have been the apostles, but many of the characteristics of Christ were derived from the Jewish scriptures—and called prophecy whether it was meant to be or not—as exemplified by Matthew.
Thus, Polycarp urged the acceptance of Christ himself with “the apostles who preached the gospel to us, and the prophets who announced our Lord’s coming in advance”. For the whole of nigh on a century and a half, the Jewish scriptures in the form of the Septuagint were the only scriptures most Christians could access, and so were essential to the spread of Christianity. Christians blatantly stole the scriptures of the Jews calling them their own. Justin Martyr stated as accepted truth that the Jewish scriptures belonged to Christians not Jews (1 Apol 32:2, Dial 29:2).
The prophets were all concerned with prophesying Christ, Christians were led by the Church to believe. Despite the conviction of early believers like Justin and Tatian, who said they converted merely from reading the Jewish scriptures, many of the supposed prophecies in the Jewish scriptures are plainly not prophecies, and more plainly not prophecies of Christ. They obviously had been predisposed to see prophesies of Christ when there were none, and so must have experienced Christian teaching. Many modern converts make a similar claim—that Christ appeared to them spontaneously, yet they must have been primed even to think it.
Another Apostolic Father, Barnabas, admits it and even calls it gnosis. This gnosis was a particular kind of exegesis whereby any vague association was construed as prophecy, and prophecy could be constructed from different passages, rather as modern evangelists pick passages to make up their own doctrines. The apostles used this method, and so did Jesus, according to Justin (1 Apol 50:12). This exegetical method used by the early Church was that used by the Essenes! It was loose and eccentric, and far removed from being logical, but it allowed Essene and Christian exegetes to get what they wanted, and claim it was the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Whatever messages the apostles had transmitted about Christ’s own teaching were allegedly confirmed by Papias because he made it his objective to interview “Elders”, old men of the Church who had known the apostles. Protestant sectaries have always claimed this was what they exclusively had done, or at least first did properly. By so doing, they and only they knew “the Truth”. Yet all they are doing is examining the texts and doctrines that the Catholic Church as seen fit to transmit. It includes the darling of the Protestants, Paul, who curiously is a darling of many Catholics too.
Yet Paul’s enemies were the Ebionites, the early Christian sect that the Catholics declared heretical. The Ebionites were “the Poor”, the Jewish sect that included Essenes, if they were not exactly the same people, and evidently included Jesus and the apostles too, judging by their advocating poverty and sharing. Only 100 years after Christians tell us God walked the earth, speaking His own words from His own lips, explaining personally to anyone willing to listen what they had to do to enter His kingdom, Polycarp declared, in a letter to the Philippians, that Paul’s letter to them was the foundation of Christian faith. Doubtless he was being sycophantic, but Christians have believed it ever since, while the true founders of Christianity and even God Himself Christians ignore.
