Christianity
The Gnostics 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 23 October 2002
Resurrection and Christianity
The legend of the resurrection of Jesus as a man of flesh and blood arose because the followers of Jesus, the Nazarenes, had been expecting the apocalypse in which the forces of good would defeat the forces of evil forever and the earth would be renewed as a heavenly place led by righteous Jews. This would be accompanied by a general resurrection of the saints or holy ones—God’s righteous ones—the Essenes whose lives were righteous and those who had sincerely repented and been baptized.
Jesus was an Essene who had lead the earthly fight for Good by capturing Jerusalem from the Romans. He was caught and crucified as a traitor to the emperor. After their initial horror and dismay, occurred the key event in the development of Christianity. Jesus’s corpse disappeared.
Some of the more hysterical and impressionable Nazarenes—like Mary Magdalene—in their ecstatic state, believed they had seen the risen Jesus. The way of the world was that living men died, but here was a dead man who lived again. Today fans of Elvis Presley believe sincerely that they have seen the risen Elvis, so the phenomenon is not unusual. The gullible disciples, converts of the simple of Ephraim, took it to be a sign that the general resurrection had begun. Jesus had been the first to rise in the promised general resurrection of the righteous to enter God’s kingdom which must have been about to start. The temporary capture of Jerusalem had served its purpose. God had been convinced to repent of his anger against His people. The kingdom had come! They announced: “Jesus Christ rose from death”.
That Jesus had arisen was seen by his followers after their initial despair as fulfilment of all he had proclaimed. He had arisen to become the heavenly judge, the Melchizedek, the Righteous King, the angel Michael, who would lead the resurrected saints and the angels of heaven into God’s kingdom. Jesus had become literally the Son of God! Every righteous person could expect to be resurrected. Matthew actually testifies to the resurrection of the saints from the moment of the crucifixion, declaring that the saints (the Holy Ones, in other words, the Righteous, the Essenes) walked.
The early gentile Christians had to be persuaded that, just as Jesus had risen, they too would live again in the flesh. The followers of Jesus had not been righteous livers but they had sincerely repented to make them spiritually pure, and had accepted baptism to make them ritually pure, so that they could enter God’s kingdom as righteous people. By the time of Tertullian, 150 years later, Christian baptism was considered sufficient. Greeks at that time believed in ghosts but were scientific enough not to accept that a dead man could live again. Everyone accepted that the soul was immortal and survived physical death, but Jesus had been physically resurrected. That was what Tertullian taught—every believer would be literally resurrected in the flesh. The difference of Tertullian’s message from the original belief was that, instead of the Righteous, it was the Believer who was resurrected.
It was essential to the Christians’ continuing faith that they be able to prove that Jesus had genuinely arisen and the gospel writers are over zealous in trying to prove it. Luke 24:36-43 has the risen Jesus chatting with his friends, being touched and even eating roast fish with them to refute the criticism that he was a ghost or an illusion. Yet none of this appears in the first gospel written, the gospel of Mark, which really ends twelve verses before the versions normally published.
In John’s gospel, Thomas does not believe that Jesus is risen and to prove it John actually has Thomas pushing his hand into his wounds! Many people found it repugnant. But in John 20:11-17, Jesus forbids Mary Magdalene from touching him when she recognizes a gardener as Jesus. Luke 24:13-32 offers a quite different story—Jesus is said to have appeared in “another form” when he met the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. This then finds its way into the twelve verses added to Mark (Mk 16:12). When the disciples eventually recognize him he disappears before their eyes.
The earliest stories we have of these “sightings” are from the hand of Paul the Apostle not from any first hand witnesses. Paul admits that his meetings with Jesus were hallucinatory. In the gospels which came after Mark’s, these sightings were included and eventually some pious bishop thought they should have been in Mark’s gospel as well—so he put them in, adding the final twelve verses to the gospel. By the time we get to Paul writing to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:50), Paul is categoric that Jesus was not resurrected in the flesh:
Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
Paul was no longer apocalyptic—his thought was Gnostic: the kingdom of God was no longer “in earth”. Paul cops out by calling it a mystery.
All of this suggests that it was the Gnostics who were correct—there had been no resurrection of the flesh—the sightings had all been mystical visions like Paul’s. For the rational men of the time, it made no difference. Celsus, Plotinus and Porphyry all found Christianity and Gnosticism equally absurd and obnoxious.
John’s gospel says that Mary Magdalene was the first to see Jesus and this was added to Mark. Identical verses are found in the Gnostic Gospel of Mary—whose author admits that the sighting of Jesus was through the mind—and it seems that this was therefore their original source. The style of these verses precludes a first century author and the Gnostic works we know of all stem from the second century.
Another Gnostic text says that the resurrection was real but the world we experience is not because it is devoid of spiritual life and the resurrection therefore was simply a glimpse of the real world. The experience of such a resurrection, or rising up, however was open to anyone through an exploration of their inner being. According to the Gospel of Philip resurrection after death was not possible—resurrection had to be sought while people lived.
The Second Treatise of the Great Seth found at Nag Hammadi is a Gnostic polemic against orthodox Christianity. In it, the author calls the Gnostics, the Sons of Light, harking back to the name the Essenes used for themselves. Christians were described as dumb animals who have “proclaimed a doctrine of a dead man and lies” reconciling themselves to fear and slavery. The revulsion for “lies” again reminds one of Qumran documents, and Zoroastrianism.
Christians claim that Peter confirmed that the resurrection happened. That does not mean it did, and Mark’s gospel, which in Christian tradition records Peter’s own recollections of Jesus’s ministry, makes no such claim. The importance of Peter is that, in John 21:15-19, the resurrected Jesus appoints Peter as his successor, beginning the Apostolic Succession that has given the Church’s appointed priests authority over believers ever since.
Though, in John and the additional verses in Mark, Mary Magdalene was the first witness of the resurrection, it suited the Church to maintain that Peter was. In Matthew 28:18, a plain late addition to the gospel, Jesus delegated authority to the remaining eleven disciples, Judas already being dead. And Peter says to the successor of Judas appointed in Acts 1:22 that he must become with them a witness to the resurrection. How can one become a witness after the event?
Peter’s speeches were composed by Luke, who had not been a personal witness. He also describes the ascension into heaven in Acts 1:6-11. The purpose of these stories was to prevent anyone, who had not known the Jesus of the flesh before he ascended, from having any authority, because that authority rested entirely in the instructions of the Jesus of the flesh. Only those who had directly received them could pass them on.
The early Church was not noted for getting its story consistent, despite the work of the Holy Ghost, and Paul completely refutes the authority of the apostles claiming that his knowledge and understanding of Jesus through dreams and trances was superior to that of the apostles who knew the living Jesus. The clever idea of giving themselves authority through the Apostolic Succession was refuted by the most important apostle to the gentiles, Paul. They were not clever enough to edit away the contradictory passages in the epistles and in Acts that Paul’s contact with the spiritual Jesus of his imagination was more important. Nevertheless, the invention of the Apostolic Succession has given the uncritical followers of the Church an irrefutable reason to follow the most corrupt of clerics ever since. Origen admits that those Christians who literally believed in the resurrection of Jesus in the flesh had the “faith of fools”.
In the immediate aftermath of the empty tomb, the expectation of a general resurrection into a kingdom of God on earth seemed the simple explanation of Jesus’s disappearance. He was the first fruits of the kingdom. As time passed and nothing more seemed to happen, the original believers had to make choices:
- they had been mistaken and reverted to Judaism, or more probably to backsliding since most of Jesus’s followers—the simple of Ephraim—had been backsliders
- they had not been mistaken, but the resurrection meant something different, not the start of a perfect kingdom on earth
- they had been mistaken in believing that the resurrection was a bodily resurrection and not a metaphorical or spiritual one.
Each of these possibilities had adherents. The second led to orthodoxy—the kingdom of God was not a worldly utopia but the world in which Christian believers were active. The third led to Gnosticism which considered the risen Jesus as a spiritual being superior, as he was for Paul, to the Jesus of the flesh.
Varieties of Christianity
There was no single normative form of Christianity in the first century.James D G Dunn
Why should this have been? If Jesus was an Essene and Essenism already existed in different varieties while Jesus lived, there must have been different varieties of Christianity from the outset. That is one reason. Another is that Christianity was an Essene heresy propagated by Hellenized Jews—Jews whose knowledge and practice of Judaism was frail and who were influenced by the Hellenistic Paganism that itself existed in many varieties. Furthermore, outside Palestine and the authority of the Jerusalem Church, these lapsed and lapsing Jews were subject to no authority at all, and nothing could stop them devising different syntheses of Essenic Judaism and Hellenized religions in the different towns of the Roman empire they settled in.
The split between Judaism and Christianity had nothing to do with believing that Jesus was the messiah. The scribes and Pharisees might have thought such people insane, but it was certainly no sin. The real split was caused by factions with the attitude of Paul—Hellenizers who wanted to abrogate the law to make it easier to recruit gentiles. Most difficult was the legal requirement of circumcision, and next the food taboos. The first made it almost impossible for a male gentile to convert, and the second seemed fussy and unnecessry to most Romans. But the event that allowed the split was the Jewish War and the fall of Jerusalem, and the authority of the Jerusalem Church.
Gnosticism is more purely dualistic than the Christianity that has come down to us, and links more clearly with the Essene world view and the source of Judaism, Zoroastrianism. The world is the creation of the evil spirit but humans have a spark of divine light in them. The Essenes saw men as having different proportions of good and evil in them, but even the most evil man could be saved by choosing righteousness. For Gnostics, salvation was through divine knowledge which allowed the spark of divinity to ignite. For Christians, it was purely through faith in the return of Christ at his Parousia.
The spread of Christianity is aptly described by the metaphor of the Gnostic “spark”. The Hellenized Jews fled from Judaea into the empire each carrying a spark that could ignite a new religion. Each place where a bright spark landed a new fire burned, but all differed through the lack of any central authority.
Evangelists like Paul tried to impress this mosaic of people with their own coherent interpretation, and the initial phase of Universal Christianity will have been a condensation of disparate local interpretations into areas of more unified doctrine. In the next 100 years they evolved in different directions, and only in the second century did the Roman Church succeed in asserting its central authority.
All this had to be done in secrecy from the authorities for whom Jesus had died a rebel, whatever Christians ancient or modern might have thought. Those supporting a rebel could only be seen as rebels themselves—traitors or potential traitors—and so Christians were distrusted by Romans and Jews alike. By disguising itself as a mystery, Christianity could suppress the truth about their Saviour until a novice had been suitably indoctrinated.
Remember, too that the strongest motivation for these people was that they expected the world to end soon! The Romans thought they were intent on bringing it about, whereas most Christians were probably content to wait for their Saviour to return on a cloud, and meanwhile to decide how they should behave to avoid an unfavourable judgement when he arrived. Later, they were more inclined to be aggressive against the Pagan religions they convinced themselves were devilish, and therefore provided grist for the mill of Roman distrust.
Robert L Wilkins (The Myth of Christian Beginnings, Doubleday 1979) says bluntly:
There was no original Christian faith… no definitive statement of the meaning of Christ for all times… Christians said one thing while going ahead and doing something else.
Myths and Secrets
The teaching of the various Gnostic sects was not well known until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi cache of Gnostic texts, and even now, no one is saying they understand it. Previously, what was known depended entirely on the biased and fragmentary refutations of Fathers of the Church. The Fathers greatly misrepresented the Gnostics. Gnosticism was itself sub-divided into more than fifty sects, each with its own bishops, organizations, and accepted books, and each with some divergency of doctrine from the others. From that mass of doctrines, surviving only in fragmentary forms, the principal theories held by early Christians have been deduced, and the rise and fall of Gnostic Christianity roughly dated.
Gnosticism dates from the first century BC, and was originally a Theosophic movement, which attempted to reconcile diverse elements such as Judaism, Greek philosophy, Iranian metaphysics, and aspects of mythology. From this blend sprang a Gnostic Christianity which fed, and fed on, gospel Christianity. The Pauline epistles came between some form of Gnosticism and gospel Christianity. They were probably written in the middle of the first century AD, and the synoptic gospels were not completed before the end of the first century AD. But Christian Gnostics had adopted, in the earliest of their writings with which we are acquainted, some doctrines which were foreign to the Gnosticism of the first century BC, and whence these proto-Christian rather than orthodox doctrines came is not certain.
That the attacks on Gnosticism made by the Fathers of the Church do not begin until well on in the second century need not have been due, as alleged by the orthodox, to the fact that Gnosticism began only then. Perhaps only then did gospel Christianity separate from and begin to compete with Gnostic Christianity. In the middle of the second century Gnostic Christianity and gospel Christianity do not seem always to have been clearly distinguished. Valentinus, the leader of the Christian sect which was afterwards anathematized by the Catholics as heretic, was, on the evidence of the Fathers themselves, a member of the same Church as that considered by them as orthodox.
The schism between them may have been caused as much by a change in one as in the other. Perhaps Gnosticism became more mystic, while gospel Christianity became more materialistic. From one religion, they became two widely differing religions, evolving in different directions, but each took from the other doctrines formulated after they had begun to branch away from each other.
For the Sethians, the disciples were deluded in believing that Christ had risen in a bodily form and deliberately appeared to them to prove that the resurrection was spiritual not physical. Mary is often depicted in Gnostic works as a visionary who understood through her hallucinations more than the orthodox apostles. Tradition has it that she was mad or unstable and the verses added to the gospel of Mark in the second century might confirm it. She had had seven devils in her.
In the Gospel of Mary, Mary explains her vision to the disciples but they are thoroughly skeptical, especially Peter. She is conscious of the constant presence of Jesus but Peter is suspicious of such intangible revelation. Mary like Paul felt her awareness of the risen Jesus was more valid than the historical knowledge the appointed apostles had of him. Her sincerity and distress wins them over and they believe. The story expresses the point at which the Jesus of history, the leader of a band of rebels against the Roman usurpers of God’s kingdom—Israel, disappears and instead becomes a myth.
Jesus became mythical for both orthodox and Gnostic churches but the orthodox Church wanted its organization to reflect the political organization of the empire whereas the Gnostics retained an element of revolutionary outlook, abhoring central authority in favour of personal revelation. The Church offered its solace to “the many” (hoi polloi, from the word the Essenes used of their congregations) but Gnostics retained the exclusive outlook of the Essenes claiming the additional insight of secret teaching for the few prepared to seek it. The distinction possibly reflects a dissappointment with the apocalyptic outlook of the Essenes, the result of repeatedly foiled beliefs that the terminal battle had begun.
Gnostics like Valentinus, according to Irenaeus, thought that passages like Mark 4:11, in which Jesus says he speaks in parables, following the Essene tradition, intended to be hard to understand for gentiles and unreligious Jews, meant that he had reserved certain secret knowledge for his apostles alone—the “hidden things” of the Essenes. They believed the apostles in turn taught this secret knowledge only to those who were ready to receive it.
In fact, the followers of Jesus had mainly been his converts and those of John the Baptist, the simple of Ephraim and backsliders desperate to make amends with God before the kingdom came. Mostly these were not people who were sophisticated in Judaism and therefore took away with them, after the death of their leader, whatever they knew of him and his teachings in a fairly undigested pieces. Those who remained loyal told others the story and by degrees it became mythologized. Others of course, Jews or Greek observers, also saw the story unfold and regarded it in a much more skeptical way. Critical stories of a renegade monk from them would keep conflicting with the preferred story of a pacific holy teacher and had to be countered. They could not be ignored because they were widespread and tied in with the stories of the faithful quite often, so they had to be altered.
Eventually, we had the gospels stories, which became the basis of orthodox Christianity. Those who believed that there was more to it however began to seek in the stories the hidden secrets that they thought were there. They interpreted the stories in an even more mystical way when the correct way to get the truth from the distortions of the bishops was to disentangle the genuine tradition from the inventions. The Gnostics also followed Paul in believing that Jesus continued to reveal himself after death. In 1 Corinthians 2:6 Paul sounds just like one of the revealers of hidden things. Gnostics, like Paul, were not interested in the real life of Jesus, but the life they felt for themselves—much like most pious Christians today. The risen Jesus, the spiritual being, is of interest to them, not the humble Essene Poor Man who led an obscure band of converts against the Romans in Palestine.
Many Gnostic works presume that the Jesus of the flesh is dead. Their Jesus is the Christ, the redemptive superbeing. He appears to them as he did to Paul in mystical experiences, like the Old Testament God, as a bright light, as an appropriate form or as an ever changing form. Each visionary sees him as they want to see him. Gnostics also wrote pseudepigraphic gospels, supposedly written by those close to Jesus. For the orthodox Church these were blasphemous even though their own four canonical gospels were also not written by eye witnesses.
Irenaeus tells us that Gnostics were encouraged to write down their intuitive spiritual revelations. Irenaeus found this offensive, as attributing merely human feeling to the divine. He felt the Gnostics were boasting that their own revelations were superior to those of Peter and Paul, and this he found absurd in itself but also threatening towards the authority of the apostles, and therefore of the bishops and priesthood in general. Gnostics opposed a professional priesthood, preferring to chose people from among their own number at each service. Irenaeus also pressed the claims of the church of Rome in settling disputes on doctrine, because it had been founded by Peter and Paul, was the oldest church, and because of its “pre-eminent authority”.
There is much to be said for letting people express their spiritual selves in writing, and without disparagement. Everyone, for a Gnostic, had a spark of the divine, and it would have the chance of revealing itself through religious creativity. Those which were appreciated would be read, given that people had the opportunity. Those that were relatively valueless would not. The Holy Ghost could work through anyone and would manifest itself through its effect. Thus, Gnostics wrestling with one problem or another would feel themselves inspired by one or other of Jesus’s companions and would write in their spirit. Modern Gnostics should do the same. Works which are popular could be kept in libraries and those which are not can be archived like old holy books of a synagogue genista.
Gnostics and Christians
Marcion contrasted the God of love of Jesus with the wrathful God of the scriptures who made the evil world and sent laws so that he could enjoy punishing those who broke them. These must have been different gods, one good and one evil. Irenaeus and the orthodox Christians denied that there was another god and that the creator was evil and introduced the creed:
I believe in one God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
The Valentinians happily recited this creed because they also accepted only one God. Irenaeus was distressed that the ordinary religious punter could not distinguish between the orthodox and the Valentinian churches. Actually Valentinians thought that Christians had mistaken the image of God for the real thing. For them, the real God was incomprehensible but the Christians pictured Him as a tetchy old craftsman, a king or a judge. But Jesus taught “God is Spirit” and the “Father of Truth” according to Heraclaon, quoted by Origen.
Remember that in the empire at the time of the first bishops, gods were rife. Besides the Greek and Roman pantheons, many eastern gods had been introduced and often identified with one or other of the old pantheon. Nobody was concerned with blasphemy, and nobody boasted that their god was superior to another’s because they still feared the revenge of the offended god. Christians had no such qualms, labelling all other gods as devils.
The Christian bishops in Rome were interested in centralized authority. The political authority of the Empire rested in Rome. So too the religious authority should rest in Rome. Yet, other churches were as prominent, though not always as orthodox as the Roman church. So it suited the powers of orthodoxy to emphasise the sole power of God. Ignatius of Antioch declaimed: “One God! One bishop!” The bishop had to obeyed as if he were God on earth.
The archons of the Gnostics are these earthly rulers as well as evil angels. In his epistle, 1 Clement, Clement, an early Pope, threatens those in the church of Corinth who disobey the rulers of the earth with death—presumably the everlasting death of the Essenes—excommunication. He insists on strict rankings within the church, again from the Essene tradition but lacking the strict humility of the Essenes.
The “Hidden Tradition” which Valentinus claimed to receive from a student of Paul is that the God of the Christians is really only the Creator or the Demiurgos, a servant of the Highest God. He makes false claims of power as the only god because he is blind (Samael) and ignorant. Gnosis is the recognition that God is really “the Depth”. Those who get this revelation of knowledge receives the secret sacrament called the release or the redemption (apolytrosis)—he is released from the power of the Demiurge. The ritual involves a spoken defiance of the Demiurge and an assertion that the proper place to be is with the pre-existent Father. This again is reminiscent of the Essene chants against Satan.
Because the Christian bishop receives his authority from the God of the Hebrews, the Gnostic who does not recognize this god as God, can defy the power of the Church—the power of the earthly rulers or archons. The Gnostics were egalitarian, at least after their “apolytrosis”, and had no hierarchies. The sevices they held were conducted by one of their number chosen by lot—a bishop, a priest, a prophet and a reader each with their own role. This egalitarianism is closer to the Essenes’ idea of precedence than the authoritarian Church’s. The choice by lot was simply an expression of God’s will.
Women and the Mother Spirit
Even women had equal representation, Tertullian observed appalled. They took part in the lottery and could serve in any position. This is a very significant distinction from the Essenes of Qumran, but that was a monastery for the holiest of the saints. The ordinary village Essene, and more so the converted followers of the Nazarene, included women, for the scrolls tell us that, at the End Time, all Israel will be called including women and little children. Though the monastic Essenes regarded women as sinful and temptresses—and this came through to the Church, the village Essenes and Nazarenes accepted them, and it became a principle to do so for the Gnostics. The church originally had a large majority of women members and had a liberal view of them, but by 200 AD women were forbidden all active roles.
Irenaeus says the Gnostic heresies mainly attracted women and they were allowed to prophesy, an ability denied them by the orthodox Church. Many of the powerful emanations of Gnosticism—Grace, Thought, Silence—were feminine. The Hebrew word for spirit is “ruach”, a feminine word whereas the word for spirit in Greek, “pneuma”, is neuter. For Christians the Holy Ghost is either masculine, being an aspect of God, or is sexless. In the original Semitic, it was a female principle.
In the Apocryphon of John, John describes a vision of the Trinity reassuring him after the crucifixion, and the Holy Ghost is shown as a feminine principle, the Mother. That Gnostics associated the Holy Ghost with the Mother is confirmed in the Gospel of the Hebrews where Jesus refers to her as “my Mother, the Spirit”. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus’s divine mother, as opposed to his earthly mother, is the Holy Ghost. The Gospel of Philip declares “the Spirit is mother of many”. This is another possible element in the myth of the virgin birth because the Holy Ghost is also considered a virgin.
Sophia was also a feminine principle which might have been identified with the Holy Ghost or an aspect of God equal to it. The voice of the “Preacher”, the Ecclesiates of the Wisdom Book of Ecclesiates, is similarly, in Hebrew, a feminine word, “koheleth”, and yet is supposed to have been Solomon. It is not Solomon but the voice of Sophia who was preaching. Ideas are, metaphorically, conceived, emphasizing Sophia’s aspect as a Mother and linking with the Holy Ghost. Much Gnostic writing asserts the female against the male in the shape of Mary Magdalene against the orthodoxy of Peter.
Marcion had appointed women as bishops and priests. Prisca and Maximilla were founders of the Montanists and Marcellina represented the Carpocratians—a group which claimed secret teachings from Mary, Salome and Martha—in Rome. Yet each of these three had a masculine view of God.
In Galatians 3:28, Paul asserts that all humanity, male or female, Jew or Greek, bondman or freeman, are one man in Christ. In the salutations of various epistles, he mentions and commends women. Yet, in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul insists that women should be veiled when prophesying or praying because otherwise they stimulate lust, and because they are inferior to men who must not have their heads covered. Contradicting this totally in 14:34-36, he declares that women should not be allowed to speak at all in church.
The Epistle to Timothy was markedly anti-women. Roman women in the first few centuries of the empire became quite emancipated and the salutations of the epistles testify to this. Yet these passages in Paul were plainly anti-women, despite the preponderance of women in the Church. With such a reactionary outlook for the time how could Christianity have succeeded in the Greek world. In the middle of the second century AD women in the churches began to be segregated from men as they were in the synagogues. Modern Christians have blamed this on the mythical tribe of Judaizers but made no attempt to de-Judaize the practices of the Church thus introduced.
In truth, the passages of Paul, mentioned above, give the game away. The early Christians were always thoroughly conservative in social and political outlook, and emancipated women, though on the march at the time, were frowned upon by middle class Greeks and Romans. The early Christians were keen to be respectable and the passages of 1 Corinthians show it, though the second one, if not both, was probably inserted at a later date.
Christians like Tertullian claimed that cruelty to the martyrs simply led to more recruits, and we find writers like Irenaeus seemingly encouraging converts to emulate Christ and die as martyrs as confirmation of their faith. It seems that Gnostics would not have taken this lead because they did not believe that Christ was ever human and could see no sense in deliberately dying. The original meaning of “martyr” was “witness” because they were witnesses to Christ before the Roman magistrates, and some died for it. For Gnostics, the proper witness to Christ was an exemplary life, not an exemplary death. Tertullian, at the end of his life rejected the Church in favour of the Gnostics, joining the Montanists.
Christianity has been successful because it provided apparent certainties and cajoled, bullied, tortured and murdered to ensure there was no opposition. Yet love and truth reside in one’s own conscience, must be sought there and openly expressed whatever organized churches or hierarchical societies care to command. Irenaeus said:
The preaching of the truth, like the sun, shines everywhere the same in the world and enlightens all people who are willing.
Irenaeus was intent on distinguishing the universality of the orthodox church as opposed to a perceived exclusiveness of Gnosticism. Yet plainly he fails for he has to qualify those who are enlightened with the clause “who are willing”. No one can claim that all Christians are good and undoubltedly some of the not-good ones are evil. So the sun of truth can shine but it does not necessarily enlighten—it also casts shadows. Irenaeus’s small qualification proves that no church can be universal unless the kingdom of God came in the meantime. The qualifying clause actually makes his statement Gnostic because it becomes the entire point of the metaphor. Only those who are willing can become enlightened! That is elitist and quite properly so.
The Essenes did not believe, like the Christians, that baptism made anyone righteous. Baptism with fire was also needed. They had to seek the spirit of holiness inside themselves, repent sincerely and behave righteously. The orthodox church effectively abandoned all but baptism. The Gnostics did not. Yet it was the Gnostics who died out, and with it went genuine soul searching, and genuine effort to find and do good. That is perhaps the trouble with the world.
Paul and Gnosis
In the Clementine Homilies, Peter explains that, though usually the best and purest doctrine appears first, the second form of Christianity was better than the first, coming like light after darkness, and as knowledge upon ignorance. In other passages, the former doctrines were the work of the Evil One, and that the later doctrines are the true religion as revealed by God. That the leaders of the sect which afterwards grew into the Catholic Church inveighed with equal vehemence against Pauline doctrines and against Gnosticism suggests that these doctrines had something in common, even though they were not the same. Gnosticism was not the first form of Christianity, Essenism was, but both came from the same rootstock. Pauline Christianity was the link to Catholicism. Gnosticism played an important and early part in turning the Jesus cult into Christianity.
These Clementine Homilies describe Peter as heaping scorn upon the teacher who claimed to have had a vision of Jesus (Paul), as if a vision—real or pretended—could authorize a man to teach the true doctrines better than those who actually knew and saw the living Jesus. As these Homilies were probably not written until the end of the second century, the scorn is not Peter’s, but that of a writer who was upholding the Petrine form of Christianity—the form said by its adherents to be founded upon the teaching of actual disciples of Jesus—against the Pauline form of the religion.
In the second century, many Christians were Gnostics. Catholicism was neither the older nor the more genuine form of Christianity. The sect which is now referred to as orthodox, since its doctrines eventually became the foundations of Catholicism, denounced Paul as much as it denounced the Gnostics. It founded itself upon the gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, which were written long after the epistles, and which were later than, or possibly contained revised versions of writings used by the Gnostics. The latter were eventually classed as apocryphal, and lost or destroyed. Only fragments of them survived the fires of the eventually triumphant Catholic Church. One of the Gnostic gospels, The Ascent of Paul, purported to give an account of everything which Paul had done and seen when he ascended into the third heaven, and most of them—so far as we can judge from surviving fragments—had much in common with Pauline theology.
The doctrines found in the epistles are not all the same as those formulated after the appearance of the gospels and the subsequent rise of that Christian sect which became the Catholic Church. Throughout the epistles there are references to disputes between various unnamed sects of Christians, and signs, in the later epistles, that their authors are hostile to one of those forms which were more or less accepted by the authors of the earlier epistles. The epistles, especially in Galatians, often refer to some rival form of Christianity, and Pauline Christians and Petrine Christians were apparently opposed. In some of the apocryphal writings the dispute is plainly acrimonious.
The epistles are full of references to spiritual beings—the “æons”, and, in John, Jesus is explicitly identified with the Logos. But before the epistles were written, and long before any gospel was written, the Gnostics had elaborated this theosophical system of a Supreme God and his emanations. The minds of Egyptians, of Greeks, and even of the dispersed Jews, were saturated with this Western development of the yet older Eastern theosophy of Zoroaster. Christian Gnostics added to their lists of these æons the name of Christ.
Most of the epistles show signs of Gnostic influences, but the later show signs of anti-Gnostic bias. Paul’s early letters like Thessalonians (1 Thes 4:16-17; 2 Thes 1:7-8) are more apocalyptic and contain nothing that seems Gnostic. In Galatians 4:8-10 Paul tells his converts not to serve the “weak and impoverished stoicheia” which they served when they employed a calendar which had “days, months, seasons and years”. This sounds like a speech to former Essenes, but what precisely are the “stoicheia?” Possibly angels because Paul rejected the Mosaic law which was commanded by angels (Gal 3:19).
“Thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers”, are referred to in other passages in the epistles. In one place they are mentioned after angels, and their names are followed by the phrase, “Nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature”, and in another we are told that in heaven Christ will be placed “far above all principality, power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named… which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all”. The Gnostic meaning is quite plain. Christ is, in heaven, to be placed above all these other spiritual beings, called Thrones, Principalities, and so on, who together with himself form the Pleroma—the complete fullness of the godhead. Christ is the chief emanation of God, above all the others, and therefore practically indistinguishable from God himself. Outside of these mystic theosophical doctrines of Gnosticism these terms have no meaning whatever in the connexion in which they are used. Christ as the head of the Pleroma of Yehouah astonishingly parallels the relationship of Mithras and Ahuramazda.
Paul gradually comes to dwell more on Jesus’s redeeming death and less on his renewing return. Like Gnostics, Paul took the present time, if not the world itself, to be evil (Gal 1:4) but Jesus had saved those who believe—the new creation had already happened (Gal 6:15). In Colossians, we have all died with Christ to be separated from the “stoicheia” of the world. He sounds singularly Gnostic in 1 Corinthians 2:8 where he says the “archons of this æon” murdered Christ because they did not know God’s hidden wisdom. Here he calls Christ “lord of Glory” one of God’s titles in the Book of Enoch, so there is a bit of apocalyptic and a bit of gnosis, though “archons” might simply mean rulers.
The Gnostics spoke of Christ as the “joint fruit of the Pleroma”, the eight or twelve æons which formed the Supreme Being. This group of eight or twelve, jointly, made the spirit Christ, each individual member contributing some “Light” towards His making. “For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” is a text which does not appear, to the ordinary orthodox Christian, to mean much beyond connecting Jesus with God, but to the Gnostic it explained the Christ Spirit’s origin from a corporation of emanations from the Supreme Being.
The Pleroma is constantly referred to in the epistles. Colossians 2 again says the Pleroma dwells in Christ, and mantions principalities, powers, rudiments, or elements. Colossians 3 gives a pantheistic view of the Christ Spirit: “Christ is all, and in all”—the spirit existing in all things, and in whom all things exist. “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell” means nothing unless it refers to the Pleroma—a Pleroma in which John tells us all would share. It is a pantheistic doctrine of the universal soul, the Atma of the Hindus, which contains all things and is contained in all.
In addition to these references to the Pleroma and the æons which are to be found scattered throughout the epistles, there are references to other Gnostic conceptions, which, to those who have not studied Gnosticism, appear to have a quite simple meaning, but are, by all theological scholars, acknowledged to have evidently been written as technical expressions taken from Gnosticism, the philosophy which was so widely known, at the time when these words were published, that no explanation of their meaning was either given or required. Such are the words “wisdom” and “knowledge”, which stand for “Sophia”, one of the principal æons, and for “the Gnosis”, or the “knowledge of the mysteries”. Wherever these words or such phrases as “The Word”, The “Light”, “The Way”, “The Dove”, “The Truth”, or “The Life”, are used in the New Testament it may be presumed that they are being used in a technical sense, and that they have an allegorical meaning, probably connected with some celestial member of the Gnostic Pleroma.
Elsewhere (1 Cor 8:5), Paul speaks of many gods and many lords, possibly meaning the “archons”, one of which is Death (1 Cor 15:25-26). In 2 Corinthians, Paul sounds even more Gnostic speaking of “the god of this age, who has blinded the minds of unbelievers” (2 Cor 4:4) but also harks back to Essene phraseology (2 Cor 6:14-15) including the name Belial for Satan. In 2 Corinthians 11:2-3, he speaks of the serpent seducing Eve and says they will become angels of light (2 Cor 11:14), also Gnostic. He declares with false modesty that he has himself visited the third heaven where paradise is and heard “unutterable words” (2 Cor 12:2-4). Gnostic belief is in the existence of seven heavens, one each for the Governors or Archons. Paul firmly believes now that Christ has won the cosmic battle over the evil angels. His outlook always sits between the Essenes and the Gnostics.
Some of Paul’s followers got carried away with such talk and the Colossians seemed to worship “the elemental spirits of this world”—the angels—and to practise certain ascetic ways (2 Cor 2:16,21). Paul responds that all authority was created in Christ so they should not worship any of these authorities, angels or rulers (a suggestion of the deification of the Emperors?) (2 Cor 1:16, 2:14-15).
In Ephesians, Paul is plainly Gnostic, if the letter is to be attributed to him—it might have been written pseudepigraphically after his death and the fall of Jerusalem. In Ephesians 2:14, the suggestion is made that the wall separating off the court of the gentiles from the holier parts of the temple has been broken. If this is not metaphorical, it means that the temple had been destroyed. Christians already live in heaven, the church having ascended to heaven to make the wisdom of God known to the powers that his followers battled against, “the world rulers of this darkness”, “the spiritual beings of wickedness in the heavenly regions” (Eph 6:12). The apocalyptic expectations of the Essenes had turned into the cosmological myths of the Gnostics. Later Gnostics were fond of citing Paul as a proof text (2 Peter 3:15-16) and an elder of the church finds it necessary to write the Pastoral Epistles as pseudepigraphs to combat “myths and genealogies” (1 Tim 1:4) or “Jewish myths” (Tit 1:14) and the “profane babblings and contradictions of gnosis which is falsely so-called” (1 Tim 6:20). Everything created by God is good (1 Tim 4:4) and a gnosis opposed to marriage and to meat must be opposed (1 Tim 4:3).
In Colossians, the expression the “firstborn of every creature”, is used with reference to Jesus, in Revelation, 3:14, “the beginning of the creation of God” is with reference to “the Amen”. Both evidently refer to the Gnostic æon, “the First Man”, an æon at one time identified by some Gnostics with a pre-existing spiritual being, called Jesus. There is no orthodox doctrine to which these phrases can be referred, there is no meaning in them without reference to Gnosticism.
Paul’s exact position with regard to Gnosticism is doubtful, but he was acquainted with it and habitually used its technical expressions. When Paul lists the resurrection appearances of Jesus, he finishes with the words:
And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.
Commentators say “one born out of due time” is a euphemism for an abortion. Christians might see this simply as a sign of humility, though Paul did not seem naturally humble. “The abortion” is a Gnostic technical term for chaotic matter before it has been formed, shaped and perfected by the spirit. For the Gnostics, matter was evil, and spirit alone was good. Till matter was touched and organized by the pre-existing spiritual being, the Logos, it was “the abortion”. Paul implies that he was a chaotic mess until the Christ Spirit entered into him.
The Christ spirit was in Paul himself, just as it had been in Jesus: “Christ liveth in me”. And it might enter into his hearers: “Christ formed in you”. God had sent forth his Son “that we might receive the adoption of sons”. This seems to be a distinct reference to, and acceptance of, the Adoptionist doctrine. His Son is the creator of all things, including those essentially Gnostic beings “thrones”, “dominions”, “principalities”, and “powers”, and, being the “firstborn of every creature”, He had existed “before all things”.
Gnosticism is mentioned in later and non-Pauline epistles, but now the references are hostile. At the end of 1 Timothy, the writer warns Timothy to avoid the science (Gnosis) “falsely so-called”. In 1 John, the author inveighs against teachers who are evidently Gnostics. It begins with the assertion that “the word of life” has been manifested, the “eternal life, which was with the Father”, has been handled by them, and later the author condemns those who do not believe “that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh”. The author is addressing Gnostics who still believe that Christ is a spirit—the eternal Logos—and who deny that this spirit became flesh and blood, as the writer of this epistle himself believes.
More Christian Gnosis
Although most Gnostics considered themselves Christians, some sects assimilated only minor Christian elements into a body of non-Christian Gnostic texts. The Christian Gnostics refused to identify the God of the New Testament, the father of Jesus, with the God of the Old Testament, and they developed an unorthodox interpretation of Jesus’s ministry. The Gnostics wrote apocryphal gospels (such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary ) to substantiate their claim that the risen Jesus told his disciples the true, Gnostic interpretation of his teachings. Christ, the divine spirit, inhabited the body of the man Jesus and did not die on the cross, but ascended to the divine realm from which he had come. The Gnostics thus rejected the atoning suffering and death of Christ and the resurrection of the body. They also rejected other literal and traditional interpretations of the gospels.
Matthew 11:27 and Luke 10:22 sounds Gnostic:
All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.
The son is the sole instrument of revelation, but did it really mean Israel? Jesus identified himself with Israel because he saw the Children of Israel as the targets of his saving mission rather than the whole of humanity as Christians later taught. A reference to hidden things and “babes” in the previous verses is plainly Essene. The hidden things were revealed to the “Babes” who were originally “children” or “sons” or perhaps “thy sons”, the same change having been made elsewhere in the gospels to make Jesus a friend of infants when adult Children of Israel was the original reading in all cases. Perhaps all the subsequent mentions of “the Son” were “thy sons” meaning the Essenes. In John’s gospel “the Son” probably often meant “thy sons” in the works which John used or remembered in the writing of his piece.
Matthew 11:28-30 sounds like Sirach 51:1, 23-27, wisdom literature. Luke also inclines towards gnosis when he says “the kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21).
John might have remembered the sayings of Jesus but recast them in his own style (under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, of course, (Jn 14:26)). That is one Christian explanation of the vast difference between the Jesus of the synoptic gospels and of John. The prologue of John is probably an Essene song of thanksgiving for the creation with Christian insertions (Jn 1:6-8, 15) to provide a link with the arrival on the scene of John the Baptist a few verses later. The word translated “Word” is Logos which can mean matter, deed, reason, thought. All the attributes of Logos in the prologue are the attributes of Wisdom in Jewish tradition. Philo, who was Jewish, has “the Word” as a second level god after the primal God, the god of the wise and the perfect, and the creator of imperfect men.
In Sirach 24:3, Wisdom is considered to have come from God’s mouth, as when God says, “Let there be… ” in Genesis. Much of this is punning in Hebrew and is probably the source of the Essene love of punning and punning exegesis. The verb “to be” was associated with God’s name which is “I am”—God was “being” or “living”, whence he is “the living God”. So when God repeatedly says, “Let there be…” he is repeatedly saying “God”. “Let there be light” can be taken to mean “God is light”. “Let there be” is “YHY” which is like “YHWH” and “HYH” which is “live”—the punning or at least the assonance of these words is plain.
In John, the same occurs where Jesus identifies himself with God in the “I am” statements, which could not have been written by an Essene, unless he was thoroughly disillusioned with Judaism—the Father has given Jesus his own name, so Jesus is the Father (Jn 17:11). Similar aretalogies occur in Hellenistic religious literature. John also has Jesus saying he is at one with the Father (Jn 10:30) and by way of explanation he says (Jn 5:46) that Moses wrote all of this—it was therefore prophesied—apparently referring to the puns on God’s name in Genesis and Exodus.
The spark of the Divine Spirit is the better part of men’s natures, that little speck of divinity which prompts men to do good, which teaches them to recognize true wisdom, which makes them brothers of their fellow men and sons of God. Ignorant Christian bishops interpreted the expression “to be one with God” as a claim to be supernatural or unique.
This kind of speculation is like that of the Gospel of Truth and the Odes of Solomon. It might have its roots in Essenism but was fully used by the Gnostics. The Essenes considered themselves as an “Elect” of God, chosen by God even from among the—generally apostate—“Chosen People”. They were determined to be like the angels in heaven in the hope that, by doing so, heaven and earth would get closer. This notion of “election” seemed to pass into Gnosticism as the idea that only some men had the spark of divinity in them. These were the “Elect”. John 4:22 tells us “salvation originates with the Jews”. In Sirach 24:13 God says to Wisdom she had to tabernacle in Jacob and be an inheritance in Israel so she “dwelt with” the Jews.
The gospel of John paints a picture of Jesus which is essentially mythical. A redeemer descends from the invisible unknown God above. He defeats Satan, the prince of this world. He returns above exalted on the cross, opening the way for his followers. This is not the synoptists’ story but it is close to those of Simon and Menander, though the redeemer is flesh, a real man. John’s gospel is another intermediary between the Essenes and the Gnostics which is why the Gnostics made such use of it, whereas the synoptics remain essentially Essene.
In the earlier stages of the Logos theory, the Word was different from God, being only a spiritual manifestation of God. Eventually the Logos came to be regarded as a person, an abstract conception representing the Will of the Supreme God, just as Sophia represented His Wisdom. The Word was an angel—a messenger—from God, neither divine nor human, but something intermediate between God and man. The epistles frequently contain a doctrine like this. 1 Timothy 2:5: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”—a text which, it may be noticed, contradicts the Trinity and many other Christian doctrines. The author of John identified this Logos with the Jesus of whom the other evangelists had written, but the Gnostic Logos was not made flesh.
The doctrine was not peculiar to the Gnostic form of Christianity, nor to that particular form of Christianity professed by the author of John. It was also taught in the Pagan creeds which Christians deny. Indeed, Christianity took it from the pagan Greeks who had themselves developed the concept from Zoroastrianism.
Though the Catholics suppressed the Gnostics, they made little effort to purify Catholicism from its Gnostic elements. Most Christians read much in the epistles which they either carelessly pass unnoticed, or wonderingly set down as archaic phraseology, with no definite modern meaning—mere theological rhetoric maybe. Not only do the epistles contain little or nothing about the life and sayings of the gospel Jesus, they are remarkable because they are largely expressed in phraseology so essentially Gnostic as to be meaningless apart from Gnostic doctrines. The doctrines which give these Gnostic passages meaning have been abandoned and forgotten. Thus it is that esoteric works with a known meaning become even more esoteric when the meaning is lost altogether, and apparently become more attractive to some, for that reason. Gnostic terminology, involving acceptance of Gnostic mysticism, abounds in these writings, and is meaningless to those who have learnt only the doctrines of orthodox Christianity.
In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine adopted the Catholic form of Christianity as the established state religion. By the middle of the fifth century, Gnosticism, except for minor resurgences, had disappeared—persecuted out of existence by its successful rival.
