Christianity
The Gnostics 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 24 October 2002
Gnosis
The Greek word gnosis means revealed knowledge, and from it derives the word Gnosticism, a religion of the second and third centuries. Gnosis is identifiable with the Sanskrit bodhi (from which, Buddhism), knowledge that transcends the empirical or rational—it is intuitive knowledge derived from internal sources. Gnosticism promised a secret knowledge of the divine realm. Gnostic know, not because they have spent a long time studying but by revelation of hidden truth.
Seek and you shall find. Ask and it shall be given. Knock and it shall be opened unto you.
They do not merely believe—belief (pistis) is inferior to knowledge (gnosis). Most gnostic sects professed Christianity but, as the early church developed, its beliefs differed from those of the gnostics and they were labelled as heretics.
Today we have good evidence that the brain works as a rational organ or an intuitive organ—crudely denoted as the right brain and left brain division. The association of spiritual matters with the intuitive seems a satisfactory one and suggests a synthesis of the rational and the Gnostic outlook. Both are needed for true knowledge—the dichotomy between them is a false. To the Gnostic, gnosis is necessary for salvation.
The ultimate terror is that of your own identity.
Gnosis yields redemption and Irenaeus tells us that for the Valentinians gnosis was the redemption of the inner, spiritual man not the body or the soul. A Gnostic creed read:
We know who we are and what we have become, where we were and where we have been made to fall, whither we are going, whence we are being redeemed, what birth is and what rebirth is.
Elaine Pagels explains to us that gnosis could be sensitively translated as “insight”. God has to be sought inside oneself rather than externally, because the self, at its core is God. Gnostics had to know themselves to know God. The Pagan god who urged his followers to “Know Thyself” was Apollo, a Greek version of Mithras. He had a famous oracle at Delphi. Plato has Socrates saying in Phaedrus:
I must first know myself, as the Delphinium inscription says.
From gnosis comes the word Gnosticism, a religion of the second and third centuries. Most Gnostic sects professed Christianity and, for awhile, they rivalled Christianity, but the early church solved the problem of competition by declaring the Gnostics as heretics.
Our primary sources of Gnostic doctrines were fragmentary quotations contained in the works of anti-Gnostic Christian texts of the second and third centuries, which provided the only extensive quotations in the Greek of the original Gnostic texts. Critics of Gnosticism included Justin at Rome (150-165 AD), Irenaeus at Lyons (180 AD), Hippolytus at Rome (230 AD) and Epiphanius at Cyprus (375 AD).
Now we have discovered old codices at Nag Hammadi, notably the Gospel of Truth, believed to be a translation of an original work by Valentinus. Nag Hammadi is a town in Egypt about 30 miles south of Qina, where in 1945 an Egyptian peasant found 700 pages of a Gnostic library in 12 codices—a collection of 52 early Christian Coptic manuscripts, some of them copied in the fourth century in local monasteries, probably by Gnostic monks since they had cause to hide their work. Most of the Gnostic texts are in Coptic, into which they had been translated when Gnosticism spread to Egypt at the end of the second century. The original Greek texts were written earlier in the second century AD.
They tell us the beliefs of the Gnostic sects declared heretical by the early church. The collection includes writings attributed to several of Jesus’s apostles. Among these is the Gospel of Thomas, which consists of sayings of Jesus, many of them similar to those found in the New Testament. Other books are the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Apocryphon of John, which seems to have been used by Irenaeus to describe the Sethian Ophites, and The Sophia of Jesus Christ.
Among Gnostic sects were Valentinians, Marcionites, Basilidians, Docetists, Ophites, Cainites, Peretikoi, Phrygians, Haimatitoi, Encratites (the continent ones) and Entichytes (the promiscuous ones). Some of these were insulting names and would not have been used by the sect themselves.
Beliefs
Gnostics evolved an intricate mythology to explain the relationships between the material and the spiritual, and the human and the divine in the universe. None of it was essential to gnosis, a personal thing, but was intended as an aid to self-realization—it was useful only insomuch as it enabled a person to understand themselves, and their destiny if they achieved a state of understanding. Gnosticism is a religion of saving knowledge, and the knowledge which saves is self-knowledge.
Christianity and other religions are God centred but Gnosticism is centred on each person. Hippolytus tells us that Monoimus (GRA-GAEC 9) wrote:
Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is who within you makes everything his own and says: my God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches wilthout willing, rests without willing, becomes angry without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully persue these matters you will find God in yourself.
Like the prodigal son (Lk 15:17) the Gnostic has to come to himself before he can return to the father he has forgotten.
Saturninus of Antioch taught that men have a divine spark which wants to return to the unknown God. Each has to seek the divine spark within—the spiritual being trapped within themself. So, Gnostics were originally spiritual beings who had been made to live in bodies and souls through falling from the spiritual world above. Sparks or seeds of the Divine Being fell from the transcendent realm into the material universe, which is wholly evil, and were imprisoned in human bodies. Gnosis allows the Gnostic redemption and rebirth into the spiritual world in which they were first born. Reawakened by knowledge, the divine element in humanity can return to its proper home in the spiritual realm. This is a recasting of the return of the Righteous Jews to the Perfect Israel expected by he Essenes. The Gospel of Truth has (GRA-GAEC 12):
He who knows is a being from above. If he is called he hears, he replies, he turns to him who calls him, to come back to him. And he knows what he is called. Possessing gnosis he carries out the will of him who called him. He desires to do what pleases him. He receives rest. He who thus possess gnosis knows whence he has come and whither he goes. He knows, like a man who has been drunk and awakens from the drunkenness in which he was, returning to himself and restoring what belongs to him.
What is found inside is a vast intuitive knowledge, stemming back to the birth of life, the creation, an eternal, timeless knowledge because it is that vast knowledge which time gives through experience, as opposed to that equally valid knowledge we can deduce by external observation and reason. It is the reality of ourselves.
Differences among the Gnostic sects partly depended upon the emphases that people placed upon their need for salvation. Self-revelation showed which was appropriate. Thus someone might choose release from conventional morality as their route. Only they knew whether they were sincere or whether they made a choice for lust—insincerity would imprison the spirit even more. Others regarded the whole of the material world as wicked and practised a rigorous asceticism to punish the flesh.
Gnostics value the free play of creative imagination seeking new interpretations and eschewing tradition. Christians like Irenaeus preferred people to agree to the assertions of an authority but Gnostics wanted variety. They believed in the creativity that stemmed from freedom of thought and behaviour. They rejected control whether by human laws, by demons or by gods. Thus they rejected first the laws of Moses then the Old Testament God of the Hebrews.
Gnosticism disdains authority or orthodoxy. The Gnostics believed in equality among the members of the sect, choosing the priest by drawing lots at Gnostic gatherings. They also stressed direct revelation through dreams and visions and individual interpretation of the revelations of fellow Gnostics and sacred scriptures.
The Gnostic defiance of authority led them to develop an elaborate cosmogony, opposing traditional Jewish and Christian beliefs. For the Jew and Christian, it was a good, though authoritarian, god that created Adam and Eve. It was through their own sin that they fell into corruption. Yet for the Gnostic, the creator was not good at all, rather he became known to the Gnostics as the Demiurge, or “Craftsman” (Plato’s Timaeus), much like the Masonic “Architect of the Universe”. He was a secondary god below Sophia, Mother Wisdom, and the unknown Most High God. To the Gnostics, the Demiurge, who is also known as Ialdabaoth, Sabaoth, and Saclas, acted in error when he created the material universe and mistakenly thought of himself as the only god.
In Hypostasis of the Archons, Adam and Eve are seen as heroic figures in their disobedience, aided by the serpent, who gave them knowledge and who will later return in some sects as Jesus, to redeem humanity by teaching disobedience to the curse of the laws of Yehouah the Creator.
The Testament of Truth relates the story of the garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent, which is wisdom and warns Adam and Eve that God is jealous and irrational and bent on keeping the first humans ignorant.
Mandaeans
The Mandaean word comes from the Aramaic, “manda”, which means knowledge. It is the Aramaic equivalent of Gnosis and “Bodhi”. Mandaeans are also known as Sabians (baptists). It is a sect still found in an area south of Baghdad in Iraq and in an adjacent area of Iran and has about 6000 followers.
The Mandaeans migrated to Mesopotamia from the Palestinian-Syrian region, where it probably originated in the first or second century AD or even in pre-Christian times. Mandaean rituals and texts reflect Persian, Judaic, and Christian influences.
The major teachings of the Mandaeans are derived from the ancient esoteric doctrine of Gnosticism. Mandaeans believe that the human soul, imprisoned in the body and the material universe, can be saved through revealed knowledge, a rigorously ethical life, and ritual observances. They also believe in a redeemer, Manda da Hayye (Knowledge of Life) or Hibel-Ziwa. This redeemer once dwelled on earth, where he triumphed over the demons who are its rulers and who try to keep the soul imprisoned. He can thus assist the soul in its ascent toward reunion with the Supreme God. The Mandaeans may have originally derived the idea of a redeemer from the Christian conception of Jesus Christ and may have begun as a heretical offshoot of Christianity. They regard Jesus as a false messiah, however, and revere John the Baptist. They emphasize the importance of frequent baptism as a ritual of purification. Unlike the ancient Gnostic sects, Mandaeans have traditionally regarded marriage and procreation as important moral obligations. The Mandaean priests, called Nasoreans (“observers of the rites” ), form a caste apart from the laity.
Simon Magus
Gnostic texts reveal nothing about the history of the various sects or about the lives of their teachers. The history of the movement must be inferred from the traditions reflected in the texts and from anti-Gnostic writings. The question of whether Gnosticism developed as a distinct non-Christian doctrine has not been resolved, but pagan Gnostic sects did exist. Gnostic mythology derived from Essene speculation during the first century AD, following the disappointment of constant defeat by Jewish oppressors with no response by God. By the second century, Christian Gnostic teachers had synthesized this mythology with Platonic metaphysical speculation and with certain heretical Christian traditions. The most prominent Christian Gnostics were Valentinus and his disciple Ptolemaeus, who during the second century were influential in the Roman church. Christian Gnostics, while continuing to participate in the larger Christian community, apparently also gathered in small groups to follow their secret teachings and rituals.
According to Irenaeus, the religions founded by Simon Magus, Menander and Saturninus were the first of the Gnostic sects. The first two held that a First Power emanated a First Thought which emanated angels which created the world. For Saturninus, an unknown god made seven angels including the god of the Jews, and they it was who made the world. Thus Simon and Menander take it that spiritual things are begotten or emanated whereas material things are made but Saturninus took it that both spiritual things and material things were made. In all three systems the angels rebelled against the Supreme Power. Simon says they imprisoned the Thought and Menander suggests they brought death into the world. Saturninus said evil angels oppressed men who had the divine spark and wanted to destroy the Father. All three believed scriptural prophecies came from the wicked angels and Simon thinks the law was too.
All three have a saviour who descended and defeated the wicked angels but they were different in each case. Simon claimed he was the saviour who descended, freed the Thought, Helen, from her slavery and ended the Jewish law. Menander said he was the saviour who descended with a baptism that offerred immediate resurrection and freedom from old age and death. Saturninus was more modest saying the saviour was Christ who had taught that marriage and procreation were the work of the devil and were to be avoided. Instead of the Thought of Simon and Menander, Saturninus introduced the idea of the spark of Life. For all three the world required a divine redeemer. It was so bad because the wicked angels had made it bad. But in each case, the redeemer had already appeared and done his redeeming work.
Justin, Hegesippus and Irenaeus considered Simon Magus to have been the first Gnostic. Simon appears in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions where he is supposed to have flown over Rome only to be brought down by the prayers of the apostle, Peter.
In Acts, Philip converts Simon and he was baptized a Christian but he did not receive the Holy Spirit and he offered Peter and John money for the privilege of getting it, when they went to Samaria. Peter refuses and Simon is satisfied with a prayer instead. Luke tells us Simon was a magician and was called the Great Power of God by his Samaritan followers (Acts 8:10). The Power of God that was Great was Mithras or the Holy Spirit, both being the same in Zoroastrianism, and equated to the Archangel Michael (“Who is Like God”) in Judaism. The Samaritans saw Simon as equivalent to Jesus among the Nazrenes. He was the Samaritan messiah. Josephus tells us of a great rebellion in Samaria in 36 AD when a prophet (“that prophet”—the messiah?) led armed Samaritans up mount Gerizim. Samaritans awaited a Ta’eb or Restorer and Pilate ruthlessly put this rebellion down killing many who were not part of it but merely trying to escape and, consequently, he was sent by Vitellius, his superior, to Rome to account for himself. If Simon were the leader of the Samaritans perhaps he turned to Gnostic ideas in disgust.
Justin, who was a Samaritan, tells us that Samaritans and some other races regarded Simon as the First God and Helen, his consort, as the First Thought. The claim to be the First or Supreme God can be explained because Mithras, alias Michael, was the human face of God and the Holy Spirit. Irenaeus wrote:
This man taught that he himself had appeared before the Jews as the Son, but descended in Samaria as the Father while he came to other nations as the Holy Ghost.
As Irenaeus had pointed out, Simon was claiming to be the Trinity long before the Church had one! But this Trinity was already implicit in Zoroastrianism with Ahuramazda, Mithras and Spenta Mainyu in the three roles.
Simon had redeemed the prostitute Helen at Tyre. Though she was the divine Thought, Helen had been imprisioned by hostile angels and degraded to the level of a prostitute. Simon’s redemption freed her from her fallen state. So the First Thought, the Creator, had fallen but had been saved and redeemed by the First God. A goddess Helen was certainly worshipped as Persephone (Kore) in Samaria and Persephone had descended into the underworld but had been redeemed. Helen was also identified with Athena. Plainly the religion of Simon Magus in Samaria was quite well devoped and successful. Could this have been the same man as the one in Acts?
Irenaeus confirms that Helen was worshipped as Athena and as the Great Mother, and Simon as Zeus. Athena was born from the top of Zeus’s head so that she symbolized wisdom or thought. A Gnostic hymn tells that the Father planned to create angels. His Thought, knowing this plan, sprang into the lower regions to obey the will of the Father, but when she had made the angels they imprisoned her because they did not want to be offspring and had no knowledge at all that there was a Supreme God of which Thought was merely an offspring. Thus imprisoned she passed from body to body appearing at one stage as Helen of Troy and finally as Helen the prostitute of Tyre who was redeemed by Simon. Simon appeared as a man—though not a man—to free her and offer men salvation. “He seemed to suffer in Judaea but did not suffer” was written of him, perhaps an indication that he considered himself to have appeared as Jesus.
In Proverbs 8:22-31, Wisdom is God’s helper at the creation where she prepared herself a dwelling and cut out seven mysterious pillars (9:1) possibly the planets. Philo calls her the daughter of God, the Bride of God and the Mother of All. [The essenes might have seen her as Israel, also the bride of god and her redemption was signified in the raising of Jair’s daughter].
What of her fall? Grant tells us of a revealing Babylonian myth (GRA-GAEC 81) which had remained popular in Mesopotamia for over a thousand years and which the Jewish colonists from Babylon must have come across. It was used as a magical incantation to raise a sister from the dead. The goddess Inanna or later Ishtar descends to the “land of no return, the land of darkness”. She has to traverse seven gates at each of which she loses a quality until she arrives at the lowest level as a naked woman. She is then judged and punished with 60 miseries and is hung on a stake for three day and nights. The Supreme God, Eä (Ionnes), notices she has ceased all activity including sexual activity and concludes she is dead. He orders the water of life to be sprinkled on to her. Resurrected she ascends to her rightful place. The story is reminiscent of the descent and ascent of Persephone and might have given rise to that myth—the centre of the rites of the Eleusinian mysteries. More important however is that it has the elements of Christianity and Gnosticism.
For the Gnostics it implied the earthly level, the lowest level was Hell. Inanna’s journey was Helen’s journey. Now Isis was identified with the goddess Ishtar and one called Nania, an alternative name for Inanna. Isis was identified with the moon and Helen was also called Luna. Finally Sophia was probably a Jewish interpretation of Isis. The rabbis maintained that God acted at the creation for the sake of Israel who could be identified with Sophia. Israel suffered from the rulers (archons) of the nations which opposed her. Hosea married a prostitute, the relationship between the prophet and her supposedly reflecting the relationship between God and Israel. Helen therefore represented the sinners of Israel, the lost sheep of the house of Israel, for whom the saviour was sent. Simon and Helen presented themselves as a living parable like Hosea and his wife. Hippolytus tells us that the bride of god is called Eden or Israel.
In Acts 3:21, we have an apparent scriptural reference to heaven receiving the Christ until the restoration of all things which God had spoken of through His holy prophets which have been since the world began. The final reference must be to the Essenes who seemed to consider themselves prophets existent at the creation, and the restoration of all things is met again in a Simonian hymn in which Somon came for the restoration of all things. The Simonians might have meant the releasing of people from conventional restrictions, citing Ephesians 2:8-9—people are “saved by grace, not by righteous works”. The Simonians seemed to take this to mean that they could do as they liked. Slavery to law giving rulers or archons might stem from another of Paul’s epistles, Galations 3:19 and 4:1-10. The Simonians seem to have been followers of Paul but have taken Hellenization even further than Paul.
It might have been, of course, that both Paul and Simon drew on the same Essene sources as each other. Grant believes Simon used Galatians 2:20 when he said: “It is no longer Christ who lives but I who live in him”. From 1 Corinthians 1:24 Simon was the Power and Helen the Wisdom of God. Grant concludes that Simonianism arose later than the period described in Acts—some time after the destruction of the temple—and spread to Rome at the end of the first century.
The pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, though fourth century works, are a reworking of first century tradition, They say John the baptist had 30 disciples, 29 men and one woman called Helen or Selene, to match the number of days of the month. The woman Helen was not a prostitute but it is curious that in Christian tradition, though not in the gospels, that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute and it has often been suggested that she was the bride of Jesus.
After John dies a man called Dositheus—the gift of God—became the head of the sect, The Standing One, and Simon followed Dositheus in the position. Dositheus was a Samaritan and his followers thought he had defied death. Photius tells us that even in the sixth century Samaritans argued whether “the prophet like Moses” was Jesus or Dositheus. It seems at least possible that the Clementine literature is here an imperfectly recorded account of Jesus (Dositheus) following John the Baptist and Simon Peter (Simon) then following Jesus as head of the Nazarenes.
Epiphanius tells us that the Dositheans were a sect which began in the time of the Maccabees and called God only Elohim not Yehouah or Lord. They rejected the normal dates of festivals, insisted that every month had thirty days and that members should bathe every day. A fourteenth century Arab source confirms Epiphanius, but adds that this sect lived near Jerusalem and were prosecuted by the High Priest. They were plainly the Essenes of Qumran. The title “The Standing One” must come from Deuteronomy 5:31: “You stand with me and I will tell you the commandments”. The sect was apocalyptic and “The Standing One” was a Moses-like figure who was to free the world.
Possibly with the repeated failure of the apocalypse to introduce the kingdom, the sectaries came to believe their leader was the Power and Helen the Wisdom of God. Indeed possibly these were titles of the holders even in the old apocalyptic sect which took on greater significance with the failure of apocalypse.
Justin and Irenaeus tell us that Simon’s disciple, Menander, a Samaritan, taught at Antioch in the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD). However, if Menander was a disciple of Simon, then he had considerably altered his master’s teaching. Menander said that Simon was not the Supreme God—he was unknown—and he had no role for Helen. Menander's message was the same as that of the Christians—his followers would not die. Menander himself was the Saviour who freed his believers from old-age and death through baptism. Menander claimed, like Ignatius of Antioch who called the Christian Eucharist “a drug of immortality, an antidote for death”, it was an antidote for death.
Both Simon’s and Menander’s systems had died out by the time of Origen.
Simonites were quite optimistic, taking pleasure in living at least, but later systems were increasingly pessimistic. Humans were left with only a spark of the divine and the Absolute God disappeared into ever more distant levels separated by the spheres of the evil ones of whom the Christian God was one, being the same as the Hebrew God who was an oppressor, and the Christian Fathers had insisted on the unity and continuity of the scriptures and the New Testament.
Basilides
Hippolytus describes the work of Basilides, a Jew who taught in Alexandria in the reign of Hadrian (117-138 AD), founded a Gnostic sect. He taught secret traditions deriving from some of the apostles, dualism, and elements of Platonism and Stoicism. Irenaeus and Hippolytus give conflicting accounts of his teaching. The writings of Basilides include his own version of the gospels and a commentary on this work in 24 books called the Exegetica. Known as Basilidians, his followers were numerous until the fourth century.
Basilides taught that originally there was nothing—absolutely nothing! Unlike the other systems in which God existed in some sense albeit non-material, Basilides did not accept anything at the beginning. Into this non-existing world a non-existing wish made a non-existing cosmos and ultimately a non-existing seed which contained a sonship consisting of three parts:
- one part returned to the non-existent God
- another part also returned but left behind its wing, the Holy Spirit, a link between the material cosmos and the non-existent cosmos beyond it
- the third part remained in the seed.
Then the seed begat a Great Archon who used what was in the seed to make the material cosmos. He also made a son and seated him at his right hand. Another Archon arose and made the world also begetting a son, the God of the Hebrews. The two Archons thought they were each a Supreme God until the Light of the Gospels came down past them to the level of the earth where it settled in Jesus the son of Mary.
The lowest sonship is being refashioned and is following Jesus upwards beyond the firmament back to the non-existing God. Jesus separates out spiritual men from others to return to the non-existing god but leaves everyone else including the archons below the firmament, the link, in cosmic ignorance. These ideas, which might have originated in India, sound amazingly modern in view of quantum fluctuations and the origin of the Big-Bang, but ultimately they are desparing of the material world.
Ophites
One group of Gnostics of the second century Roman Empire were the Ophites, so called from the Greek word for serpent, “ophis”. They had the common Gnostic belief that that the soul is imprisoned in the body and the material universe, and can be saved through revealed knowledge of the soul’s transcendent origin. The Ophites revered the serpent as a symbol of spirituality and wisdom, holding that the serpent in the Garden of Eden imparted gnosis to Adam and Eve, who were therefore punished by God. Gnostics commonly saw the God of the Old Testament as the evil deity who created the material world, and they venerated all those who defied him. Most Ophites were nominally Christian, but they repudiated the human Jesus, as opposed to the spiritual Christ who temporarily inhabited his body and who taught the esoteric wisdom of gnosis. They were therefore considered heretics and eventually succumbed to the persecution of the early church.
Some Gnostic sects rejected all sacraments, others observed Baptism and the Eucharist, interpreting them as signs of the awakening of gnosis. Other rites were intended to facilitate the ascent of the divine element of the soul to the spiritual realm. Hymns and magic formulas were recited to achieve a vision of God or were recited at death to ward off the demons who might capture the ascending spirit and imprison it again in a body. In the Valentinian sect, a special rite, called the bridal chamber, celebrated the reunion of the lost spirit with its heavenly counterpart.
The ethical teachings of the Gnostics ranged from asceticism to libertinism. The doctrine that the body and the material world are evil led some sects to renounce even marriage and procreation. Other Gnostics held that because their souls were completely alien to this world, it did not matter what they did in it. Gnostics generally rejected the moral commandments of the Old Testament, regarding them as part of the evil god’s effort to entrap humanity.
Saturninus
Both Simon and Menander considered themselves gods but not Saturninus, who therefore needed an authority that they already had. The Apocryphon of John seemed to provide it. It declares it is the revelation of one who is Father, Mother and Son but transmitted through the Christ. The first imperishable Æon gives rise to various emanations until Ialdabaoth, the God of the Jews, created the world. Seven archons of Ialdabaoth see a reflexion of the first Æon in the primeval waters and they agree to make a man after its likeness. They make him body and soul but he does not live. Ialdabaoth, who has some spirit from his mother, breathes it into the man and he lives. The Father finally helps raise up the man by sending his own spirit into him. Ialdabaoth puts the man into Eden and later seduces Eve to procreate Cain and Abel who are Yehouah and Elohim. Some men have the spirit of life but others only appear to have it when they are really the offspring of Ialdabaoth’s archons with the daughters of men (Gen 6:1). Only the genuine spirits can rise up to immortality. Essentially this account agrees with that of Saturninus except that now Ialdabaoth and Satan are the same whereas before they were still adversaries. Sophia has no role in the cosmogony of Saturninus who has no great Mother figure but she appears in the Apocryphon. Thus Saturninus seems to be earlier but already seems to draw up the myths of Christianity.
Saturninus who taught at Aqntioch in the reign of Hadrian (117-138 AD) seems to have gone further along the line towards Gnosticism and in a largely Jewish setting. Satan is the adversary of the God of the Jews. Ignatius, the Christian bishop and Menander were in Antioch at the same time as Saturninus. Ignatius agreed with Saturninus that the danger to souls was Satan but he added various Jewish sects by which he probably meant groups like those led by Saturninus—Jewish sects that were similar to early Christianity.
Failed revolts of 115-117 AD and that of Bar Kosiba in 132-136 AD must have added to the despair of Jewish apocalypticists. Saturninus gives a sort of Essene pesher on Genesis to interpret it in a new way. The angels created man but did not have enough power to make him stand up and he was left wriggling like a worm in the dust. The Ophites and the Marcionites used the same idea, as did the Mandaeans where it appears in the Ginza. But the Power above saw the man’s plight and put the spark of life into him to raise him up and make him live (Hosea 6:2). But the angels had made two types of man—the good and the wicked.
In Genesis, the only way in which two types of man were made, these Gnostics thought, was in the sense of Genesis 1:27: “Male and female created he them”. They deduced that women were wicked and that Eve’s act of temptation proved it. Essenes certainly had little regard for women and, if they did not actually write such exegesis, it is quite possible that disappointed Essenes could have come to such conclusions. Only the good have the spark of life in them because God breathed into Adam but not into Eve. Furthermore the wicked were counselled by demons not by God and Eve took her advice from the serpent. These Gnostics concluded that marriage and reproduction were the works of Satan, and because Eve’s statement in Genesis 4;1 can be read as, “I have gotten Yehouah as my husband” Yehouah was identified with Satan and Cain is his son not Adam’s.
Many Gnostics took it also that Eve was seduced by the serpent (2 Cor 11:2-3). From the creation onwards the wicked angels continued to help the wicked, promoting marriage and reproduction. They led man astray by sending Moses and even planned to supplant the Father—the second psalm says so: the kings of the earth rose up and the archons took counsel together against the Lord and against His Christ. The Essenes idea of a cosmic war supported this and Paul (1 Cor 2:8) confirms that archons were the demonic powers which crucified Christ. All of these archons are, of course, earthly rulers but by then the Gnostics and perhaps Paul were reading it as evil spiritual powers.
Because of the brewing war in heaven, Christ descends to punish the wicked archons of the Jews and destroy the wicked among men, meaning those who do not believe in him because they do not have the spark of life in them. In the Gospel of the Egyptians we find this confirmed, his descent being to “destroy the works of the female”. Christ was not human but only appeared to be—he was formless because in Isaiah 53:2 the servant of God has no form. Paul seems to agree writing (Phil 2:6-11) Christ “came to be in the likeness of man” and he “appeared in human form”. In other words he was not human!
Christians have assumed that Christian features of the Gnostic sects were stolen from Christianity but they might have simply come from a common tradition. Saturinus’s Saviour is Jesus but he is a man, as the Ebionites believed, not the god of the orthodox Christians. He came to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:8) who was the Father of the Jews (Jn 8:44). In John 17:16, believers are “not of this world” and only those capable of receiving it could have eternal life (Jn 17:2). Justin attacked Simonites and Marcionites but wrote passages that many Gnostics could find totally acceptable, and Clement and origen were plainly indebted to Valentinus. Both Christian and Gnostic churches arose from a common species and for a while lived together with concepts being exchanged, but gradually the church proscribed the writings of those whose views they found unacceptable and those not accepted were not read by Christian theologians until the speciation of the sects was complete. In Christianity creation won over, emanations, authority won over individual freedom, objectivity won over subjectivity, prescriptions won over creativity, rationality won over intuition.
Marcion
Marcion went from Pontus in what is now the Black Sea coast of Turkey to Rome between 136 and 140 AD when Hyginus was bishop of Rome. In 144 AD he was excommunicated from the church. His journey to Rome came just as the final rebellion of the Jews under Bar Kosiba was defeated. Jews were extremely unpopular in the Empire and in the east large numbers had been massacred in riots. Marcion saw the Jewishness of Christianity as a severe disadvantage which he thought must have arisen in some huge error. He wanted to purge Christianity of its Jewish connexions.
Now Christianity at this time—despite the influence of Hellenistic culture—might not yet have evolved a great deal from its Essene roots. An early second century letter from a Roman Christian called Hermas is virtually purely Essene, apparently from the Damascus Rule. The Son of God is identified with the archangel Michael who puts the law of god into men’s hearts. Jesus or Christ are not mentioned but merely a statement that the Holy Ghost dwelt in the flesh of its choice which served it well and was rewarded by God with a place of “tabernacling”. This seems to be Jesus. For Hermas the relationships of the names of the angels also seemed to be important as it was for the Essenes. 2 Clement also sounds Essene when he speaks of God as being the Father of Truth, a title favoured by the Valentinians.
Cerdo, an unorthodox teacher of Rome, and Marcion saw two gods in the names Yehouah and Elohim of the scriptural creation story. The Jewish scriptures were then rejected being the revelation of the inferior god, Yehouah. Though this approach is Gnostic, Marcion was otherwise quite Christian, insisting on faith (pistis) in God as revealed through Christ not knowledge (gnosis) of Him as the basis of salvation, and making little use of non-scriptural myths. The Church calling him Gnostic is simply a Christian calumny because the clergy disagreed with him. He said nothing about ascending spirits or restricting salvation to those with the spark. Nevertheless, matter was evil, Jesus was therefore never human and resurrection of the flesh was undesirable and impossible, and indeed the flesh should be neglected if not mortified. Cerdo, Epiphanius tells us, came from Syria where he was influenced by Saturninus, and according to Irenaeus, he led Marcion astray.
Gnostics often claimed they were recovering true Christianity. Marcion was sure Christianity had been spoilt by the tribe of Judaizers, and revised his own versions of the gospels to expunge all trace of their influence. For Marcion the true gospel was Luke’s which had really been revealed to Paul, though even Luke had been interpolated in part by the Judaizers. Proof came from the identical prescriptions for the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper in Luke and in Paul’s epistle. Many Roman Christians would have agreed with Marcion but the leadership of the Church and particularly Justin who had written his book against heresies refuted Marcion and excommunicated him as a troublemaker. Yet by choosing only particular works that Christians could read, Marcion began the Christian canon.
Marcion believed the creator was only just, not good, and that the world was wicked. The Supreme God sent his son to rescue humanity, and the lesser Just God killed him in error. His punishment was that he had to let the Good God have the souls of all who believed in him. Jesus had paid for all these souls on the cross, and all God needed now was for people to have faith in His love. But the Gnostic tendency was to become increasingly hostile to the creator of a world which to them seemed to be evil.
Marcionites had an elect of baptized Christians who were not allowed to marry. These were the “Perfect”, and they led ascetic lives. Ordinary Christians could marry and had the duty of giving every assistance to the “Perfect Ones”. These ordinary Marcionites were baptized at the ends of their lives. It sounds closely analogous to the Essenes described in Josephus and the scrolls, and is also parallel to the organization of the Manichees, which came from the Sabeans (Mandaeans), the followers of John the Baptist. Both Marcion and Valentinus, coming from Christian backgrounds, offered serious challenges to Christianity.
Valentinus
Valentinus, a second century Gnostic teacher and founder of one of the most important sects of Gnosticism, was born in Egypt and educated in Alexandria. About the same time as Marcion, he went to Rome—during the reign (136-40 AD) of Pope Hyginus—and taught there for more than 20 years. Valentinus came to Rome but determined to build not to demolish belief and gained a reputation for eloquence and forceful intelligence that attracted a large following, his disciples including Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Heracleon. Justin also often found common ground regarding doctrine with The Valentinian Gnostic, Ptolemaeus. Clement of Alexandria often happily and uncritically cites the Valentinain, Theodotus.
Like Marcion, Valentinus was dismayed by the slaughter following Bar Kosiba’s failed uprising, and determined to reinterpret apocalypse as gnosis but with a Christian ambience. His Gospel of Truth has common ground with parts of all the New Testamant books except the Pastoral Epistles. The Gospel of Truth resembles the Shepherd of Hermas which some consider was written about the same time, or was reworked from an Essene original. John’s gospel, Valentinus’s favourite, promised another revelation and Valentinus thought he had it. The Paraclete would lead the disciples into the whole truth (Jn 16:12-14).
According to Tertullian, Valentinus broke with the Christian church and left Rome after being passed over for the office of bishop of Rome in about 140 AD. He abandoned orthodoxy, withdrawing from Rome to Cyprus in about 160 AD hoping to find a more favorable reception for his doctrines later called Valentinian Gnosticism, or Valentinianism. His followers elaborated his teachings and evolved into two schools, one centered in Italy, the other in Alexandria.
Valentinus’s mythology postulated a spiritual realm (pleroma) consisting of Æons or emanations (Latin, “to flow out”) of an unknowable God. The word emanation was first used to describe divine procreation in Hellenistic Jewish works of the second and first centuries BC, especially the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha. In each successive emanation, a diminution of the divine essence occurs, and the emanations lost knowledge of Him eventually bringing ignorance into the world and Error, Anguish, Oblivion and Terror. Error “elaborated its own matter from the void, without knowing Truth”. It tried to make a figure that would be the same as Truth in a place called Deficiency where men were unstable and life was a nightmare.
The pleroma of Valentinus has 30 Æons or emanations, one for each of the days of the ideal month of the solar calendar of Jubilees and Enoch, which emerge from Depth and Silence which are pre-existent. The first eight Æons, the Ogdoad, occur in Genesis as Beginning, God, Heaven, Earth, Abyss, Darkness, Water, Spirit. A further 22 were made in the next six days of creation, making 30 in all. The last of the thirty was Sophia, or Wisdom, who had free will, and whose fall led to the material world. She left in heaven the imperfect number 29 explaining the irregularity of the calendar. Plainly a sage had seen, in the artificial perfection of the Essene solar calendar, a glossing over of the true imperfection of the heavens which he saw as another reason why apocalyptic expectations had been wrong.
Sophia was infected with Hubris (Pride) but thought it was Love. In her Pride, she thought she could understood God, and so fell. From the despair of Sophia, when she fell, came the conditions of the world, and from her lust, in a void created by her sin, Jesus was born. A dark shadow shrouded him but he cast it off and found his way to the spiritual light. Sophia had asked him to seek help for her, and after the Holy Ghost had revealed God's gnosis to them, the Æons agreed. Together they formed Christ who was sent with his angels to free Sophia from her passions. Thus the world was created.
For Valentinus, the universe consisted of the material world of the Devil, below the moon, the celestial world of the Demiurge, who is Yehouah, the hostile Jewish god, and the world beyond the planets of Sophia and spiritual beings. Humanity has three levels too—their material bodies, their souls which is their source of marality and reason, and their spirits, divine sparks of Sophia and God. Humanity divides, therefore, into those who are material only, those who have a soul and believe in Yehouah as God—Jews and ordinary Christians—and those who are genuinely spiritual, and obey the promptings of their guardian angel which is always with them, teaches gnosis and accompanies them into immortality. The guardian angel is, of course, the Zoroastrian Fravashi, and in the scheme of Valentinus, the unity of the being and the angel it is that generates the divine immortal spirit.
Many of the Æons have the names of human qualities and it is tempting to think that they are an unconscious externalization of the psychical personality. Thus in trying to know oneself the names of these Æons helped the devout Gnostic to meditate on those qualities.
The demiurge was the God of the Jews in the Old Testament, which Gnostics read as proof of the demiurge’s efforts to keep mankind slaves of ignorance and subject to the material world. It recorded his punishing mankind for trying to gain knowledge. It was in this light that they understood the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the flood, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Hebrew God was not made evil but the new emanation Error served the same purpose and the Æons were still controlling the world. The elevation of error into a spirit suggests roots again in Esseneism where Error, Falsehood or Deceit were despised.
Most of the Gospel of Truth discusses redemption, reinterpreting the New Testament. The Æon Christ came to reveal to the emanations the knowledge or gnosis of the living book, to teach, to suffer and to die. He united himself with the man Jesus to bring redeeming knowledge of the divine realm to humanity. Children loved him but false sages hated him, but on his death the Holy Spirit revived him and he became a Way or a Gnosis. The resurrection allowed all spiritual people to realize that they had the divine spark. Divine beings, sparks or seeds of the Supreme Being, dwell among humans because they have fallen here from a higher plane, or were sent here by the supreme God in order to redeem humanity. Only the most spiritual human beings, the Gnostics themselves, are fully able to receive this revelation and thereby return after death to the spiritual realm.
Other Christians can only attain the realm of the demiurge, and Pagans, engrossed in material existence, are doomed to eternal damnation. History is the process whereby people can realize their true selves. When everyone realized it, history would end. Then a hierogamos of Christ and Sophia permits them to enter the Pleroma, and all of those with divine sparks similarly unite with their spirtual selves to enter the Fulness of God in the Pleroma.
Gnostics who meditate on the name of God recognize that their root is in him—they are in the father and the father is in them.
True brothers manifest themselves truly since they are in true and eternal life.
Close parallels with some of the Odes to Solomon in the Gospel of Truth betray a debt to them. Scholars regard the Odes as having been composed by Valentinus about 150 AD but they are surely Essene in origin though doubtless reworked by Gnostics. They speak of truth, the Elect, the Deceiver, and so on and Salvation is depicted as the laying of a foundation stone and the planting of a root. The Error of the Gospel of Truth destroys Jesus but he has already shown man the Way of salvation—”the Truth which he taught them”.
Other Valentinians were Ptolemaus, under whose influence they began to mythologize, introducing elements from Saturninus, Heraclaeon, a second century Italian who developed more conservative form of Gnosticism and wrote the earliest exegesis of the fourth gospel, only fragments of which remain, and Theodotus, a second century Gnostic theologian of the school of Valentinus who developed eastern Gnosticism.
