The Gnostic Gospels (16 page)

IV

The Passion of Christ and the Persecution of Christians

T
HERE IS ONLY
one fact on which nearly all accounts about Jesus of Nazareth, whether written by persons hostile or devoted to him, agree: that, by order of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, he was condemned and crucified (c. 30). Tacitus, the aristocratic Roman historian (c. 55–115), knowing virtually nothing about Jesus, mentions only this. Relating the history of the infamous Nero (emperor 54–58), he says that Nero, accused of starting major fires in Rome,

substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of persons hated for their vices, whom the crowd called Christians.
Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate
, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not only in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where everything horrible or shameful in the world gathers and becomes fashionable.
¹

The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus of Nazareth in a list of troubles that disturbed Jewish relations with Rome when Pilate was governor (roughly 26–36). A comment attributed to Josephus reports that “Pilate, having heard him accused by men of the highest standing among us … condemned him to be crucified.”
²

Jesus’ followers confirm this report. The gospel of Mark, probably the earliest of the New Testament accounts (c. 70–80), tells how Jesus, betrayed by Judas Iscariot at night in the garden of Gethsemane opposite Jerusalem, was arrested by armed men as his disciples fled.
³
Charged with sedition before Pilate, he was condemned to death.
⁴
Crucified, Jesus lived for several hours before, as Mark tells it, he “uttered a loud cry”
⁵
and died. The gospels of Luke and John, written perhaps a generation later (c. 90–110), describe his death in more heroic terms: Jesus forgives his torturers, and, with a prayer, yields up his life.
⁶
Yet all four of the New Testament gospels describe his suffering, death, and hasty burial. The gospels, of course, interpret the circumstances leading to his death to demonstrate his innocence. Mark says that the chief priests and leaders in Jerusalem planned to have Jesus arrested and executed because of his teaching against them.
⁷
John presents a fuller account, historically plausible. He reports that as Jesus’ popularity grew and attracted increasing numbers to his movement, the chief priests gathered the council of the Sanhedrin to discuss the dangers of riot. Some among the uneducated masses already acclaimed Jesus as Messiah
⁸
—the “anointed king” who they expected would liberate Israel from foreign imperialism and restore the Jewish state. Especially during Passover, when thousands of Jews poured into Jerusalem to celebrate the holiday, this impetus might ignite feelings of Jewish nationalism, already smoldering in the city, into revolt. The council held the responsibility for keeping the peace between the Jewish population and the Roman occupying army—a peace so tenuous that when, only a few years later, a Roman soldier stationed on guard in Jerusalem during Passover
expressed his contempt by exposing himself in the Temple courtyard, his act provoked a riot in which 30,000 people are said to have lost their lives. Josephus, who tells this story, adds: “Thus the Feast ended in distress to the whole nation, and bereavement to every household.”
⁹

John reconstructs the council debate concerning Jesus: “What are we to do? … If we let him go on thus,” the masses may demonstrate in favor of this alleged new Jewish king, “and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”
¹⁰
The chief priest Caiphas argued for the expedience of arresting one man at once, rather than endanger the whole population.
¹¹
Even John had to recognize the political acumen of this reasoning: he wrote his account not long after the Jewish War of 66–70, an insurrection against Rome that ended in the total disaster which, according to John, Caiphas had predicted: the Temple burned to the ground, the city of Jerusalem devastated, the population decimated.

Yet if the sources agree on the basic facts of Jesus’ execution, Christians sharply disagree on their interpretation. One gnostic text from Nag Hammadi, the
Apocalypse of Peter
, relates a radically different version of the crucifixion:

 … I saw him apparently being seized by them. And I said, “What am I seeing, O Lord? Is it really you whom they take? And are you holding on to me? And are they hammering the feet and hands of another? Who is this one above the cross, who is glad and laughing?” The Savior said to me, “He whom you saw being glad and laughing above the cross is the Living Jesus. But he into whose hands and feet they are driving the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute. They put to shame that which remained in his likeness. And look at him, and [look at] me!”
¹²

Another of the Nag Hammadi texts, the
Second Treatise of the Great Seth
, relates Christ’s teaching that

it was another … who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over … their error … And I was laughing at their ignorance.
¹³

What does this mean? The
Acts of John
—one of the most famous gnostic texts, and one of the few discovered before Nag Hammadi, having somehow survived, in fragmentary form, repeated denunciations by the orthodox—explains that Jesus was not a human being at all; instead, he was a spiritual being who adapted himself to human perception. The
Acts
tells how James once saw him standing on the shore in the form of a child, but when he pointed him out to John,

I [John] said, “Which child?” And he answered me, “The one who is beckoning to us.” And I said, “This is because of the long watch we have kept at sea. You are not seeing straight, brother James. Do you not see the man standing there who is handsome, fair and cheerful looking?” But he said to me, “I do not see that man, my brother.”
¹⁴

Going ashore to investigate, they became even more confused. According to John,

he appeared to me again as rather bald-(headed) but with a thick flowing beard, but to James as a young man whose beard was just beginning.… I tried to see him as he was … But he sometimes appeared to me as a small man with no good looks, and then again as looking up to heaven.
¹⁵

John continues:

I will tell you another glory, brethren; sometimes when I meant to touch him I encountered a material, solid body; but at other times again when I felt him, his substance was immaterial and incorporeal … as if it did not exist at all.
¹⁶

John adds that he checked carefully for footprints, but Jesus never left any—nor did he ever blink his eyes. All of this demonstrates to John that his nature was spiritual, not human.

The
Acts
goes on to tell how Jesus, anticipating arrest, joined with his disciples in Gethsemane the night before:

 … he assembled us all, and said, “Before I am delivered to them, let us sing a hymn to the Father, and so go to meet what lies before (us).” So he told us to form a circle, holding one another’s hands, and himself stood in the middle …
¹⁷

Instructing the disciples to “Answer Amen to me,” he began to intone a mystical chant, which reads, in part,

“To the Universe belongs the dancer.”—“Amen.”

“He who does not dance does not know what happens.”—“Amen.” …

“Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in Me who am speaking …

You who dance, consider what I do, for yours is

This passion of Man which I am to suffer. For you could by no means have understood what you suffer unless to you as Logos I had been sent by the Father …

Learn how to suffer and you shall be able not to suffer.”
¹⁸

John continues:

After the Lord had danced with us, my beloved, he went out [to suffer]. And we were like men amazed or fast asleep, and we fled this way and that. And so I saw him suffer, and did not wait by his suffering, but fled to the Mount of Olives and wept … And when he was hung (upon the Cross) on Friday, at the sixth hour of the day there came a darkness over the whole earth.
¹⁹

At that moment John, sitting in a cave in Gethsemane, suddenly saw a vision of Jesus, who said,

“John, for the people below … I am being crucified and pierced with lances … and given vinegar and gall to drink. But to you I am speaking, and listen to what I speak.”
²⁰

Then the vision reveals to John a “cross of light,” and explains that “I have suffered none of the things which they will say of
me; even that suffering which I showed to you and to the rest in my dance, I will that it be called a mystery.”
²¹
Other gnostics, followers of Valentinus, interpret the meaning of such paradoxes in a different way. According to the
Treatise on Resurrection
, discovered at Nag Hammadi, insofar as Jesus was the “Son of Man,” being human, he suffered and died like the rest of humanity.
²²
But since he was also “Son of God,” the divine spirit within him could not die: in that sense he transcended suffering and death.

Yet orthodox Christians insist that Jesus
was
a human being, and that all “straight-thinking” Christians must take the crucifixion as a historical and literal event. To ensure this they place in the creed, as a central element of faith, the simple statement that “Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.” Pope Leo the Great (c. 447) condemned such writings as the
Acts of John
as “a hotbed of manifold perversity,” which “should not only be forbidden, but entirely destroyed and burned with fire.” But because heretical circles continued to copy and hide this text, the second Nicene Council, three hundred years later, had to repeat the judgment, directing that “No one is to copy [this book]: not only so, but we consider that it deserves to be consigned to the fire.”

What lies behind this vehemence? Why does faith in the passion and death of Christ become an essential element—some say,
the
essential element—of orthodox Christianity? I am convinced that we cannot answer this question fully until we recognize that controversy over the interpretation of Christ’s suffering and death involved, for Christians of the first and second centuries, an urgent practical question: How are believers to respond to persecution, which raises the imminent threat of their
own
suffering and death?

No issue could be more immediate to Jesus’ disciples, having themselves experienced the traumatic events of his betrayal and arrest, and having heard accounts of his trial, torture, and final agony. From that time, especially when the most prominent among them, Peter and James, were arrested
and executed, every Christian recognized that affiliation with the movement placed him in danger. Both Tacitus and Suetonius, the historian of the imperial court (c. 115), who shared an utter contempt for Christians, mention the group principally as the target of official persecution. In telling the life of Nero, Suetonius reports, in a list of the
good
things the emperor did, that “punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of persons given to a new and malificent superstition.”
²³
Tacitus adds to his remarks on the fire in Rome:

First, then, those of the sect were arrested who confessed; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson, as for hatred of the human race. And ridicule accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed, were burned to serve as torches by night. Nero had offered his gardens for the spectacle …
²⁴