The Gnostic Gospels (5 page)

Recently several scholars have sought the impetus for the development of gnosticism not in terms of it cultural origins, but in specific events or experiences. Professor R. M. Grant has suggested that gnosticism emerged as a reaction to the shattering
of traditional religious views—Jewish and Christian—after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in
A.D.
70.
⁵⁵
Quispel proposed that gnosticism originated in a potentially universal “experience of the self” projected into religious mythology.
⁵⁶
Jonas has offered a typological scheme describing gnosticism as a specific kind of philosophical world view.
⁵⁷
The British scholar E. R. Dodds characterized gnosticism as a movement whose writings derived from mystical experience.
⁵⁸
Gershom Scholem, the eminent Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, agrees with Dodds that gnosticism involves mystical speculation and practice. Tracing esoteric currents in rabbinic circles that were contemporary with the development of gnosticism, Scholem calls them forms of “Jewish gnosticism.”
⁵⁹

Today, those investigating the Nag Hammadi texts are less concerned about constructing comprehensive theories than analyzing in detail the sources unearthed at Nag Hammadi. There are several different types of research, each investigating primarily those specific groups of texts appropriate to the purposes of the inquiry. One type of research, concerned with the relationship of gnosticism to Hellenistic philosophy, focuses primarily on those Nag Hammadi texts that exemplify this relationship. Contributors to this aspect of research include, for example (besides Hans Jonas), the British scholars A. D. Nock
⁶⁰
and A. H. Armstrong,
⁶¹
and such American scholars as Professors Bentley Layton
⁶²
of Yale University and Harold Attridge of Southern Methodist University.
⁶³
Professor Morton Smith of Columbia University, on the other hand, whose current research concerns the history of magic, investigates the sources that evince magical practice.
⁶⁴

A second direction of research investigates gnostic texts from a literar
and form-critical point of view. Much of this work was initiated by J. M. Robinson and H. Koester in their book
Trajectories Through Early Christianity.
⁶⁵
Others have explored the rich symbolism of gnostic texts. The French scholar M. Tardieu, for example, has analyzed gnostic myths;
⁶⁶
Professor L. Schottroff has investigated gnostic accounts of the
powers of evil.
⁶⁷
Many of their American colleagues, too, have contributed to the literary analysis of gnostic sources. Professor P. Perkins has investigated both genre
⁶⁸
and imagery;
⁶⁹
Professor George MacRae has contributed to our understandings of gnostic metaphors,
⁷⁰
myth,
⁷¹
and literary form;
⁷²
he and others, including Quispel and Professor B. A. Pearson, have shown how certain gnostic myths drew upon material traditional in Judaism.
⁷³

A third direction of research (which often overlaps with the second) explores the relation of gnosticism to its contemporary religious environment. While Scholem, MacRae, Quispel, Pearson (to name a few) have demonstrated that some gnostic sources refer extensively to Jewish tradition, others are examining the question: What do the gnostic texts tell us about the origins of Christianity? The many scholars who have shared in this research, besides those mentioned above, include Professors R. M. Grant and E. Yamauchi in the United States; R. McL. Wilson in Scotland; G. C Stead and H. Chadwick in England; W. C. van Unnik in the Netherlands; H.-Ch. Puech and Dr. S. Petrement in France; A. Orbe in Spain; S. Arai in Japan; J. Ménard and F. Wisse in Canada; and, in Germany, besides the members of the Berliner Arbeitskreis, A. Böhlig and Dr. K. Koschorke. Because my own research falls into this category (i.e., gnosticism and early Christianity), I have selected primarily the gnostic Christian sources as the basis for this book. Rather than considering the question of the origins of gnosticism, I intend here to show how gnostic forms of Christianity interact with orthodoxy—and what this tells us about the origins of Christianity itself.

Given the enormous amount of current research in the field, this sketch is necessarily brief and incomplete. Whoever wants to follow the research in detail will find invaluable help in the
Nag Hammadi Bibliography
, published by Professor D. M. Scholer.
⁷⁴
Kept up to date by regular supplements published in the journal
Novum Testamentum
, Scholer’s bibliography currently lists nearly 4,000 books, editions, articles, and reviews
published in the last thirty years concerning research on the Nag Hammadi texts.

Yet even the fifty-two writings discovered at Nag Hammadi offer only a glimpse of the complexity of the early Christian movement. We now begin to see that what we call Christianity—and what we identify as Christian tradition—actually represents only a small selection of specific sources, chosen from among dozens of others. Who made that selection, and for what reasons? Why were these other writings excluded and banned as “heresy”? What made them so dangerous? Now, for the first time, we have the opportunity to find out about the earliest Christian heresy; for the first time, the heretics can speak for themselves.

Gnostic Christians undoubtedly expressed ideas that the orthodox abhored. For example, some of these gnostic texts question whether all suffering, labor, and death derive from human sin, which, in the orthodox version, marred an originally perfect creation. Others speak of the feminine element in the divine, celebrating God as Father
and
Mother. Still others suggest that Christ’s resurrection is to be understood symbolically, not literally. A few radical texts even denounce catholic Christians themselves as heretics, who, although they “do not understand mystery … boast that the mystery of truth belongs to them alone.”
⁷⁵
Such gnostic ideas fascinated the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung: he thought they expressed “the other side of the mind”—the spontaneous, unconscious thoughts that any orthodoxy requires its adherents to repress.

Yet orthodox Christianity, as the apostolic creed defines it, contains some ideas that many of us today might find even stranger. The creed requires, for example, that Christians confess that God is perfectly good, and still, he created a world that includes pain, injustice, and death; that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin mother; and that, after being executed by order of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, he arose from his grave “on the third day.”

Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? Traditionally, historians have told us that the orthodox objected to gnostic views for religious and philosophic reasons. Certainly they did; yet investigation of the newly discovered gnostic sources suggests another dimension of the controversy. It suggests that these religious debates—questions of the nature of God, or of Christ—simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as “heresy”; ideas which implicitly support it become “orthodox.”

By investigating the texts from Nag Hammadi, together with sources known for well over a thousand years from orthodox tradition, we can see how politics and religion coincide in the development of Christianity. We can see, for example, the
political
implications of such orthodox doctrines as the bodily resurrection—and how gnostic views of resurrection bear opposite implications. In the process, we can gain a startlingly new perspective on the origins of Christianity.

I

The Controversy over Christ’s Resurrection: Historical Event or Symbol?

“J
ESUS
C
HRIST ROSE
from the grave.” With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical. Other religions celebrate cycles of birth and death: Christianity insists that in one unique historical moment, the cycle reversed, and a dead man came back to life! For Jesus’ followers this was the turning point in world history, the sign of its coming end. Orthodox Christians since then have confessed in the creed that Jesus of Nazareth, “crucified, dead, and buried,” was raised “on the third day.”
¹
Many today recite that creed without thinking about what they are saying, much less actually believing it. Recently some ministers, theologians, and scholars have challenged the literal view of resurrection. To account for this doctrine, they point out its psychological appeal to our deepest fears and hopes; to explain it, they offer symbolic interpretations.

But much of the early tradition insists literally that a man—Jesus—had come back to life. What makes these Christian
accounts so extraordinary is not the claim that his friends had “seen” Jesus after his death—ghost stories, hallucinations, and visions were even more commonplace then than now—but that they saw an actual human being. At first, according to Luke, the disciples themselves, in their astonishment and terror at the appearance of Jesus among them, immediately assumed that they were seeing his ghost. But Jesus challenged them: “Handle me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.”
²
Since they remained incredulous, he asked for something to eat; as they watched in amazement, he ate a piece of broiled fish. The point is clear: no ghost could do that.

Had they said that Jesus’ spirit lived on, surviving bodily decay, their contemporaries might have thought that their stories made sense. Five hundred years before, Socrates’ disciples had claimed that their teacher’s soul was immortal. But what the Christians said was different, and, in ordinary terms, wholly implausible. The finality of death, which had always been a part of the human experience, was being transformed. Peter contrasts King David, who died and was buried, and whose tomb was well known, with Jesus, who, although killed, rose from the grave, “because it was not possible for him to be held by it”—that is, by death.
³
Luke says that Peter excluded metaphorical interpretation of the event he said he witnessed: “[We] ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”
⁴

Tertullian, a brilliantly talented writer (
A.D. C.
190), speaking for the majority, defines the orthodox position: as Christ rose bodily from the grave, so every believer should anticipate the resurrection of the flesh. He leaves no room for doubt. He is not, he says, talking about the immortality of the soul: “The salvation of the soul I believe needs no discussion: for almost all heretics, in whatever way they accept it, at least do not deny it.”
⁵
What is raised is “this flesh, suffused with blood, built up with bones, interwoven with nerves, entwined with veins, (a flesh) which … was born, and … dies, undoubtedly human.”
⁶
Tertullian expects the idea of Christ’s suffering, death, and
resurrection to shock his readers; he insists that “it must be believed, because it is absurd!”
⁷