The Gnostic Gospels (7 page)

But the gnostic Christians rejected Luke’s theory. Some gnostics called the literal view of resurrection the “faith of fools.”
³⁶
The resurrection, they insisted, was not a unique event in the past: instead, it symbolized how Christ’s presence could be experienced in the present. What mattered was not literal seeing, but spiritual vision.
³⁷
They pointed out that many who witnessed the events of Jesus’ life remained blind to their meaning. The disciples themselves often misunderstood what Jesus said: those who announced that their dead master had come back physically to life mistook a spiritual truth for an actual event.
³⁸
But the true disciple may never have seen the earthly Jesus, having been born at the wrong time, as Paul said of himself.
³⁹
Yet this physical disability may become a spiritual advantage: such persons, like Paul, may encounter Christ first on the level of inner experience.

How is Christ’s presence experienced? The author of the
Gospel of Mary
, one of the few gnostic texts discovered before Nag Hammadi, interprets the resurrection appearances as visions received in dreams or in ecstatic trance. This gnostic gospel recalls traditions recorded in Mark and John, that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Christ.
⁴⁰
John says that Mary saw Jesus on the morning of his resurrection, and that he appeared to the other disciples only later, on the evening of the same day.
⁴¹
According to the
Gospel of Mary
, Mary Magdalene, seeing the Lord in a vision, asked him, “How does he who sees the vision see it? [Through] the soul, [or] through the spirit?”
⁴²
He answered that the visionary perceives through the mind. The
Apocalypse of Peter
, discovered at Nag Hammadi, tells how
Peter, deep in trance, saw Christ, who explained that “I am the intellectual spirit, filled with radiant light.”
⁴³
Gnostic accounts often mention how the recipients respond to Christ’s presence with intense emotions—terror, awe, distress, and joy.

Yet these gnostic writers do not dismiss visions as fantasies or hallucinations. They respect—even revere—such experiences, through which spiritual intuition discloses insight into the nature of reality. One gnostic teacher, whose
Treatise on Resurrection
, a letter to Rheginos, his student, was found at Nag Hammadi, says: “Do not suppose that resurrection is an apparition [
phantasia
; literally, “fantasy”]. It is not an apparition; rather it is something real. Instead,” he continues, “one ought to maintain that the world is an apparition, rather than resurrection.”
⁴⁴
Like a Buddhist master, Rheginos’ teacher, himself anonymous, goes on to explain that ordinary human existence is spiritual death. But the resurrection is the moment of enlightenment: “It is … the revealing of what truly exists … and a migration (
metabolē
—change, transition) into newness.”
⁴⁵
Whoever grasps this becomes spiritually alive. This means, he declares, that you can be “resurrected from the dead” right now: “Are you—the real you—mere corruption? … Why do you not examine your own self, and see that you have arisen?”
⁴⁶
A third text from Nag Hammadi, the
Gospel of Philip
, expresses the same view, ridiculing ignorant Christians who take the resurrection literally. “Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error.”
⁴⁷
Instead they must “receive the resurrection while they live.” The author says ironically that in one sense, then, of course “it is necessary to rise ‘in this flesh,’ since everything exists in it!”
⁴⁸

What interested these gnostics far more than past events attributed to the “historical Jesus” was the possibility of encountering the risen Christ in the present.
⁴⁹
The
Gospel of Mary
illustrates the contrast between orthodox and gnostic viewpoints. The account recalls what Mark relates:

Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene … She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.
⁵⁰

As the
Gospel of Mary
opens, the disciples are mourning Jesus’ death and terrified for their own lives. Then Mary Magdalene stands up to encourage them, recalling Christ’s continual presence with them: “Do not weep, and do not grieve, and do not doubt; for his grace will be with you completely, and will protect you.”
⁵¹
Peter invites Mary to “tell us the words of the Savior which you remember.”
⁵²
But to Peter’s surprise, Mary does not tell anecdotes from the past; instead, she explains that she has just seen the Lord in a vision received through the mind, and she goes on to tell what he revealed to her. When Mary finishes,

she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, “Say what you will about what she has said. I, at least, do not believe that the Savior has said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas!”
⁵³

Peter agrees with Andrew, ridiculing the idea that Mary actually saw the Lord in her vision. Then, the story continues,

Mary wept and said to Peter, “My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart? Do you think I am lying about the Savior?” Levi answered and said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered … If the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her?”
⁵⁴

Finally Mary, vindicated, joins the other apostles as they go out to preach. Peter, apparently representing the orthodox position, looks to past events, suspicious of those who “see the Lord” in visions: Mary, representing the gnostic, claims to experience his continuing presence.
⁵⁵

These gnostics recognized that their theory, like the orthodox one, bore political implications. It suggests that whoever “sees the Lord” through inner vision can claim that his or her
own authority equals, or surpasses, that of the Twelve—and of their successors. Consider the political implications of the
Gospel of Mary
: Peter and Andrew, here representing the leaders of the orthodox group, accuse Mary—the gnostic—of pretending to have seen the Lord in order to justify the strange ideas, fictions, and lies she invents and attributes to divine inspiration. Mary lacks the proper credentials for leadership, from the orthodox viewpoint: she is not one of the “twelve.” But as Mary stands up to Peter, so the gnostics who take her as their prototype challenge the authority of those priests and bishops who claim to be Peter’s successors.

We know that gnostic teachers challenged the orthodox in precisely this way. While, according to them, the orthodox relied solely on the public, exoteric teaching which Christ and the apostles offered to “the many,” gnostic Christians claimed to offer, in addition, their
secret
teaching, known only to the few.
⁵⁶
The gnostic teacher and poet Valentinus (c. 140) points out that even during his lifetime, Jesus shared with his disciples certain mysteries, which he kept secret from outsiders.
⁵⁷
According to the New Testament gospel of Mark, Jesus said to his disciples,

… “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.”
⁵⁸

Matthew, too, relates that when Jesus spoke in public, he spoke only in parables; when his disciples asked the reason, he replied, “To you it has been given to know the secrets [
mysteria
; literally, “mysteries”] of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”
⁵⁹
According to the gnostics, some of the disciples, following his instructions, kept secret Jesus’ esoteric teaching: this they taught only in private, to certain persons who had proven themselves to be spiritually mature, and who therefore
qualified for “initiation into
gnosis
”—that is, into secret knowledge.

Following the crucifixion, they allege that the risen Christ continued to reveal himself to certain disciples, opening to them, through visions, new insights into divine mysteries. Paul, referring to himself obliquely in the third person, says that he was “caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know.” There, in an ecstatic trance, he heard “things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.”
⁶⁰
Through his spiritual communication with Christ, Paul says he discovered “hidden mysteries” and “secret wisdom,” which, he explains, he shares only with those Christians he considers “mature”
⁶¹
but not with everyone. Many contemporary Biblical scholars, themselves orthodox, have followed Rudolph Bultmann, who insists that Paul does not mean what he says in this passage.
⁶²
They argue that Paul does
not
claim to have a secret tradition; such a claim would apparently make Paul sound too “gnostic.” Recently Professor Robin Scroggs has taken the opposite view, pointing out that Paul clearly says that he
does
have secret wisdom.
⁶³
Gnostic Christians in ancient times came to the same conclusion. Valentinus, the gnostic poet who traveled from Egypt to teach in Rome (c. 140), even claimed that he himself learned Paul’s secret teaching from Theudas, one of Paul’s own disciples.

Followers of Valentinus say that only their own gospels and revelations disclose those secret teachings. These writings tell countless stories about the risen Christ—the spiritual being whom Jesus represented—a figure who fascinated them far more than the merely human Jesus, the obscure rabbi from Nazareth. For this reason, gnostic writings often reverse the pattern of the New Testament gospels. Instead of telling the history of Jesus biographically, from birth to death, gnostic accounts begin where the others end—with stories of the spiritual Christ appearing to his disciples. The
Apocryphon of John
, for example, begins as John tells how he went out after the crucifixion in “great grief”:

Immediately … the [heavens were opened, and the whole] creation [which is] under heaven shone, and [the world] was shaken. [I was afraid, and I] saw in the light [a child] … while I looked he became like an old man. And he [changed his] form again, becoming like a servant … I saw … a[n image] with multiple forms in the light …
⁶⁴

As he marveled, the presence spoke:

“John, Jo[h]n, why do you doubt, and why are you afraid? You are not unfamiliar with this form, are you? … Do not be afraid! I am the one who [is with you] always … [I have come to teach] you what is [and what was], and what will come to [be] …”
⁶⁵

The
Letter of Peter to Philip
, also discovered at Nag Hammadi, relates that after Jesus’ death, the disciples were praying on the Mount of Olives when

a great light appeared, so that the mountain shone from the sight of him who had appeared. And a voice called out to them saying “Listen … I am Jesus Christ, who is with you forever.”
⁶⁶

Then, as the disciples ask him about the secrets of the universe, “a voice came out of the light” answering them. The
Wisdom of Jesus Christ
tells a similar story. Here again the disciples are gathered on a mountain after Jesus’ death, when “then there appeared to them the Redeemer, not in his original form but in the invisible spirit. But his appearance was the appearance of a great angel of light.” Responding to their amazement and terror, he smiles, and offers to teach them the “secrets [
mysteria
; literally, “mysteries”] of the holy plan” of the universe and its destiny.
⁶⁷

But the contrast with the orthodox view is striking.
⁶⁸
Here Jesus does not appear in the ordinary human form the disciples recognize—and certainly not in
bodily
form. Either he appears as a luminous presence speaking out of the light, or he transforms himself into multiple forms. The
Gospel of Philip
takes up the same theme:

Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not reveal himself in the manner [in which] he was, but in the manner in which [they would] be able to see him. He revealed himself to [them all. He revealed himself] to the great as great … (and) to the small as small.
⁶⁹

To the immature disciple, Jesus appears as a child; to the mature, as an old man, symbol of wisdom. As the gnostic teacher Theodotus says, “each person recognizes the Lord in his own way, not all alike.”
⁷⁰