Early documents suggest the first Christian communities had radically different interpretations of the meaning of Jesus' life and teachings.
Elaine H. Pagels:
The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University
Gnostic texts of nag hammadi
The discovery at Nag Hammadi began with an Arab villager whose name wasMohammed Ali going with his brothers on an ordinary errand. They saddled uptheir camels and they rode out from their village, a small town in the barrenstretches of upper Egypt. They took their camels and rode up to a cliff nearby,which is honeycombed with thousands of caves. These caves were used as burialcaves in antiquity, thousands of years ago. But they were digging under thecliffs for fertilizer, that is, for bird droppings which fertilized the crops.And Mohammed Ali said he struck something when he was digging underground.And, curious, he kept digging, and he was startled to find a six foot jarsealed. And next to it was buried a corpse. Mohammed Ali said he hesitated tobreak the jar because he thought there might be a jinn in it. But hopeovercame fear; he said he picked up his mattock and smashed the jar, and sawparticles of gold fly out of it, much to his delight. But a moment later herealized it was only fragments of papyrus. Inside the jar were 13 volumes,bound in tooled gazelle leather. Thirteen volumes of papyrus text. NowMohammed Ali could not read these texts. He doesn't read Arabic, which is hisown language. And these texts were in some strange archaic language. Theywere actually Coptic, which is the Egyptian language of 1400 years ago. But henevertheless put them in his backpack, slung them along and took them home andthrew them on the ground in his house near the stove. Later his mother saidthat she took some of them and threw them into the fire for kindling when shewas baking bread. What we didn't know until much later is that these containedsome of the most precious texts of the 20th century. That they have uncoveredfor us a whole new way of seeing the early Christian world.
There were 52 texts altogether, apparently, unless some of them wereburned that we don't know about. And they contain, some of them, secretgospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip. The Gospel ofMary Magdalene is a similar text that was found separately. They also containconversations between Jesus and his disciples.... All kinds of literature fromthe early Christian era, a whole discovery of text rather like the NewTestament but also very different.
For more on the gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, read this excerpt fromElaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. Plus, read excerpts from thegnostic Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
GNOSTICISM
The term gnosticism is often used as a sort of umbrella term to cover thepeople that the leaders of the church don't like. It covers probably a hugevariety of points of view. And yet there is a theme; the way I connect textthat we think of as gnostic is the sense that the divine is to be discovered bysome kind of interior search, and not simply by a savior who is outside ofyou.
How does one demonstrate that one has acquired a secret knowledge? How didthe gnostics themselves demonstrate and understand this secret innerknowledge?
Many, many Christians, who are not appreciated by many of the leaders of thechurch, believed that spiritual awakening was demonstrated in one's capacity tospeak in either revelation or dream visions.... Such Christians often spoke inpoems, in songs, in stories that we would say come out of the creativeimagination or the religious imagination. Fathers of the church objected andsaid, "Well, they're just making up a lot of garbage. It's a ridiculous thingthat they are just inventing themselves out of their own feelings." But asthey saw it, the sense of an original voice, an original insight, is as wewould see it, say, in a creative writing class today, was evidence that thatperson has discovered his or her genuine voice.
Did the gnostics see themselves as being outside?
The people who wrote and circulated gospels like the Gospel of Thomascertainly didn't think they were heretics. They thought of themselves asChristians who had received, in addition to the other gospels, secret teaching.For example in the 4th chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Mark says that Jesustaught certain things privately to the disciples. And Paul too says that hehad secret teaching. And these claim to give some of the secret teaching ofJesus. Whether he actually did teach secretly or not, we don't know otherwise.But the Gospel of Thomas claims to be this kind of secret teaching.
Did the people who were called the Gnostics survive? What happened tothem?
A spokesman for the orthodox church called certain other Christians gnostics.We don't know quite what they mean by that except that they didn't like theirviewpoints. The people whom they called gnostics would have called themselvesChristian. And they were Christians of very diverse viewpoints. I mean, wethink today Christianity looks diverse. If you look from Pentecostal churchesto Roman Catholic Churches, to orthodox churches, to every kind of ProtestantChurch one can imagine, we think that's diversity. But actually mostChristians today share a common list of New Testament writings, they share acertain kind of structure of church, and a certain core of beliefs. But backthen there was no list of agreed gospels. There was no list of agreeddoctrines. And there was no agreed upon structure. So actually the earlyChristian movement was much more wildly diverse. And perhaps that's why thatpart of the movement in fact couldn't survive.
"HERETICS" DEFINED IN RESPONSE TO PERSECUTION
As far as we can tell, the earliest Christian communities had anenormous variety of viewpoints and attitudes and approach, as we've said. Butby the end of the second century, you begin to see hierarchies of bishops,priests and deacons emerge in various communities and claim to speak for themajority. And with that development, there's probably an assertion ofleadership against viewpoints that those leaders considered dangerous andheretical. One of the issues that polarized those communities, perhaps themost urgent and pressing issue, was persecution. That is, these people, allChristians, belonged to an illegal movement. It was dangerous to belong tothis movement. You could be arrested, if you were charged with being aChristian, you could be put on trial, you could be tortured and executed if yourefused to recant. And with that pressure, many said, "We want to know when aperson joins this movement if that person is going to stand with us or is goingto pretend they're not with us. So let's clarify who belongs to us...."
The Bishop Irenaeus was about 18 to 20 years old when his little community wasabsolutely decimated by a devastating persecution. They say that 50 to 70people in two small towns were tortured and executed. That must have meanthundreds were rounded up and put in prison. But 50 to 70 people in two smalltowns executed in public is a devastating destruction of that beleagueredcommunity. And Irenaeus was trying to unify those who were left. Whatfrustrating him is that they didn't all believe the same thing. They didn'tall gather under one kind of leadership. And he, like others, was deeply awareof the dangers of fragmentation, that one community could be lost. And so itis out of that deep concern, I think, that Irenaeus and others began to try tounify the church, and, and create criteria like, you know, these are the fourgospels. These are what we believe, these are the rituals, which you first do.You're baptized and then you're a member of this community. It would be absurdto suggest that the leaders of the church were out to protect their power.Because to become bishop in a church in which the 92 year old bishop had justdied in prison, which is what Irenaeus did as a very young man, he had thecourage to become bishop, is to become a target for the next persecution. Thisis not a position of power, it's a position of danger and courage. And thosepeople were concerned to try to unify the church. So it would be ridiculous totell the story of the early Christian movement as though the orthodox were, youknow, power mad, and trying to destroy all diversity in the church. It's muchmore complicated than that. The sociologist Max Weber has shown that areligious movement, if it doesn't develop a certain institutional structurewithin a generation of its founder's death, will not survive. So it's likely,I think, that we owe the survival of the Christian movement to those forms thatIrenaeus and others developed. You know, the list of acceptable books, thelist of acceptable teachings, the rituals.
Harold W. Attridge:
The Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament Yale Divinity School
GNOSTICISM
What is gnosticism? How did it come into being?
Gnosticism is a term that's etymologically connected with the word "toknow." It has the same root in English, "kno" is related to "gno" the Greekword for gnosis. And Gnostics were people who claimed to know somethingspecial. This knowledge could be a knowledge of a person, the kind of personalacquaintance that a mystic would have with the divine. Or it could be a kindof propositional knowledge of certain key truths. Gnostics claim both of thosekinds of knowledge. The claim to have some sort of special knowledge was notconfined to any particular group in the second century. It was widespread, andwe have such claims being advanced by fairly orthodox teachers such as Clementof Alexandria, we have similar claims being advanced by all sorts of otherteachers during that period.
How did it come into being? How did it develop?
It's difficult to know with precision how gnosticism emerged. Becausethe way we use the term today is as a cover for a variety of phenomena duringthe course of the second century. One main strand of gnosticism seems to haveemerged as a way of reflecting on Jewish scripture and reflecting on Jewishtraditions about the descent of the angels to beget children by human beings.Using that old tradition as a way of reflecting on why there's evil in theworld. So in one way, gnosticism is a movement that has a philosophical or atheological dimension that's wrestling with the problem of theodicy. And manygnostics solve that problem by saying there's a sharp dichotomy between theworld of matter and the world of spirit, and they're very much interested ingetting into the world of spirit, removing themselves from the world of matter.They explain that dichotomy with elaborate theories about how spirit gotinvolved with matter and then with practices, usually ascetical practices, toenable spirit to return to its own place.
Why is it seen as a heresy?
By the end of the second century there was considerable debate amongChristian teachers, theologians, about how best to articulate Christian belief.Gnostics are charged by their their critics with making a fundamental mistakeabout the relationship between God as creator and God as redeemer. And theyseem to suggest, at least some of them seem to suggest that the divine powerthat created this world is an inferior being, inferior to the true spiritualGod who desires the salvation of all human beings, or at least all of thosehuman beings who are capable of knowledge. That distinction between the beliefin creation and belief in redemption was viewed by theologians such as Irenaeusas to be a fundamental mistake which departed radically from the testimony ofscripture.
Another thing that gnostics worried about was the relationship between thedivine element and the human element in Jesus, and in some cases they seem tohave made a similar sort of distinction between the divine and the human thatput those into sharp opposition, an opposition that was viewed as a mistake bytheir critics. By making that distinction they tended to denigrate thephysical humanity of Jesus, and orthodox teachers such as Irenaeus by the endof the second century wanted to insist very strongly on the humanity of Jesusas an example for his followers, so it was very important to insist on Jesus asreally suffering and dying on the cross because Christians were being calledupon at that time to suffer and die as witnesses, as martyrs to their faith.And if with some gnostics you could denigrate the physical suffering of Jesus,you might call into question that obligation to stand and to bear witness forthe faith.
What did gnostics believe happened at the time of the crucifixion?
Different gnostics believed different things about the death andresurrection of Jesus. But some were people, whom we know as docetists, [who]believed that the death and suffering of Jesus were things that only appearedto happen, or if they happened, didn't really happen to the core of Jesus'spiritual reality. And so they abandoned the insistence upon those two polesof what were coming to be the heart of orthodox belief, the death andresurrection of Jesus.
How the image of Jesus change in the Gnostic Judeo-Christiantradition?
There are different texts in the opus of material that we call gnosticthat are presentations of the teachings of Jesus or the person of Jesus. Someof those texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, which is at least asemi-gnosticizing kind of production, presents Jesus simply as a teacher, ateacher of wisdom. Someone who did not suffer an ignominious death on thecross and did not experience a resurrection. So the focus on Jesus as teacherwould be characteristic of a strand of Christianity that certainly comes to begnostic.
Another text called the Gospel of Truth is not a narrative of the death andresurrection of Jesus at all. It's a symbolic reflection on certain themesthat come from scripture and are associated with the life and teachings ofJesus. But that symbolic reflection is a way of getting the the readers orhearers of that text to think about their relationship to God, their essentialconnection with the divine and the world of spirit....
What do gnostics think when they hear a hymn like "Thunder, The PerfectMind?"
The hymn "Thunder, the Perfect Mind" is a series of riddles which makecontradictory statements about some sort of mysterious figure. Riddles suchas, "I am the mother, and I am the daughter. I am the wife and I am thewhor*." Well, that kind of text evokes the question, who is the I that'sspeaking? And so this text probably was a text used to stimulate meditationupon some spiritual principle, whatever that spiritual principle was. Therevealer figure, for instance, the divine wisdom that many gnostics saw as animportant figure in the history of salvation.
