The Gnostic Gospels (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)

CONCLUSION

IT IS THE WINNERS who write history—their way. No wonder, then, that the viewpoint of the successful majority has dominated all traditional accounts of the origin of Christianity. Ecclesiastical Christians first defined the terms (naming themselves “orthodox” and their opponents “heretics”); then they proceeded to demonstrate—at least to their own satisfaction—that their triumph was historically inevitable, or, in religious terms, “guided by the Holy Spirit.”

But the discoveries at Nag Hammadi reopen fundamental questions. They suggest that Christianity might have developed in very different directions—or that Christianity as we know it might not have survived at all. Had Christianity remained multiform, it might well have disappeared from history, along with dozens of rival religious cults of antiquity. I believe that we owe the survival of Christian tradition to the organizational and theological structure that the emerging church developed. Anyone as powerfully attracted to Christianity as I am will regard that as a major achievement. We need not be surprised, then, that the religious ideas enshrined in the creed (from “I believe in one God,” who is “Father Almighty,” and Christ’s incarnation, death, and bodily resurrection “on the third day,” to faith in the “holy, catholic, and apostolic church”) coincide with social and political issues in the formation of orthodox Christianity.

Furthermore, since historians themselves tend to be intellectuals, it is, again, no surprise that most have interpreted the controversy between orthodox and gnostic Christians in terms of the “history of ideas,” as if ideas, themselves assumed to be the essential mainspring of human action, battled (presumably in some disembodied state) for supremacy. So Tertullian, himself a highly intelligent man, fond of abstract thought, complained that “heretics and philosophers” concerned themselves with the same questions. The “questions that make people heretics”¹ are, he says, the following: Where does humanity come from, and how? Where does evil come from, and why? Tertullian insists (at least before his own violent break with the church) that the catholic church prevailed because it offered “truer” answers to these questions.

Yet the majority of Christians, gnostic and orthodox, like religious people of every tradition, concerned themselves with ideas primarily as expressions or symbols of religious experience. Such experience remains the source and testing ground of all religious ideas (as, for example, a man and a woman are likely to experience differently the idea that God is masculine). Gnosticism and orthodoxy, then, articulated very different kinds of human experience; I suspect that they appealed to different types of persons.

For when gnostic Christians inquired about the origin of evil they did not interpret the term, as we do, primarily in terms of moral evil. The Greek term kakía (like the English term “ill-ness”) originally meant “what is bad”—what one desires to avoid, such as physical pain, sickness, suffering, misfortune, every kind of harm. When followers of Valentinus asked about the source of kakía, they referred especially to emotional harm—fear, confusion, grief. According to the Gospel of Truth, the process of self-discovery begins as a person experiences the “anguish and terror”² of the human condition, as if lost in a fog or haunted in sleep by terrifying nightmares. Valentinus’ myth of humanity’s origin, as we have seen, describes the anticipation of death and destruction as the experiential beginning of the gnostic’s search. “They say that all materiality was formed from three experiences [or: sufferings]: terror, pain, and confusion [aporia; literally, “roadlessness,” not knowing where to go].”³

Since such experiences, especially the fear of death and dissolution, are located, in the first place, in the body, the gnostic tended to mistrust the body, regarding it as the saboteur that inevitably engaged him in suffering. Nor did the gnostic trust the blind forces that prevail in the universe; after all, these are the forces that constitute the body. What can bring release? Gnostics came to the conviction that the only way out of suffering was to realize the truth about humanity’s place and destiny in the universe. Convinced that the only answers were to be found within, the gnostic engaged on an intensely private interior journey.

Whoever comes to experience his own nature—human nature—as itself the “source of all things,” the primary reality, will receive enlightenment. Realizing the essential Self, the divine within, the gnostic laughed in joy at being released from external constraints to celebrate his identification with the divine being:

The gospel of truth is a joy for those who have received from the Father of truth the grace of knowing him … For he discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves, the incomprehensible, inconceivable one, the Father, the perfect one, the one who made all things.⁴

In the process, gnostics celebrated—their opponents said they overwhelmingly exaggerated—the greatness of human nature. Humanity itself, in its primordial being, was disclosed to be the “God over all.” The philosopher Plotinus, who agreed with his master, Plato, that the universe was divinely created and that nonhuman intelligences, including the stars, share in immortal soul,⁵ castigated the gnostics for “thinking very well of themselves, and very ill of the universe.”⁶

Although, as the great British scholar Arthur Darby Nock has stated, gnosticism “involves no recoil from society, but a desire to concentrate on inner well being,”⁷ the gnostic pursued an essentially solitary path. According to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus praises this solitude: “Blessed are the solitary and the chosen, for you will find the Kingdom. For you are from it, and to it you will return.”⁸

This solitude derives from the gnostics’ insistence on the primacy of immediate experience. No one else can tell another which way to go, what to do, how to act. The gnostic could not accept on faith what others said, except as a provisional measure, until one found one’s own path, “for,” as the gnostic teacher Heracleon says, “people at first are led to believe in the Savior through others,” but when they become mature “they no longer rely on mere human testimony,” but discover instead their own immediate relationship with “the truth itself.”⁹ Whoever follows secondhand testimony—even testimony of the apostles and the Scriptures—could earn the rebuke Jesus delivered to his disciples when they quoted the prophets to him: “You have ignored the one living in your presence and have spoken (only) of the dead.”¹⁰ Only on the basis of immediate experience could one create the poems, vision accounts, myths, and hymns that gnostics prized as proof that one actually has attained gnosis.

Compared with that achievement, all others fall away. If “the many”—unenlightened people—believed that they would find fulfillment in family life, sexual relationships, business, politics, ordinary employment or leisure, the gnostic rejected this belief as illusion. Some radicals rejected all transactions involving sexuality or money: they claimed that whoever rejects sexual intercourse and Mammon “shows [that] he is [from] the generation of the [Son of Man].”¹¹ Others, like the Valentinians, married, raised children, worked at ordinary employment, but like devout Buddhists, regarded all these as secondary to the solitary, interior path of gnosis.

Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, articulated a different kind of experience. Orthodox Christians were concerned—far more than gnostics—with their relationships with other people. If gnostics insisted that humanity’s original experience of evil involved internal emotional distress, the orthodox dissented. Recalling the story of Adam and Eve, they explained that humanity discovered evil in human violation of the natural order, itself essentially “good.” The orthodox interpreted evil (kakía) primarily in terms of violence against others (thus giving the moral connotation of the term). They revised the Mosaic code, which prohibits physical violation of others—murder, stealing, adultery—in terms of Jesus’ prohibition against even mental and emotional violence—anger, lust, hatred.

Agreeing that human suffering derives from human fault, orthodox Christians affirmed the natural order. Earth’s plains, deserts, seas, mountains, stars, and trees form an appropriate home for humanity. As part of that “good” creation, the orthodox recognized the processes of human biology: they tended to trust and affirm sexuality (at least in marriage), procreation, and human development. The orthodox Christian saw Christ not as one who leads souls out of this world into enlightenment, but as “fullness of God” come down into human experience—into bodily experience—to sacralize it. Irenaeus declares that Christ

did not despise or evade any condition of humanity, nor set aside for himself the law which he had appointed for the human race, but sanctified every age … He therefore passes through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying those who are at this age … a youth for youths … and … because he was an old man for old people … sanctifying at the same time the aged also … then, at last, he came onto death itself.¹²

To maintain the consistency of his theory, Irenaeus revised the common tradition that Jesus died in his thirties: lest old age be left unsanctified by Christ’s participation, Irenaeus argued that Jesus was more than fifty years old when he died.¹³

But it is not only the story of Christ that makes ordinary life sacred. The orthodox church gradually developed rituals to sanction major events of biological existence: the sharing of food, in the eucharist; sexuality, in marriage; childbirth, in baptism; sickness, in anointment; and death, in funerals. The social arrangements that these events celebrated, in communities, in the family, and in social life, all bore, for the orthodox believer, vitally important ethical responsibilities. The believer heard church leaders constantly warning against incurring sin in the most practical affairs of life: cheating in business, lying to a spouse, tyrannizing children or slaves, ignoring the poor. Even their pagan critics noticed that Christians appealed to the destitute by alleviating two of their major anxieties: Christians provided food for the poor, and they buried the dead.

While the gnostic saw himself as “one out of a thousand, two out of ten thousand,”¹⁴ the orthodox experienced himself as one member of the common human family, and as one member of a universal church. According to Professor Helmut Koester, “the test of orthodoxy is whether it is able to build a church rather than a club or school or a sect, or merely a series of concerned religious individuals.”¹⁵ Origen, the most brilliant theologian of the third century, expressed, although he was himself brought under suspicion of heresy, the orthodox viewpoint when he declared that God would not have offered a way of salvation accessible only to an intellectual or spiritual elite. What the church teaches, he agreed, must be simple, unanimous, accessible to all. Irenaeus declares that

as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere, and enlightens all people who are willing … Nor will any one of the rulers in the churches, however highly gifted he may be in matters of eloquence, teach doctrines different from these.¹⁶

Irenaeus encouraged his community to enjoy the security of believing that their faith rested upon absolute authority: the canonically approved Scriptures, the creed, church ritual, and the clerical hierarchy.

If we go back to the earliest known sources of Christian tradition—the sayings of Jesus (although scholars disagree on the question of which sayings are genuinely authentic), we can see how both gnostic and orthodox forms of Christianity could emerge as variant interpretations of the teaching and significance of Christ. Those attracted to solitude would note that even the New Testament gospel of Luke includes Jesus’ saying that whoever “does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”¹⁷ He demanded that those who followed him must give up everything—family, home, children, ordinary work, wealth—to join him. And he himself, as prototype, was a homeless man who rejected his own family, avoided marriage and family life, a mysterious wanderer who insisted on truth at all costs, even the cost of his own life. Mark relates that Jesus concealed his teaching from the masses, and entrusted it only to the few he considered worthy to receive it.¹⁸

Yet the New Testament gospels also offer accounts that lend themselves to a very different interpretation. Jesus blessed marriage and declared it inviolable;¹⁹ he welcomed the children who surrounded him;²⁰ he responded with compassion to the most common forms of human suffering,²¹ such as fever, blindness, paralysis, and mental illness, and wept²² when he realized that his people had rejected him. William Blake, noting such different portraits of Jesus in the New Testament, sided with the one the gnostics preferred against “the vision of Christ that all men see”:

The vision of Christ that thou dost see

Is my vision’s deepest enemy …

Thine is the friend of all Mankind,

Mine speaks in parables to the blind:

Thine loves the same world that mine hates,

Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates …

Both read the Bible day and night

But thou read’st black where I read white …

Seeing this False Christ, In fury and passion

I made my Voice heard all over the Nation.²³

Nietzsche, who detested what he knew as Christianity, nevertheless wrote: “There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”²⁴ Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, attributes to Ivan a vision of the Christ rejected by the church, the Christ who “desired man’s free love, that he should follow Thee freely,”²⁵ choosing the truth of one’s own conscience over material well-being, social approval, and religious certainty. Like the author of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Ivan denounced the orthodox church for seducing people away from “the truth of their freedom.”²⁶

We can see, then, how conflicts arose in the formation of Christianity between those restless, inquiring people who marked out a solitary path of self-discovery and the institutional framework that gave to the great majority of people religious sanction and ethical direction for their daily lives. Adapting for its own purposes the model of Roman political and military organization, and gaining, in the fourth century, imperial support, orthodox Christianity grew increasingly stable and enduring. Gnostic Christianity proved no match for the orthodox faith, either in terms of orthodoxy’s wide popular appeal, what Nock called its “perfect because unconscious correspondence to the needs and aspirations of ordinary humanity,”²⁷ or in terms of its effective organization. Both have ensured its survival through time. But the process of establishing orthodoxy ruled out every other option. To the impoverishment of Christian tradition, gnosticism, which offered alternatives to what became the main thrust of Christian orthodoxy, was forced outside.

The concerns of gnostic Christians survived only as a suppressed current, like a river driven underground. Such currents resurfaced throughout the Middle Ages in various forms of heresy; then, with the Reformation, Christian tradition again took on new and diverse forms. Mystics like Jacob Boehme, himself accused of heresy, and radical visionaries like George Fox, themselves unfamiliar, in all probability, with gnostic tradition, nevertheless articulated analogous interpretations of religious experience. But the great majority of the movements that emerged from the Reformation—Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian, Quaker—remained within the basic framework of orthodoxy established in the second century. All regarded the New Testament writings alone as authoritative; most accepted the orthodox creed and retained the Christian sacraments, even when they altered their form and interpretation.

Now that the Nag Hammadi discoveries give us a new perspective on this process, we can understand why certain creative persons throughout the ages, from Valentinus and Heracleon to Blake, Rembrandt, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, found themselves at the edges of orthodoxy. All were fascinated by the figure of Christ—his birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection: all returned constantly to Christian symbols to express their own experience. And yet they found themselves in revolt against orthodox institutions. An increasing number of people today share their experience. They cannot rest solely on the authority of the Scriptures, the apostles, the church—at least not without inquiring how that authority constituted itself, and what, if anything, gives it legitimacy. All the old questions—the original questions, sharply debated at the beginning of Christianity—are being reopened: How is one to understand the resurrection? What about women’s participation in priestly and episcopal office? Who was Christ, and how does he relate to the believer? What are the similarities between Christianity and other world religions?

That I have devoted so much of this discussion to gnosticism does not mean, as the casual reader might assume, that I advocate going back to gnosticism—much less that I “side with it” against orthodox Christianity. As a historian, of course, I find the discoveries at Nag Hammadi enormously exciting, since the evidence they offer opens a new perspective for understanding what fascinates me most—the history of Christianity. But the task of the historian, as I understand it, is not to advocate any side, but to explore the evidence—in this instance, to attempt to discover how Christianity originated. Furthermore, as a person concerned with religious questions, I find that rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian, the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of one’s own experience and that claimed for the Scriptures, the ritual, and the clergy?

When Muhammed ‘Alī smashed that jar filled with papyrus on the cliff near Nag Hammadi and was disappointed not to find gold, he could not have imagined the implications of his accidental find. Had they been discovered 1,000 years earlier, the gnostic texts almost certainly would have been burned for their heresy. But they remained hidden until the twentieth century, when our own cultural experience has given us a new perspective on the issues they raise. Today we read them with different eyes, not merely as “madness and blasphemy” but as Christians in the first centuries experienced them—a powerful alternative to what we know as orthodox Christian tradition. Only now are we beginning to consider the questions with which they confront us.