Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (112 page)

So too with the followers of the Savior. Their material flesh is not what matters. What matters is the spirit within. And so, as Havelaar notes, the crucifixion of Jesus is “an example of the repudiation of the material world.”
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One of the striking features of the passage is the Savior who laughs at his own crucifixion. We meet this image elsewhere, most notably in the Gospel of Basilides, unfortunately no longer extant, but mentioned by Irenaeus (
Adv. Haer
. 1.24.4), and in the Second Treatise of the Great Seth (7.62.27–64.20). The idea that the Savior could be killed was, for many Gnostics, completely risible. Jesus laughs for other, but related, reasons four times in the Gospel of Judas. A comparable motif occurs in the “Gnostic” chapters of the Acts of John, where John is portrayed as laughing at the wooden cross. A similar view, without such humor, occurs in the Letter of Peter to Philip, which insists that Jesus was “a stranger to these sufferings” (8.139.21–11). As with this final instance, the authority of such views was significantly heightened when expressed not simply as a trustworthy revelation of secret knowledge, but pseudepigraphically in the name of one who would know. In the Coptic Apocalypse it is to Simon Peter, Jesus’ closest disciple, the foundation on which, allegedly, the (proto-orthodox) church was built, that Jesus reveals his true spiritual nature and the complete insignificance of his material, fleshly existence.

It is central to the understanding of the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter that its two parts—the revelation of Jesus concerning the false teachers of the church and the vision of Peter revealing the false understandings of Christ’s material nature—are linked thematically by ideas of knowledge and ignorance. The church leaders who are misled and who mislead others are like those who crucify Jesus, thinking that they know the truth when in fact they are misled by appearances. The ultimate reality is not material but spiritual. The church leaders are blind and ignorant, people of the flesh instead of the spirit, devoted to the creator Elohim and so enslaved to the Law, rather than perceiving the true divine being who is the radiant savior.

These church leaders not only fail to understand the true God, thinking that he is Elohim, and Christ, thinking that he is a dead man: they also misunderstand Peter, who is the foundation for the “remnant” that has knowledge. Peter sees that Christ is not the “dead man” who was crucified, but the living, laughing savior who is an incorporeal body (83.7) and who was “released” from his flesh (82.30). Just as God and Christ are falsely proclaimed by the proto-orthodox community, so too Peter is falsely claimed in support of the community’s errant theological and Christological views. The forgery of the book functions, then, not only to correct the proto-orthodox community in its doctrinal assertions but also to rob it of its apostolic foundation. The person claimed by the proto-orthodox as the guarantor of the truth of its message shows that this message is rooted in ignorance, blindness, and error.

Part of this error is the claim that truth was anticipated in the Scriptures given by the God of the Old Testament. In fact, prior to the coming of Christ “they did not find him, nor was he mentioned among any generation of the prophet. He has now appeared among these, in him who appeared, who is the Son of Man” (71.6–12). It is not the scriptures of Elohim that reveal Christ, as the proto-orthodox
insist. Only Christ himself reveals the truth of God. And it has nothing to do with the material world of the creator.

This pseudonymous attack on materiality, on the significance of Jesus’ real bodily death, and on the world of the flesh comes to us as a minority voice among the extant Christian writings of antiquity. As we will see, the proto-orthodox position is, as one would expect, far better represented in our surviving remains. The one-time vitality of this Gnostic view should not be underplayed, however. The orthodox response was so virulent and extensive precisely because of the attractiveness and widespread effect that the opposition to the flesh had in the early Christian movement. Some of the proto-orthodox response came likewise in forgeries, some of them penned in the name of Peter, including at least one other apocalypse that he allegedly wrote.

The Book of Thomas the Contender comes to us as tractate 7 of codex 2 from Nag Hammadi. It is generally recognized as a late-second- or early-third-century work, whose major theme, in the words of John Turner, is “unbending asceticism that condemns anything to do with the flesh, supplemented by the Platonic-Hermetic-Gnostic theme of salvation by self-knowledge.”
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The book allegedly records the words of Thomas as written by “Matthias,” who could be either Matthew the disciple and Gospel writer or Matthias the apostle elected to replace Judas Iscariot after the resurrection. In either case, the work is pseudepigraphic, or, rather, doubly pseudepigraphic, as it purports not only to be written by an apostle but also to record faithfully the words delivered to another (Thomas). Thomas and Matthew are linked in other Thomasine writings (cf. Gospel of Thomas, 13) and other Gnostic works, such as the Pistis Sophia, where Mariam exclaims that Jesus secretly taught his revelation to Philip, Thomas, and Matthew (1.43).

The book comprises two parts, a lengthy dialogue between Jesus and his twin brother Judas Thomas, and a monologue delivered by Jesus (the final two-fifths of the text).
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The discussion is placed just before Jesus’ ascension (138.23). In a way reminiscent of the Gospel of Thomas, it begins with “the secret words that the savior spoke to Judas Thomas” (138.1–2).
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In this case, however, it is clear that Thomas is to be understood specifically as the brother of Jesus, as Jesus addresses
“brother Thomas” (138.4) and indicates that “it has been said that you are my twin and true companion” (138.7–8). There is obviously no one better to receive the Savior’s ultimate teachings about this world and the humans in it.
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The revelation is almost entirely about gnosis, self-knowledge:

I will reveal to you the things you have pondered in your mind … examine yourself and learn who you are, in what way you exist, and how you will come to be. … It is not fitting that you be ignorant of yourself. … For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge about the depth of the all. (138.6–18)

Whether or not one ultimately considers the book “Gnostic,” there are certainly Gnostic terms and concepts in it: “depth of the All” (138.18), the Pleroma (138.34), the doctrine for the perfect (139.10), “you will find rest” (145.11); the Archon in charge of this world who will punish those attached to it (142.26–143.7). But ultimately there is no Gnostic mythology either explicated or underlying the views of the text. Instead, it presents a view of rigorous asceticism grounded in Platonic understandings of image versus reality, and a concordant denigration of the flesh. The book may well have been amenable to a Gnostic construal, and could conceivably have been produced, in its current state, by a Gnostic author, but its concerns are not distinctively Gnostic.

Of greater importance for my purposes here is the centrality of the “flesh” to the text. This can be seen at the outset, when Thomas asks to be told about the things that are invisible, leading Jesus to deliberate on the physical, visible (human) body that will decay, controlled by the blaze of lust and destined to perish and be lost (138.10–139.12, 33–37). This then is the point of the entire treatise; it is an attack on the flesh and on those who cave in to its fiery desires. And so human bodies are said to be “bestial” (139.6). Jesus teaches that the body survives by eating other creatures and so changes; but anything that changes “will decay and perish, and has no hope of life from then on” (139.4–6). Moreover, bodies come into being through intercourse, just as happens with “beasts”; as a result humans cannot beget anything that is nonbestial (139.8–11). The goal of existence is for the “elect” to “abandon bestiality,” that is, escape their fleshly
bodies (139.28–31). For in fact, “the vessel of their flesh will dissolve.” And so Jesus pronounces a “woe” on those “who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish” (143.10–11).

One problem with those who live in and for the flesh is that they “suppose that the imperishable will perish too” (143.12–13); that is, they think that this life in the flesh is all there is, and that nothing survives the death of the body. And so Jesus pronounces a series of twelve woes on those who give themselves up to the desires of the flesh, who hope in the flesh, who are in the grip of the burning of lust of their flesh, who engage in sexual intercourse and do not receive the true doctrine (143.9–145.1). These woes are followed by three blessings for those who have “prior knowledge of the stumbling blocks,” who are persecuted for their message, but who “will be released from every bondage” (145.1–8). Jesus’ final exhortation sums up his urgent message:

Watch and pray that you not come to be in the flesh, but rather that you come forth from the bondage of the bitterness of this life. … For when you come forth from the sufferings and passions of the body, you will receive rest from the good one, and you will reign with the king. (145.8–14)

As intimated in some of the preceding quotations, a controlling metaphor of the work is the image of “fire.” The illuminating power of the “light” of the sun is set in contrast with the “fire” that burns within human bodies and makes them drunk in mind and deranged in soul (139.33–37). This fire is the bodily passions, “The lust that scorches the spirits of men” (140.3–4). Ironically, this fire will “blind them with insatiable lust and burn their souls” (140.25–26). It is an imitative fire, which gives people an “illusion of truth” but in fact leads them to be imprisoned “in a dark sweetness” (140.21–24).

This passage is nothing so much as an exposition of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: the sun, the fire, the people bound by chains who do not recognize the true light because of the effects of the fire, the ultimate contrast of images versus reality, and so on (
Republic
, 514–20). The heavy Platonism of the Book of Thomas is, in fact, evident throughout, as elucidated in particular by Turner: “In the Book of Thomas, the teaching of Jesus has become Platonized, while Plato’s teaching on the soul has become Christianized.” The “metaphysical axis” of the book is the Platonic opposition between appearance and reality; its hortatory force is the insistence that the soul must be set free from the bodily appetites that constrain it.
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In addition, there is a good deal of eschatological incentive in the piece, which Turner argues is also platonically inspired, but which may as well have come from the early Christian tradition. “Only a little while longer” and that which is visible “will dissolve” (141:14–15). When it does, “shapeless shades …. will forever
dwell upon the corpses in pain and corruption of soul” (141.16–18). Moreover, people “will be thrown down to the abyss and be afflicted by the torment of the bitterness of their evil nature” because they “fulfill the lust of their fathers” (141.32–34). Those who do not come to the truth will find that the fire they follow (the lust of their flesh) will be “the fire that will burn them” (142.2). Those who reject the message of Jesus will be turned over to “the ruler above who rules over all the powers as their king” and he will cast them into the abyss and imprison them in “a narrow dark place” (142.28–35). These souls will be scourged with fire and find fire wherever they turn (142.42–143.7). The flesh may be destined for extinction, but the fire of its passions will burn forever.

It is clear that the forger of this text was involved in some kind of community conflict. The “woes” that are leveled against others are directed toward members of the larger community, those who refuse to engage in the ascetic life that Christ demands and instead value the flesh and so indulge in its passions. This polemical context is seen as well in 141.19–143.7, where Thomas wonders what to say to the “blind” people who do not agree with the teaching. The Savior replies that scoffers will devour each other and suffer horribly in the afterlife. And in fact there is little reason to try to convert the outsiders. This document is meant for those inside the ascetic subgroup of the community; those outside are “ignorant fools” and “blind,” and so beyond the pale. They place their hope in the flesh, and for that reason they will be punished forever, not raised to eternal glory. It is those who escape the flesh, and the demands of its desires, who will be liberated to enjoy a blessed afterlife.

The authority for these views is ensured by the identity of its authors. These are the words delivered directly by Jesus himself to his twin brother Thomas, faithfully recorded by the apostle Matthias.

We have already examined sayings of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas in chapters dealing with eschatology and anti-Judaism. A third and final set of polemics evident in the text involves sayings that denigrate the flesh and the material world it inhabits. Six of the 114 sayings merit investigation.

When Jesus claims that “If the flesh came into being because of the spirit, it is a marvel”
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he is almost certainly not referring to the “Holy Spirit” but to the spirit that resides within humans, set here in contrast to the human flesh.
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It is difficult to imagine that flesh arose because of spirit, for example as a place of housing or imprisonment. But the option, that the “spirit came into existence because
of the body,” is beyond imagining. That would be a “marvel of marvels.” Already Johannes Leipoldt recognized that this alternative does not mean that hearers should be struck with awe that such a thing has happened; on the contrary, “marvel of marvels” indicates that this is a hypothetical possibility that the saying rejects.
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Read in this way, the three parts of the saying cohere and form an original unity, contra Plisch, who contends that part three of the saying—“I marvel at this, how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty”—as incongruous must not originally have belonged with the other two.
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The parts do in fact belong together, and they function to show the denigration of the flesh as inferior to the spirit. “This great wealth” is the spirit; “this poverty” is the flesh—a completely impoverished existence. It is a marvel to the author that the greatness of spirit has made its home in such a pathetic vessel.