The Gnostic Gospels (28 page)

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 wept
²²
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.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.
J. M. Robinson, Introduction, in
The Nag Hammadi Library
(New York, 1977), 21–22. Hereafter cited as
NHL.

2.
Ibid.
, 22.

3.
Gospel of Thomas
32.10–11, in
NHL
118.

4.
Ibid.
, 45.29–33, in
NHL
126.

5.
Gospel of Philip
63.32–64.5, in
NHL
138.

6.
Apocryphon of John
1.2–3, in NHL 99.

7.
Gospel of the Egyptians
40.12–13, in
NHL
195.

8.
See discussion by W. Schneemelcher in E. Hennecke, W. Schneemelcher,
New Testament Apocrypha
(transl, from
Neutestamentliche Apocryphen)
, (Philadelphia, 1963), I, 97–113. Hereafter cited as
NT APOCRYPHA
. J. A. Fitzmyer, “The Oxyrhynchus Logoi of Jesus and the Coptic Gospel According to Thomas,” in
Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament
(Missoula, 1974), 355–433.

9.
Robinson, Introduction, in
NHL
13–18.

10.
Irenaeus,
Libros Quinque Adversus Haereses
3.11.9. Hereafter cited as
AH
.

11.
M. Malanine, H.-Ch. Puech, G. Quispel, W. Till, R. McL. Wilson,
Evangelium Veritatis
(Zürich and Stuttgart, 1961), Introduction.

12.
H. Koester, Introduction to the
Gospel of Thomas
,
NHL
117.

13.
Testimony of Truth
45:23–48:18, in
NHL
411–412.

14.
Thunder, Perfect Mind
13:16–14:15, in
NHL
271–272.

15.
Irenaeus,
AH
Praefatio.

16.
Irenaeus,
AH
3.11.9.

17.
H. M. Schenke,
Die Herkunft des sogennanten Evangelium Veritatis
(Berlin, 1958; Göttingen, 1959).

18.
Hippolytus,
Refutationis Omnium Haeresium
1. Hereafter cited as REF.

19.
See F. Wisse, “Gnosticism and Early Monasticism in Egypt,” in
Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas
(Göttingen, 1978), 431–440.

20.
Theodotus, cited in Clemens Alexandrinus,
Excerpta ex Theodoto
78.2. Hereafter cited as
EXCERPTA.

21.
Hippolytus,
REF
8.15.1–2. Emphasis added.

22.
Gospel of Thomas
35.4–7 and 50.28–30, conflated, in
NHL
119 and 129.

23.
E. Conze, “Buddhism and Gnosis,” in
Le Origini dello Gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina 13–18 Aprile 1966
(Leiden, 1967),
665
.

24.
Hippolytus,
REF
1.24.

25.
Conze, “Buddhism and Gnosis,”
665–666.

26.
One scholar who, even before the Nag Hammadi find,
did
suspect such diversity is W. Bauer, whose book,
Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum
, first appeared in 1934. It was translated and published in English as
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity
(Philadelphia, 1971).

27.
See, for example, Bauer,
Orthodoxy and Heresy
, 111–240.

28.
See discussion by H.-Ch. Puech, in
NT APOCRYPHA
259 f.

29.
Ibid.
, 250 f.

30.
Ibid.
, 244.

31.
H. Jonas,
Journal of Religion
(1961) 262, cited in J. M. Robinson, “The Jung Codex: The Rise and Fall of a Monopoly,” in
Religious Studies Review
3.1 (January 1977), 29.

32.
For a more complete account of the events briefly sketched here, see Robinson, “The Jung Codex,” 17–30.

33.
La bourse égyptienne
(June 10, 1949), cited in Robinson, “The Jung Codex,” 20.

34.
G. Quispel,
Jung—een mens voor deze tijd
(Rotterdam, 1975), 85.

35.
Robinson, “The Jung Codex,” 24 f.

36.
E. Pagels,
The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis
(Nashville, 1973);
The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters
(Philadelphia, 1975).

37.
E. Pagels, with H. Koester, “Report on the Dialogue of the Savior” (CG III.5), in R. McL. Wilson,
Nag Hammadi and Gnosis
(Leiden, 1978), 66–74.

38.
G. Garitte,
Le Muséon
(1960), 214, cited in Robinson, “The Jung Codex,” 29.

39.
Tertullian,
Adversus Valentinianos
7.

40.
A. von Harnack,
History of Dogma
, trans, from 3rd German ed. (New York, 1961), I.4, 228.

41.
Ibid.
, 229.

42.
A. D. Nock,
Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background
, 2nd ed. (New York, 1964), xvi.

43.
W. Bousset,
Kyrios Christos
(1st ed., Göttingen, 1913; 2nd ed., 1921; English trans., 1970), 245.

44.
R. Reitzenstein,
Poimandres: Studien zur griechisch-ägyptischen und frühchristlichen Literatur
(Leipzig, 1904; repr. Darmstadt, 1966), 81. See also
Das iranische Erlösungmysterium
(Leipzig, 1921).