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http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5956.html
Most anyone interested in such topics as creation mythology, Jungian theory, or the idea of "secret teachings" in ancient Judaism and Christianity has found "gnosticism" compelling. Yet the term "gnosticism," which often connotes a single rebellious movement against the prevailing religions of late antiquity, gives the false impression of a monolithic religious phenomenon. Here Michael Williams challenges the validity of the widely invoked category of ancient "gnosticism" and the ways it has been described. Presenting such famous writings and movements as the Apocryphon of John and Valentinian Christianity, Williams uncovers the similarities and differences among some major traditions widely categorized as gnostic. He provides an eloquent, systematic argument for a more accurate way to discuss these interpretive approaches.The modern construct "gnosticism" is not justified by any ancient self-definition, and many of the most commonly cited religious features that supposedly define gnosticism phenomenologically turn out to be questionable. Exploring the sample sets of "gnostic" teachings, Williams refutes generalizations concerning asceticism and libertinism, attitudes toward the body and the created world, and alleged features of protest, parasitism, and elitism. He sketches a fresh model for understanding ancient innovations on more "mainstream" Judaism and Christianity, a model that is informed by modern research on dynamics in new religious movements and is freed from the false stereotypes from which the category "gnosticism" has been constructed.
"Rare is the book on gnosticism that is thoroughly grounded in the primary sources in the ancient languages, widely conversant with the secondary literature, controlled and sophisticated in its historical method--and still intelligible and interesting, not only for experts in its field, but also for religious historians and educated readers in general. Michael Williams's Rethinking `Gnosticism' is such a book. It is essential reading for scholars of ancient Christianity and for anyone who wishes to use the terms `gnostic' and `gnosticism,' but it can be read with profit by all historians concerned with issues of methodology in studying religious people of the past."--Church History
"There can hardly be a category more misused in contemporary scholarly and not-so-scholarly discourse than `gnosticism,' so it was probably inevitable that a serious scholar would come along with an argument for the abandonment of the category altogether. In this provocative book Williams does just that."--Religious Studies Review
Endorsement:
"Michael Williams presents the first treatment of gnosticism in book form that endeavors, and succeeds, to get out of beaten tracks by questioning the very definition and description of this phenomenon. He conducts a detailed analysis of the clichés that have been in circulation for decades and shows convincingly how they have contributed to a distorted and biased approach to the sources. This book will be epoch-making for the field of gnostic studies and should attract a very large reading audience."--Paul-Hubert Poirier, Université Laval
http://www.necessaryprose.com/rethinking.htm
Gnosticism:
Rethinking the Mother of All Heresies
Rethinking "Gnosticism":
An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category
By Michael Allen Williams
Princeton UP, 335 pages
If one seeks out a quick definition of ancient gnosticism, one is liable to get something like the following:
Gnosticism:
A religious movement that flourished in the Roman Empire between the second and fourth centuries C.E. Identified as heretical by both Christians and Jews, the gnostics taught that the world was created not by the true God but by a lesser, deficient being called the Demiurge, who ruled over his creation, our world, with the help of administrative powers called Archons. The realm of the true God (the Pleroma, or "Fullness") lay beyond this faulty creation, and it was the goal of the gnostics to escape the trap of this world and return there.
According to the gnostics, human beings contained a spark of true divinity that did not belong in this lesser creation, but would continually be reincarnated here unless redeemed by gnosis (the liberating knowledge of our true origins). Human beings were divided into three types: the spirituals (those predestined for salvation), the psychicals (those who could attain a kind of salvation through gnosis and various purifying practices) and the materials (those who by their nature were permanently tied to the material realm). Gnostic religion was thus characterized by a radical contempt both for the world (understood as a prison) and for the body (each individual's prison cell). Ancient sources show that this contempt led in some groups to a rigorous asceticism, in others to an equally rigorous licentiousness (since the laws of morality were merely part of the trap created by the Demiurge, some gnostics taught that the spiritually liberated must demonstrate their liberation by breaking as many of these laws as they could).
Christian gnostics understood Jesus to be a messenger of the true God, sent from the Pleroma to bring the liberating teachings of gnosis. They rejected the orthodox doctrine that Jesus died to atone for the sins of men. According to the gnostics, the evil in the world did not result from human sin, but rather from the Demiurge's faulty creation: i.e., the world was evil because its creator was evil. Whereas orthodox Christians accepted the Old Testament as part of their sacred scriptures, the gnostics saw in the Old Testament God a depiction of the Demiurge. Only Jesus was sent from the "Father," i.e. the true God.
Given its rigorous contempt for the world and its concomitant rejection of social norms, most scholars understand gnosticism to have been a religion of radical revolt. The Bogomils in eastern Europe and the medieval Cathars in the south of France are considered to be later incarnations of gnostic religion. A buried collection of ancient gnostic scriptures was discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Here in a few paragraphs is an example of how gnosticism is typically defined in university classes and encyclopedias. It is a presentation buttressed by such classic modern studies of gnosticism as Hans Jonas' book The Gnostic Religion. Through force of repetition it has become more or less standard. But is this definition really apt to the beliefs and practices of the ancient gnostics? How appropriate is it to what we find in the Nag Hammadi texts? After all, most of the elements of this definition were forged before the discovery of these writings. With actual gnostic writings now available, scholars should be able to come to a more nuanced understanding of gnosticism than was previously possible. Has their reading of the Nag Hammadi texts changed our understanding of this ancient religious movement?
In his book Rethinking "Gnosticism" Michael Allen Williams assesses the validity of such usual definitions and finds them seriously lacking. To read his study is to realize to what extent this thing called "gnosticism" is an amalgam of modern scholarly caricature and uncritical reliance on ancient heresiologists like Irenaeus and Epiphanius. Such reliance was maybe inevitable given the previous lack of original sources. But now with the wealth of gnostic gospels and treatises uncovered in Egypt, things have changed. Williams' work sets out to reveal the extent of the needed change.
Williams' overall methodology is simple: take the current scholarly presentations of gnostic religion and compare them point by point with what we actually find in the gnostics' writings. But also: take the ancient heresiologists' presentation of the gnostics and undertake a similar comparison. Do the gnostics' presentations of themselves in their writings correspond to the doctrines attributed to them by Irenaeus? Do they correspond to what we hear from the community of modern scholars? If not, why not?
If Williams is right, our idea of gnosticism as an ancient religion would not, in important respects, have been shared by the ancient gnostics themselves. Our understanding of gnostic doctrines and attitudes (to the body, to society, to ethics) has often put the stress in the wrong place. And our presentation of gnostic practices still relies on the heresiologists, even though their portrayals have been given the lie by the Nag Hammadi writings.
For one, gnosticism is usually presented as a world-denying religion of revolt: a religion adopted by outsiders in a state of rebellion against social norms. The gnostics were believed to have erected a barrier between themselves and the surrounding world by mechanically reversing dominant social values. This notion of the gnostics undertaking a kind of systematic denial of everything society held sacred grew mainly from select observations of gnostic readings of Hebrew scripture (for example, they frequently understood the serpent in the Garden of Eden in a positive way, while Yahweh, understood as the Demiurge, was seen negatively). But, as Williams points out, such instances of gnostic scriptural interpretation do not necessarily indicate a rebellious attitude to society at large. Using models developed from the sociological study of religious movements, Williams argues that in many cases the opposite was more likely true: that the gnostics were actually interpreting Judeo-Christian ideas of the divine in ways more in harmony with the dominant pagan society in which they lived. Williams' argument here is convincing. Our interpretation of the gnostic attitude as one of revolt against society has been foisted on us by the heresiologists, who themselves, for obvious reasons, sought to portray the gnostics as rebels against orthodoxy. To claim the gnostics were radical social deviants is thus anachronistic.
Williams likewise takes up the question of "gnostic determinism": the oft-repeated modern assertion that the gnostics believed mankind to be strictly divided into different types (the spirituals, the psychics, the materials) or different races (the race of Seth, the race of Cain), and that the doctrinal upshot of such divisions was that each individual's potential for salvation was understood to be already determined at birth. Williams shows that this modern notion of gnostic determinism is not supported by the original texts. A careful reading of the sources shows that one is not "born into" the race of Seth: rather it is a status one may attain or earn. The race of Seth is more a spiritual community than a biological "race" in our modern sense. Likewise with the division into three types: one's status as a spiritual is seen to be linked to one's behavior: one may lose this status through abandoning the truth, and thus to be born as a spiritual is no guarantee of salvation. The assertion that the ancient gnostics were elitists in the sense of believing themselves predestined to salvation (saved in essence) is misguided. Williams demonstrates that there was at least as much flexibility in these gnostic notions as there is in more recent Protestant doctrines of the elect.
With these remarks I've only scratched the surface of this subtle and wide-ranging study. Williams offers an important discussion of gnostic hermeneutics (their practice of Biblical interpretation) and reassesses gnostic notions of the body and how these might relate to the different doctrines of salvation. One abiding concern of Williams' book--and I've maybe been irresponsible in skirting it until now--is the appropriateness of the term "gnosticism" itself. On the basis of the many disadvantages Williams sees in the term--its vagueness as a category, the baggage it brings with it--he suggests scholars refer instead to "biblical demiurgical traditions" when discussing much of what is typically called "gnosticism." He seeks to demonstrate that 1) the ancient people we refer to as "gnostics" did not themselves use this term, and 2) modern scholars have long had difficulty establishing a stable set of characteristics for gnosticism: i.e., we still cannot define clearly what gnosticism is. The argument Williams finally puts forward is that the term has impeded our understanding of the ancient religious movements in question. It has led generations of scholars to grapple with false problems and construct arguments on the basis of unexamined preconceptions. This is a pretty serious charge to make. Whether or not Williams is right in these assertions--something I'm in no position to judge--it seems obvious that his book has brought forth much that is new in the field of "gnostic" studies. And it seems clear that many of his new perspectives on the "gnostics" grew directly from his attempts to think beyond the (academic or heresiological) category "gnosticism."
Williams' book is not for scholars only, however. Even a reader only slightly familiar with the Nag Hammadi texts can gain much from it. He helpfully begins the book with a chapter summarizing the myths or doctrines of four important "gnostic" traditions: the myth from The Apocryphon of John; the doctrine of the Valentinian teacher Ptolemy; the myth taught by Justin the Gnostic; and the teachings of Marcion. These four different examples are then referred to repeatedly in the remainder of the study in order to clarify this or that point. Williams has structured Rethinking Gnosticism in a way that allows him to write both for fellow scholars and the general reader. It is a successful strategy all around, one that makes the book fascinating reading for anyone interested in "gnosticism," the Nag Hammadi texts, or the history of Christianity.
Eric Mader
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2003/2003-07-26.html
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2003.07.26 Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-674-01071-X. $29.95.
Reviewed by Nicola Denzey, Bowdoin College (ndenzey@bowdoin.edu)
Word count: 2496 wordsAn unprepared reader might pick up What is Gnosticism? expecting either a primer or a definitive study of Gnosticism's nature and origins. But this book, written by one of the country's leading scholars of early Christianity, should not be mistaken for an introductory textbook. First of all, it never addresses what Gnosticism is. In a rather subversive move -- given the book's title -- King asserts that "Gnosticism" exists solely as a modern reification, a terminological construct deriving ultimately from an early Christian discourse of orthodoxy and heresy which has now taken on an independent existence. "My purpose in this book," King explains, "is to show how twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism has simultaneously reinscribed, elaborated, and deviated from this discourse" (54). The book assumes that readers will have at least a passing familiarity with the sources which have conventionally been called "Gnostic," as well as with contemporary terms of debate and prominent figures. This "ideal audience" of the learned and open-minded has much to gain from reading King's book. Casual readers, however, would likely find King's thesis -- like the book itself -- too sophisticated and too historiographically esoteric to sustain their interest.
Karen King taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles before moving to her current position as Professor of the History of Ancient Christianity at the Harvard University Divinity School. A highly respected scholar of Gnosticism, King's work has often focused on issues of gender. What is Gnosticism? is her second book to appear in 2003, taking its place next to her new translation of the Gospel of Mary (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003). Here, King identifies her primary research interests as "early Christian identity formation and the critique of current scholarly categories of analysis" (vii-viii). This book has been at least twenty years in the making; we have had tastes of her critical acumen in a series of articles on the topic of Gnosticism and identity formation which she has presented to a variety of scholarly audiences since 1993. Why is a book like King's timely? The past fifty years have witnessed a series of dramatic paradigm shifts in the Academy that have called for the revision and re-articulation of our discipline. The first of these historiographical and hermeneutical shifts which King chronicles is the rise of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule as distinct from Theology with its interested, invested focus, its fixed canon, and its implicit Christian supersessionism. The second shift was initiated by the discovery of a cache of hitherto unknown ancient Christian texts in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Because scholars prior to 1945 had only a very limited number of primary sources which early members of the Christian mainstream had termed "Gnostic," the Nag Hammadi treatises have had a profound impact on our understanding of early Christianity as richly diverse in doctrine and praxis. The third and most recent shift has been the re-evaluation of the History of Religions School by postcolonialist and postmodern scholarship, which drew into question its implicit Orientalism and colonialist orientation. For these three reasons, the work of generations of Gnosticism scholars -- built upon a limited number of primary sources and the polemical writings of a few early Christian heresiologists -- needed to be reassessed. More often than not, this examination has called for substantial revision.
The scope of King's book is ambitious, but necessarily so. She recognizes that it is impossible to take on the conceptual and definitional problem of Gnosticism without tackling the conceptual and definitional problem of "heresy," which then draws into question Christianity's discourse of orthodoxy. She notes, "...a discussion of the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy needs to include polemics aimed at pagans and Jews as well" (21). King then dedicates the book's eight chapters to evaluating and critiquing "the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy" in ancient sources, in the work of early twentieth-century scholars, and in more contemporary scholarship. The book addresses the process of early Christian identity formation as a whole, with results both cogent and incisive. It is refreshing to read an approach that neither marginalizes Judaism or paganism, nor places Christianity in high relief against otherwise "insufficient" religious options in the ancient world.
In her first chapter, "Why Is Gnosticism So Hard to Define?" King outlines two overarching scholarly approaches to Gnosticism, one genealogical and one typological. The first approach locates the origins and developments of Gnosticism over time by looking to and comparing Gnosticism with so-called Oriental religions on the one hand and "Christianity" (i.e. "orthodoxy") on the other. The second approach draws upon phenomenological analyses of primarily literary material to develop a set of coherent and definitive terms, characteristics, and tendencies. Both approaches, King warns us, went considerably astray; most significantly, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts rendered genealogical and typological analyses of Gnosticism largely moot. Central, too, has been the problem of Gnosticism's infelicitous relationship with Christianity as a whole. King observes, "the problem of defining Gnosticism has been and continues to be primarily an aspect of the ongoing project of defining and maintaining a normative Christianity" (18). In the final words of the chapter, King clarifies the task that lies ahead for the remainder of the volume:
My purpose ... is to consider the ways in which the early Christian polemicists' discourse of orthodoxy and heresy has been intertwined with twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism in order to show where and how that involvement has distorted our analysis of the ancient texts. At stake is not only the capacity to write a more accurate history of ancient Christianity in all its multiformity, but also our capacity to engage critically the ancient politics of religious difference rather than unwittingly reproduce its strategies and results (19).Accordingly, Chapter Two, "Gnosticism as Heresy," focuses on the "rhetorical consolidation" of the broad variety of religious options available to individuals in the ancient world into three recognizable, mutually exclusive, and easily definable groups: Jews, Christians, and pagans (22). What was at stake, King observes, was the discourse of difference and sameness that was crucial to Christian identity-building. In order to exclude those Christians whom members of a nascent orthodoxy opposed, members of this group had to make their competitors look like outsiders; certain doctrinal or practical differences needed to be fabricated, just as real differences needed to be exaggerated. As part of the same strategy of distinction, similarities -- whether between Christians and Jews, Christians and pagans, or different Christian teachers -- were either suppressed or maliciously miscast. So successful were certain Christians in this endeavor, King notes, that even now the terms "heresy" and "orthodoxy" imply only difference, not similarity (23). These two terms are best understood as the consequence of an evaluative process that aimed to "articulate the meaning of self while simultaneously silencing and excluding others within the group" (24). King invokes the examples of Tertullian's Prescription against Heretics, and Irenaeus' Against the Heresies, in a set of rhetorical attitudes she categorizes as "antisyncretism." This discourse functioned to define and defend boundaries (34) and to contribute to the "master narrative" of Christian decline from a time of pure origins to the doctrinal divisiveness of the second century and beyond.Chapters three and four are explicitly historiographical, as King works through foundational figures and movements of early twentieth-century scholarship on religion. Chapter Three investigates Adolf von Harnack, Chapter Four, the early History of Religions school. Here, modern readers owe perhaps the greatest debt to King, who provides intelligent and useful summaries and analyses of works which are infamously impenetrable and more often than not, only available in their original German. This extended examination of early twentieth-century historiography is central for King to prove her thesis: that modern scholarship has only served to reinscribe a discourse of orthodoxy and heresy established by certain Christians of the second and third centuries. King points out that as a theologian and scholar, for instance, Harnack was perfectly aware of the manifold forms of ancient Christianity, yet like his orthodox predecessors Irenaeus and Tertullian, he employed the term "Gnosticism" as a rhetorical tool to produce a normative vision of Christianity (68).
Chapter five, "Gnosticism Reconsidered," is devoted to a discussion of Walter Bauer --particularly his landmark study Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity -- and to Hans Jonas' Gnosis und Spätantike Geist. King paints Bauer as an innovator, the first to develop an alternative model of Christian historiography away from the master narrative of Christian supersessionism. Jonas, rather differently, was important for his typological reduction of Gnosticism to a series of qualities or characteristics. His work on the "Gnostic experience of self and world" (117) defined Gnosticism as a transhistorical religious movement characterized primarily by the experience of existential alienation and world-abnegation. Thus Jonas proposed seven qualities of Gnosticism: gnosis, dynamic character (pathomorphic crisis), mythological character, dualism, impiety, artificiality, and unique historical locus (120). King discusses each one of these in turn, pointing out their difficulties and shortcomings. The chapter ends with a discussion of the German History of Religions scholar Carsten Colpe. It is not clear what ties these three figures together, however; overall, the chapter division here -- as elsewhere in the book -- seems more arbitrary than seamlessly sewn together into one master narrative.
The last three chapters of the book discuss Gnosticism scholarship following the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts. Here, King spends some time discussing the various sources themselves, particularly the manner in which they defy the tidy systems of classification and categorization established by earlier generations of scholars. Indeed, King is quick to point out that even post-Nag Hammadi typologies of Gnosticism such as "Sethianism" and "Valentinianism" strain to maintain coherence when applied to the tremendous doctrinal diversity we find reflected in Nag Hammadi's forty-six texts. As King notes, "the problem with variety is not variety itself; the problem is trying to force multiform, irregularly shaped objects into square essentialist definitional holes" (168). These chapters are particularly enjoyable because they move away from historiography to the ancient sources themselves; however, it is difficult to assess how a reader not well-versed in the Nag Hammadi texts would follow King's summaries and arguments.
Readers will inevitably compare What is Gnosticism? to Michael Williams' Rethinking "Gnosticism": Arguments for Dismantling a Dubious Category (1996). Williams' provocative work -- which quickly became obligatory reading for all serious students of ancient Gnosticism -- calls for the abandonment of the term "Gnosticism" altogether, stating that it is best not to imagine that anything like "Gnosticism" or "the Gnostic religion" ever existed. Instead, Williams suggests that we remain cognizant of the many diverse groups and individuals that originally comprised Christianity before they were marginalized and de-legitimated by an emergent orthodoxy. It is obvious thatRethinking "Gnosticism" and What is Gnosticism? were written contemporaneously and that King and Williams were deeply engaged in dialogue with one another. They each carefully and graciously acknowledge one another in their forewords; it is clear that their connections have fostered genuine respect and mutual fondness rather than competition. Still, since Rethinking "Gnosticism" was first to appear, the problem for King is whether or not What is Gnosticism? sufficiently advances the approach both scholars bring to the fore, and whether or not she successfully treats the same topic in a way that complements, rather than competes with, Williams' book. As a partial answer to this issue, it is important to note that for all their topical similarity and virtually identical theses, What is Gnosticism? and Rethinking "Gnosticism" are very different books, because the two authors work very differently. Williams applies previously established typological categories of "Gnosticism" to ancient materials, thus highlighting their insufficiencies for understanding ancient materials on their own terms. King carefully builds a sort of historiographic genealogy and keeps her focus consistently on the last century's scholarship, telling the story of how the reification of "Gnosticism" came to be from within the broader social and intellectual matrix of twentieth-century interests and movements. The books differ, too, in their suggestions for future work. In place of "Gnosticism," Williams suggests we adopt when appropriate the more specific term "biblical demiurgical" (Williams, 265). But King rightly points out the problems with this term: it is cumbersome, and it persists in the same process of naming and categorizing she proposes we abandon altogether (168, 214-16). Still, she spends more time critiquing scholars and scholarship than she does solving the essential problem to which the book is devoted. Is there a future for studying Gnosticism without "Gnosticism"? She herself raises the question in her eighth and final chapter, but ends it reflexively: "It is important not so much to eliminate the term per se, but to recognize and correct the ways in which reinscribing the discourses of orthodoxy and heresy distort our reading and reconstruction of ancient religion" (218).
Ultimately, the reader of What is Gnosticism? is left questioning why King doggedly pursues Gnosticism' s historiographical genealogy. What precisely is at stake? And how well does she convey this? King states at the outset that she will reexamine how twentieth-century scholarship of Gnosticism has reinscribed a second-century discourse, but most of her detailed examples (Harnack, Jonas, Bousset, Reitzenstein, Bauer) harken from the first half of the century. The sole contemporary scholar of Gnosticism to receive a detailed discussion is Michael Williams, leaving readers with the impression that no one else is doing the sort of work King advocates. Because she withholds from the reader what the "state of the debate" truly is, she leaves the impression that hers is the sole clarion call for a new hermeneutic. This is misleading, because King's work not so much presents new material as it presents for a broader audience the methodological approach already well entrenched in the academy, certainly among specialists of Nag Hammadi and early Christianity. Perhaps, though, King would argue that there are only a few scholars who take this approach for granted, and this book is clearly not written for them.
While this book tears down the scaffolding upon which many earlier studies of Gnosticism have been built, King stops short of offering a concrete new direction, though her final chapter and "Note on Methodology" seems to suggest that such a direction lies in adopting postmodern and postcolonial reading strategies. It would have been enlightening and stimulating to see examples of what such a new hermeneutic, applied to the Nag Hammadi writings either individually or as a corpus, might yield; there are indeed recent articles and monographs out there from which to draw, but these are neglected. Because she does not address the work of modern scholars of early Christianity who likewise adhere to the New Historicism, King effectively flattens the background, placing her own methodological convictions in stark relief against a century's worth of essentially flawed scholarship. Still, as the only full-length study of the scholarship of Gnosticism that exists, there is surely a place for King's volume. Readers can follow the thread of a story ably told about a relatively new academic discipline now facing the challenge of modernity.
http://www.oup.com/obso/focus/focus_on_gnosticism/
Focus On Gnosticism
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Gnosticism
Stevan Davies
Professor of Religious Studies
Misericordia UniversityWalk into any large bookstore and you will discover a few shelves of books labeled "Christian" or "Buddhist" or "Jewish" while next to them you will see several shelves with the vague label "New Age" or "Spirituality." Today many people have left the comfort of the churches or synagogues they grew up in and have decided to understand religion for themselves, to be "spiritual" rather than to be part of any organized religion, perhaps to combine ideas from Buddhism and Judaism and Catholicism into a new synthesis that they create themselves. In ancient times, mainly in the first through the fourth centuries, religious thinkers of this sort were called "Gnostics." In roughly 180 CE Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul (now Lyon, France) wrote a long savage attack against the Gnostics entitled "The Refutation and Overthrow of the Knowledge (Gnosis) Falsely So Called," in which he says angrily that "since their teachings and traditions are different, and the newer ones among them claim to be constantly finding something new, and working out what no one ever thought of before, it is hard to describe their views." Irenaeus was certainly right about that.
Like today's New Age writers, ancient Gnostic writers delighted in coming up with new theories, highly variable creation myths, creative salvation schemes and imaginative descriptions of supernatural realms. Because the Gnostic texts contain such a diversity of ideas, scholars sometimes despair of ever coming up with a clear and useful definition of Gnosticism. Michael Williams has argued that the term "Gnosticism" is so overloaded with diverse meanings, so contradictory in the ways it is used by scholars, and so negative in its connotation when used by Christian clergy, that we probably should not use the label "Gnosticism" at all. I think that Williams is correct, yet I will continue on here to try and discuss Gnosticism in a meaningful way, while urging you to bear in mind that there is a great deal of variation in Gnostic thought that will not be reflected in the relatively straightforward account I will provide.
The word Gnosticism comes from the Greek word "gnosis," which means "knowledge." The reason that Gnostics made "gnosis" their primary category is that for them salvation depended on correct knowledge. One might immediately ask, "salvation from what?" and "knowledge of what?"
Gnosticism postulates that human beings have divinity within them because a divine soul or divine wisdom permeates us. However, they observed, hardly anyone seems to know this. To know that you are fundamentally divine reveals to you that you are also fundamentally trapped in a non-divine material environment filled with demonic forces. If people are inherently divine, and if our divinity is trapped within a world filled with demonic forces, the god who created this world cannot be the same God who is the divinity within us. There must be a higher God in a higher realm than this one. Salvation, then, is an escape from this world into the world of the God beyond the creator god and demons of this world.
In order to escape from this world to the realm of the true God we need to understand how that divinity got trapped here in the first place. This is the essential Gnostic "gnosis," knowing how it came to be that we are God trapped in this world. If we can understand the cosmic process by which we came to be here, we can reverse that process and go back to whence we came. Understanding that cosmic process is the fundamental point of Gnostic mythology, which is a mythology of creation that describes the devolution of God into us.
Many ancient Gnostic manuscripts depict this process, which Irenaus called their attempts to "work out what no one ever thought before." But there is one "locus classicus," of the Gnostic myth that is found in a book called the "Apocryphon Johannis" or, in English, "The Secret Book of John." The Secret Book of John was probably written by Jewish Gnostics in the first century CE, or even a century before. While it is critical of the Jewish God, its terminology and mythic motifs and biblical citations show that it comes from a Jewish cultural background. In the early second century CE Christians revised it slightly to make it Christian; Jesus appears at its beginning and its end and Jesus is now the name of the revealer of Gnostic truth. There are no fewer than four surviving manuscripts of the Secret Book of John, three found in the great collection of Gnostic texts called the Nag Hammadi library and one in what is called the Berlin Gnostic Codex. In addition Irenaeus includes a summary of it in his anti-gnostic tract. If there is a single basic Gnostic text, the Secret Book of John is it.
Here is a brief summary of the Secret Book of John. First we hear of an unimaginable, indescribable perfect God, the being (beyond being) called Brahman in Hinduism, or Ein Sof in mystical Judaism. The Secret Book of John goes on at some length to describe how indescribable God is. Second we hear about the mystical structures of the divine mind, how God's mind contains a central realm of providence called Barbelo, and four subordinate categories of divine activity—truth, incorruptibility, foreknowledge, and everlasting life—then how further subordinate categories of divine being, mainly mental, come into existence. The Secret Book of John's description of the mind of God, called the fullness or, in Greek, the "pleroma," is conceptual and therefore below the level of the indescribable God. Third, we are told that Sophia, the Wisdom of God, seeks to know God objectively. But this leads to crisis because God is purely subjective. God's Wisdom imagines God and, although an imaginary God is unreal, it yet takes on a kind of inferior illusory being of its own outside of God's realm. This lower god has the name Yaldabaoth and is to be identified with Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. Fourth, Yaldabaoth, who does have a portion of divine spirit from his mother, Sophia, creates a universe populated by all sorts of demonic creatures when, to his amazement, the full mind of God reveals itself as a human being in the heavens. Yaldabaoth constructs a material version of the heavenly human being and puts the divine spirit into it to make it mobile. But, surprise! It was a trick, for now, if the human being can realize its divine origin and return above, the divine spirit will return with it and thereby the realm of Yaldabaoth will become devoid of divine spirit and cease to be. Fifth, in self-defense Yaldabaoth makes the human being ignorant of its origins. But the divine mind sends down a messenger (Jesus, in the Christian version of the tale) to give human beings true "gnosis" by which they can go back to the perfect divine realm.
Whew. The Secret Book of John may be bizarre (and there is a great deal more to it that I have left out here) but it is ultimately a negative reworking of the Biblical story of Genesis, taking the point of view that while the story behind Genesis is true, the version written into the Bible by Moses is mistaken. We hear several times in the Secret Book of John that we should understand that it was "not as Moses wrote," but as some other thing. Moses is taken to be a mistaken interpreter of the fundamental myth. For Gnosticism, the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15–17) was the tree of gnosis, and people should eat from it. Wicked Yaldabaoth forbade this and then walled off the garden and the tree after Eve did the right thing (led by a divinely empowered serpent) by eating from that Tree (Genesis 3:1–24). The story in Genesis is wholly reversed through Gnostic interpretation.
From the Gnostic perspective, Jesus is a divine being sent from the realm of the higher God into this world to inform the trapped divine elements within human beings of their true nature and origin. Accordingly, Jesus is from some entirely other world than this one and therefore the Gospel of John was particularly interesting to Gnostics because in that Gospel Jesus says repeatedly that he is not of this demonic world of lies but from another world of light and truth (Jn 12:44–46, 17:14–16). The idea of a revealer coming from a world above that is infinitely superior to this demonic world below makes the Gospel of John very open to Gnostic interpretation.
Some have said that the Gospel of Thomas is gnostic, but they are mistaken. They observe correctly that in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus sometimes says that people have divine light within them, e.g. "There is light within a man of light and he lights up all of the world. If he is not a light there is darkness," (saying 24) or "When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you," (saying 70), and certainly Gnostics would have agreed with those passages. But overall the Gospel of Thomas is not Gnostic because it affirms that the Kingdom of God is now and has been from the beginning spread out upon this world, although people do not see it (saying 113). While Gnosticism regards the world as an enimical place of entrapment and declares that God's kingdom is beyond this world, the Gospel of Thomas denies this by mocking (in saying 3) the idea that the Kingdom is in heaven (if so, "the birds will be there before you are!") rather than right here now. (For more information, see the new article on the Gospel of Thomas.)
The success of orthodox Christianity over Gnostic Christianity stemmed in part from its organizational superiority. In establishing an invariant set of beliefs through creedal conferences such as the one in Nicea (325 CE), the range of possible Christian ideas was pinned down to a defined set. Gnosticism's wild creativity worked against its success as an organized religion. Eventually orthodox Christianity defined Gnosticism as a heresy that first Roman and then medieval Catholic police power would work to exterminate. In 367CE the Egyptian bishop Athanasius of Alexandria ordered his monks to destroy "illegitimate and secret books" and so, in a Pachomian monastery near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, the monks took their library of Gnostic books and, rather than burn them all, buried them in jars. In 1945 CE those jars were unearthed and they have subsequently been translated and published. Anyone interested in Gnosticism can read a whole library of texts from 1,600 years ago (many of which were written a couple of centuries earlier still). Through these texts, and others, Gnosticism still lives today, and through the New Age movement and the Spiritual religion movement the creative impulses of the Gnostic thinkers persist.
Further Reading
- Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.
- Davies, Stevan. The Secret Book of John: The Gnostic Gospel Annotated and Explained. Woodstock, Vt.: Skylight Paths, 2005.
- King, Karen L. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2005.
- Meyer, Marvin. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: Revised and Updated Translation. New York: HarperOne, 2009.
- Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.
- Williams, Michael A. Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Biblical Passages and Apocrypha
Subject Entries and Commentary
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_sbj.htm
The Apocryphon of John Collection
(The Secret Revelation of John - The Secret Book of John)Gnosis Archive | Library | Bookstore | Index | Web Lectures | Ecclesia Gnostica | Gnostic Society
I have come to teach you about what is, and what was, and what will be
in order for you to understand the invisible world, and the world that is visible,
and the immovable race of perfect humanity. - The Apocryphon of JohnIntroduction
Among the several dozen ancient Gnostic manuscripts rediscovered in modern times, the Secret Book of John is generally agreed to be the most important. It has been called the locus classicus for the Gnostic mythological system – in sum, it is the preeminent “Gnostic Gospel”, a sacred reservoir for the defining essence of Gnostic myth and revelation. It breathes with the life of vision that vitalized early Christianity, a life suppressed and then largely forgotten in later ages. From a modern reading of this crucially important and recently rediscovered "Gospel", we are granted fundamental insights into the lost foundations of Christian tradition.
Apocryphon Iohannis – the Apocryphon of John – is the title that appears on the original manuscripts, and by this title the text has been known in scholarly circles over the last fifty years. In Greek,apocryphon literally means “hidden” or “secret”, thus in recent popular literature the title is usually translated as either the Secret Book of John or The Secret Revelation of John.
By its own declaration, the Secret Book of John is a sacred text intended to be shared only with individuals properly prepared to receive its revelation. In second-century Christian communions circulation of the text probably remained restricted. Amazingly, despite limited circulation and the effective later efforts by evolving Christian orthodoxy to destroy all such “heretical” scriptures, four separate manuscripts of the SBJ have survived into our own age. Three of these were found among the Nag Hammadi codices discovered in 1945, while a fourth copy was independently recovered fifty years earlier from another site in Egypt. All four versions date to the fourth century. Three of the four appear to be independently produced Coptic translations of an original text in Greek. Two of the four manuscripts (NHC II and NHC IV) are so similar that they most likely represent copies of a single common source.
To put in context the uniqueness of finding four complete copies of a document of this extreme antiquity, note that we possess only two fairly complete manuscripts of the canonical gospels of equal age (the Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus). Only a few fragments of canonical texts with dates of creation earlier than the fourth century have survived. These four manuscripts of the Apocryphon of John represent some of the oldest known surviving books. From the ancient sands of Egypt, they come to our modern age bearing a timeless message.The Secret Book of John is the one Gnostic text every student seeking to understand the roots of ancient Christianity must read. At first reading it will seem unlike anything encountered in the New Testament -- excepting perhaps the Apocalypse of John. Like the Apocalypse, this too is a revelation text, a secret and sacred vision. It is the story of God, and by reflection, the story of Humankind -- a penetrating psychological reflection on the source of consciousness and the existential predicament of an eternal light indwelling life. It is not an intellectual curiosity, nor is it a text to be "surfed", in the perverse sense of modern internet reading. As Prof Karen King notes:
In antiquity, readers studied the Secret Revelation of John in order to perfect the divine image of their souls; it was composed, translated, and distributed largely to further salvation—or to refute its claims to aid in salvation. In the modern world, however, it has rarely been read with such goals in mind. It usually finds its place either in the theology of orthodox Christianity as a chapter on Gnostic heresy or in disputes about the historical origins and definition of Gnosticism. Within the academy more narrowly its value largely has to do with intellectual production and prestige, including concerns about tenure and promotion—salvation, if you will, of a rather different sort. As the Secret Revelation of John becomes known more widely, we may expect it to have new and varied impacts on early Christian historiography, constructive theology, and personal appropriation. In any case, modern readers do not stand outside the work's history, but take it up on a new historical stage. (King, p 23)
The resources in this collection are intended to assist study of the Secret Revelation -- the Secret Book, the Apocryphon -- of John, to help it become more widely known, to aid the "personal appropriation" by modern readers who now surprisingly find themselves part of its history.
In addition to the materials presented here, we strongly advise serious students obtain two excellent books. The first is Stevan Davies' superb new translation of The Secret Book of John. Davies has produced a readable translation that is profoundly true to the source material: it is both accurate and beautiful. Davies' translation is accompanied by an excellent verse by verse commentary on facing pages. For any reader, this is the place to start. The second book is Karen King's The Secret Revelation of John. This is an extensive and scholarly -- but still very readable -- study of the text and the cultural milieu that influenced and in turn was influenced by the Apocryphon Iohannis.
-- Lance Owens
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