I recently picked up a book by N.T. Wright Judas and the Gospel of Jesus to prepare for a paper for my New Testament class. I absolutly loved it. In this short offering, in what starts as a response to what has been presented as a “new gospel”, the Gospel of Judas, suggested to shake the Christian world to its knees, Wright exposes the message of Gnosticism, challenging even what many of us in the West have let seep into our beliefs. Much of my paper is indebted to this book. I’ve recomended books before, but for me this goes close to the top. I can’t wait to read more of his body of work. Below is the first and what turned out to be the final draft of my paper on Gnosticism. So, here it is. Enjoy.
As the first disciples of Jesus lived and prayed for the Kingdom of God to be done on earth as in heaven, another belief and prayer had “sparked” inside some in Roman Judea. While I don’t have the space or ability here to give an exhaustive account of the interaction between Gnosticism (or the many Gnosticisms alive in the first and second centuries) and the New Testament, I want to focus on a just a few aspects of their beliefs and how they sharply stand against everything the writers of the New Testament wrote. Before we can do that we must look at these beliefs ourselves and where they came from.The Gnosticism I want to talk about and one that the New Testament writers and early Church Fathers fought against is actually a hybrid of sorts. Rather than Jewish, it comes from a Greek and specifically Platonic dualistic worldview of spirit and matter mixed and smuggled into the language of the ancient scriptures of the Jews. After the failed messiah in Simon Bar Kokhba and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Roman occupiers in 70 AD, it is not hard to see how some Jews would reject the promises found in the Torah and look elsewhere. To the Gnostics, the world of time, space and matter was an inherently bad and wicked place. Matter is evil thus men made of it and living in it are evil. Imprisoned within men, though, is something very different, not made of matter. In their writings, such as found in Nag Hammadi, the Gnostics portray the Jewish creator god as stupid and foolish, if not blatantly evil and malevolent. The god of creation is not the god of salvation. Another divinity, pure, wise, and good exists, detached and distant from this world. The main objective for any wise or knowledgeable person is to then escape from this wicked old world and be delivered from material human existence. Only then can one ascend to a higher plane, liberated from matter, space, and time, and enjoy the bliss of disembodied life somewhere in the heavens, inaccessible to those either clinging on to the physical world or mistakenly worshiping its creator. “Salvation” then comes from the revelation, by a “revealer”, of a special knowledge or “gnosis” of themselves as special “sparks of light”.
In many of the Epistles of the New Testament, John and Paul warn their readers against many of the different false teachers and new theologies entering the church. Multiple references in 1 John, for example, have been shown to be aimed directly against Gnostic or at least proto-Gnostic beliefs. From the Gnostic standpoint, creation was a mistake. There was nothing good about it to begin with, so the notion of a fall from perfection and goodness are completely absent. The world is evil but not because of our sin. One can almost hear them shouting out to their creator, “It’s not our fault, it’s yours. I’m done with it”. The Gnostics would either lean in two directions; they would become ascetics, looking with contempt at anything associated with the body, such as sex or food, or they would throw away all boundaries and restraint altogether because it didn’t matter. The body and world were irrelevant, for their “inner divinity” were going up to the clouds soon anyway. This is very important to understand in studying books like 1 John, as I have mentioned, where by the time it was penned Gnostic teachings were beginning to affect the church family he was addressing. John is condemning them when he says “Whoever says, ‘I have come to know him’, but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, ‘I abide in him’, ought to walk just as he walked.” (1 John 2:4-6) Which some Gnostics would even contend that Jesus never really physically walked here in the first place, but I’ll come back to that. There is even a reference in the book of The Revelation in the Letter to Thyatira to a Gnostic teaching going even farther spurning those who had attained “gnosis” to not only know that which is in the “light”, but also which is in the “dark”. Because of their superior knowledge they should know the very depths of evil, giving them almost an obligation to sin. The resurrected Jesus condemns this teaching and the woman teaching it (in Rev. 2:20-24) referring to those who had known the “deep things of Satan”.
Paul, with early Gnostics in mind, says in 1 Corinthians 8:1-3 that “we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.” Paul moves the whole thing from intellectual gnosis, to a different kind of gnosis. It is worth mentioning that the Greek word ginoskein (though a synonym for gnosis), throughout the Septuagint, usually represents the Hebrew word yada, which is also used in Genesis when Adam “knew” his wife. Paul and the other apostles preach a relational knowledge of God for the present earth, which, as we’ll see, is impossible for Gnostics.
John again says in 1 John 4:2-3 “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” One of the major heresies contended with later in the second century by the church fathers and here by John is the rejection of the Incarnation, Docetism, that Jesus only seemed human. Another related position was that of Cerinthus who was a known sworn enemy of John in particular, who taught that the Christ-spirit came on Jesus as he was baptized and left before his crucifixion (Gundry 493). Here Jesus has been split by the Gnostics into two separate entities: the spirit “revealer” Jesus and the worthless physical human Jesus. In one of the Gnostic scrolls found in Nag Hammadi known as the Apocalypse of Peter, perhaps written somewhere during the second century, tells a narrative of the “real Jesus” laughing at the crucifixion mocking the mere fleshly “Jesus” who is hung up on the cross. In another Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Judas, where Judas is actually the “beloved disciple” and hero of the story, Jesus approaches him saying “Truly I say to you, Judas, those who offer sacrifices to Saklas (the Gnostic name for the Jewish God meaning “foolish”)…everything that is evil. But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me” (Gospel of Judas 56). “The man that clothes me”, not only conflicts strongly with the canonical Gospels but is illustrative of the Gnostic’s view of Jesus, as well as that of themselves to a certain extent, that the only relative part of a person was his inner soul or “spark of divine light”. Countering this underlying Platonist view, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, would contend that “the state of the soul is more perfect embodied than disembodied” (Invitation to the Classic 94.) I think the writers of the New Testament would agree. But John continues still in 1 John 5:6 that “This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood” denouncing any notion that the divine Jesus was not the Jesus that suffered crucifixion. John even begins the epistle in 1 John declaring that that which was in the beginning, has been heard from his own hears, seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own hands.
Upon reflection of these Gnostics, their beliefs and later texts, who were busily trying to reform and assimilate these ideas into the church, a notable shift comes to light. An underlying feeling, coming from these false teachers and Gnostics, surfaces. In rejecting the Kingdom promises of the Jewish God to judge and restore, bringing the world to rights, they seem to give up. Compounding a little of bit of everything from Jewish tradition, oriental mythology, Iranian theology, and complicated astrology they, in Platonic terms and concepts, relinquish any hope for the redemption of the world and life here and now and look up for escape. In Paul’s Letter to the Philippians he says “But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Which could sound very much like the escapism of the Gnostics but he doesn’t finish his thought with that. Paul continues “He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” The Gospel of Jesus and that of Paul is not that redemption is “up there”, but that redemption comes from “up there”. The message of the New Testament then is this, YHWH, the Creator God of the Torah, who loved the world so much, calling the man and nation of Israel to bring restoration and salvation to the world, at the fullness of the times sent the Jewish Messiah to implement that purpose in his actions, teachings, and ultimate death and resurrection, the perfect love, that of a father for his only son, breaking his impending new creation into the present, here on earth as in heaven. The lie, I believe, that the Apostles in the New Testament fought so hard against, for their beloved churches, is that of the escapism of the Gnostics. To quote N.T. Wright, on this “good news” of the Gnostics, “Unlike the challenge of Jesus, this message doesn’t tell you to deny yourself and take up your cross, but to discover yourself and follow your star” (Wright 144). In light of all of this, an annoying and perhaps burning question comes out to us, a question that deserves a reflective response. To whose vision do we gravitate closer, that of the escapists Gnostics, or that of the returning Jesus?
