The Scandals of the Scrolls, Part V: The Codex Conundrum 2

The Hidden Words of Jesus: “These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke. And Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down. And he said: ‘Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death.’” This is the first saying recorded in the mysterious Gospel of Thomas; here are some of the others.

#3: Jesus says: “If those who lead you say to you: ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fishes will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you and outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realise that you are the children of the living God. But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you are poverty.”

#5: Jesus says: “Come to know what is in front of you, and what is hidden will become clear to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not become manifest.”

#18: The disciples said to Jesus: “Tell us how our end will be.” Jesus said: “Have you already discovered the beginning that you are now asking about the end? For where the beginning is, there the end will be too. Blessed is he who will stand at the beginning. And he will know the end, and he will not taste death.”

#24: His disciples said: “Show us the place where you are, because it is necessary for us to seek it.” He said to them: “Whoever has ears should hear! Light exists inside a person of light, and he shines on the whole world. If he does not shine, there is darkness.”

#29: Jesus says: “If the flesh came into being because of the spirit, it is a wonder. But if the spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has taken up residence in this poverty.”

#42: Jesus says: “Be passers-by.”

#51: His disciples said to him: “When will the resurrection of the dead take place, and when will the new world come?” He said to them: “That resurrection which you are awaiting has already come, but you do not recognise it.”

#70: Jesus says: “If you bring forth what is within you, then that which you bring forth will save you. If you do not have it within you, then that which you do not have within you will destroy you.”

#97: Jesus says: “The kingdom of God is like a woman who is carrying a jar filled with grain. She was very far from home and as she walked along the handle of the jar broke and the grain began to leak out behind her onto the path. But she didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed she had a problem. And so, when she reached her home and put down the jar she found it empty.”

#108: Jesus says: “Whoever drinks [the words] from my mouth will become like me. I myself will become he and what is hidden will be revealed to him.”

Mysterious Book What do such gnomic utterances mean? At the end of the previous part of this series we asked about the gnosis upon which Gnosticism is based. Considerable insight into this is provided by the once unobtainable Gospel According to Thomas, which claimed to contain “the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas recorded”. Scholars have always known that such a book existed, as several early Christian authors mention it and the third-century Church Father, Hippolytus, even quoted a short section from it. Then, about seventy years ago, this was found to match a passage in a Coptic translation from Nag Hammadi, and scholars realised that they had also unearthed other excerpts from it in the original Greek among the findings from archaeological excavations at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt around 1900. Suddenly, this mysterious lost gospel, which purports to record the Gnostic utterances of Jesus, could be reconstructed.

Date & Author Scholars date these Greek fragments of Thomas to the third century AD, which means that the original gospel must have been written sometime before 200 AD, with some passages at least dating from the mid-to-late first century. Even though it begins with the assertion that “these are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas recorded”, historians agree that it was not actually written by the disciple Thomas. (It seems all the Gospels, including those in the New Testament, were originally composed anonymously, with such titles as “According to Matthew” or “According to Luke” assigned to them.)

Priority Most biblical scholars agree that the earliest canonical Gospel written was Mark, which was probably composed around 65 to 70 AD. They also agree that the authors of Matthew and Luke then used Mark in writing their Gospels (around 85 AD) along with a hypothetical “sayings source”, “Q”, which supplied the sayings of Jesus that they cited in their books. This raises the question of whether Thomas is a similar “sayings source” because, like Q, it consists entirely of Jesus’s sayings (114 of them!), almost all introduced with “Jesus says”. Many of these are original although a large number are similar to those found in Q (and hence in Matthew and Luke). This raises several important questions: Was Thomas derived from these sources? Or was it an independent parallel record of Jesus’s sayings dating from Jesus’s own time? Or was it the primary source, from which the others were derived?

Significance This is very important because if Thomas was not dependent on the Gospels, then it may provide an independent witness to teachings that Jesus had given his followers, and that have been preserved outside the processes that established the mainstream doctrine of the Church and determined the New Testament canon. This becomes even more important if the content of those teachings varies significantly from the New Testament message, as it seems that Thomas does.

The Message of Thomas Although it’s called a “gospel”, Thomas doesn’t offer a narrative about Jesus in the way the canonical Gospels do. It’s not interested in a historical Jesus who lived in Judea and died on a cross in Jerusalem. Instead it is concerned with “the living Jesus”—the spiritual Jesus who lives and is present in the world in a mystical sense. Consequently, it’s basically a “Wisdom Book”, a collection of wise sayings, in which Jesus speaks in a similar vein as Wisdom does in the Book of Proverbs, speaking of himself and calling upon people to follow him in devotion to God. In this respect, Jesus is also like the Wisdom Aeon in other Gnostic texts—the messenger from the heavenly realm calling upon people to understand their true selves, while he’s also the divine potential within us that constitutes those true selves.

Wisdom As Wisdom, this Jesus is the source of all that is, and he is present in all creation: “I am the light that is over all. I am the All. The All came forth out of me. And to me the All has come. Split a piece of wood—I am there. Lift the stone, and you will find me there.” (Thomas #77) Jesus is a ubiquitous divine presence. Moreover, the light that is Jesus is also within those human beings who are from the spiritual realm and destined to return: “There is a light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark.” (#24) But he is especially present in his words, in the things he says, according to Thomas, in other words, when we truly hear the message of Jesus, we realise that the kingdom of heaven is within us, and that knowing Jesus is knowing our true selves. If we do not recognise the light within us, we remain in darkness, indeed we are that darkness, according to Thomas.

Life & Death But there are difficulties. As the opening sayings of Thomas make clear, it seems that what Jesus has to say is a matter of spiritual life and death. And yet his meaning is not at all clear; it seems that what we seek is not far away, but within us and all around us, but also somehow obscured from us. It has to be sought and discerned, guided only by the gnomic utterances recorded in Thomas.

Powerhouses This seems to have caused frustration amongst earnest devotees, who may have been members of the didaskaleia, the small, exclusive study-circles of male and female disciples that gathered around the spiritual guides that appeared across the Roman empire in the early centuries. These were “the powerhouses of the Christian culture of the 2nd and 3rd Centuries”, as Peter Brown, the great historian of Late Antiquity, points out in The Body and Society. Indeed, “well-to-do Christians of the 2nd Century took it for granted that their spiritual growth depended on close, face-to-face consultation with beloved teachers”. “Serious Christians … were convinced that only through prolonged, intimate contact with a spiritual guide, and not through the somewhat jejune preaching of the clergy in church, would ‘the dead coals of sacred learning come to glow again in the heart’.”

Where to Look But what to do, if the Master’s words or the tradition he is handing down are unclear, ambiguous, or simply don’t make sense? Such dilemmas even invited criticism from the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (who was himself a mystic): “The Gnostics say only, ‘Look to God!’ but they do not tell anyone where or how to look!” As it happens, the Gnostics did have a mystic pathway to God, outlined in several of the Nag Hammadi texts, as we will discuss later. However, before we can do that, we have to review some essential aspects of Early Christian history.

The Conventional Account The religious situation of first-century Judea was diverse and factionalised, with various sects. These included the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, the devotees of the “Fourth Philosophy”, and the Zealots. It also had a number of charismatic religious leaders, including Jesus and those recorded in the Dead Sea Scrolls (such as the Teacher of Righteousness), as well as those who established the foundations of Rabbinical Judaism (such as Yohanan ben Zakkai). In this context, the Jesus Movement would have been considered just another sect. As Geza Vermes observes (in his 2012 article “From Jewish to Gentile: How the Jesus Movement became Christianity”): “They were comparable to the Essenes in number, and they exhibited similar customs such as the daily solemn meal and subsistence from a common kitty. Indeed, the followers of Jesus were referred to in the late 50s of the 1st Century AD as the ‘sect of the Nazarenes’.” At this time they were still “Jewish Christians”, as we will see below, and remained so for many decades. Indeed, up until the Bar Kokhba War (132 to 135 AD) all thirteen bishops of Jerusalem, starting with James, the brother of Jesus, came from this “Circumcision Party” as Eusebius describes them in his Church History.

Chronology & Sources Traditional accounts of Early Christianity begin with the ministry of Jesus (c. 27 to 33 AD), and then proceed through the Apostolic Age. This is the period, c. 33 to 100, when direct followers of Jesus were still alive, and there occurred the split between the “Jewish” and “Gentile” strands in the movement, with the Jewish Christian stream dominating in Jerusalem before gradually fading in significance during the second century, as the Gentile tendency took over. This period was followed by several centuries of expansion in the midst of often extreme marginalisation and persecution, up to the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), which signalled the consolidation of Christian doctrine and the legitimation of the Church in the Roman empire. In terms of historical sources, traditionally the main ones for Jesus’s life and teachings are included in the New Testament: the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul, and the other epistles. These have been augmented by extra-canonical sources, including the Apocrypha, the works of Josephus, and later by the Church History of Eusebius (“the Father of Church History”), which included references to invaluable ancient sources that are no longer extant, while also largely defining the conventional view of Early Church history.

A Straightforward Narrative The traditional “Eusebian” account derived from these sources provides a relatively uncomplicated narrative. Initially, the Jesus Movement was a minor sect of Jewish Christians, inspired by a charismatic leader and guided by a theologically radical interpretation of his Crucifixion and Resurrection. Through the middle decades of the first century it harboured apocalyptic expectations as Second Temple Judaism hurtled towards destruction in the First Roman-Jewish War. Consequently, at first they retained a strong sense of continuity with Judaism, depicting their founder as the promised Messiah whose claims were vindicated by his Resurrection. The obvious difficulty that the Messiah was expected to come in glory and power, not as a crucified criminal, was answered by the argument that Jesus’s sufferings were redemptive, like those of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah (52:13–53:12), and that his death and Resurrection inaugurated a new covenant between God and his people, in accordance with the great hope of Jeremiah (31:31–4).

Expansion The earliest Christian community in Jerusalem was led by James the Just, the brother of Jesus, as we’ve discussed in earlier parts of this series. Soon there were also significant Christian communities in the Judean countryside, Galilee, Damascus, and Alexandria and Antioch, the second and third cities of the Roman empire, and then across Anatolia, Greece, the Balkans and Italy, reaching Rome by mid-century. It was in Antioch that the population began to call them “Christians”, while the Jews called them “Nazarenes”, and they called themselves “followers of the Way” (Acts 9:2).

Accepting Gentiles Unsurprisingly, given this expansion, the movement began to attract Gentiles, including “God-fearers”, non-Jews who had previously been attracted to Judaism but had been reluctant to convert because of the onerous requirements of the Mosaic Law (circumcision, for example, which Gentiles considered a repulsive abomination). This posed enormous problems for the movement, as its members felt themselves prohibited from fraternising with non-Jews (Acts 10:28). However, this began to be resolved with the conversion and baptism of the Roman centurion Cornelius and his family, after he and St Peter had divine visions bringing them together. This extraordinary step was then ratified by the Jerusalem Church, which declared, “So then, God has granted even the Gentile repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18). This then spurred the further spread of the Movement (Acts 11:19–21), but also began a process that ultimately split the Early Church.

Paul The key figure here is St Paul. Originally known as Saul of Tarsus, Paul was a zealous and learned young Pharisee who initially attacked the Jesus Movement (and may have had a hand in the stoning to death of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr (Acts 7–8)). However, he then had a stupendous visionary experience on the road to Damascus, where he felt Jesus appeared and commissioned him to become the Apostle to the Gentiles. This precipitated a series of missions that he pursued with enormous energy, commitment and success until he was executed in Rome, around 60 AD. It seems the key to his success was his radical re-formulation of the original Jewish Christian theology as it had developed in the Jerusalem Church. Paul basically turned his back on Second Temple Judaism and universalised the Christian message: salvation was available to everyone, Jews or otherwise, who renounced any previous gods, accepted the God of Israel, and placed their faith in Jesus, whose death and resurrection put them in right-standing with God. So firm was Paul on the pivotal role of this “justification by faith” that he declared that any Gentile converts who still felt obliged to follow the Mosaic Laws and practices were calling into question their salvation achieved by Jesus on the Cross (Galatians 2:15–16; Romans 3:10, 8:3).

The Incident at Antioch Things came to a head over Paul’s radical revision after emissaries of the Jerusalem Church visited Antioch, where there was a thriving mixed community of Jewish and Gentile Christians. These emissaries were “Judaisers”, Jewish Christians led by James who held that many of the Old Testament attitudes and practices (such as circumcision) were still binding on the New Testament Church. They were appalled by the level of fraternisation they witnessed, and their censorious attitude forced the previously sympathetic Peter and Barnabas to abandon the Antioch fellowship. This rigid stance may have been caused by fears that the fanatical Zealots might attack the Jesus Movement, but at any rate Paul was outraged, confronted Peter and called him a hypocrite. He wrote a stinging letter of denunciation to the Galatian church in which he provided a forceful and succinct statement of the Christian faith as he now formulated it. In exasperation, he declares that those Jerusalem “agitators” trying to impose adult male circumcision on Gentile converts in the Antioch Church should “go the whole way and castrate themselves” (Galatians 5:12).

Apostolic Council The result of this confrontation was the first Apostolic Council, held in Jerusalem, around 48 AD. Attended by Paul and Barnabas, with James presiding, the Council decided that Gentile converts to Christianity were not obligated to observe most of the Old Testament rules and rituals, including circumcision of males. But it did re-state the Old Testament dietary prohibitions and rules on idolatry and sexual morality. However, this compromise applied mainly to the diaspora, where Paul and his followers were most active. In Jerusalem itself, the strict “Judaising” regime continued to prevail. For example, Gentile Christians were prohibited on the pain of death from joining Jewish Christians in the Temple. Inevitably, the Council marked the beginning of the defining divergence between the two branches of Early Christianity. In the mid-second century the Church Father Justin Martyr (executed in 165 AD), proudly observed that non-Jews largely outnumbered Jews in the Church.

Examples: Two Texts This split can be seen by comparing two of the oldest (non-canonical) Christian texts: the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas.

The Didache (c. late first century) is the oldest “Church Manual” and reflects a Jewish Christianity lying in continuity with Judaism, focusing on rituals, diets, baptism, preaching and so on. Jesus is depicted as the servant of God and there is none of the High Christology and theology of atonement and redemption found in Paul and John.

The Epistle of Barnabas On the other hand, the Epistle of Barnabas (c. early second century) presents a High Christology and is also the earliest example of theological anti-Judaism. It was widely read for centuries and was nearly canonised as part of the New Testament, an act that might have institutionalised anti-Semitism within Christianity.

Hellenism & Anti-Judaism The appearance of Barnabas helps us understand the forces shaping Early Christianity. It was written in Alexandria, the empire’s second city, and a dynamic centre of Hellenistic thought. It was also a scene of the Kitos War (c. 115–17), when the Jews in the Diaspora rose in a co-ordinated revolt against the local Greek populations and the Roman occupying forces. It was eventually crushed, but the death toll was massive, some 660,000 people, with some Jewish communities annihilated, including those in Alexandria and Cyprus, and some areas were completely devastated and depopulated.

Dissociation Unsurprisingly in such a context, Barnabas sought to dissociate the nascent Christian Church from the aggressive and implacable Jewish rebels:

the purpose of the book was to show that Christianity is superior to Judaism, that Judaism has always been a false religion. In the author’s opinion, Jews have misunderstood the law given to them by God: because they hardened their hearts and broke God’s covenant, they mistakenly assumed that he meant his law to be taken literally. Instead, it was all along intended symbolically as a pointer to Christ. Using an allegorical method of interpretation … the author interprets key passages of the OT as mysterious witnesses to Christ, whose meaning completely escaped the Jews to whom it was originally given. For this author, the OT is a Christian, not a Jewish, book, and it is Christians, not Jews, who are the people of God. — Bart Ehrman, After the New Testament, 1999

Examples: Two Movements Two sects, later declared heretical, further illustrate the extreme extent of this bifurcation between the Jewish and Gentile streams in Early Christianity as they evolved in opposite directions during this era.

The Ebionites The Ebionites evolved out of the Jewish Christian faction. They were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, but they clung to their traditional laws, beliefs, practices and identities, including male circumcision for adults who wished to join the sect. They believed that Jesus was fully human but was adopted by God upon his baptism by John the Baptist; that he died for the sins of the Jewish people; and that as a reward God raised him from the dead. Their scriptures were based on the gospel of Matthew, and they especially reviled Paul, who extended the mission of Jesus to encompass the Gentiles.

The Marcionites In sharp contrast, the Marcionites appealed specifically to the Gentiles and insisted that Christianity had little or nothing to do with Judaism. Founded by a charismatic teacher, Marcion, in the mid-second century, they adapted the Gnostic Myth and insisted that the wrathful Jewish God of the Old Testament was different from the loving “new” God revealed in the New Testament. For them Jesus was “the Christ”, a spiritual being sent by this new God to reveal the truth about existence, thus empowering humanity to escape the wrathful grip of the Jewish God. He was fully divine and only appeared human (this view is called “Docetism”). He “died” for the sins of humanity but only his human appearance was crucified. Their scriptures were based on the gospel of Luke and the epistles of Paul.

Valentinus This “Gnosticising” theological tendency was further developed by Valentinus (c. 100–160 AD), a charismatic teacher who was ultimately anathematised as a heretic. His system of Gnostic Christianity had tremendous influence before it was eventually suppressed and almost all information about it destroyed. Valentinus was born in Egypt, and received a Greek education in Alexandria, one of the theological powerhouses of Christianity and home of the legendary library (ransacked by Christian fanatics in 387 and destroyed by Muslims in 641). There he studied the great Jewish philosopher Philo, and associated with the mysterious Gnostic philosopher Basilides (fl. 117–38 AD).

Spiritual Guide Later, Valentinus went to Rome, where he served as a spiritual guide for a didaskaleion attended by “men and women touched by the metaphysical ferocity that was a feature of all second-century intellectuals”. Such spiritual seekers sought from their study-circle and its guide “what any educated pagan might expect—an end to the ache of doubt and the hope of personal transformation” (Brown, Body & Society). He went on to found his own sect, which became large and widespread, and he was at one stage a candidate for Bishop of Rome, but he was denounced for his teachings and forced to flee. Nevertheless, “Valentinian Christian” churches survived for centuries.

The Gospel of Truth Valentinus developed a complex theological system of considerable sophistication and beauty, for example in The Gospel of Truth. This is one of the Gnostic books Irenaeus condemned and no copies were extant until the Nag Hammadi discoveries. It is not a gospel in the usual sense—there is nothing about Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. Instead, the “good news” it expounds about the salvation brought by Jesus concerns the secret gnosis, the truth that can free the soul from its bondage to this material world. Its title comes from its opening line, and it is filled with heartfelt gratitude to God for the unexpected grace of salvation that has been received. It is regarded as one of the most powerful and moving expositions of the joy of salvation to survive from Christian antiquity.

Cosmic Significance Like Paul, Valentinus made the cosmic significance of the redemption achieved by Christ central to his teachings. However, “he claimed that only he and his disciples had understood the extent of the invisible transformation of the entire creation” this involved. Sadly, “ordinary believers were content to live according to the deceptively simple anecdotes, homely parables and banal ethical injunctions contained in the [canonical] Gospels”.

Succession Valentinus claimed to stand in direct theological descent from St Paul and ultimately from Jesus himself, according to a fierce critic, Clement of Alexandria. This transmission was via Paul’s disciple Theudas, who had been initiated into the esoteric wisdom that Paul apparently had revealed only to his inner circle (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:6–8), and which Paul had himself received from the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. In other words, Valentinus and his school claimed to possess an esoteric gnosis that came ultimately from Jesus Christ, and Valentinus, in turn, sought to pass it on to the spiritually mature in his following to use as a guide for their journey back to their divine home.

Basilides This notion of a succession of teachers within the Gnostic tradition was a feature also of the thought of Basilides, another Christian Gnostic who claimed to possess esoteric gnosis handed down from the time of Jesus via a succession of thinkers going back, in the case of Basilides, to the apostle St Matthias (the apostle chosen to replace Judas after his expulsion and death). It seems he was also a pupil of Menander, the leader of the Simonian Gnostics after the death of the sect’s founder, Simon Magus, and that he taught and studied among the Zoroastrians in Persia. He is believed to have written over two dozen books of Gnostic exegesis on the Christian faith, making him one of the earliest Gospel commentators. All of this writing was ultimately suppressed as heretical and only fragments have survived.

Underlying Unity? These divergent tendencies might seem to be evidence of significant dissent, diversity and disunity in the Early Church. However, this is not the conventional view. Indeed, the fact that they were eventually declared heretical and successfully suppressed has been taken to illustrate the underlying unity and core strength of the Early Christian Church and its doctrines, against which such divergent “heretical” views couldn’t stand. Such unity was based on the set of “proto-orthodox” beliefs that would later be ratified at Nicaea and become the basis of mainstream Christian orthodoxy as we know it.

Eusebius This view of Early Christian orthodoxy evolving around a firm, largely uncontested core set of beliefs has been maintained on the authority of the conventional sources, epitomised by the great Christian historian Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (c. 263–339 AD), and his invaluable Church History, the pioneering fourth-century account of the development of Early Christianity from the first to fourth centuries.

Peace & Unity This Eusebian view of history painted a harmonious internal picture: “the Christian community enjoyed internal peace and unity. There were, to be sure, false teachers [like the Ebionites, Marcionites, and Valentinians] who occasionally disrupted the tranquillity of the Church, i.e., heretics inspired by the Devil to pervert the truth of God, but these stood merely on the margins of the Great Church and were easily overpowered by the truth affirmed by the genuine followers of Christ, the representatives of Christian orthodoxy” passed down and enforced by the bishops and the other leaders of the Church since the days of Jesus and his Apostles. (Ehrman, After the New Testament)

The Bishops’ Role In the conventional history of Early Christianity, it was the bishops and theologians who were expected to play a central role in enforcing orthodoxy and identifying and combating heresy. The term “heresy” comes from the Greek for “school of thought” or “faction”, and it didn’t originally have negative connotations. The Early Christians, however, were constantly under threat and had a strong belief that they should be a single harmonious community of the faithful, the one unified Body of Christ, and therefore they worried greatly about the divisions that were appearing among them, a phenomenon that they blamed on demonic forces.

Justin Martyr It was the great Christian theologian Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) who first articulated the concept of heresy. He argued that he and Christians like him were part of the one Body of Christ, while the Gnostics, Marcionites and Valentinians were merely “schools of thought”, which had no similarly privileged access to the Truth. Such Truth came only from the Word of God imparted by Jesus and was now the exclusive treasure of the Church. To make this case, Justin wrote a book (now lost), Against All the Schools of Thought That Have Arisen. According to Justin, people who followed “false teachers” like Marcion or Valentinus may have called themselves Christians, but they were not true members of the Body of Christ, but merely “godless and impious members of a school of thought”—heretics, inspired by demonic forces to undermine the True Faith. In fact, these were felt to be the same demons that were inspiring the Romans in their hideous persecution of the Christians, a persecution that eventually took Justin’s life. The “True Church” was therefore facing a deadly battle on two fronts, against external and internal enemies bent on its destruction.

Against Heresies Irenaeus (c. 130–202; also martyred) was the Bishop of Lyons and he also played a crucial role in developing a theory of heresy. The Christian community in Lyons (which largely consisted of immigrants from Anatolia) was subjected to fearful violence while it was also split by the influence of Valentinus, a subversive influence Irenaeus found also throughout Rome when he visited there. In desperation, Irenaeus wrote an extremely influential five-volume polemic, On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis (also known as Against Heresies), which drew the battlelines between the two tendencies (apostolic orthodoxy and demonic heresy) and remained the principal source of information on Gnosticism until the Nag Hammadi discoveries.

Refinement Irenaeus was very impressed by Justin’s arguments, and he also noticed the Gnostic insistence that their secret gnosis was handed down from master to disciple. Consequently, he added a crucial refinement to the doctrine of heresy: he depicted orthodoxy and heresy as two parallel but antagonistic streams, both going back through a succession of generations to their respective founders—Jesus and Simon Magus. To vary the metaphor: orthodoxy and heresy both had “family trees” that could be traced back, one to the divine inspiration of Jesus, the other to the demonic inspiration of Simon.

Safeguards According to this model, the leaders safeguarding the Christian tradition from the earliest days were the bishops, all of whom stood in an order of succession going back to the Apostles, who had in turn received the Truth from Jesus. In contrast to the claims of the Gnostics that they possessed a secret knowledge (gnosis), Irenaeus insisted that the bishops passed down orthodox doctrines that were available to all, and in an entirely public and open manner.

Revisionism In brief outline, such is the conventional account of Early Christianity and its allegedly firm underlying unity guaranteed by doctrinal orthodoxy. However, it seems things must change in the aftermath of the Scrolls and the Codices, and in the light of recent revisionist histories. It now appears we “are no longer able to accept Eusebius’s account uncritically”, and that “Christianity before his time was in fact widely diverse” (Ehrman, After the New Testament). These are very important claims which we will explore further in the final part of this series.

Gnostic Study Circles Meanwhile, we can now return to the gnomic teachings exemplified by The Gospel of Thomas and the frustration devotees must have felt over their esoteric nature, especially when these were concerned with seeking out the divine. As we have seen, these devotees would have been members of a didaskaleion, “a Gnostic study-circle [where] men and women re-lived, at the feet of their spiritual guide, the first moment of liberating precision, when the Saviour Himself had spoken to a chosen few. Serious souls, they had come together disquieted by a world that had lost contact with God.” For such seekers, the surrounding “ignorance brought anguish and horror; and the anguish grew solid like a fog” (Brown, Body & Society). So, what was the pathway out of this miasma and upwards towards the divine?

Spiritual Guidebooks The Nag Hammadi discoveries provided several texts that augment Thomas and help illuminate that path, one that many members of the Jesus Movement and the Early Christian church must have been pursuing, judging by the evidence of these newly discovered documents. These include The Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth, Zostrianos and The Foreigner.

The Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth In this discourse, the reference to “the Eighth and the Ninth” refers to the highest of the celestial spheres surrounding the Earth, designating the outer boundaries of the divine realm, one step short of the tenth sphere, the impenetrable dwelling place of the One, the True God. The seeker, in his benighted plight, finds himself far beneath this realm, the epitome of mystical ascent to which he aspires. He is trapped in a corporeal existence, embedded in the dark, gross, intractable material nature of this world, subject to the demonic “powers and principalities” (cf. Romans 8:37–39; Ephesians 3:10–11, 6:12; Colossians 1:6, 2:15) that control the inner spheres of moon, planets and stars, and whose machinations the ancients tried desperately to read through astrology and divination.

Initiation The Discourse is a dialogue between the seeker and his spiritual guide. The latter is identified as the legendary mystagogue Hermes Trismegistus (“the Thrice-Greatest Hermes”, the legendary founder of the Hermetic tradition). He initiates the seeker into the secret gnosis and the “order of the tradition” through which all seekers must pass. After fervent study and prayer, the master then guides him through an ecstatic experience of the “eighth and the ninth”. It culminates in the seeker’s extravagant effusion of gratitude:

I will offer up the praise in my heart, as I pray to the end of the universe and the beginning of the beginning, to the object of man’s quest, the immortal discovery, the begetter of light and truth, the sower of reason, the love of immortal life … I am the instrument of your spirit; Mind is your plectrum. And your counsel plucks me. I see myself! I have received power from you. For your love has reached us.

The text closes with the master inviting the seeker to write down what he has experienced, which he does—and so we have the Discourse, discovered nearly two millennia after it was composed.

Zostrianos The longest book in the entire Nag Hammadi Library is Zostrianos. This is a vivid and dramatic tale of a spiritual master’s pursuit of enlightenment, as he flees “the corporeal darkness within me as well as the psychic chaos and the lustful desires that are the darkness”. It is a feature of his book that Zostrianos describes his initial despair at his poor spiritual progress and how this drove him out into the wilderness and to the edge of suicide: “As I was deeply troubled and gloomy because of the discouragement that encompassed me, I dared to act and to deliver myself to the wild beasts of the desert for a violent death.” But then, “there stood before me the angel of the knowledge of eternal light”, and this emissary of gnosis then said, “Zostrianos, why have you gone mad as if you were ignorant of the great eternals who are above? [Know] that you are now saved.” Later, he was further admonished: “Do not be led astray … Flee quickly before death reaches you. Look at the Light. Flee the Darkness. Do not be led astray to your destruction.”

Mystic Baptisms Zostrianos then submitted to some mysterious baptisms as his soul ascended through a series of stages, corresponding to the successive emanations from the One, with the meaning of each being explained by attendant angels. Once he achieved the ultimate gnosis he descended along the same path and returned to this earthly realm: “I came down to the perceptible world and put back on my image [that is, his physical visage], strengthened it and went about preaching the truth to everyone.” No longer vulnerable to the demonic wiles of the archons that rule the world, he didn’t fear death. Indeed, he carefully recalled his mystic quest: “I wrote three tablets and left them as knowledge for those who would come after me, the living elect.” And so, once again, we have a guide to the spiritual path to enlightenment.

The Foreigner The third account of a Gnostic spiritual quest we will review is The Foreigner. This marks a significant shift from an upwards journey through the celestial realms to an inward quest to the interiority of the self. This book is also known as Allogenes, which means “the stranger” or “he of another race” and refers to the way in which the spiritually enlightened person becomes an alien presence in this benighted world, a common theme in all these writings. It also refers to the Sethians, a Gnostic sect who believed themselves to be descendants of Seth (the godly third son of Adam and Eve, cf. Genesis 4:25 ff.) and spiritually distinct from the rest of the human race.

Inwardness The tale has two stages: the first concerns five revelations provided by the female deity, Youel, to Allogenes. These involve complex descriptions of the inner heavenly realm, with a particular focus on the path to be taken through the divine emanations towards Barbēlō, the first emanation of God, as described in the Gnostic Myth. After digesting this, Allogenes is judged ready to embark (after a further 100 years of study and contemplation!) on the final stage of the journey. He is taken outside his body to a holy place where divine beings instruct him on how to contemplate the One by directing his attention onto himself and contemplating sequentially the structures of his own mind.

Psychic Microcosm/Cosmic Macrocosm It seems that we must know our true selves in order to know God. This is because it was the One’s own primordial act of self-knowledge that generated the Barbēlō, the other emanations, and the entirety of the Pleroma. In other words, we can aspire to knowledge of the divine through knowledge of our self because our minds reflect in microcosm the structure of the Pleroma, which is God’s Mind (the macrocosm). As Allogenes undertakes this intense self-contemplation he simultaneously gains insight into the Barbēlō, discovers that she is “that which exists within me”, and attains gnosis. However, this was not the ultimate gnosis to which he aspired: he had been graciously granted a glimpse of the One but now desired to go beyond this, to a fully rational understanding of the Divine Essence: “I was seeking the Ineffable and Unknown God”. However, the aeons attending him intervene to explain that the One is not knowable at that level. Instead, “God was revealed as the Unknown One, invisible, unfathomable, and incomprehensible, and who exists, paradoxically, as ‘the non-being Existence’” (Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library). Ultimately, what Allogenes learns is paradoxical: he comprehends the One precisely by realising the infinite depths of its incomprehensibility.

Great Appeal In the end, Allogenes attains gnosis by journeying through his own mind. And here we find what may have been one of the great appeals of Gnosticism: the spiritual quest is explicitly declared to be “inward”, into the interior of the self and the soul, rather than “outward” or “upward”, towards a celestial or heavenly destination. If we pursue the spiritual path correctly, with careful attention and appropriate humility, it is possible that that path may open up before us and that we may experience—however briefly—gnosis of the One, the true God.

Belonging The Gnostics believed they confronted a deeply flawed world full of violence and misery. They lamented our corporeal existence and the material world in which we are embedded. They saw that this obstructs not only our contemplation of higher spiritual realities, but also our ability to know such realities even exist. However, according to these teachings, it seems there is a spiritual realm of truth and perfection beyond this universe; it lies within, and our dissatisfaction with this external world is a sign that we belong to that mystic realm, however alienated from it we may be. The task, as they saw it, was to find a pathway to that realm and follow it to the end, wherever it might lead.

Epilogue In the light of these Gnostic descriptions of spiritual ascent, what are we to make of St Paul’s ecstatic vision recorded in 2 Corinthians 12:1–4? There he speaks about himself in the third person, addressing claims that others have made about their mystical insights:

I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell …

What these mysterious things might be we will explore shortly in this series.

Mervyn Bendle is the author of Anzac and its Enemies: The History War on Australia’s National Identity. The first four parts of this series appeared in the March, April, May and June issues, and the sixth part will appear shortly.