The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The intrigue of these Gnostic systems for general readers is thus obvious. But why, as I indicated at the outset, have they created such scholarly befuddlement? Maybe the easiest explanation is that while it is one thing to summarize the gist of the teachings of one Gnostic group or another, it is another thing to plumb the depths of the texts themselves. And there is scarcely any religious literature written in any language at any time that can be more perplexing and deliberately obscure than some of the Gnostic writings of Christian antiquity. To be sure, these are all available in good English translation. But even as translators try to present these texts in terms comprehensible to modern readers, they remain obtuse in places, as, for example, they detail the complex relations of incalculable divine beings described in the subtle nuances of highly symbolic language. Sometimes you may suspect the translation is bad, but in fact, most of the time the English translation is clearer than the Coptic of the texts themselves.

  Not only are some of these original materials difficult to understand individually: they are also difficult to place in relationship with one another. Scholars have concluded that there are numerous religious perspectives represented in the various Gnostic documents surviving from antiquity and that these perspectives are not always consistent with one another. Probably different documents come from different communities with different worldviews, mythological systems, beliefs, and practices. Some of the texts found at Nag Hammadi present or presuppose religious systems unrelated to anything else known from the ancient world; some of them are evidently not even Gnostic; some are almost certainly not Christian. Rather than one thing, then, the Nag Hammadi library contains numerous things, various perspectives presented in an array of texts including a whole host of lost Christianities. It is impossible to synthesize the views, presuppositions, religious perspectives of these into one monolithic system.

  As a result, scholars have enormous and ongoing disputes over them, in terms of the individual documents and the overall phenomenon traditionally called Gnosticism. Some of the major questions are: Is Gnosticism an appropriate term for all the religions that we normally subsume under this name? Or are these religions so different from one another that we level out their differences by calling them all Gnostic? When did these various religions come into being? Were some of them in existence before Christianity? Do they spring from some kind of Judaism? Or are they offshoots of Christianity? Or are they religions that sprang up at the same time as Christianity and were mutually influential with it (i.e., with non-Gnostic Christians picking up ideas from Gnostics and Gnostics picking up ideas from non-Gnostic Christians)? Can we assign certain Christian Gnostic texts to known Christian Gnostic sects? Were there scores of Gnostic myths or just one overarching myth that was told in a variety of ways? And so on.

  Fortunately, I do not need to delve into these questions of scholarship here, many of which revolve around highly technical issues. My interests are much broader. I will be assuming that Gnosticism is a complex phenomenon with numerous manifestations (like Christianity, past and present), but that a number of the texts of the Nag Hammadi library cohere together because they were rooted in the same basic Gnostic view of the world—even when that view comes to be manifested in a variety of ways. Moreover, I will assume that, based on these texts which do cohere (as opposed to others which assume different perspectives), we can describe general characteristics of some Gnostic religions (while acknowledging that other characteristics might apply to other kinds of Gnostic religion), that these characteristics can in turn help explain the texts, and that we can get a general idea of how some forms of Gnostic Christianity relate to non-Gnostic Christianities, whether or not there were Gnostic groups before or independent of early Christianity. When I speak of the "Gnostic texts" in the discussion that follows, then, I will be referring only to those documents (mainly from Nag Hammadi) that cohere together and appear therefore to represent a particular religious perspective. It must always be borne in mind that even as I speak of one form of the Gnostic religion, I do not thereby mean to say that Gnosticism was only one thing any more than Christianity was.

  The Origins of Gnosticism

  Before discussing further the major tenets of the one kind of Gnosticism we will be focusing on, I should say a few words about where it appears to have come from and give a more extensive account of how we now can know about it.

  The "where it came from" question has intrigued scholars for a very long time. Two features of Gnostic texts in particular have caused a good deal of puzzlement. On the one hand, these texts clearly suppose that the material world is not a good place, that it is not the creation of the good God who made all things and then declared them "good," as in Genesis. To be sure, Jews and Christians have never thought the world was perfect, not even the Jews and Christians responsible for writing the Bible. Evil and suffering are constantly on their minds and usually at the forefront of their writings. But for the most part, the biblical writers maintain that the evil in this world results from human sin, which brought about a corruption of the good creation of God. Most Gnostic authors assume, however, that evil is written into the fabric of the material world itself. This may sound like an anf/'-Judeo-Christian view. On the other hand, these Christian Gnostic texts are filled with Jewish and Christian matedals; Christ is the ultimate redeemer, the creator God is assumed to be the God of the Old Testament, and a number of the texts are actually expositions of the early chapters of Genesis (creation, Adam and Eve, the flood, etc.)- If the writers were anti-Jewish, why did they presuppose the teachings of Judaism? If they came from an anti- Jewish milieu, why did they write commentaries on Genesis?

  One way to solve this problem is to situate the origins of Gnostic Christianity not outside of Judaism but inside it, as a kind of reaction movement to forms of Judaism that had developed by the time Christianity emerged, forms of Judaism that influenced Jesus and his followers. To give even a simplified picture of how it works, we need to start way back, as far back as we have records among Jewish theologians who were trying to understand why there was suffering in the world. This is as far back as we have records of Jewish theologians—hundreds of years before Jesus.

  In one way or another, a significant amount of Jewish theology goes back to the traditions about the Exodus from Egypt under Moses, as recounted in the early books of the Hebrew Bible. According to the accounts, after the children of Israel had been enslaved for centuries, God heard their cry and raised up for them a prophet, Moses, whom he used to oppose the Egyptian Pharaoh, working ten plagues against the Egyptians to force his hand and set the people free. After the Israelites escaped, Pharaoh pursued his former slaves, only to be soundly defeated at the Red Sea, when the waters miraculously parted, the children of Israel crossed on dry land, and the Egyptian armies were destroyed by the floods when the waters returned. For ancient Jews, this Exodus tradition was theologically significant. It showed, in broad terms, that God had chosen Israel to be his people and that he would intervene on their behalf when they were in dire straits.

  What were theologians, and others, to think, then, when in later times the people of Israel suffered but God did not intervene? Much of the Hebrew Bible is taken up with this question. The standard answer comes in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Amos. For these writers, Israel suffers military, political, economic, and social setbacks because the people have sinned against God and he is punishing them for it. But when they return to his ways, following the directions for communal life and worship that he had given to Moses in the Law, he would relent and return them to their happy and prosperous lives.

  This "classical" view of suffering continued to affirm the Exodus theology, that God is the God of Israel who will intervene on their behalf, and yet it explains the ongoing problem of suffering. But what happens when the people do return to God, do try to keep his ways, and still suffer? The difficulty with the classical, prophetic view is that it does not explain why the wicke
d prosper and the righteous suffer. This shortcoming led to a number of variant theologies in ancient Israel, including those of the books of Job and Ecclesiastes (both directed against this prophetic view) and to that of a group of Jewish thinkers that modern scholars have called "apocalypticists." The term comes from the Greek word apocalypsis, which means an "unveiling" or a "revealing," used of these people because they believed God had "revealed" to them the ultimate secrets of the world that explain why it contains such evil and suffering.

  Jewish apocalypticism arose in a context of intense suffering, some two hundred years before Jesus, when the Syrian ruler who had control of Palestine, the Jewish homeland, persecuted Jews precisely for being Jewish. For example, circumcision—the central sign of covenant union with God—was forbidden on pain of death. Clearly, for many Jewish thinkers, this kind of suffering, contrary to the classical view of the prophets, could not come from God, since it was the direct result of trying to follow God. There must be some other reason for the suffering, then, and some other agent responsible for it. Jewish apocalypticists developed the idea that God had a personal adversary, the Devil, who was responsible for suffering, that there were cosmic forces in the world, evil powers with the Devil at their head, who were afflicting God's people. According to this perspective, God was still the creator of this world and would be its ultimate redeemer. But for the time being, the forces of evil had been unleashed and were wreaking havoc among God's people.

  Jewish apocalypticists maintained, however, that God would soon intervene and overthrow these forces of evil in a cataclysmic show of force, that he would destroy all that opposed him, including all the kingdoms that were causing his people to suffer, and that he would then bring in a new kingdom, in which there would be no more sin, suffering, evil, or death. These apocalypticists maintained that those who were suffering needed to hold on just a little while longer, for God would soon vindicate them and give them an eternal reward in his Kingdom. How soon would this be? "Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death until you see the Kingdom of God having come in power." These are the words of Jesus (Mark 9:1), probably the best-known Jewish apocalypticist of antiquity. Or as he says later, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (Mark 13:30).

  Jesus and his earliest followers were Jewish apocalypticists, expecting the imminent intervention of God to overthrow the forces of evil. To this extent they were like many other Jews of the first century, including those who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus appears to have thought that God was soon to send the Son of man from heaven as a judge against all those who align themselves against God (cf. Mark 8:38-9:1,13:24-30); in this, too, he agreed with other apocalyptic prophets of his own day. But after Jesus died, his followers came to think that it was Jesus himself who would soon return from heaven on the clouds as a cosmic judge of the earth. The apostle Paul, our earliest Christian author, believed that Jesus would return in judgment in his own lifetime (see 1 Thess. 4:14-18; 1 Cor. 15:51-52).

  What would happen to an apocalyptic worldview if, contrary to expectation, the end did not come "soon"? Or, worse, if it never came at all? What would people firmly committed to an apocalyptic view of the world do then? How would their thinking change?

  Some such people might well experience another radical modification in their thinking, at least as radical as that from the prophetic view (God is causing suffering) to the apocalyptic (God's enemy, the Devil, is causing suffering). Both of these earlier views presuppose that the world was created by God, who is the good and all-powerful divine force behind it. But if these views are called into question by the ongoing realities of suffering in the world, what then? Maybe in fact the entire assumption is wrong. Maybe this world is not the creation of the one true God. Maybe the suffering in this world is not happening as a punishment from this good God or despite his goodness. Maybe the God of this world is not good. Maybe he is causing suffering not because he is good and wants people to share in his goodness but because he is evil, or ignorant, or inferior, and he wants people to suffer or doesn't care if they do, or maybe he can't do anything about it. But if that's true, then the God of this world is not the one true God. There must be a greater God above this world, one who did not create this world. In this understanding, the material world itself—material existence in all its forms—is inferior at best or evil at worst, and so is the God, then, who created it. There must be a nonmaterial God unconnected with this world, above the creator God of the Old Testament, a God who neither created this world nor brought suffering to it, who wants to relieve his people from their suffering—not by redeeming this world but by delivering them from it, liberating them from their entrapment in this material existence.

  That is a Gnostic view. It may well have derived, ultimately, from a kind of failed apocalypticism. No wonder, then, that it is so taken up with Jewish texts. It derives from a Jewish worldview. And no wonder that in its Christian forms it gives such a central role to Christ, reinterpreting him away from his own apocalyptic roots.

  It would be a mistake, however, to see Gnosticism as failed apocalypticism, pure and simple, for there are other factors that appear to have affected the complicated "mix" that we find in the Gnostic religions. Here I will mention just one other. One of the most striking features of Gnosticism is its radical dualism, in which the material world is evil and the world of the spirit is good. Where did this idea come from? Some readers are immediately struck by the parallels to certain kinds of eastern religion, and there may be something to that connection. But scholars of antiquity are usually struck even more by the similarities to other philosophical notions known from the period, especially among thinkers who stood within the Platonic tradition. Plato, too, had emphasized a kind of dualism of shadow and reality, matter and spirit. And there were a number of philosophers from the first and second centuries of the common era who expanded Plato's views and developed entire cosmologies—explanations for our world—that were dependent on him. These thinkers are usually called "Middle Platonists," to differentiate them from the older Platonists immediately following Plato (who died in the fourth century bce) and the even better known Neoplatonists of the third and following centuries ce.

  Like the Gnostics, Middle Platonists thought that there was an ultimate deity far removed from anything we could think or imagine, completely ineffable (i.e., words cannot describe this God—even the loftiest words we can muster), absolutely perfect, totally removed from this world and its categories. He is complete and eternal within himself, not in relation to something else, not limited by space or time, and not intrinsically connected with anything in space and time. You cannot say that he is "great," because that would mean that he participates in something other than himself, called "greatness." You can't really say that he is "good," for the same reason. He is not big, because that would imply he has size.

  Like Gnostics, the Middle Platonists were obsessed with understanding how this material world could come into being, if in the beginning the only thing that existed was this self-existent, perfect One. They developed mythological systems to explain how it happened. These myths did not suggest that the one God decided to create the world. Instead, they maintained that from this One there emanated a bewildering series of other divine beings, spilling outwards like water from a fountain, so that between the One True Spirit and this material world there were large numbers and various kinds of divine intermediaries, separating us from that One by an unbridgeable chasm.

  These Middle Platonists were especially enthralled with Plato's dialogue, the Timaeus, in which Plato himself describes the creation of the material world from the world of nonmatter. It is interesting that one of the most philosophically astute Jews of the first century, Philo of Alexandria, wrote a commentary on the book of Genesis in which he tried to show that, when properly understood, Moses stood in direct continuity with Plato. Philo himself can be understood as a Middle Platonist, taking the Middle Platonic notions
of the One supreme spiritual God and the realm of divine intermediaries between that God and this world, and applying them to his interpretation of Scripture.

  Maybe Gnostics stood in that intellectual line, deriving their understanding of the world from Middle Platonism, in light of a transformation of a traditional view of Judaism, driven by the failure of apocalyptic hopes to materialize. The Christian form of Gnosticism, then, would have been influenced by the Christian claims about Christ, as the one through whom salvation comes, the one who reveals the truth, the one who comes from God above to us below (see, e.g., John 3:12-13, 6:41-42, 8:32).

  This, then, is at least one way of understanding where this puzzling worldview of early Christian Gnosticism came from.

  The Sources of Our "Knowledge" of Gnosticism

  What, more precisely, was this Gnostic view? One of the difficulties in summarizing it has to do with the ancient sources that are available. For centuries— in fact, all the time prior to the discovery of original Gnostic documents—our only sources of information about Gnosticism were the writings of the orthodox and proto-orthodox church fathers who opposed it, writers like Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who around 180 ce composed a five-volume work, Refutation and Overthrow of Gnosis, Falsely So-Called (usually simply called Against Heresies); Tertullian of Carthage, who about twenty years later wrote a number of treatises against various heretics; and his contemporary, Hippolytus of Rome, whose own work, Refutation of All Heresies, was itself discovered only in the nineteenth century. These writers give full, sometimes interminable, descriptions of Gnosticism. But they have nothing good to say about it. Gnostics are consistently ridiculed for espousing absurd and absurdly complex myths, for corrupting the clear teachings of Scripture (clear, that is, to the proto-orthodox), for espousing self-contradictory views, for encouraging wild and licentious activities that reveal their true colors as reprobates and deviants from the truth.