by Michael Haag
Until the discovery of the gnostic gospels little was known of the gnostics except from the writings of their proto-orthodox opponents who branded them as heretics. What can be described as the proto-orthodox position within early Christianity – that is the doctrine held by those who in the fourth century would become the victorious and therefore orthodox party – can be found in the version of the New Testament that began to take shape in the second century and was eventually agreed by the Western Church at the Council of Carthage in 397 and by the Eastern Orthodox Church several years later. In particular the letters of Paul, the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the Acts of the Apostles could together be read as affirming that Jesus was divine, that his crucifixion was followed by his resurrection and that salvation lies in accepting this mystery via the apostolic Church, that is the Church that gains its authority by claiming that its highest officials are the successors of Jesus’s original apostles.
The sky goddess Nut on the vaulted ceiling of the burial chamber of Ramses VI in the Valley of the Kings. The theme of death and resurrection was as old as Egyptian civilisation itself. They believed that Nut swallowed the setting sun, that it travelled through her body illuminated by stars, and that she gave birth to the sun at the following dawn. Likewise Ramses will travel through the darkness of death but will emerge into the light.
Sky goddess Nut. Wikimedia Commons.
The existence of evil in God’s world posed a problem for early Christians, ‘this present evil world’ in the words of Paul. If there was only one God, and if God was the creator, and if God was good, how was it possible for there to be suffering, illness and death in his world? Christians divided into two responses. On the one hand the proto-orthodox Christians said that it was man, not God, who had introduced evil into the world, and for this they generally put the blame on Eve for eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A virtue of this argument was that it spoke of the great drama which found its resolution in this world. Here man had introduced evil, yes, but by his crucifixion and resurrection Jesus had come to save him from his sins and give him eternal life.
But the crucifixion and resurrection has no place in gnostic beliefs, nor was Jesus offering salvation from the sins of mankind. For the gnostics the evil in this world came not from man; it came from God. They rejected mankind’s original sin and going much further they rejected this world utterly, saying it was the creation of an evil deity, the enemy of man.
One of the most prominent gnostic teachers was Valentinus who flourished in Alexandria around AD 140. He claimed to possess the true knowledge of how the world had been created and how evil had come into being, a story that he introduced to his followers in terms of a cosmic myth. He conceived of a primal God, the centre of a divine harmony, who sends out manifestations of himself in pairs of male and female. Sophia, meaning Wisdom in Greek, the youngest of these divine emanations, tries to emulate her father, the primal God, who alone has the true power of creation, but instead she produces an abortion which after a long series of transformations evolves into the lower world of evil and decay inhabited by man and is ruled over by a hapless demiurge. In Valentinus’ system, however, Sophia, through repentance and expiation, ultimately returns to the upper world.
Valentinus’ description of the cosmos continued to excite the minds of thinkers long after gnosticism was suppressed. Here in this frontispiece to Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris metaphysica atque technical Historia (The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser), published in 1617–19 by the English physician and cosmologist Robert Fludd and illustrated by his own hand, he shows how the Anima Mundi, the World Spirit, otherwise known as Sophia, stands as intermediary between the upper world of God and the lower world of man. God’s hand holds a chain which descends to her right hand, while from her left hand, in turn, the chain descends to an ape, the symbol for the arts and sciences and crafts of mankind. Pagan Egyptians identified Sophia with Isis while the gnostics identified Sophia with Mary Magdalene.
Anima Mundi. The Wellcome Library, London.
The gnostics are called dualists because of their belief in these two worlds, the world of evil and decay inhabited by man, and the world of light where the primal God resides. But the gnostics also knew the secret of salvation. At the moment of her cosmic blunder, Sophia brought with her sparks of the divine light, like slivers of shattered glass, which became embedded in humankind. The gnostics saw themselves as the children of Sophia, a divinity of many names. She was the All-Mother, the Celestial Eve, the Holy Spirit. She was also She of the Left-hand as opposed to Jesus who is He of the Right-hand, she was the Man-Woman, she was Paradise, Eden, the Virgin, the Daughter of Light, the World Soul and the Soul in Man. From Sophia the gnostics had obtained the divine spark that urges them to seek the upper world, the true and perfect realm, of the primal God.
Cosmic redemption, however, and not just personal salvation, was necessary because the whole of creation had been a mistake; it had nothing to do with God who had never intended that there should be a universe and had never intended man. Creation was a defective work and so man lived in a meaningless world or in the iron control of evil powers; in any case he was caught in the trap of the material world which was sundered from the spirit of God.
Valentinus taught his followers that they could free themselves by attempting to quell their desires and by practising sexual abstinence. Bearing children would simply repeat and prolong the soul’s imprisonment in this defective world, its exile from the primal God. ‘Until when shall men continue to die?’, Jesus is asked in the Gospel of the Egyptians, to which he replies, ‘So long as women bear children’. In the polarity of the male and the female was mirrored the division, the duality, of the universe, so that the Last Judgement and the world’s redemption would come – as Jesus says in the gnostic Gospel of the Egyptians – ‘when the two become one, and the male with the female, there being neither male nor female’.
But not all schools of gnosticism promoted sexual abstinence. The Carpocratians, mentioned in Clement of Alexandria’s letter about the Secret Gospel of Mark, had been founded in Alexandria around the time of Hadrian’s visit in AD 130-131. The Carpocratians believed they could escape the shackles of this world by disregarding its rules and conventions; property was unnatural, they said, and women should be held in common; every experience, good or sinful, should be indulged, and as this could take more than a lifetime to accomplish they believed in the transmigration of souls. The licentiousness of the Carpocratians was confirmed by Clement who claimed that at their agape feast, the sacremental sharing of wine and bread and other foods practised by early Christians rather like the Eucharist, they had ‘intercourse where they will and with whom they will’.
Another version of the Eucharist featured in the practices of the Phibionites according to Epiphanius, a fourth-century bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, who witnessed their practices first hand at Alexandria in his youth. In his book the Panarion, a treatise on heresies, Epiphanius describes how members of this gnostic sect gathered for meals where men had sex with other men’s wives. Just before ejaculation the man withdrew and together with the woman collected his semen and ate it. If the woman was menstruating they mixed her blood with the semen and ate that too.
This sexual sacrament came from what the Phibionites took to be a holy scripture called the Great Questions of Mary, long lost and known to us only through mentions in the Panarion, in which Jesus takes Mary Magdalene to a mountaintop where he draws a woman out from his side, rather like Eve was first created from the rib of Adam. Jesus then has sexual intercourse with the woman, but withdraws in time to catch and swallow his own semen, saying to Mary, ‘This we must do so that we may live’. The prohibition is not on sexual intercourse but on reproduction;Jesus is showing that by consuming the man’s semen and the woman’s blood he is stopping the cycle of reproduction which would otherwise create ye
t more human prisons for the soul.
Men and women break bread at the outset of an agape feast in this painting within the second to fourth-century Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome. But for at least two gnostic sects in Egypt, the Carpocratians and the Phibionites, the agape feasts were said to be more like orgies in which the men had sex with each other’s wives.
Agape feast. Wikimedia Commons.
That Mary Magdalene could be identified with such a range of practices, from libertinism to asceticism, shows how widely she appealed. She was a woman who could be everything to everybody – as Isis was the goddess of countless names, the all-embracing goddess. But when ultimately gnosticism became a heresy, Mary Magdalene was dethroned; from goddess Mary Magdalene became everything to everybody in a very different way; the Church turned her into a whore.
Because the gnostic mystery lay not in the crucifixion and resurrection, it undermined the rationale for the Great Commission, the command by the resurrected Jesus (found for example in Mark 9:15-16 and Matthew 28:16-20) to spread the gospel throughout the world and which became the basis for the apostolic sees and the principal of apostolic succession which is the foundation stone of the hierarichal order of the Church. Instead the gnostic approach to the divine was personal and visionary; the role of Jesus was to descend from the primal God and impart to his disciples the secret tradition of the gnosis. And according to the gnostic Dialogue of the Saviour found at Nag Hammadi, his best pupil, the ‘woman who understood the all’, was Mary Magdalene.
Mary Magdalene in the Gnostic Gospels
Mary Magdalene features prominently in Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Mary, the Dialogue of the Saviour, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Thomas where she is associated with Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, and is portrayed as a visionary, as the woman who ‘knows all’ and as the ‘inheritor of light’.
The setting is usually in the period after the resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas is an exception in that it is a gospel composed entirely of the sayings of Jesus and therefore set outside time. Another exception is the Gospel of Philip in which Mary Magdalene has an explicit role in the lifetime of the historical Jesus where she is the only disciple who already understands his real character and message. She is celebrated as the chief disciple of Jesus and in the Gospel of Philip she is described as his koinonos, a Greek word used in the Bible to mean companion or consort or wife.
But also the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the gnostic gospels generally suggests a profounder dimension; she is the divine syzygos of Jesus, his feminine aspect that creates a spiritual whole. In Pistis Sophia the disciples ask Jesus how he came down from the immortal realms to this world where everything dies, to which he replies, ‘The Son of Man consented with Sophia, his consort, and revealed a great androgynous light. His male name is “Saviour, Begetter of All Things”. His female name is “All-Begettress Sophia”’.
The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, dates to the very beginnings of the Christian era. Written in Coptic, it was translated from an earlier Greek version, fragments of which are known from excavations in 1897 and 1903 at Oxyrhynchus farther north along the Nile. There is growing scholarly agreement that the Gospel of Thomas was composed at about the same time and possibly before the four canonical gospels, and some would place it as early as AD 50. The gospel opens with these lines.
These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke, and that Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. And He said: ‘Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death’.
The mention of hidden words suggests gnosticism, but the Gospel of Thomas need not be set apart as gnostic for much of it can be found in the canonical gospels, indeed many of its lines may first have been written in Thomas rather than in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.
The Gospel of Thomas is not a gospel in the New Testament sense; there is no narrative of Jesus’ life, no account of his healings or miracles or teachings, nothing about his birth or death. Instead the gospel amounts to 114 sayings of Jesus as recorded by someone who calls himself Didymos Judas Thomas. The gospel of John mentions a Didymos Thomas as one of the apostles, but we really do not know who wrote the Gospel of Thomas, any more than we know who wrote the canonical gospels, all of them anonymous; the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were added in the second century.
But whoever wrote the Gospel of Thomas had at hand the same basic materials as appear in the canonical gospels. Most of its 114 sayings will be familiar. There are the parables of the mustard seed, of the mote in your brother’s eye, of the blind leading the blind. Prophets are not recognised on their home ground, Jesus says, and he warns not to throw pearls before swine. Being shown a gold coin bearing the head of the Roman emperor, Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas says, ‘Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, give God what belongs to God, and give me what is mine’, recalling the scene of Jesus being questioned by the priests at the Temple in the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke – but in the synoptic gospels the material has been worked into a narrative and a drama; in the Gospel of Thomas it remains a saying without context.
Instead of relying on a storyline the Gospel of Thomas offers bursts of revelation: ‘The Father’s kingdom is within you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty’.
Mary Magdalene is mentioned twice in the Gospel of Thomas. The first time, in saying 21, she says to Jesus, ‘What are your disciples like?’ and he replies, ‘They are like little children living in a field that is not theirs’. The meaning of the parable is not clear, indeed it may have been poorly translated from the Greek, but what appears to happen is that the owner returns, demands his field, and the children remove their clothes and go. This can be taken to mean that the disciples, that is the children, are dwellers in this world, this creation of the demiurge, which is not their true world; in leaving, the children strip themselves of their bodies which are likewise part of the false creation of the demiurge.
Jesus continues, ‘Be on guard against the world. Prepare yourselves with great strength, so the robbers cannot find a way to get to you, for the trouble you expect will come. Let there be among you a person who understands. When the crop ripened, he came quickly carrying a sickle and harvested it. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!’ Here it seems that the one who understands will know when the moment has come to harvest the gnostic wisdom. Significantly it is Mary Magdalene who has asked the question, and as though his words are meant specially for her, Jesus says, ‘Let there be among you a person who understands’.
When the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus, a vanished ancient city in Upper Egypt, were excavated at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries they yielded not only the documents of everyday ancient lives such as private letters, marriage certificates, wills, accounts and land leases, but also long lost works by Sophocles, Plato and Thucydides, and they revealed also the gnostic gospels of Thomas and of Mary Magdalene.
Oxyrhynchus excavations. Imaging Papyri Project, University of Oxford.
Mary Magdalene is mentioned again in saying 114. This is the very last saying in the gospel and there is some scholarly thought that it might have been added at a later date. Abruptly, Peter says to Jesus, ‘Make Mary leave us, for females do not deserve life’. Jesus replies, ‘Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven’.
The life to which Peter refers is eternal life; he is objecting to a spiritual role for Mary Magdalene and women generally. This is a complaint that Peter makes even more strongly in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and Pistis Sophia, and the clash between Peter and Mary Magdalene is there also in the Gospel of Luke. But Jesus deals with Peter firmly, saying that he wi
ll personally ensure that she enters the kingdom of heaven. But though the language of this saying might be disturbing to modern ears – ‘I will guide her to make her male’ – to take it simply as evidence of misogyny is to not hear the fuller story.
A common philosophical metaphor in Hellenistic times was to describe the essence of form as male and its material element as female. ‘To become male’ was a commonplace phrase for becoming spiritual and pure. It was based on the notion of a continuum of being through plants and animals to men and the gods. Human males were closest to the gods along that continuum. If the aim of men was to become like gods, so for a female also to become like a god she first had to pass through being a male. Peter’s prejudice against Mary Magdalene is immediately converted by Jesus into a philosophical matter; all that is earthly and perishable will be transformed into the heavenly and imperishable. Jesus is ensuring the liberation and salvation of Mary Magdalene in the same way that all must be lifted out of this material world to be liberated and saved.
There was also a Judaic aspect to this. In the original state of existence before the Fall, Adam was complete: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’ (Genesis 1:27). Woman was created when Eve was removed from Adam’s side. Therefore, goes the reasoning, to restore the primal unity, to escape the pain and decay and death of the material world, woman needs to be reabsorbed into man.
There is something else going on here too, more important than any sexual politics, and that is the argument between vision on the one hand, that is the direct and personal apprehension of the divine, a quality represented by Mary Magdalene, the woman who knows, and a religion which demands the mediation of the Church, a hierarchy of officials who base their authority on apostolic succession, for whom Peter is the ‘rock’ – though there is no evidence whatsoever, only Church-invented legend, that Peter ever went to Rome.
