1st John and the Long Lost Gnostics, Part 1

A fragment of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas

A New Gospel

In the year 2006 a team of scholars at the University of Geneva in Switzerland announced that they had translated the long lost Gnostic Gospel of Judas. This was the product of five long years spent painstakingly tweezering together the crumbling fragments of a manuscript that had been lost for nearly 1700 years. I remember listening to an NPR interview at the time with an expert on this newly-discovered gospel. They talked about the religion that had  produced this gospel--Gnostic Christianity--and about what it had to say about Jesus and Judas. And at the end of the interview, I remember how the NPR reporter dropped his voice into a deep and husky reverence, as he breathed his final, burning question: "Do you believe, doctor, that Christians will one day think of the Gospel of Judas as a fifth gospel alongside those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?"

Christians in Wonderland

Ah, hmmm, "No." Christians aren't likely to recast Judas as the hero of the Passion anytime soon, which is how he is portrayed in the Gospel of Judas. Nor are we likely to replace our concept of the Trinity with the idea that Yahweh, the God of the Jews, was actually one of the lesser gods in the pantheon of aeons that emanated from the Monad, that he is really the twisted, evil offspring of Sophia, the aeon of Wisdom, who emanated from one of the descendants of the aeons that emanated from Christ, who was himself the offspring of Barbelo and the Monad, as described in the Apocryphon of John, another Gnostic text. With several entire books of the New Testament dedicated to opposing Gnosticism, Christians are not likely to add any of the scores of Gnostic gospels, acts and apocalypses to the canon of the Scriptures, now or ever. 

Indeed, a Christian who enters the world of Gnosticism feels like Alice descending into Wonderland, into a world turned upside down, where not only Judas but all the villains of the Bible are transformed into heroes, and where Yahweh--God himself, who the Gnostics call 'Yaltabaoth'--is the principle villain. It is a world in which God orders Adam and Eve to refrain from eating of the tree of knowledge in order to enslave them with ignorance. In which the serpent who tempts Eve is really a liberating spirit from the realm of light, whose tempation leads not to a Fall, but to freedom from the Garden and escape from the clutches of Yaltabaoth. It is a world in which Cain and Abel are the products of the rape of Eve by God. In their writings, the Gnostics delight in heaping insults upon the God of the Jews: He was conceived in a moment of sinfulness by his mother Sophia, who "wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the Spirit, - he had not approved - and without her consort, and without his consideration." When Sophia looked upon her offspring, she found it deformed and hideous, with the "form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires which flash. She cast it away from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it, for she had created it in ignorance." He became the "Demiurge," the semi-creator, not powerful enough to create a world on his own, but the one who would shape the matter that was thrown off of his mother into the world as we know it, a world, like Yaltabaoth himself, of ignorance, evil and deception. He stupidly believes that he is the ultimate source of Creation. He is "full of ignorance," the "god of the blind," "the arrogant ruler," the "deceiver." His rape of Eve "planted sexual desire in her" and is the source of all lust in the world, for it "inspired [her descendants] with his counterfeit spirit." These are not ideas that can be easily incorporated into orthodox Christianity.

The Neo-Gnostics

If the NPR correspondent I listened to three years ago didn't realize the absurdity of his question, some unconscionable reporting by the National Geographic Society at the time no doubt bears some of the blame. The Society, which funded the translation project and made it the cover story of their May 2006 issue, as well as the subject of three books, advertised their findings with this teaser:

The Gospel of Judas gives a different view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas, offering new insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus....

During the first centuries A.D. Christianity grew from humble origins to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Through time lines, maps, and photos explore the world of early Christianity. And learn where the Gospel of Judas fit into the divergent philosophies within the new religion.

The picture presented here is that Gnostic and orthodox Christians were in the earliest days all part of the same big, diverse Christian family, and that the Gnostic gospels have the same claim to historical truth as the canonical ones. These ideas have been most famously advocated by Elaine Pagels, a professor of Religion at Princeton University who advised the Society on their story, and whose book The Gnostic Gospels is widely viewed as having spawned a modern, modest resurgence in Gnosticism. In her book she writes:

[I]deas that we associate with Eastern religions emerged in the first century through the gnostic movement in the West, but they were suppressed and condemned by polemicists like Irenaeus. Yet those who called gnosticism heresy were adopting--consciously or not--the viewpoint of that group of Christians who called themselves orthodox Christians. A heretic may be anyone whose outlook someone else dislikes or denounces. According to tradition, a heretic is one who deviates from the true faith. But what defines that "true faith"? Who calls it that, and for what reasons?

...If we admit that some of these fifty-two [Gnostic] texts [discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, including the Gospel of Judas,] represents early forms of Christian teaching, we may have to recognize that early Christianity is far more diverse than nearly anyone expected before the Nag Hammadi discoveries.

...[T]he canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure [of the Church] emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. Before that time, as Irenaeus and others attest, numerous gospels circulated among various Christian groups, ranging from those of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, to such writings as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth, as well as many other secret teachings, myths, and poems attributed to Jesus or his disciples. 

...Yet by A. D. 200, the situation had changed. Christianity had become an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, who understood themselves to be the guardians of the only "true faith." The majority of churches, among which the church of Rome took a leading role, rejected all other viewpoints as heresy. Deploring the diversity of the earlier movement, Bishop Irenaeus and his followers insisted that there could be only one church, and outside of that church, he declared, "there is no salvation." Members of this church alone are orthodox (literally, "straight-thinking") Christians. And, he claimed, this church must be catholic-- that is, universal. Whoever challenged that consensus, arguing instead for other forms of Christian teaching, was declared to be a heretic, and expelled. When the orthodox gained military support, sometime after the Emperor Constantine became Christian in the fourth century, the penalty for heresy escalated.

The story presented is this: that in the century and a half after Jesus' death, Christians struggled to come to grips with the meaning of his ministry, with many different viewpoints being expressed--some somewhat Gnostic, others more orthodox--but none with any more valid claim to fidelity to Jesus' teachings than any other. And out of this cacophony of voices there arose, sometime around the end of the second century, a new outlook, which we today think of as "orthodox" Christianity, that sought to unify Christianity by suppressing any Christians with Gnostic tendencies. This is an eminently coherent, self-consistent story that would be perfectly sensible, if we were given a different set of historical facts than the ones we have. As it is, I find this viewpoint profoundly a-historical and illogical.

Rebuttals

Because from the very beginning, the historical evidence shows us that there was an orthodox, Apostolic Church that organized itself around the Apostles and their descendants, that carefully preserved the succession of its bishops from the original Apostles, and that perceived a crystal clear delineation between itself and the Gnostics. Irenaeus, in his book Against Heresies, written around the year A.D. 180, which was no more than 80 years after the last of the New Testament Scriptures were written, has this to say:

We have learned the plan of our salvation from none other than those through whom the gospel came down to us. Indeed, they first preached the gospel, and afterwards, by the will of God, they handed it down to us in the Scriptures, to be the foundation and pillar of our faith....They went forth to the ends of the earth, spreading the good news of the good things which God has sent to us, and announcing the peace of heaven to men, who indeed are all equally and individually sharers in the gospel of God. Matthew also issued among the Hebrews a written Gospel in their own language, while Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord who reclined at His bosom, also published a Gospel, while he was residing at Ephesus in Asia.

...It is possible, then, for everyone in every Church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the Apostles which has been made known throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the Apostles, and their successors to our own times: men who neither knew nor taught anything like these heretics rave about. 

And elsewhere Irenaeus says:

[T]he Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although she is disseminated throughout the whole world, yet guarded it, as if she occupied one house....For while the languages of the world are diverse, nevertheless, the authority of the tradition is one and the same. 

Neither do the Churches among the Germans believe otherwise or have another tradition, nor do those among the Iberians, nor among the Celts, nor away in the East, nor in Egypt, nor in Libya, nor those which have been established in the central regions of the world. But just as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere and enlightens all men who desire to come to knowledge of the truth.

Of course Pagels would have us believe that Irenaeus was, through statements such as these, making himself one of the principle architects of a new orthodoxy, one that had not existed before he and like-minded people began this campaign against the Gnostics. But if we look at what Irenaeus is saying here, we can see that he is not arguing that the Church must become catholic and Apostolic, he is arguing that it always has been that way. He is saying that the Church has so jealously guarded the succession of the bishops from the Apostles, that he could, from his vantage point in history less than 80 years after the death of the last Apostle, list the men called upon by the Apostles to become bishops, as well as every one of their successors down to his own day. He is saying that the Church has worked so hard to maintain the unity of its teachings that he can confidently say that the churches in the far Western end of the known world, the churches in the far Eastern end of the world, and the churches dispersed everywhere else in between, maintain a single tradition, and speak with a single voice. 

Anyone who would wish to dismiss statements such as these as fabrications should think about the reason they believe in the existence of China. Most of us have never seen China and never will, so we cannot personally verify its existence. We believe that China is a real place, and cannot be a hoax, because we know that it would impossible to prevent such a hoax from being exposed, given the ease with which other people can determine the facts. So too would it be impossible for Irenaeus to publicly proclaim these things about the Church, and to believe that his proclamations will carry weight with his readers in his fight against Gnosticism, if they were a lie. 

As for Pagels' claim that the Church only "became an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons" at the end of the second century, Clement of Rome, writing 100 years before that, sometime around the years A.D. 80 - 99, would disagree. In his Epistle to the Corinthians he writes:

The Apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ was sent from God. Christ, therefore, is from God, and the Apostles are from Christ. Both of these orderly arrangements, then, are by God's will. Receiving their instructions and being full of confidence on account of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and confirmed in faith by the word of God, they went forth in complete assurance of the Holy Spirit, preaching the good news that the Kingdom of God is coming. Throughout the countryside and city they preached; and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers.

Clement's letter is so ancient it was written before some of the books of the New Testament. But we don't even have to take Irenaeus' or Clement's word for it, because the evidence that the Church had this perception of itself from the beginning, and that it considered Gnosticism as being something other than Christianity, can be found in the New Testament writings themselves. As we will see in my next post, it can be found specifically in the first letter of John.