Papyrus P9, oldest known fragment of the 1st Letter of John
"What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life--
for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us--
what we have seen and heard we proclaim now to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ."
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
And in fact it is generally agreed that 1st John and the Gospel of John were written by the same person, a man styled "John the Evangelist." The tradition of the early Church fathers and the text of the Gospel itself suggests that this man was the "beloved disciple" who rested his head upon Jesus' chest at the last supper, and who was given charge of Mary as he stood at the foot of the cross at the crucifixion. He must have been a very young man at the time, because the Gospel and 1st John are believed to have been written toward the end of the first century, probably in the 90s, some 60 or more years after the crucifixion.
The 1st Letter of John is intended to be a warning, and also a source of strength and encouragement, for a community that was midst of a crisis. John paints the situation in the starkest possible terms: "Children," he says, "it is the last hour; and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming, so now many antichrists have appeared." These "antichrists" were people who had once been members of the community to which he writes, but who abandoned the Church for another. "They went out from us," he says, "but they were not really of our number; if they had been, they would have remained with us. Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number." John warns his readers that they must be vigilant against the missionaries of this false religion, telling them that they must "not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world." To forestall the heretics and save the faith of the community, John eloquently lays out his case against the heresy, and tries to help his readers to recognize the power and value of their own faith.
The Opening Shot
The similarities in the opening verses of the Gospel of John and the 1st Letter of John are so overpowering that we tend to overlook one important way in which they differ: both are powerful and poetic descriptions of the mysterious, divine nature of Jesus, but woven throughout the opening paragraph of 1st John is an additional and not-so-subtle appeal to the authority conferred by John's personal witness to the living Christ:
What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life--Perhaps the word "authority" conjures up the wrong image: John isn't dictating anything, he isn't saying "I knew Jesus and you didn't, so fall in line," but neither is he giving any quarter when it comes to the faith he proclaims. His teachings aren't open for discussion. He has complete confidence in his own fidelity to the will of God, a confidence based on his personal experience with Jesus during his Earthly ministry. "Our fellowship is with Jesus," he's saying, "and we know that we are true to him because we saw him with our own eyes, and heard him with our own ears, and touched him with our own hands. And we are happy to extend that fellowship to you if you will believe in the gospel that we proclaim to you now." Anyone is free to accept that fellowship or to reject it, but the nature of the choice is clear: you can side with a community that was founded by Jesus himself, or you can side with the pretenders.
for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us--
what we have seen and heard we proclaim now to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
To John, the Church is a community founded by and centered on Jesus, consisting of the Apostles and the disciples who knew him during his ministry, and radiating outward to those who would join in fellowship with them. This continuity of fellowship with the original community of the Apostles is what we call "Apostolicity", and it has been maintained by the Church down to this very day, a fact we affirm every time we say the Nicene Creed and declare the Church to be "one, holy, catholic and Apostolic." It's an idea that was also expressed by Clement of Rome, who was a contemporary of John's, in his letter to the Corinthians: "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." And it is echoed in Jesus' commandment to the Apostles after the Resurrection, as related in the Gospel of John: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you."
And this provides an answer to the rhetorical question that was posed by Elaine Pagels, that I quoted in my last post:
And this provides an answer to the rhetorical question that was posed by Elaine Pagels, that I quoted in my last post:
[T]hose 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?Evidently she believes there is no objective criteria by which these things may be judged, that they are determined by the other Golden Rule (whoever has the gold makes the rules); whichever side wins gets to write the history books and claim the title of orthodoxy. But that's not what the early Christians believed. In John's opinion, the authentic Christian community is the one that has maintained a continuous fellowship with the Apostolic community that was founded by Christ. This is the objective standard by which all faith communities may be evaluated. And not only does this answer Pagels' question in the abstract, but I believe it directly answers her specific question, the question of how we can know that Gnosticism in particular is not the authentic a form of Christianity. Because as the astute reader has no doubt surmised from the title of this post, I believe that that the heretics that John was warning his community about in the 1st Letter of John were, in fact, Gnostics.
The Freedom of the Blogosphere
Now this is the message that we have heard from him and proclaim to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.If we say, "We have fellowship with him," while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.If we say, "We are without sin," we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.If we say, "We have not sinned," we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
I often find Scriptural commentaries frustrating to read, because they can tend to be so cautious in their interpretations that they do little more than repeat the literal meaning of the text. This is especially true of 1st John, where so little is known about the context of the letter. There isn't even certainty about which heresy John's community was confronting. The introduction to the New American Bible calls it "a form of docetism or gnosticism," because that is as much as can be certainly proven from the text of the letter. This kind of caution is altogether fitting and proper for a scholarly study, where it is so important to maintain clarity about that which is absolutely known and that which is speculative. But this level of caution comes with a heavy price: it turns 1st John into a one-sided phone conversation, in which we only get to hear John's side of the dialog. We know his answers to the heresy he's confronting, but we don't know the questions. We don't know what the person on the other side of the line is saying, and this robs the text of a great deal of its meaning. When reading these oh-so-cautious commentaries I often find myself thinking that the author must surely have private opinions about the material that go way beyond whatever he or she is stating for the record. Well if there is any venue for stating those types opinions, then a blog post must surely be it, so I'm going to express some of my opinions about the letter here. But I do so knowing full well that in venturing away from that which is certainly known, I'm taking the risk that I could be wrong.
But I don't think that I am, because it appears to me if we do assume that the heresy in question is a form of Gnosticism, then the arguments John makes in this letter, though delivered in his restrained style, snap neatly into place to form an insightful, cutting, and ultimately devastating assault upon that heresy. Because having opened the letter with his strongest appeal, the strongest possible appeal to authority ("Listen to me, I knew Jesus and they did not"), John turns immediately to a set of arguments that would be sure to cut any Christian who is flirting with Gnosticism straight to the quick. John's assault begins with the passage quoted above, but if you aren't familiar with Gnosticism then you probably can't see it there yet. To do so we will have to spend a little more time reviewing some of the beliefs of Gnosticism.
Shedding Light on Gnosticism
God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
Now Jews and Christians have long used the imagery of light their descriptions of God and heaven, but they have never used it to the extent that the Gnostics did. In fact, when reading Gnostic literature it often seems to me that light and darkness are the only images Gnostics ever used. Here are a few examples from The Apocryphon of John, in which it describes the Monad, who is the first, foremost and highest deity:
The Monad is a monarchy with nothing above it. It is he who exists as God and Father of everything, the invisible One who is above everything, who exists as incorruption, which is in the pure light into which no eye can look.....He is immeasurable light, which is pure, holy (and) immaculate....
And in speaking of the conception of Christ, who in some Gnostic cosmologies is described not as the son of Yahweh, the God of the Jews, but as the child of the Monad and Barbelo:
And [the Monad] looked at Barbelo with the pure light which surrounds the invisible Spirit, and (with) his spark, and she conceived from him. He begot a spark of light with a light resembling blessedness. But it does not equal his greatness. This was an only-begotten child of the Mother-Father which had come forth; it is the only offspring, the only-begotten one of the Father, the pure Light. And the invisible, virginal Spirit rejoiced over the light which came forth...
The light of the Pleroma, the heavenly realm, is contrasted with the darkness of the outer world, the world of matter, as related in the Gnostic text On the Origin of the World:
Now the eternal realm (aeon) of truth has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it. But its exterior is shadow, which has been called by the name 'darkness'....[M]atter came into being out of shadow.
Light and darkness are indeed apt metaphors for the Gnostic conception of good and evil, which in their worldview are essentially the same as knowledge of or ignorance of the Pleroma. Knowledge and ignorance are all-important concepts in Gnosticism--the word "Gnostic" comes from the Greek word "gnosis," which means "knowledge." It takes a little while for a modern Christian to grasp just how important these concepts are to a Gnostic. One way to understand it is by reading the Gnostic creation stories.
Gnostic Genesis
The specifics of the Gnostic creation stories vary greatly from sect to sect, but they convey similar theologies. These are very different stories than those of the Jews, and the differences are deeply revealing. As I described in my last post, in Gnostic mythology Yahweh, the God of the Jews, is not the first and greatest Creator of all things that he is in the Jewish tradition, nor is he the Father of Christ as the Christians believe. He is instead the bastard child of Sophia, who was one of the least of the aeons. He was "created...in ignorance," and in his ignorance he deceived himself into believing that he was the one and only God. Appalled by this blasphemous self-deception, the true divinities from the realm of light chastise him as "the god of the blind," their voices booming in from out of nowhere. Yahweh flees from them, flees to the world of matter, an evil world that he makes his own, and shapes after the pattern of his own ignorance.
As related in the Gnostic Hypostatis of the Archons, after Yahweh and his minions arrived on Earth, they created Adam, the first man, molding him out of earth. They modeled him on a glimpse they once had of a divine being of the Pleroma, which they saw in a reflection on the primordial waters of the Earth, as it looked down upon the world from above. But Yahweh lacked the power to give Adam a spirit, and so the newly-created man was unable to stand; he could only writhe about pathetically on the ground. But then a divine being descended from the Pleroma and granted Adam a spirit, which gave him life and the freedom of movement.
Yahweh and his minions respond by placing Adam in the Garden and causing a deep sleep of Ignorance to fall upon him, so that he would forget the divine spark of life that had been given him by the divinities of the Pleroma. And while Adam slept Yahweh created Eve from the flesh of his side, and the spirit granted to Adam by the divine beings of the Pleroma came to rest in her. Armed with a real spirit and not yet under the spell of Ignorance (and in this version of the story, escaping from Yahweh's attempt to rape her), she takes the guise of a wise serpent, and talks Adam into eating of the fruit of knowledge, which awakens him from his sleep and opens his eyes: "And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge; and they recognized that they were naked of the spiritual element, and took fig leaves and bound them upon their loins." As punishment, Yahweh and his minions expelled them from the Garden, throwing "mankind into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that their mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, and might not have the opportunity of being devoted to the holy spirit."
The Secret Knowledge
The primary aim of the Gnostic, then, is to awaken from this slumber imposed upon us by Yahweh through the distraction of worldly affairs, and to reconnect ourselves to the divine inner spark that underlies our evil outer natures. This idea that within each of us lies a spark of light from the Pleroma is common to most if not all forms of Gnosticism. As Jesus says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas,
Anyone here with two ears had better listen! There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark.
and again
If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'
This is why Elaine Pagels, in her book The Gnostic Gospels, argues that the word "gnosis" is, in the way that Gnostics use it, better translated as "insight" rather than "knowledge." Or, I would suggest, "enlightenment." It is a looking-inward to rediscover the inner light of the Pleroma. It involves both a direct, mystical experience of the divine, and it involves secrets that can only be revealed to the initiated. It is not rational or logical; it can't be learned in a book. It is, rather, experiential. Like Mahakashyapa in the story of the Sermon of the Lotus Flower that forms the genesis of Zen Buddhism, the Gnostic initiate must come to realize that gnosis cannot be expressed in words. Only when that understanding is reached can the deeper, secret gnosis be revealed. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas this is illustrated this way:
Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I am like."Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a just messenger."Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher."Thomas said to him, "Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."
This is the answer Jesus was looking for; he's quite pleased:
Jesus said, "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended."
This scene is repeated in the other Gnostic gospels, with the protagonist changing to whichever disciple that particular gospel is named after. Once the wise disciple is identified, Jesus always follows it up by taking him or her off camera in order to reveal his secret knowledge:
And [Jesus] took [Thomas], and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him.
When Thomas came back to his friends they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?"Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you."
There are many theories about what this secret knowledge might have been--ways of producing states of ecstasy through meditation or other means, wherein the Pleroma may be directly experienced; magical incantations for bringing about liberation from this evil world, etc. The fact is that we'll never know exactly what it was. The Gnostics' deepest secrets shall remain forever secure, in their graves.
A World Without Sin
Noticeably absent from all of this is any notion of sin and repentance. As the neo-Gnostic author of Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing, Stephan Hoeller, says,
In many ways, the Gnostic concept of salvation is close to the concept of liberation found in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions; Gnostics look to salvation not from sin (original or otherwise), but from the ignorance of which sin is the consequence.
Indeed, in the creation story related above in The Hypostasis of the Archons, there is no possibility of an original sin on the part of Adam and Eve: all of the sinning in the story is done by Yahweh against them. But in truth, even Yahweh's actions aren't "sinful" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word. As Hoeller notes, in Gnosticism "the chief characteristic of [Yahweh] is ignorance, not evil." Ignorance is the (dare I say it?) "original sin" that produced Yahweh's evil nature. The ignorance of his mother, Sophia, who conceived him without the knowledge and consent of her male counterpart because she failed to understand the limits of her power and place in the divine order; and the ignorance of Yahweh himself, who did not know that there were divinities superior to him, and who upon learning about them fled into the twisted ignorance of self-deception, in order to escape the knowledge of them.
John Weighs In
This freedom from even the idea of sin may be one of the chief attractions that Gnosticism has for modern-day neo-Gnostics, for people who have become weary of what Hoeller calls "the threats and anger of the Old Testament Creator God," but it is precisely this idea that John assails first in his case against Gnosticism. He begins with this attention-getter:
God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
I believe it's no coincidence that John starts with a description of God as "light": the Gnostics' ears have perked up now--he's speaking their language. And now that he's gotten their attention, consider how the following passage would sound to a Gnostic:
If we say, "We have fellowship with him," while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.If we say, "We are without sin," we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.If we say, "We have not sinned," we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
You may like the idea of a world without sin, but look into your own hearts, John is saying, and ask yourself if you really believe in it. You know sin exists, and if you tell yourself otherwise you are lying; you are deceiving yourself! To a Gnostic, these are fighting words: lies and deception are the penultimate evil in the Gnostic worldview.
The Not-So-Secret Knowledge
And consider how the following passage would read to a Christian who is sitting on the fence between Gnosticism and Christianity. The Gnostics claim to have secret knowledge that will lead their adherents to a deep experience of God--what does orthodox Christianity have that can compete with that? John continues:
My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is expiation for our sins, and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world.The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments. Whoever says, "I know him," but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him. This is the way we may know that we are in union with him: whoever claims to abide in him ought to live (just) as he lived.
John's answer is simple: knowledge of God is not hidden in secrets reserved only for a chosen few. Rather, the path to God is open for anyone to see: "The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments." In the original Greek the word "know" actually appears twice in this verse: "καὶ ἐν τούτῳ γινώσκομεν ὅτι ἐγνώκαμεν αὐτόν ἐὰν τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦτηρῶμεν." "The way we may know that we know him is to keep his commandments." Although the word "Gnostic" ("knower") hadn't been coined yet as a name for these people when 1st John was written, the word "gnosis" ("knowledge") must have already been associated with them, because word play such as this is common. (One of my favorite of these is at the beginning of chapter 3: "The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him." John is lumping the heretics in with the "world" here--elsewhere he implies that they are "lovers of the world." Yeouch! The Gnostics, who believe that matter is evil, are lovers of the world?! Who "know" neither Christ nor the Christians?! John really knows how to twist the knife.)
John never works a single argument at a time: he alternates from one to another, weaving two arguments together, proceeding to another, weaving that one back into the first, and so on. So how is it that following the commandments and example of Jesus enables us to "know" him? John weaves his answer into the idea of Apostolicity:
If we say, 'We have fellowship with him,' while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.
Doing good and avoiding sin enables us to maintain our fellowship with one another--with the Church, the Apostolic community founded by Christ. This doesn't mean that to be Christians we have to be perfect. Quite the opposite: John reassures us that if we do sin we have an Advocate with the Father in Jesus, and "if we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing."
But there appears to be something else going on here as well. Some Gnostic groups developed antinomian (which is to say, 'anti-moral law') ideas, and many were accused of licentiousness. There are a number of reasons they developed these ideas; their motivations probably varied from one group to another. One reason was that the moral law was created, according to Jewish tradition, by Yahweh, and anything that comes from him could only be a deception whose true, ulterior motive is humanity's enslavement. Another reason was the notion that a Gnostic, having achieved liberation through gnosis, had 'left the world behind' so to speak, and had moved on to bigger and better things. Once gnosis was achieved, nothing that happens on this meaningless, shadowy, material plane of existence could possibly matter, so you may as well do whatever you want.
It appears likely that John was confronting just such a group, because he presses this point about the necessity of avoiding sin and the vanity of evil, not just once but again and again throughout the letter, intimating that the heretics may have fallen into "sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life," that they commit "lawlessness", indicating that they not only disbelieve in sin, but that they are itinerant sinners. John attempts to refocus his readers' minds on the true benevolence of the moral law, and the real gravity of sin, by reminding his readers what Jesus' commandment was, and by emphasizing what it really means to behave as if sin doesn't matter:
Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness.Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.Whoever hates his brother is in darkness; he walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
John reminds us that one of Jesus' primary commandments is to love your neighbor. To say that sin doesn't matter is to say that hatred of your neighbor is no big deal. How can someone claim to know God while living in hatred? To John the idea is ridiculous. And to which would you rather aspire: knowledge or love? Which would you rather avoid: ignorance, or hatred? To John the answer is obvious.
Freedom Now
Finally, against the Gnostic promise of eventual liberty, through initiation into the secret gnosis, from the bonds of ignorance that enslave us in the darkness of this current existence, John offers liberty now. And not just liberty for the individual Christian, but liberty for all of creation. Because according to John, we are living in a new era, in which already "the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining." Christ has torn away the veil that has covered the world in darkness since mankind was cast out of the Garden due to the sin of Adam and Eve. The light of Christ is already streaming throughout the universe; there is no longer any darkness from which to escape. All knowledge required to triumph over evil has been granted to us through him. In this rousing send-up, John cheers his readers with the knowledge that the Gnostics have nothing to teach them:
I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning.I am writing to you, young men, because you have conquered the evil one.I write to you, children, because you know the Father.I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning.I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God remains in you, and you have conquered the evil one.....You have the anointing that comes from the holy one, and you all have knowledge.I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you do!
