The Gnostic Gospels: Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical

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The Gnostic Gospels

 

The 52 texts discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt include " secret "

gospels poems and myths attributed to Jesus sayings and beliefs which

are very different from the New Testament. Scholar Elaine Pagels

explores these documents and their implications.

 

From Gnostic Gosples

by Elaine Pagels

 

" Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of

the texts tell the origin of the human race in terms very different

from the usual reading of Genesis: the Testimony of Truth, for

example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of

the serpent! Here the serpent, long known to appear in Gnostic

literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve

to partake of knowledge while " the Lord " threatens them with death,

trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and

expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it. Another text,

mysteriously entitled The Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an

extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

 

For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin....

I am the barren one, and many are her sons....

I am the silence that is incomprehensible....

I am the utterance of my name.

 

These diverse texts range, then, from secret gospels, poems, and

quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origin of the universe, to

myths, magic, and instructions for mystical practice.

 

Why were these texts buried-and why have they remained virtually

unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned

documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns

out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early

Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which

circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as

heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We

have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by

other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came

from what their opponents wrote attacking them...

 

This campaign against heresy involved an involuntary admission of its

persuasive power; yet the bishops prevailed. By the time of the

Emperor Constantine's conversion, when Christianity became an

officially approved religion in the fourth century, Christian

bishops, previously victimized by the police, now commanded them.

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal

offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper

Egypt, someone; possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St.

Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction--in

the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.

 

But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard

themselves as " heretics. Most of the writings use Christian

terminology, unmistakable related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to

offer traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from " the many "

who constitute what, in the second century, came to be called

the " catholic church. " These Christians are now called gnostics, from

the Greek word gnosis, usually translated as " knowledge. " For as

those who claim to know nothing about ultimate reality are called

agnostic (literally, " not knowing " ), the person who does claim to

know such things is called gnostic ( " knowing " ). But gnosis is not

primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes

between scientific or reflective knowledge ( " He knows mathematics " )

and knowing through observation or experience ( " He knows me " ), which

is gnosis. As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it

as " insight, " for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing

oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature

and human destiny. According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus,

writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160), the gnostic is one has come to

understand who we were, and what we have become; where we were...

whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth

is, and what is rebirth.

 

Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know

God; this is the secret of gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus,

says:

 

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a

similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point.

Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, " My

God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. " Learn the sources of

sorrow:, joy, love, hate . . . If you carefully investigate these

matters you will find him in yourself.

 

What Muhammad 'All discovered at Nag Hammadi is, apparently, a

library of writings, almost all of them gnostic. Although they claim

to offer secret teaching, many of these texts refer to the Scriptures

of the Old Testament, and others to the letters of Paul and the New

Testament gospels. Many of them include the same dramatic personae as

the New Testament--Jesus and his disciples. Yet the differences are

striking.

 

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity

from Its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who

wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of

God; the self and the divine are identical.

 

Second, the " living Jesus " of these texts speaks of illusion and

enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New

Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide

who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple

attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual

master: the two have become equal--even identical.

 

Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God

in a unique way: he remains forever distinct from the rest of

humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas

relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas

that they have both received their being from the same source:

 

Jesus said, " I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have

become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out....

He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall

become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him. "

 

Does not such teaching--the identity of the divine and human. the

concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented

not as Lord, but as spiritual guide sound more Eastern than Western?

Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed,

the " living Buddha " appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas

attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition

have influenced gnosticism?

 

The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, suggests that it had.

He points out that " Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas

Christians (that is, Christians who knew and used such writings as

the Gospel of Thomas) in South India. " Trade routes between the Greco-

Roman world and the Far East were opening up at the time when

gnosticism flourished (A.D. 80-200); for generations, Buddhist

missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria. We note, too, that

Hippolytus, who was a Greek speaking Christian in Rome (c. 225),

knows of the Indian Brahmins--and includes their tradition among the

sources of heresy:

 

There is . . . among the Indians a heresy of those who philosophize

among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from

(eating) living creatures and all cooked food . . . They say that God

is light, not like the light one sees, nor like the sun nor fire, but

to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in

articulate sounds, but that of knowledge (gnosis) through which the

secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise.

 

Could the title of the Gospel of Thomas--named for the disciple who,

tradition tells us, went to India--suggest the influence of Indian

tradition?

 

These hints indicate the possibility, yet our evidence is not

conclusive. Since parallel traditions may emerge in different

cultures at different times, such ideas could have developed in both

places independently. What we call Eastern and Western religions, and

tend to regard as separate streams, were not clearly differentiated

2,000 years ago. Research on the Nag Hammadi texts is only beginning:

we look forward to the work of scholars who can study these

traditions comparatively to discover whether they can, in fact, be

traced to Indian sources.

 

Even so, ideas 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?

 

We find this problem familiar in our own experience. The

term " Christianity, " especially since the Reformation, has covered an

astonishing range of groups. Those claiming to represent " true

Christianity " in the twentieth century can range from a Catholic

cardinal in the Vatican to an African Methodist Episcopal preacher

initiating revival in Detroit, a Mormon missionary in Thailand, or

the member of a village church on the coast of Greece. Yet Catholics,

Protestants, and Orthodox agree that such diversity is a recent--and

deplorable--development. According to Christian legend, the early

church was different. Christians of every persuasion look back to the

primitive church to find a simpler, purer form of Christian faith. In

the apostles' time, all members of the Christian community shared

their money and property; all believed the same teaching, and

worshipped together; all revered the authority of the apostles. It

was only after that golden age that conflict, then heresy emerged: so

says the author of the Acts of the Apostles, who identifies himself

as the first historian of Christianity.

 

But the discoveries at Nag Hammadi have upset this picture. If we

admit that some of these fifty-two texts 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.

 

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it,

actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the

first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that

time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic

premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second,

they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific

forms of church institution. But every one of these-the canon of

Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure--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. Some of these, apparently, were discovered at

Nag Hammadi; many others are lost to us. Those who identified

themselves as Christians entertained many--and radically differing-

religious beliefs and practices. And the communities scattered

throughout the known world organized themselves in ways that differed

widely from one group to another.

 

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. "

 

 

From The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. Published by Vintage Books.

 

 

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