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Who Were the Gnostics?

The earliest centuries of Christianity were times of great questioning. Jesus' followers evangelized in lands around the Mediterranean and in Africa and India. Many new converts were culturally, linguistically, and sociopolitically different from the zealous Christians who risked persecution to take the teachings of Jesus throughout the ancient world. As Christianity was translated for people of different cultures, some groups developed beliefs that deviated from the literalist doctrine of the emerging Christian church hierarchy.

Roots of Gnosticism

Aspects of Gnosticism were present from the earliest beginnings of the Christian faith and spread rapidly throughout Palestine, Syria, and elsewhere in the Near East. It developed into a coherent system of thought during the second through the fourth centuries. Gnosticism likely predated Christianity and borrowed ideas and themes from Greek philosophy (especially Plato) and Judaism, syncretizing or merging them with ancient myths and Christian stories. Biblical historians believe that Gnosticism, as a growing movement, originated in the Hebrew-Christian environment because many names, ideas, and idiomatic expressions that occur in Gnostic writings have Semitic origins.

Scholars are quick to point out that within so-called ancient Gnostic materials are religious ideas that are not necessarily the same or in agreement with each other or with tenets of Christianity. There were certainly Gnostic Christians. It would be incorrect to say that the Gnostics were a single group of people in a specific locale, with one religious doctrine, one view of God, one concept of creation and cosmology. Scholar Bart D. Ehrman, who studies the scriptures and faiths of the ancient world and who chairs the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asserts that it might make sense to place the origins of Gnostic Christianity inside of Judaism.

For their differences, one thing remained constant about the Gnostics. Regardless of the cultural lenses they peered through, they were spiritual seekers. They sought to acquire knowledge about spiritual beliefs in order to further their understanding of all things divine. They believed that matter was essentially the deterioration of spirit. Through inner intuitive knowledge of the transcendent unknowable God, their souls became liberated. The quest for that special knowledge was the central purpose of life. They sought not the spiritual teachings for the masses (though they were interested in them), but rather secret wisdom from their own inner insights. The Gnostics presented their ideas and beliefs through mythological stories, treatises, gospels, letters, books, acts, sayings, hymns, and other texts much as the Christians did. But unlike the Christian literature, little of the Gnostic tradition survived — that is, until the discovery of a treasure trove of Gnostic writings in a cave near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the spring of 1945. The material has since been translated and published, both in book form as The Nag Hammadi Library , edited by James M. Robinson, and on the Internet at www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html . The Gnostics loved myth and storytelling and so it is not surprising that their creation myth puts the forces of light and darkness in perpetual struggle. But their tales use terms that you may not have heard, so before delving too deeply into Gnostic ideas, it may be helpful to know the meaning of words the Gnostics used to tell their stories.

The Gnostics depict creation as having two main realms. The first is a dark (materialistic) world, full of malevolent forces, including its creator the Demiurge (akin to Satan in Christian theology) and its fellow rulers known as archons. The other is the realm of Light, presided over by the supreme, transcendent God and spiritual emanations of the Divine known as Aeons.

Integral to all Gnostic thinking was the idea that the divine fragment or spark from the realm of Light (a synonym for God) dwells in each human. The spark, in a virginal state of purity, became trapped in the realm of matter or darkness (material world) where it suffered. Only when it returns to the realm of Light through gnosis (inner knowledge) will it be free. There it will dwell while others remain trapped in the dark, evil materialistic world. Aeons like Sophia (the embodiment of wisdom) and Jesus (the embodiment of the Savior) bring secret teachings to help those trapped find their way back to the Light.

Plato's Influence

The Gnostic's conception of a creator god, known as the Demiurge, may have derived from Demiurgos, a figure from Plato's Timaeus and Republic . Out of chaos, the Gnostic Demiurge created the imperfect copies of the divine model that either purposefully or unconsciously trap divinity in matter. This seems to suggest the pre-existence of particles of matter out of which the universe could be created. Further, they distinguish this evil materialistic world from the Pleroma, the world of wisdom, light, truth, and reality. The human body imprisons the sparks of the Divine, and it is only through the ascent from the physical world back to the Pleroma that the soul finds salvation. A Gnostic savior or revealer is one who comes to awaken those asleep or “slumbering” in darkness.

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Plato, a Greek philosopher, lived from 427 to 347 B.C. He founded the Academy in Athens, emphasizing studies in science, mathematics, and philosophy. He tried unsuccessfully to convert the boy and future king Dionysius II into a philosopher king. Plato's Academy continued for almost 1,000 years but was closed by Emperor Justinian, who saw it as harmful to the Christian faith.

Plato asserted that the cosmos emanated from the transcendent unknowable One and was created by the Demiurgos out of passive matter in chaos. The Demiurgos , according to Plato (writing in the Socratic dialogue Timaeus ), is a benevolent entity, a “craftsman,” who cobbled together the world out of pre-existing matter that resisted the effort — and thus the world remains imperfect. Plato expressed through his philosophical writing in Phaedo the idea that physical bodies are ephemeral and are only imperfect copies of the eternal forms. Also in Phaedo , he argued the idea of immortality of the soul. These two concepts resonate in Gnostic thinking.

Gnostic beliefs also reflect Plato's ideas about metaphysics — in particular, his dualistic concept of the world having two aspects, intelligible and perceptual. The intelligible aspect consisted of the world of forms (or “ideas”) and the perceptual aspect consisted of the world of replicas of those forms (carbon copies of the original). The true forms/ideas (not copies) can only be comprehended by the intellect, and such comprehension of reality is the goal of all knowledge.

Plato espoused that the essence of something (for example, a Judean date palm) was its form. The plant could grow through all the stages from a seed to a young palm and then a frond-covered mature tree laden with succulent dates, but through each stage or change in substance, the tree's essence (its form) is always present and is only being embodied by substance. This resonates with the Gnostic idea of the divine spark, unchanging, though embodied in matter. The object of knowledge is to break through to the underlying reality behind false forms of this world, and to understand that reality — that world of being that always is and never changes — is comprehended by the mind, not the senses or the imagination.

Plato's dualism expresses the idea that the human body is different than the soul. The body is simply a container or temporary housing for the soul. Plato suggested that the soul came from the world of ideas, a spiritual realm, before it entered the body. Once in the body, it became the overseer of the human. A saying of Plato reflects this idea of dualism perfectly: “Man is the soul which utilizes the body.” In Timaeus , Plato offers further clarification.

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Now God did not make the soul after the body … for having brought them together he would never have allowed that the elder should be ruled by the younger…. Whereas he made the soul in origin and excellence prior to and older than the body, to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject. — Timaeus, 34

Christian theology was anchored in monotheism, or the belief in one god, a concept that early Christians shared with Judaism. Monotheism was also the basis of Islam. In opposition to the concept of the Demiurge, most early Christian fathers rejected the idea that any being other than God created the cosmos. They believed that a benevolent God created the world out of nothingness, unlike Plato's Demiurgos who created the world out of matter that already existed in the chaos.

The Book of Genesis

The Gnostics were fascinated by creation myths. The book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew scriptures, which represents a monotheistic God but immediately presents ideas of dualistic creation, may have particularly appealed to them. The eternal God alone in existence created heaven and earth. Earth was dark and formless. After establishing light and separating it from darkness, God established a firmament called heaven. God continued the process of creating, often observing that “it was good” until finally creating human beings out of “his own image, male and female,” the first pair.

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And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul…. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and … made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. — Genesis 2:7–22

Not surprisingly, the Gnostics interpreted the story of Genesis differently than did ancient Jews and Christians. For the Gnostics, Adam and Eve were not historical people, the predecessors of humankind, or the original couple who brought sin upon humanity, but rather the personification of two principles indwelling in humans. While Adam personified the soul, Eve represented the spirit. Adam represented the “lower self” and Eve the “higher self.” Right away, you can see the problem that orthodox Christianity might have with this idea because it places Eve in a superior position to Adam.

The Gnostics viewed Eve as Adam's numinous “awakener.” The second century Gnostic text titled Apocryphon of John reveals that Adam was covered in the “drunkenness of darkness” and he awakened when Luminous Epinoia (or Eve) appeared and “lifted the veil which lay over his mind.” Ancient Hebrews called the first woman by the name of Eve (in Hebrew, the name means “life”), but the Gnostics knew her as the “mother of all living.”

Before orthodox Christianity established the belief in the Trinity — that is, belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — and the belief subsequently became part of the orthodox Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed (the first written sometime around A.D. 215 and the second in A.D. 325), some early Christian communities venerated a deity named Luminous Epinoia as the Divine Eve. The word “luminous” suggests light, so Gnostics undoubtedly saw her as a “light bearer,” empowered to illuminate the sacred in their lives. The Apocryphon of John states that she is humanity's capacity to know God. The narrator of the Apocryphon of John asked Jesus if every human receives her, to which Jesus replied, “Yes.”

This Gnostic Eve stands in dramatic contrast to the Orthodox Christian view of Eve as a weak, impressionable woman, powerless to resist the Serpent's temptation to eat from the tree in the center of the Garden of Eden. Eve “saw that the tree was good for food … pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6). She wanted those things. Consider this in the cultural context of the times of Jesus, when women were considered the property of men. Because of the times in which they lived, women were not educated and likely not well versed in the ancient scriptures, although they would have had some knowledge in order to train their children and practice the faith themselves. Until Jesus came along with his egalitarian beliefs and practices, women were not thought capable of understanding the deep wisdom of the scriptures. Many Jews and Christians saw Eve's act of defiance at disobeying God, of eating the apple, and of involving Adam by offering him a taste as a sin against the Father God. The second chapter of 1 Timothy describes the blame assigned to Eve for desiring knowledge and partaking of the forbidden fruit.

Sethian Mythology

There were many groups of Christians in the first few centuries. One important group — the Sethian Gnostics — aspired to mystical knowledge that they interpreted through wisdom, stories, themes (in particular, Genesis), and myths of various religious and philosophical traditions in order to find their way back to the Godhead. The fifth chapter of Genesis details the genealogy of the Hebrew patriarchs, among them a son of Adam. When Adam was 130 years old, he bore a son “in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth” (Genesis 5:3). The Sethians saw Seth as a savior figure much as Christians viewed Christ. The Sethians began as a Messianic religion (with the expectation of the coming of a savior/mes-siah) much as the Jewish Christian movement did. Contact with the earliest forms of Christianity brought Christian elements into the Gnostic Sethians' belief and practices.

Gnostic Sethian mythology features a number of characters who play out roles in an epic story that serves as a “pre-story” to Genesis. Gnostics did not believe that human sin brought humanity into enslavement in the material world, but rather that this enslavement was the fault of the creator. The Sethian myth attempts to offer a Gnostic explanation of the downward shift from God to human, from Spirit to matter.

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Sethian Gnosticism is so-called because of references to Seth, the child of Adam and Eve, one who provided special knowledge. Sethian Gnostic writings include Zostrianos, The Three Steles of Seth, Apocalypse of Adam, Allogenes, The Reality of the Rulers, The Gospel of the Egyptians, The Apocryphon of John, The Threefold First Thought, and The Thunder, Perfect Mind.

Several Gnostic texts share a cluster of common beliefs that relate to Sethian mythology:

One version of the Sethian myth opened with an Aeon named Barbelo. This Aeon was perhaps the original emanation of God and possessed both a masculine and feminine side. Barbelo was a kind of master parent of all the other emanations or Aeons, and they, too had masculine and feminine aspects. And so, each emanation split off into more emanations that continued the process. All of these emanations, dividing and multiplying like a cell undergoing mitosis, fragmented God until the primordial universe became unstable. That's when the Aeon Sophia appeared in the story.

Sophia means “wisdom” in Greek; as her name implied, she wisely considered her position so far removed from the Godhead and pondered on how to get back to the center of divine nature closest to God. She decided to imitate God's original action of emanating. She did not seek permission. Her act of creating a copy of herself caused something of a crisis to occur within the Pleroma and as a result, the Demiurge known as Yaldabaoth (sometimes pictured as a serpent with a lion's head) was born of Sophia. She created a throne for him and wrapped him in a resplendent cloud, where the monstrous being lived, isolated and without knowledge of the higher realms — of the Pleroma Reality.

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How was Yaldabaoth similar to Yahweh, God of the Hebrews?

Yaldabaoth, ignorant of any other god, declares some variation of: “I am a jealous God; there is no God but me.” The Hebrew's Yahweh makes a similar statement in Exodus 20:4–5. The Gnostics accorded Yaldabaoth and Yahweh the status of inferior gods.

Yaldabaoth stole some power from his mother to create the material universe. Unknowingly, he created a carbon copy of the Pleroma, but his world simply reflected reality. It wasn't the real deal. He, as inferior creator, created the imperfect physical world and the beings in it mirrored those above. In that way, his mother's power became encapsulated into human forms and humans became ensnared in the material universe. This sets the stage for Yaldabaoth to create man in the image of God.

One version of the Gnostic myth is that God tricks Yaldabaoth to transfer some of his mother Sophia's power into the inanimate Adam, who at that point had no spirit. This breathing of life into Adam was the initial step in making all humans animate and more powerful than Yaldabaoth's beings or cosmic forces. Those beings then banished Adam into the lowest realms of matter. But all is not lost, because God takes pity on Adam and inspires him with a divine thought on how to extricate himself from matter and ascend to his true home.

Tenets of Gnosticism

For the Gnostics, the primary purpose of life was the search for enlightenment. In this regard, Gnostics were not very different from other religious mystics. In their search for enlightenment, they established certain principles. Because of the diversity of early Christian communities espousing Gnostic ideas, it is difficult to present a specific list of beliefs that could be called the tenets of Gnosticism. Still, some diverse early communities of Gnostics, including the Naassenes, Ophites, Simonians, Cerinthians, Docetists, Arianists, Manichaeans, and others shared some ideas in common. Certainly Gnostic groups in the first few centuries of early Christianity did share some basic ideas, including beliefs in:

Scholars agree that immediately following the death of Jesus there was no single version of Christianity with an established creed and set of orthodox dogmas. There was no New Testament to consult. There had not yet been a battle of theological ideas that would eventually include in the tenets of Christianity original sin, the divinity of Jesus, and the virgin birth, but exclude Gnostic ideas of immanence (God in each human as opposed to only being transcendent), a revealer who brings secret knowledge, and reincarnation.

Five Sacred Rites of Gnosticism

The following list includes the Gnostic religious rites mentioned in the Gospel of Philip. Some of the Gnostic religious rites may have been drawn from other spiritual traditions around the Greco-Roman world. These Gnostic rites (some would call them sacraments) ideally liberated the person's indwelling divine spark, putting him on the right path to enlightenment and his “real” home in the Pleroma. The Gnostics could not embrace the Christian belief that they could get to heaven simply by having enough faith and behaving well on earth. Gnostic sacraments listed in the Gospel of Philip included:

Many Gnostics saw themselves as the Christian faithful. They did not view their religious practices or sacramental rites as acts of heretical defiance against the beliefs and practices of other Christian communities. Indeed, there was not yet a body of the Christian church to formally challenge the Gnostics. However, beginning in the second century, certain Christian church fathers wrote polemics against the Gnostics.

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It might seem that there were many similarities between the baptism and Holy Eucharist rites of the Christians (Gnostic and other commu-nities), and pagan Mystery rituals. At least one source of material on ancient Christianity noted bluntly that the early fathers for many centuries after the death of Jesus — from the Apostle Paul through Saint Augustine — would have to explain the close resemblances.

Persecution of the Gnostics and purges against Gnostic communities for heresies drove the Gnostics underground to practice in secret. Gnosticism resurfaced through the ages in various countries and in the lives of various groups of people to the present day. Modern Gnostics not only have these ancient sacraments to link them with the past; they also have, thanks to the work of scholars, translations of their spiritual ancestral writings collected in The Gnostic Bible by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer. On the Internet, you can find Gnostic versions of a creed, mass, and rosary as well as prayers.

Gnostic Sacramental Rituals

As the first step on the initiate's spiritual journey, baptism was likely the most important of the Gnostic rituals. With its origins in Jewish purification rites, baptism symbolized a spiritual “washing” with the purpose of weakening the control of the archons' powers over the initiate's mental life (emotional, psychic, and intellectual). According to the Valentinian Gnostic belief, loosening the grip of this false world's ideas freed the initiate of entrapment in matter and the prison of darkness.

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The Apostles' Creed evolved as a profession of faith by baptismal candidates. Early church father Irenaeus's “Rule of Faith” and the later baptismal service of Hippolytus are strikingly similar to the Creed. In the Christian churches of the first few centuries, candidates would be dunked three times and expected to answer affirmatively each question asked of them about faith.

The Gnostic rite of baptism welcomed the individual into the church, just as it does today in most Christian places of worship. But the symbolic immersion in water did not mean the Gnostic initiate would experience immediate enlightenment. The religious candidate thereafter would undertake a regular practice of meditation, contemplation, spiritual study, and other activities in pursuit of that goal.

The ritual least understood by historical and biblical scholars is mentioned in the Gospel of Philip as the “Bridal Chamber.” Gnostic texts note that a couple once joined in the bridal chamber is to never again separate. Scholars suggest it may be a sacred ritual between a woman and man, or an allegory for some type of a mystical union of the individual Divine spark (bride) and its Source (bridegroom).

How Gnostic Christians Became Heretics

The more literalistic of the Christian communities, in an effort to preserve the “integrity” of stories about Jesus and his teachings — or at least their interpretations of those teachings — differentiated themselves from other Christians who espoused Gnostic ideas. Their term for the latter was “heretic” and their ideas came to be called heresies. Some early Christian fathers sought out heresies to vigorously oppose them. Lacking ancient sources of original Gnostic documents, prior to Nag Hammadi modern scholars have had to rely on the writings of those early Christian heresiologists (individuals who study and write about heresy) to provide information about Gnosticism in their writings.

The most notable among the heresiologists was a church father named Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who sometime around A.D. 180 wrote a treatise in five volumes titled On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis . The work is commonly referred to as simply Against Heresies . Other church fathers, such as the Tertullian (bishop of Carthage) and Hippolytus of Rome, also made contributions to what is known about Gnosticism by writing against it. You will read more about these individuals and the heresies they particularly found offensive in other chapters. For now, suffice it to say that the majority of Gnostic texts were destroyed in order to suppress the movement. Little survives to modern times, though copies of Gnostic texts discovered within the last half-century have shed more light on what is known about Gnosticism.

Gnostic Syncretism

Syncretism means the merging together of distinctly different (often opposing) ideas and fusing them into one concept. The Gnostics used syncretism from the already existing traditions of the ancient world to develop their ideas about cosmology (origin and structure of the universe) and theology. From roughly the second to the fourth centuries A.D., their sects flourished. It is believed that in some cases entire congregations may have shared Gnostic ideas but in other cases only an individual or a few people within a congregation might embrace Gnostic beliefs, since there was no Gnostic collection of teachings gathered in one book like the Bible.

Gnostic Religious Writings

The Gnostics wrote diverse works, including many gospels about Jesus, his life and his teachings, and his companions (Mary Magdalene, Thomas, Philip, Judas Iscariot, et al.). Banned for centuries, copies of Gnostic texts resurfaced in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. A peasant stumbled upon a clay jar containing fifty-two ancient papyri texts. These ancient texts discovered only a half century ago offer a snapshot of earliest evolving Christianity in Palestine in the first few centuries. Among the codices (leather-bound papyrus manuscripts) found were The Gospel of the Egyptians, Pistis Sophia, The Dialogue of the Savior, The Book of Thomas the Contender, The Apocryphon of John, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Thomas, and The Thunder, Perfect Mind. Taken together they show the extreme diversity and divisions in early Christian thinking and writing. Find these Gnostic texts at www.gnosis.org or in the book, edited by James M. Robinson, titled The Nag Hammadi Library: The Definitive Translation of the Gnostic Scriptures Complete in One Volume .

Gnostic Equality Between the Sexes

Did the Gnostics believe that men and women were equal? Most likely, since it is known that the Gnostics especially revered Mary Magdalene and held her in the highest esteem. They featured her prominently in their writings. She even has a Gnostic gospel named after her. The Gnostics depicted the Supreme God in male and female imagery and therefore saw the Divine in women as well as men. In the Gnostic scriptures, it is often Sophia, goddess of wisdom, who calls out in a Gnostic myth or proverb or shines behind the “lens” that Mary Magdalene holds in her discussions with Jesus.