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Tag: Jesus
Nag Hammadi and Gnostic Literature
For centuries, scholars depended on heresiologists for their information about Christian Gnostics. But now we can hear their truths from their own lips, thanks to the discovery of about thirty previously unknown writings near the town of Nag Hammadi, Egypt shortly after the Second World War. These writings are enclosed in a set of thirteen books (called codices) copied, it seems, around the mid-fourth century CE.
Apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi literature was the most important archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. The Nag Hammadi library contains about fifty tractates total, many of them Christian, most of them previously unknown. The writings included were composed from the early second to the early fourth century CE. They were originally written in Greek, but translated into the Egyptian language of the time, called Coptic. They were gathered together by later (possibly monastic) readers until they were hidden away in sealed jars.
Most of the writings appear in genres familiar to the New Testament: gospels, epistles, and apocalypses. There are also philosophical texts, maxims, prayers, and poetry. The texts fall into three main categories: Sethian, Valentinian, and Hermetic. Yes, the Nag Hammadi corpus contains three Hermetic tracts, one of which—the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth—was completely new and unheard of.
The Valentinian tractates include that masterpiece homily perhaps spoken by Valentinus himself, the Gospel of Truth, as well as the Gospel of Philip, and the Treatise on Resurrection. The Nag Hammadi find also includes three copies of that archetypal Sethian Gnostic text, the Secret Book of John. But other Sethian text are also included, such as the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, the Apocalypse of Adam, and Trimorphic Protennoia.
There are many borderline Gnostic texts that—even though they are officially uncategorized—they are immensely important for understanding how Christian thought and practice developed. Here we can include philosophical texts like Eugnostus, the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, rewritings of Genesis like the Nature of the Rulers, the Origin of the World, and gospel-like texts such as the Secret Book of James and the Letter of Peter to Philip. And we dare not forget unforgettable texts like Thunder Perfect Mind, the First and Second Apocalypse of James, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Second Discourse of Great Seth, the Prayer of Paul, and the Apocalypse of Paul. These were the books literally excluded from the canon and buried for some 1600 years.
Nag Hammadi codex 2 contains the only surviving complete copy of that spiritual masterpiece, the Gospel of Thomas. Scholars debate whether this text was written in Syria or Egypt, whether it contains authentic sayings of Jesus, whether it was written in the first or second century. But there is no doubt that it is one of the most amazing and though-provoking witnesses of Christian spirituality.
Christianity in the Gospel of Thomas is Christianity without a cross, without an apocalypse, without a final judgment. It is the Christianity in which female disciples like Mary and Salome speak, where “doubting” Thomas is the hero, and the Old Testament is barely in sight. The only miracles you’ll find in the Gospel of Thomas are the miracles that happen within you when you read and meditate on Jesus’ sayings. “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.”
Finally, I’ll say more about that archetypal Sethian text the Secret Book of John. In my view, this is still the best introduction to Gnostic Christian literature. The Secret Book of Johnis a dialogue gospel arguably designed to be a continuation of the Gospel according to John. It sets the conditions for why John is considered the “eagle” of apostolic—and esoteric—learning, the disciple whom Jesus loved more than others. The short answer: he was loved more, because he knew more.
The Secret Book of John has been called the “Gnostic Bible” the preeminent expression of “Classic Gnostic”/“Sethian” thought. At the same time, the Secret Book is a profoundly Christian text. This remains the case even if one removes the frame story introducing John and Jesus. The Secret Book was written by a Christian theologian in antiquity and used (that we know of) solely by Christians, ending up—in multiple copies—in what seems to have been a monastic book collection.
The Secret Book of John is the gnostic attempt to rewrite the Bible—specifically to reframe and rephrase the first seven chapters of Genesis. It will introduce you to all the main characters of Gnostic Christian lore, including the Father, Barbelo, the Selfborn, the evil creator Yaldabaoth, his angelic minions, as well as human characters like Seth, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah. It is a captivating, holy history that inverts everything you’ve been taught about the biblical world.
The Secret Book of John is Christian philosophy performed through narrative. Philosophers like Plutarch also told dialogic narratives to relate their philosophy. Middle Platonic philosophers retold the myth of Plato’s Timaeus. Like the Middle Platonists, the author(s) of the Secret Bookdistinguished a singular, monadic deity from the creator/demiurge. There are certain features of bookthat cannot be explained without knowing some basic concepts from Stoic, Platonic, and Neopythagorean philosophy (e.g. numeric differentiation from Monad to Dyad to Tetrad, Pentad, and Decad, the use of concepts like fateand a material counterfeit spirit).
For a solid introduction to Gnostic and Nag Hammadi literature, see my Gnostic and Nag Hammadi literature course. It is broken up into two parts: part one covers Nag Hammadi codices 1-5 , and part two covers codices 6-13 . The majority of Nag Hammadi texts are covered and videos are gradually being added to ensure that every Nag Hammadi text is eventually included.
Simon of Samaria. Magus? First Gnostic?
With Simon of Samaria, we enter the maelstrom, a Charybdis of confused and cacophonous incriminations, slanderous stories, and inimical innuendo. It seems that the man Simon existed—as much as any other figure in recorded history—but he has long since been swallowed in the abyss of myth and countermyth.
Anti-Simon stories and reports begin to appear in the early to mid-second century CE. In the echo chamber of heresiological discourse, Simonian belief and practice is presented in increasingly wild ways. Since Simon became known as the head of the gnostic hydra and “the father of heresies,” a welter of stereotypical traits (sexual license, radical dualism, self-deification, and so on) were gradually attributed to him and to his heirs. This means that every report about Simon and on Simonian Christianity is riddled with slander, fictions, and clichés.
Trapped in the maze of these reports, readers’ minds are so baited by presuppositions and hostile frameworks that it is hard to picture Simon as anything but a villain. He has been hounded and scapegoated so many times, readers can hardly form a positive ethical judgment of him. Even among scholars, he is called a “sorcerer” and, with apparent tongue in cheek, “the bad Samaritan.” In heresiology, he is the antihero to Peter, antichristian, antichrist, opposite of everything good, noble, and worthy. He is symbolized, according to the Acts of Peter by a dancing, enslaved, Ethiopian woman—the lowest member of the ancient social hierarchy topped by the free, noble male.
It would seem that nothing remains of the Simonians beyond the roaring waves of rumors, rants, and hostile reports. As most scholars opine, the only surviving accounts of Simon’s life and teachings have been written by his opponents and critics. As perduring as this judgment has been, I hold it to be incorrect.
There is a red thread allowing us to break through the labyrinth of heresiology, since an independent account of Simonian thought survives. I refer to the document called The Great Declaration. This fragmentary work is cited by the Refutator (the anonymous author of the Refutation of All Heresies) in the early third century CE.
Surprising as it seems, a full-length study on Simon starting with a Simonian source has never been done. Beginning with such a source allows us to hear a different tune running below the cacophony of heresiological indictments. That being said, heresiology cannot be avoided, since it makes up the lion’s share of data. Our task, then, is to read heresiology critically and carefully, so as not to perpetuate its frameworks, schemas, and assumptions. For too long, the friends, foes, and even fair-minded scholars of Simon have needlessly assented to the heresiologists when other ways of conceptualizing and framing the data are available.
A good example of (tacitly) reinscribing heresiological discourse is the near ubiquitous perpetuation of the epithet invented by them. I refer to the title “Simon Magus.” To the heresy writers, “magus” was not a compliment. It meant “quack,” “deceiver,” and “charlatan”; it was associated with greed and various kinds of vice. If wehypothesize that Simon was the better sort of (Persian) magus, we need actual evidence of Simon’s (Persian or Persian-inspired) practice along with his own act of self-identification—and this we do not have.
In my book, Simon of Samaria and the Simonians (https://amzn.to/3V7BIH5), Icall Simon by the name of the region to which he has the closest ties: Samaria. The name appears in Irenaeus (Samarites). It is possible to translate Simon Samarites by “Simon the Samaritan.” In my view, however, this would be hazardous, since only a late and fictional source (the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies) suggests that Simon held any special regard for the sacred mountain of the Samaritans, Mount Gerizim. In early sources, Simon is never said to have engaged in Samaritan cultic practices or holidays. He may well have read the Torah as a sacred book, but not the Samaritan version specifically. He and his followers did not reject the authority of the Hebrew prophets. Of course there were Samaritans in the province of Samaria. But the urban center of Samaria at the time, the city of Sebaste, was predominately Gentile. Samaria as a whole during Simon’s time was ethnically and religiously diverse. We simply cannot assume, then, that Simon was a Samaritan.
In my view, Simon was neither a magus nor a gnostic. He was a religious leader in Samaria who became a Christian sometime in the mid-30s CE. We can extrapolate that he used his leadership skills to manage a Christian group in Samaria by the late 30s or early 40s. Perhaps he performed wonders before or after his conversion, or both. Like Paul and several other early Christian leaders, Simon possibly came to Rome in the 40s or 50s. It is not certain that he established a movement which survived him. How he died is unknown. Stories of him being buried alive or shot down by apostolic prayer are polemical legends first appearing in the late second century.
My purpose in Simon of Samaria is not to rein in anyone’s imagination, but to focus it with a basically sympathetic and historical portrait of Simon and the Simonian movement(s), based on reliable sources. I sift every known tradition from the second to the fourth century CE, trying my best to check individual doctrinal elements and practices against the most reliable Simonian sources.
I intentionally seek to weaken confidence in heresiological sources (in particular, novelistic ones). Although I strip Simon of his title “(first) gnostic,” he remains a true knower of wild and worthwhile lore. And even though I deprive Simon of his epithet “Magus,” every bit of his magic remains. In the end, it is not so much about “the historical Simon,” but the capacity of Simon’s myth to form ancient Christian communities in Alexandria, Palestine, Rome, and perhaps other places. My book decisively moves the reader from Simon to the Simonians, from Simon’s myth to the people who made it.
Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Secret Mark
Who was Carpocrates? Most early Christian writers depicted him as the founder of a licentious cult, a magician, and a practitioner of “pagan” rites. They said that his followers practiced indiscriminate sex at their communal dinners. Carpocrates, said his opponents, demanded that his followers engage in every sin before they could break the cycle of transmigration and rise to the supreme Father. Since 1958, Carpocrates has also been accused of stealing, interpolating, and corrupting Christian scripture (a version of the gospel according to Mark). Scholarly treatments of the past century portray Carpocrates as a Platonic philosopher, a “Jewish Christian,” a gnostic, a promoter of free love, and even as a mythical figure who never existed.
My new study Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes reveals Carpocrates as a real person of the past, a Christian theologian, and a pioneer of melding biblical exegesis with philosophical lore. He and his followers were apparently not ascetic, but neither were they were “libertine.” Although Carpocrates would probably have denied practicing “magic” (a crime under Roman law), he and his followers may well have embraced miracles, divinatory practices, and the invoking of lower (angelic) powers.
Our best access to Carpocratian Christianity is not through the reports of those who attacked it, but through the only surviving fragment of an actual Carpocratian—Carpocrates’ son Epiphanes. Epiphanes was only seventeen when he died, and his father honored his dead son as a god—a divine soul who alighted briefly into a human body to benefit humanity. Epiphanes was writing philosophical treatises in his mid-teens, and a fragment of one of them—On Justice—survives.
In this treatise, Epiphanes presents the first robust theory of Christian communism based on divine law. He prefers Plato to Moses in arguing that Christian males should not own property—including their wives. It is humans who introduce laws and regulations which destroy the divine law of absolute equality between men and women, people and animals.
The Carpocratian understanding of a just, pure, and passionless Jesus, combined with their striving to imitate him, contradicts rumors of their licentious practices. For these practices, heresy writers seem to have had no evidence apart from rumors—rumors that were more often spoken against all Christians (for instance, group orgies under cover of darkness). Like Jesus, Carpocratians strove to rid themselves of passions in order to match the justice and purity of Jesus.
Heresy writers accused Carpocratians of moral relativism and indifference. Yet the only Carpocratian whose writings we know (Epiphanes) exhorted his readers to follow an objective and universal law of nature. Carpocratians considered certain phenomena to be evil—for instance, injustice and the passions. They seem to have gained a reputation for antinomianism based on their rejection of human conventions. The only specific law code mentioned, however, is the law of Moses, which Jesus was said to have despised, and which Epiphanes called, at least with regard to the Tenth Commandment (Exod 20:17), “comical.” Yet the (selective) rejection of the Mosaic law, at least in terms of practice, was common among early Christians.
In the late 150s or early 160s CE, Carpocrates’s follower Marcellina established a Christian conventicle in Rome with its own distinctive baptismal rite and worship practices. It is the only known Roman Christian group in the second century to have been led entirely by a woman (so much for women “must be silent,” 1 Timothy 2:12).
If Irenaeus derived Carpocratian writings from Marcellina’s group, then Marcellina may be the author of the allegory based on a mixture of Matthew 5:25-26 and Luke 12:58-59 (that angelic figures managed a system of transmigration until people paid “the last penny”). Transmigration was a widely known doctrine in antiquity. It was a teaching promoted by other Christian Platonists (Basilideans, Naassenes, Sethians). Marcellina disagreed with Plato, who wrote that philosophic (that is, pure) souls require at least three incarnations to break out of the cycle of transmigration (Phaedrus 249a). She opined that one could break out of the system in a single advent, an accomplishment modeled by Jesus himself.
Marcellina’s higher initiates may have been dubbed “firebrands of hearing” and “gnostics” (which is to say, knowers of spiritual truths) who received—perhaps from Marcellina herself—a brand mark behind the lobe of their right ear. Marcellina was thus not only a teacher but an initiator with distinctive Christian rites and practices.
Marcellina was probably an innovator in early Christian iconography. In her time, images of Christ as a philosopher were rare, if they existed at all. Marcellina is the only named Carpocratian who set up an image of Jesus among other philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, and perhaps Aristotle). She believed that Jesus’ image—evidently a painted picture or statue—went back to an archetype made in the time of Pilate. For Marcellina, artistic accuracy was important. The image of Jesus was thought to resemble his physical face. This emphasis on accuracy indicates that for Carpocratians the flesh of Jesus had at least some importance. If Carpocratians only believed in the salvation of the soul, they still worshiped the embodied image of Christ.
The work typically called Secret Mark refers to a letter claiming that “Mark” wrote a more mystical Gospel, a Gospel supposedly corrupted and published anew by Carpocrates. Secret Mark probably depends on third or fourth-century traditions which portray Mark as not only a gospel-writer but as the first evangelist of Alexandria. If Secret Mark is not a 20th century hoax, then it may be a late antique forgery which paints the same kind of portrait of Carpocrates (the licentious gnostic) we see in heresy reports.
Whether one accepts Secret Mark or not, one should strive to critically read the sources in order to transcend typically dismissive and canned heresy reports. Whatever one thinks of the Carpocratians, they were an important if experimental Christian group that flourished in the second century—and the influence of their ideas and practices has still not perished from the earth.
Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes has a companion course online, which you can access here.
Review of Simon Pétrement, A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism,trans. Carol Harrison (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990)
Arguably the most important book published on Gnosticism in the 80s, there are still few books on Gnosticism as comprehensive and daring as this. Pétrement’s grand thesis: Gnostics are Christian; Valentinians are first, and Gnostics (aka Sethians) follow. Surprisingly few have read this book; and even fewer have read it all the way through.
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Summary of C. Andrew Ballard, To Know All Mysteries: The Mystagogue Figure in Classical Antiquity and in Saint Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians, Paul in Critical Contexts (Lanham, MD—London: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2022)
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Review of David Trobisch, On the Origin of Christian Scripture: The Evolution of the New Testament Canon in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2023).
In this fascinating book, Trobisch proposes that the canonical edition of the 27-book New Testament had a single, mid-2nd century editor who used a consistent system of nomina sacra (8) and who divided the 27 books into four volumes (a 4-gospel collection, an Acts-Catholic epistles section, 14 letters of Paul, and Revelation). 82. It was a collection using first-century “apostolic” voices for second-century concerns. 58.
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The Naassenes
It is the only Christian group in antiquity to be accused of homosexual sex, of worshipping a snake, and of attending the mysteries of the Great Mother (Cybele) all at once. They worshiped God as Human, explored the Phrygian deity Attis as a manifestation of Jesus, and directly called themselves “gnostics.” They are known through a gossamer thread of tradition, a report preserved only in a worm-eaten medieval manuscript tucked away on Mount Athos, where no woman has stepped, apparently, for over a thousand years.
I refer to the mysterious group called “Naassenes.”
The Naassene report is an explosion of imagery, a cornucopia of intertextuality, a thrilling and sometimes infuriating venture into Christian allegory. Now for almost two hundred years, readers have been overwhelmed, impressed, confused, and surprised by this text—a text so jam-packed with data it offers new vistas on every encounter. Classicists will find here a range of poetic and literary allusions to Greco-Roman authors. Philosophers will find an idiosyncratic fusion of Platonic, Stoic, and Aristotelian tenets. Students of early Christianity will discover combinations of Synoptic verses seamlessly mixed with Johannine and Pauline tags. Literary theorists can approach this text to understand its notion of allegory, intertextuality, and etymology. Students of the mystery cults will find sacred hymns, words, and stories often related nowhere else. The Naassene discourse affords a feast to feed a whole range of readers.
The Naassenes: Exploring an Early Christian Identity (https://amzn.to/4bpiYZs) is the first ever comprehensive historical presentation of Naassenes myths, rites, hymns, and beliefs written for a popular audience. The story begins with the discovery of a manuscript entitled Refutation of All Heresies, attributed to an “anti-pope” in early third-century Rome. In this manuscript was discovered the only copy of transcripts from eight otherwise unknown Christian groups, first among them the “Naassenes” (or Snake People).
In The Naassenes, the original Naassene “sermon” is reconstructed and translated into English for the first time. It serves as the basis for the following chapters focusing on (1) Who were the Naassenes and where did they come from? (2) How can we distinguish what the Naassenes wrote from the critic who copied down their words? (3) What did the Naassenes believe about God, Jesus, humankind, and salvation? (4) What did the Naassenes read as scripture and did they canonize Greek mythology? (5) Did the Naassenes worship Christ as a snake or otherwise engage in snake-handling rituals? (6) What were the rites of the Naassenes and how did they differ from other churches at the time? (7) What were the Naassene hymns, and what can we tell from what survives of them? (8) Were Naassenes homosexuals and what did the mean by “the mystery of blessed pleasure?” (9) Were the Naassenes Christians and did they preserve traditions about Jesus more authentic than what we possess today?
The Naassenes are represented by a single, nameless preacher and religious entrepreneur. This Preacher, who revealed great “mysteries” to others, is himself an enigma. Part sophist and part philosopher, the Preacher was an Alexandrian polymath who could cite a range of poets and philosophers including Anacreon, Aristotle, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Homer, and so on. He—or she—knew cultural and religious lore stemming from diverse places like Syria, Libya, Samothrace, and Phrygia.
The Preacher’s library included books from the Mosaic law and the Hebrew prophets, along with a few gospels—perhaps a gospel harmony—and letters of Paul. Also on the shelves were volumes now classified as “apocryphal”: gospels attributed to Thomas, James and Mariamme, the Gospel according to the Egyptians, and the Ascension of Isaiah. The Preacher had a penchant for books relating foreign mythology—the Phrygian Attis, the Syrian Adonis, the Egyptian Isis, and so forth. By displaying a seamless fusion of Hellenic and Christian erudition, the Preacher advertised a wide-ranging expertise. Expertise at his level indicates that he had attained the heights of Hellenic education.
Naassenes were “gnostics” insofar they claimed “to know (ginōskein) the depths.” Paul of Tarsus implicitly claimed to know “the depths of God” in 1 Corinthians 2:10-12 inasmuch as he possessed the Spirit. Paul also hymned the “depth” of God’s riches—to which he had apparent access—in Romans 11:33. The Preacher did claim to have gnosis (in the sense of secret and enlightened wisdom), and he spoke to perfected (or initiated) “gnostics.” Probably, then, the Preacher spoke to an actual group of Christian knowers.
The structure of the group probably included persons of greater perceived holiness (those who made more ascetic commitments). Naassenes were likened to castrated priests of Cybele. This point does not prove that they worshiped the Great Mother as their personal goddess. What it does indicate is that at least some members of the group practiced celibacy. The Preacher advocated spiritual sex, a “mystery of blessed pleasure” in which bodiless minds (coded as “male”) had intercourse with other minds. In such intercourse, dying flesh and mortal generation was left far behind.
The Naassenes present nothing less than a new kind of Christianity. It is still commonly believed that conversion to Christianity demands a complete break with one’s religious past. Typically, when a Hellene became a Christian, the sacred lore of the gods became myths and fiction; the veneration of cult statues became idolatry; attendance at religious festivals became fellowship with demons, and mystery cults became public pollutions. The Preacher is the only second-century Christian theologian who presents a theory about how to completely integrate Hellenic religion into the structure of Christian thought and spirituality.
The Preacher’s discourse helps to break down common stereotypes about Christianity being an exclusive religion from the start, a cult which played a zero-sum game with truth and hereticalized those who disagreed. In the modern world of cultural crisscrossing, the Naassene discourse stands as an important witness to a kind of Christianity which ought no longer be marginalized in the study of Christian history: an open, free-thinking, cosmopolitan type of Christianity that has, since the faith’s first beginnings, and in every generation, never lacked a witness.
The Naassenes is joined by a companion course, which you can access here: https://bc-6561.freshlearn.com/Naassenes
Can Research on the New Testament be Honest?
I ask this, because most people who research the writings of this ancient collection still believe in them on some level (and the belief need not always be religious). Some are even paid to believe in them in a certain way—to maintain a party line, a creed, or statement of faith. If the statement of faith is not public or printed, it can still be unspoken and equally normative. (This is how social pressure normally works; and social pressure is most effective when the norms are tacit.) New Testament scholarship is the only discipline in the academy in which scholars are asked to question a document in which the answers are—in some general and even in some specific ways—predetermined by their social group (the church, or a church-affiliated school).
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The Apologist’s Dream
What does an apologist love? An anti-apologist. An anti-apologist is the apologist’s dream because, in the end, apologists, like politicians, want attention. They crave it. They want a reaction, a red-hot emotional response, like gasoline poured on a fire.
Don’t give it to them. Don’t play their game. You’re just giving M&Ms to gremlins.
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M. David Litwa, Ph.D. 