Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings: A preliminary survey of the Nag Hammadi find by W.C. Van Unnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How the Ancients Get Their Revenge

I found this book amid a pile of junk I have been meaning to dispose of for years. It is old, probably outdated by two or three generations of scholarship, and an example of a lost genre of serious popular exegesis. Nevertheless, this introduction to the Nag Hammadi documents is in some sense timeless and , I think, shows us important things about ourselves and our cultural condition.

Gnosticism is not easily defined from a doctrinal point of view. There are dozens of ancient variants that have been mixed with spiritual beliefs and practices from Persia, the Middle East, and the Roman and Greek empires. Consequently is difficult to talk about Gnosticism as more than a tendency in religious thought.

The Gnostic tendency is particularly evident in Christianity, both ancient and modern. In part this is due to the contemporaneous spread of Christian and Gnostic teaching in the first centuries of the Christian Era. But, more importantly, I think the ease with which the Gnostic impulse penetrated Christian thinking is a consequence of a fundamental epistemological problem of Christianity itself. In a sense Christianity needs, and continues to need, Gnosticism as its intellectual foundation. This makes Gnosticism the ‘go to’ retreat whenever Christianity is pressed by widespread intellectual criticism.

Paul of Tarsus is the inventor of Christianity as a distinct religion. His central innovation was the separation of his religion from both traditional rituals and genetics. His religion was open to all regardless of culture or parentage; it was ‘universal’. Participation in his religion required only one thing: what he called pistis, or faith. Specifically, faith in Jesus Christ as the redeemer, the bringer of salvation to the cosmos. This was a religion of ideas not blood or actions; of what was ‘in your head’ not in your genes or your ethics.

But Paul had never met Jesus. He was taught about his life and teachings by others who, judging by the multiplicity of writings available at the time, had different interpretations of these teachings. Some of these writings would, after several centuries, be deemed ‘canonical’, that is, official. The rest would be termed ‘apocryphal’, meaning not that they were false (they were in fact often cited by the Church Fathers from the 2nd century onwards) but that they weren’t definitive. The Nag Hammadi collection is one of apocrypha, some of which echoes the canonical New Testament but much of which is distinctively different in tone and intent.

In any case, Paul has almost nothing to say about either the life of Jesus or the actual content of what was to be believed about him as a real historical person. And nothing in contemporary Judaism suggested the need for cosmic redemption. At most, therefore, Paul depicts a sort of abstract cipher, a symbol that represents the Jesus who lived and preached, and died a horrible death. To this cipher Paul attributes characteristics that are simply absent from the so-called synoptic gospels which purport to document Jesus’s life. The details of that life, as well as its preaching, and its death are of no concern to Paul, who refers to ‘the gospel of Christ’ as if it were already known through someone else’s narrative. From a practical perspective, faith must be placed in one or some of these narratives. Paul had to do this and so do his followers; but he’s not letting on which ones are worthy of belief. It’s as if he is entirely unconcerned about any verifiable facts about Jesus as long as his slogans about Christ’s redemptive role are accepted and repeated as evidence of faith.

Enter the Gnostic environment into which teaching about Jesus is presented and interpreted. The common and binding principle among the variety of Gnostic beliefs is that knowledge, gnosis in Greek, is the key to personal salvation. The knowledge referred to is a primal understanding of the nature of the universe, an understanding which we have lost because of the corruption brought about by human desire and sin. Clearly Paul’s Christianity claims to have this required knowledge. It is the object of his faith, the knowledge of the God-man, Jesus Christ, which frees the world from desire and sin. Gnosticism has a ready-made explanation for why the world is in need of redemption and how that redemption is made possible through Christ. It is the perfect background story for the Pauline proclamation.

But the how and why of redemption and salvation has as many variants as the Gnostic imagination can supply. It is clear, therefore, that early Christianity was at least as diverse as present day Christianity. Valentius, a leading Gnostic of the time, had a good shot at becoming the bishop of Rome for example. Paul’s abstract savior is simply inadequate for whatever human need is met by religion. Religious substance was supplied by the Gnostic ideas already in circulation: the hidden messages contained in the parables of Jesus, the eternal fixity of the elements of true knowledge, the transformational power of words (as in the sacraments), the superiority of the spiritual over the physical, the need to escape from the temptations and snares of the material universe, the idea of a heaven ‘up there’, beyond the stars as our real home. All these are Gnostic in origin and are very different from the theme of love presented by the Jesus of the canonical gospels (and, incidentally, commonplace within the rabbinical Judaism of the day). But they fit nicely with Paul’s more abstract pronouncements (presuming, possibly incorrectly, that Paul himself wasn’t already influenced by Gnostic teaching; I believe on the evidence of his attested letters that he had been).

The Nag Hammadi writings, discovered only in the late 1940’s, are examples of the variations in Christian thought that were prevalent from the 2nd century onward. They follow on rather neatly from the last canonical gospel, that of John, in their spiritualized content and their Gnostic flavor. They are ‘syncretistic’ not only in the sense that the collection incorporates the scriptures of a number of Christian communities, but also because each of the documents discovered shows the blending of Christian thought and Gnostic cosmology, the beginnings of which can be detected in John’s gospel. The several dozen papyri demonstrate just how inextricably interwoven the Christianity and Gnosticism have always been. The latter provides the epistemological rational for the former. It says why faith is necessary as well as sufficient.

There is nonetheless an issue: Gnosticism presents a problem for authority in its diversity of opinion and in its poor regard for earthly structures, even ecclesiastical ones. The developing church hierarchy of the first four centuries could only maintain its authority by severely limiting the variety of Gnostic belief. However the traditional argument that ‘orthodox’ belief triumphed over ‘heretical’ or other extrinsic ideas is belied in the first instance by the more or less wholesale importation of Greek philosophy - initially Platonic eventually Aristotelian - into Christian theology, and further by the continuing influence of Gnosticism throughout the subsequent history of Christianity. Gnosticism was not suppressed, it was normalized within the Church. From the Manichaeans to the Mormons, Gnosticism has lived just below the surface, providing the substantive foundations of Christian liturgy and worship; and for its not infrequent fragmentation (the Cathars and Calvinists as well as the American Puritans spring immediately to mind).

Harold Bloom in his classic The American Religion, has shown to what degree the Gnostic tendency is alive and well. Its subordination of the material environment to human progress in re-joining the divine source, its perception of the inherent evil of those who are not privy to the secrets of salvation, its mythology of the triumph of the cognoscenti, can be observed in most nominally Christian countries, but especially in America where the Gnostic tendency has become a national distinguishing characteristic. And the tendency goes beyond formal religion. It includes the literature and culture of self-help and self-improvement which peddles the ‘secrets’ of sexual and business success. It includes a definite sort of obdurate anti-intellectualism such as that described by Kurt Andersen in his Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History. It includes a deformed attitude of equality captured in John dos Passos’s comment that “Americans feel that there neighbors do not have the right to know more than they do.” It also includes a certain style of politics, one in which the demonization of one’s opponents is essential in order to protect the truth of the mythology which is used to sustain existing structures of power.

Philologists, archaeologists, and biblical scholars are still studying the Nag Hammadi collection more than 70 years after it was unearthed. Remarkably, it seems to me, these documents have as much to reveal about how life is lived today as how it was lived in the 2nd century. This short introduction, published in 1960, is still readable and eminently relevant. I recommend it to those who don’t find conventional explanation for the state of the world very satisfying.

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