The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters 
by 

Elaine Pagels

 

The Secret Sharer

Paul of Tarsus, that Moses of the Christian religion, is a persistent intellectual pain for many, including me. He is contradictory, opaque, and elusive. It’s incredible that a world religion is based on his frequently incoherent ramblings about a man he’d never met. But Pagels book goes a long way to dispersing the Pauline conceptual mist and suggesting why he was so successful.

One of the earliest crises in Christianity, the Gnostic Controversies, occurred about a century after Paul wrote his very influential letters to the congregations he founded throughout the Roman Empire. A group of Christian heretics (so subsequently determined) began using a somewhat older and distinctly un-Jewish theological approach called Gnosticism to interpret the traditions and writings about Jesus. For Christianity, a religion grounded in ideas, Gnosticism, an established cult of ideas, presented an obvious threat.

Gnosticism had several strands but all of these converged on a view of the physical world as a creation of an evil Demiurge. Within this world, the spirits of human beings had become trapped. The mission, as it were, of Gnosticism was to provide the secret knowledge, the inside dope, which would allow these spirits to escape their material emprisonment. Since this view was radically opposed to the idea put forth in the book of Genesis that God found the world ‘good,’ a number of the so-called Fathers of the Church spent a great deal of time attacking Gnosticism as an un-scriptural and erroneous interpretation.

Most of what is known about the Gnostics is available only from these Church Fathers since their attack was successful and most of the original Gnostic writing was destroyed. However the mid-twentieth century discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, largely Gnostic, provoked a re-consideration of the history and real substance of the entire second century dispute.

The issue around which Pagels centres her analysis is fascinating. In their attack on the Gnostics the Church Fathers relied heavily on the letters of Paul to argue against their opponents. Strangely, however, the Gnostics also used Paul extensively to support their case. Before Nag Hammadi it appeared that the Gnostics were merely being tendentious and the orthodox interpretation of the Fathers obvious.

But by examining each of the Pauline letters in terms of a more complete knowledge of the Gnostic position, Pagels makes a compelling case that Paul had been heavily influenced by Gnostic thought. In fact many of the apparent contradictions and confusions contained in these documents are the result of Paul addressing two audiences simultaneously: the psychics, or Christ-followers uninitiated into the sacred Gnostic mysteries; and the pneumatics, those relatively few elect who were spiritually prepared to understand the esoteric truths about what salvation really meant.

Pagels detailed scholarship in tracing the elements of this Pauline ‘double-speak’ is impressive and impressively explanatory. For me it goes a considerable way toward suggesting definitions for what Paul actually meant in his use of terms like ‘faith’ and ‘salvation.’ The fact that these suggestions are very different from what has been passed down through orthodox theology is, to say the least, interesting.

Postscript: For more on the Pauline idea of faith and other links, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...