The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity

by David Brakke

Gnosticism-whether Sethian Gnosticism or Valentinianism or, later, Manichaeism-posed

scholars often call "Sethian Gnostics" as the Gnostic school of thought and argues that the thought and practice of only these Christians should be considered "Gnosticism" (if indeed one should even use this term). This middle way on the question of Gnosticism has not found as much support among historians of early Christianity as other approaches, perhaps because it does not completely reject the evidence of heresiologists like Irenaeus but engages it critically,

or because it is often confused with a typological approach. In any event, I shall argue for its superiority over both the traditional concept of a wide-ranging "Gnosticism" and the refusal to speak of ancient Gnostics or a Gnostic myth at all.

in Chapter 3 I provide a description of the basic teachings and rituals of this e...

Nearly all the Gnostic writings that I discuss can be found in Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), the overall plan of which represents the perspective of this book; others are available in Marvin Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition (New York: HarperOne, 2007).

In the spring of 2006, a group of scholars captured headlines across the globe by publishing a new early Christian work, The Gospel of Judas. Although it was originally composed in Greek, it survives now only in a Coptic translation found in a fragmentary manuscript probably from the fourth century CE.

And yet, Irenaeus said, all these false versions of Christianity, however different they were, stemmed from a single demonic teacher, Simon Magus. Simon appears in the Acts of the Apostles as a magician who offered the apostles money for the power to bestow the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:9-24). Moreover, Irenaeus argued that all these teachers and groups manifested false gnosis or knowledge, which St. Paul had warned against in one of his letters to Timothy (1 Timothy 6:20). The Gospel of Judas, then, indeed turned Christianity on its head, for it was not Christianity at all, rather yet another demonically inspired example of false gnosis.

First, his view that Christianity started out as a single, fairly uniform religion and then became more diverse, whether for good or for ill, has remained influential.

Irenaeus continues to shape how historians think in a second way. He argued that the various "heretical" Christian groups that he condemned, such as the Gnostics and the Valentinians and the Marcionites, were all manifestations of a single erroneous phenomenon, false gnosis, or, as we call it today, "Gnosticism."

Irenaeus and his fellow orthodox Christians are all the same, while the heretics differ widely in their teachings and go by all sorts of names: Gnostics, Sethians, Valentinians, Marcionites, Carpocratians, and so on. But this heretical diversity is somewhat illusory; in actual fact, all these heresies are a manifestation of false gnosis.

Irenaeus's model of a single true Christianity from which heretics diverged readily accounts for both of these factors. According to this view, there always was a single true orthodox faith, and any Christian "diversity" simply reflects demonically inspired heretical movements. Modern versions of this model allow that "mainstream" Christianity may have changed and developed over the centuries, but they still insist that a core set of Christian beliefs persisted within this mainstream and that groups like the Montanists and the Valentinians strayed from these basic beliefs in various ways.

Walter Bauer took a major step in dismantling the Irenaean model of early Christianity when he published his landmark 1934 book, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.3 Examining earliest Christianity in selected regions, Bauer argued that in some locations, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, forms of Christianity that would later be deemed heretical actually predated what would later emerge as orthodox.

The idea of a single orthodoxy arose in the city of Rome, whose cultural elite often liked conformity and dominance, and then spread to other regions.

the Gnostics identified themselves as "the seed of Seth" or "the immovable race."

various Christian authors used ethnic or racial language to establish identity and to construct boundaries between themselves, non-Christians, and other Christians.

Similarly Benjamin Dunning examines how Christians used the language of foreignness and civic belonging to expre...

The recognition of the fundamental tie between the gods and ethnicity or genealogy can shed better light on such Gnostic self-ide...

In recent decades scholars have recognized that ancient philosophical schools did not engage in philosophical discourse about the nature of God and other high doctrines for purely intellectual reasons; rather, they were communities in which individuals learned a way of life based on shared principles and teachings. Philosophy sought to make people more virtuous, in fact, happier, for ancient intellectuals agreed that no person could be truly happy without being virtuous.'

therapeutic purpose: to reconnect the human intellect with the source of its being and to ameliorate its condition of attachment to the body and its passions.

intellect provided the link between humanity and the divine because our intellect is modeled after and provides a means to...

the Gnostic myth provides a map, so to speak, of the divine intellect, and it explains how, despite our life in the body and opposition by demonic powers, our intellect still pro...

Divine revelation in Christ made this mes...

Gnostic ritual provided a basis for mystical ascent to ...

little evidence s...

What often passes as the primary characteristics of "Gnosticism"-dualism, alienation, esotericism, and the like-do not appear nearly as central as the Gnostics' conviction that God had acted to save people from t...

the ultimate ...

Spirit"-is un...

beyond descr...

superior to...

not corporeal, it is not ...

Indeed, no one can think of it" (Ap. Joh...

"It is life, as bestowing life. It is blessed, as bestowing blessedness. It is acquaintance, ...

does not have any of these characteristics; rather, it bestows them on all existin...

only the entirety that the aeons constitute is truly real and eternal; the material world is a flawed imitation of the entirety and destined to perish.

Foremost among the aeons is the second principle, "the image of the perfect Invisible Virgin Spirit" (Ap. John 11 4:34-35), which is the most immediate emanation from the ultimate God.

The Barbelo itself can have constituent aeons. Usuall...

concealed, first-manifest, and se...

If the Invisible Spirit is the ultimate font of humanity and our salvation and yet cannot be named and described, then the Barbelo is the more immedia...

In The Gospel of Judas, Judas says to Jesus: "You have come from the immortal aeon of the Barbelo. But as for the one who sent you"-that is, the Invisible Spirit-...

nearly all feature a triad of father, mother, and son at a very high level of the godhead.

In The Secret Book According to John, the Barbelo conceives by the gaze of the first principle and begets a spark, the Self-Originate or Christ.

Unlike other aeons, which emanate by becoming "disclosed," Christ is "the only-begotten" of the Father and the Barbelo, who are then his f...

This motif becomes even more prominent in The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, which contains at least six triads of father, mother, and child, beginning with the Invisible Sp...