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A request was made for a review of "The Gnostic Gospels." I don't have the book in front of me so I can only speak to some of the main themes, but the book basically argues that many of the Christian traditions are not a rooted in faith but are instead the political by-products of the effort to establish a universal (i.e., catholic) church.

The book supports these claims by examining the gnostic Nag Hammadi texts discovered in Egypt in 1945 and the "orthodox" response to these "heretical" ideas.¹ The Nag Hammadi texts are contemporaries of the books of the New Testament (that is, they date from about 80 - 200 AD), but offer a startlingly different view of many aspects of the catholic faith. I don't have the space to go into all the details, but I will touch on a few of the subjects covered to give you a feel for the book's arguments.

In many ways Gnosticism² can be thought of as Zen Christianity. Gnostics believed that through spiritual maturity you would gain access to gnosis, or the secret knowledge that is essential to salvation. Gnosis is supposedly the secret knowledge that Christ revealed exclusively to (possibly only some) of the apostles. Gnostic teachers would take students who would then work toward gaining spiritual maturity. Once they were sufficiently mature, the gnosis would be revealed to them by the teacher, who had learned the gnosis from his teacher, and so on back to the apostles. So, from the Gnostic's perspective, you attain salvation only through personal growth. This differs from the orthodox position, which argues that you can gain salvation merely be joining the church. This distinction matters in the context of making the catholic church truly universal. The Gnostics were selective in who they chose to teach and who they revealed the gnosis to. The goal of the orthodox church was growth and acceptance, so having a screening policy for admittance was undesired. So, they labeled the Gnostics as heretics and devoted a great deal of effort to refuting their claims.

The Gnostics differed from the orthodox church in other ways as well. It has been well established that the catholic church does not welcome females in positions of authority. This stems from the fact that the 12 disciples were all male. The Gnostics had a different perspective on things and often gave Mary Magdalene a more prominent role than the orthodox gospels do. The reason for the Gnostics' thinking on this issue is well document in "The Gnostics Gospels," but I would prefer to focus on the orthodox response to this belief. The main orthodox political objection to including females in positions of authority was that it disrupted the catholic church's authority. (Bear in mind that these arguments are taking places long after the death of Christ.) The catholics believe that the bishops' authority stems from the appointment by the apostles of their successors. By this argument the first bishops were appointed directly by the apostles and each subsequent generation of bishops was appointed by the previous generation. This apostolic succession is the source of the bishops' authority. Further, the orthodoxy believes that the bishops are all powerful and that no baptisms, for example, should take place without the bishop being present. The orthodoxy also believed in a strict bishop, priest, deacon hierarchy. All this leads to the Gnostic's arguments about the authority of women undermining the existing church hierarchy and threatening the authority of the bishops by arguing that Christ did not limit his teachings to just the apostles. So, the orthodoxy were labeled the Gnostics as heretics for this belief as well.

In addition to the two subjects mentioned above, "The Gnostic Gospels" also discusses the Gnostic and orthodox beliefs with regard to martyrdom (the orthodoxy favored martyrdom while the Gnostics thought it was a waste of human life), the resurrection (the Gnostics separated Christ's spiritual essence from his human body and argue that only the former was resurrected), and a host of other issues.

In the end, "The Gnostic Gospels" provides an interesting perspective on the origins of the catholic faith. My original goal was to get an historical analysis rather than a religious analysis of the establishment of the catholic church, but this book proved to be more than interesting enough to make up for that.

¹ Orthodox and heretical appear in quotations above because those labels represent only one viewpoint. The orthodox church -- the catholic church that still exists to this day -- created those labels as part of its attack on the Gnostics. However, they are useful labels for this discussion as they have wide-spread understanding and association, so they will reappear when necessary.

² One reason that the orthodox position won out over the Gnostics -- according to "The Gnostic Gospels" -- is that the term Gnosticism does not represent a consistent ideology. The Gnostics and heretics consisted of many different sects with similar but ultimately not identical beliefs. Future uses of the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism will therefore focus on beliefs held by the majority, but should not be taken as applying to all Gnostics or heretics.

Posted by on 10 May 2005 at 1:35 PM