It is the orthodox view that Jesus came in order to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures, but he did so in a manner that defied the expectation that the messiah would conquer the enemies of the Judeans. I have suggested that this view of Jesus arose in a wider context of ideas whereby a Jesus or Saviour figure came to overthrow the works of the Old Testament creator and lawgiver god.
My view is built on Nina Livesey’s argument for Paul’s letters being produced by one of the several “Christian schools” that existed in Rome in the second century. As I pointed out in my previous post, I have found it difficult to understand how the kinds of teachings we associate with “gnosticism” — arguing that Jesus did not have a flesh and blood body, that the Jewish god was evil, that creation itself was evil — arose from what we know of our gospels and letters of Paul. But as per my previous post, I think that the relationship between those “gnostic” ideas and the ideas of orthodox Christianity makes sense if we set orthodoxy as the latecomer.
As Livesey points out, Paul’s letters, arguably critical of “Judaism”, arose at a time when Jews or Judeans were seen as having caused horrific losses to Roman military power in the Bar Kochba war of 132-135 CE and were themselves being severely punished. I would extend the time when Jews (and Jewishness) were widely abhored to the decades before when under the emperor Trajan there were widespread Judean revolts and massacres throughout the eastern part of the empire. (One might compare the widespread loathing of the “troublous” Palestinians – and Muslims – in Israel and the West today.) This was also the time when we see the emergence of “gnostic” or similar types of teachings arguing that the Jewish Scriptures testified to an ignorant (or even evil) god whose rule only promised death.
But there is an argument that “gnosticism” emerged after Christianity. This argument denies that there was any kind of Jewish gnosticism before the gospels and letters of Paul. Edwin Yamauchi pointed out…
A major difficulty in accepting a Jewish origin for Gnosticism is to account for the anti-Jewish use which most Gnostics seem to have made of these elements. The anticosmic attitude of the Gnostics contradicts the Jewish belief that God created the world and declared it good. . . .
Many scholars therefore believe that it was probably through the mediation of Christianity that these Jewish elements came to be used in such an antithetical way. (Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Evidences, 2nd ed, p. 242f)
Then a few pages later,
Gnosticism with a fully articulated theology, cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology cannot be discerned clearly until the post-Christian era. According to Wilson, were we to adopt the programmatic definition of Jonas ‘then we must probably wait for the second century’. Hengel would concur: ‘Gnosticism is first visible as a spiritual movement at the end of the first century AD at the earliest and only develops fully in the second century.’ (p. 245)
Both of these objections fall by the wayside if we place the whole game in the second century. Anti-Jewish ideas are readily understandable in a world that saw Jews as hostile to humanity “and the gods” and deserving of the bloodshed they were suffering. That is, in the times of Trajan (110s) and Hadrian (130s).
The second objection cited above expresses the point I am making: that yes, we are looking at second century developments.
It is not altogether coincidental that scholars who assume a Gnostic background for New Testament documents in some cases also adopt very late dates for these books, because late dates for these documents would make a stronger case for affinities with Gnosticism. Thus Rudolph dates Colossians to AD 80, Ephesians to the end of the first century, and both the Pastoral and the Johannine Epistles to the beginning of the second century. Koester dates the Pastorals to as late as between AD 120 and AD 160. (pp. 192f)
And why does Koester date the Pastorals to the middle of the second century? In large part because it is believed that it would have taken decades for Paul’s first century church assemblies to have evolved into the authoritarian episcopal structures that those letters indicate. But as Livesey has pointed out in her recent book, the “home gathering” situations of the letters is a rhetorical device aimed at building a sense of community among readers. They are not documenting a historical situation.
There is no independent evidence that dates any of our New Testament writings earlier than the middle of the second century. Yamauchi acknowledges that a second century date for the gospels and letters would make the possibility of a “pre-Christian” gnosticism more likely. I think the argument goes beyond mere chronological ordering of sources, though. That returns me to the point I was making in my previous post.
In coming posts I may (as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s) post notes on various teachers who appear to me to have preceded (proto-)orthodox Christianity and whose followers appear to have engaged with the new gospels and Pauline writings.
I think I have been searching in the wrong places for the origin of the Jesus figure in our New Testament writings. Of course it would be easiest to assume that there is some truth to the gospel narratives and that there was a historical preacher by that name who was crucified and whose followers believed he rose from the dead and went to heaven. But then I would be unable to explain why the earliest uncontested and independent evidence we have for that person does not appear until a full hundred years after his time and without a hint about how that life, so rich in allusions to mythical acts and persons, came to be known. Or I could conjure up an explanation that involved ordinary (generally illiterate) persons passing on ever more imaginative “oral reports” about the person but that would be letting my imagination fly in the face of studies that tell us that’s not how fabulous tales about historical persons originate. (They are composed from the creative imaginations of the literati.)
I used to fuss fruitlessly over trying to understand what might have led to the first gospel, widely believed to have been the Gospel of Mark. I liked the idea that that gospel portrayed a Jesus who could readily be interpreted as a personification of an ideal Israel, one who died with his nation in the catastrophe of 70 CE (the destruction of the Jewish Temple by Titus along with myriads of crucifixions of Jewish victims) and rose again to establish a new “spiritual” Israel in the “church”. But that idea did not explain the kinds of Christianities (there were many types) that swelled and plopped like bubbles in a vast Mediterranean hot mud spring. Not even if we moved the gospel to a later time so that it had the Bar Kochba war (132-135 CE) in mind.
An old door reopened
An important work to be read in conjunction with Nina Livesey’s The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context
Nina Livesey (re)opened a door to a room for me that maybe I should have investigated more thoroughly before. In the book I recently discussed, Livesey speaks of a multiplicity of “Christian” schools comparable with the many philosophical schools in Rome. They usually centred around a prominent teacher, attracted an inner circle of disciples while also holding open public sessions, and would not be averse to publishing both trial and final versions of tracts illustrating some point of their teachings. Livesey revives the idea that the letters attributed to an apostle named Paul were published by one such school, one led by Marcion. Marcion was also reputed to have produced “a gospel”, one that many in later antiquity and since have considered to be an early form of our Gospel of Luke.
Let’s pause there and collect our thoughts for a moment.
Marcion was not the only “Christian” teacher in Rome around the middle of the second century. Other teachers or school heads (not all in Rome) around the same period include Apelles, Basilides, Cerdo, Heracleon, Justin, Marcion, Saturninus/Satornilos, Tatian, Valentinus . . . You get the idea. There were many competing teachings. Some of them came to be dismissed as a consequence of being labelled as “gnostic”. But they were there from the beginning — at least if by “the beginning” we insist on appealing only to independently verifiable sources.
Now when Marcion published “Paul’s letters” some other schools picked them up and used them as foils through which to teach their own doctrines. Multiple interpretations and textual variants were the result. That’s how the schools worked: they would be open to engaging with each others’ teachings, either with modifications, elaborations, or outright rejections. So it is difficult from our perspective to always know what the original teachings of some of these schools were: they were capable of changing over time.
Back to the gospels. When Marcion wrote up a life of Jesus, he was using that figure of Jesus as a means of promoting his (Marcion’s) view that “Christianity” was an antithesis of the Jewish religion. Marcion’s Jesus was not even real flesh and blood but a spirit being in the appearance of flesh and blood: the antithesis even in this respect to the physical ordinances of Moses.
Schools opposing the biblical narrative
But other schools had other ideas about Jesus. More than that, they had ideas about the origins of the Jewish religion and even of humanity itself that we today would find quite bizarre. There were multiple ideas about god and creation. Many of these ideas were borrowed from Greek philosophy, some from Greek literature and myths, as well as from the Jewish Scriptures. Some said that the god who created this world was a god lower than, and ignorant of, the ultimate “Good God”; some said the serpent in the Garden of Eden was actually a benefactor of humankind and the god who punished him (according to the Book of Genesis) was the wicked god; some said that the line of Cain (depicted in Genesis as the first murderer) was the righteous genealogy; some said Jesus first appeared in the form of Adam’s third son, Seth. Indeed, Jesus held different positions among these various schools. He might be seen as one of a number of spirit beings who were “born” in the earliest moments of time. Or he was a human, fathered by Joseph, who was possessed by a spirit being called Christ. Some saw him as hating the laws of the god of Moses and promising deliverance to all whom the Jewish god had condemned.
I suspect it is impossible to ever find a way to reconcile all of these teachings. They span events from time before creation right through to the present and beyond. One thing they all seem to have in common, though: they are all opposed to the orthodox understanding we have of the Jewish Scriptures, or the Old Testament. Not all of them, as far as we are aware, include a place for Jesus. But of those that do, Jesus has a role that is opposed to the Mosaic Law and traditional Jewish Temple. (Not unreasonably, given that Jesus is derived from the name Joshua who was originally understood as the successor to Moses.)
In other words, what I am imagining here is a situation that we can with reasonable assurance place as early as the opening decades and middle of the second century — a time when a find a multiplicity of schools with various notions proposing narratives that contradicted those we read in Genesis and those of the “orthodox” interpretation of the Jewish bible more generally.
Where did those ideas come from?
An Anti-Jewish/Judean time
I am tempted to begin with the beginning of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as proposed by Niels Peter Lemche and in some depth by Russell Gmirkin. This takes us back to the beginning of the Hellenistic era (from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests) when Samaritans and Judeans, with the aid of Greek writings, collaborated to construct a narrative of origins that we read today in the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy or Joshua. Genesis in particular has retained hints that its authors were trying to incorporate multiple gods whom later readers would equate with Yahweh. Most scholars have seen multiple hands and schools of thought going into the final product of the Pentateuch. It is not difficult to imagine some intellects associated with the production of the first bible continuing to raise alternative ideas that were infused with Greek philosophy and myth or to imagine that some of this kind of divergent thinking continued through to the Roman era. What are surely critical turning points, however, are the calamities that befell the Jews (or Judeans) first under Vespasian and Titus (the first Jewish war of 66-70 CE), the uprisings and widespread massacres of Jews a few decades later under Trajan and then the “final solution” by 135 CE under Hadrian when the Jews were forbidden even to set foot in Jerusalem.
The bloody times coincided with the emergence of “Christian schools” in Rome. Let’s take a step beyond Nina Livesey’s specific focus on the letters of Paul appearing at this time. Let’s suggest that it is these times that witness the emergence of schools teaching the “end” of the Jewish laws. These times further witness teachings declaring the falsehood of the narrative of creation by the Jewish god, or at least teaching that this creation was evil or less than “good”. Imagine that this is the time when we see the namesake of Moses’ successor, Joshua/Jesus, promising deliverance from the judgment of that lesser god of the Jews.
If we can imagine all of that, we are, I think, confining ourselves to what the evidence in our second century sources allows.
But how does any of that explain the Christianity we recognize today?
It doesn’t. If that’s all we had, no doubt those negative teachings of Marcion, of Valentinus and others would have fallen by the wayside in time.
From antipathy to antithesis to … fulfilment
But something happened after Marcion released his story of Jesus, a Jesus who was an “antithesis” of the best that the god of the Jews could offer.
Another school, perhaps one associated with the “church father” Justin, or with Basilides in Alexandria (I don’t know and can only surmise), responded with an opposing narrative about a Jesus who was less an “antithesis” of the Jewish god than a “fulfilment” of all that the Jewish god had hoped for but had failed to achieve hitherto.
If that happened, we have a revolutionary moment. We no longer have a negative response to “the Jewish religion and scriptures”; rather, we have a way of capturing and finding new and enriched meaning in that old religion and its hoary sacred writings.
What if Jesus could be transformed from an anti-Moses or anti-Yahweh figure into a ‘higher than Moses’ figure, a fulfilment of the higher ethics of god who was henceforth to appear as a newly discovered deity, or as the old deity whose true character was only being seen clearly now for the first time — or as the “one sent to reveal” that newly understood deity?
Such a Jesus had the power to enrich and so preserve with new meaning texts that had long been revered (even among non-Jews). Allegorical reading could infuse them with new meanings. The old was discarded, yes, but it was also retained and revivified as throwing the “new” into 3D relief by its shadows: Joseph and Moses and David and Elijah (and so on) of the Old Testament prefigured the Jesus of the New — at least if read with a little imagination. A gospel could depict Jesus as a personification of an ideal Israel, healing others but suffering unjustly only to be raised up and bring all humanity to salvation. Another gospel could present Jesus as a new Moses delivering a “higher law” in the Sermon on the Mount. And so on.
I suggest that once one or some of those schools (probably in Rome but not necessarily confined to there) discovered a way to both reject and embrace with new meaning the old Mosaic order of things, they were on a winner, as we might say today.
Such a Jesus, just like the other original Jewish writings and again like the writings of “proto-Christian” (including “gnostic”) schools, drew upon the inspiration of Greek myths and philosophy to flesh out their teachings. The Jesus with us today drew upon one additional source — the Jewish Scriptures — and found as a result a longer-lasting heritage. Various “schools” may have competed for the most outstanding way to oppose and supplant the religion of the Jews who from 70 to 135 CE were suffering the calamities of Vespasian, Titus, Trajan and Hadrian. The form of Christianity that became a religion that could boast of a “higher fulfilment” and stronger appeal to literati and hoi polloi alike was the one that learned how to infuse venerable texts and the experiences of their advocates with new meaning and build on their foundation. Rejection of the Old, in way, yes, like the teachings of other schools … but with one important twist.
Was a crucifixion in heaven possible? conceivable?
But the following, again, is the cause of men’s dying: A certain virgin, fair in person, and beautiful in attire, and of most persuasive address, aims at making spoil of the princes [= archons] that have been borne up and crucified on the firmament by the living Spirit . . . .
Acta Archelai 8, describing a third century Manichean answer to the question, Why death?
What gave rise to Gnosticism from within Judaism?
Birger Pearson’s answer is very similar to what I think led to the emergence of Christianity from within Judaism. If gnostics fell away from Judaism by rejecting its god as a blind and ignorant Demiurge who gave a law that enslaved its followers to the ways of the flesh, Christianity offered a positive response to similar circumstances, a new covenant grounded in an allegorical revision of the old rather than an outright rejection of it:
One can hear in this text echoes of existential despair arising in circles of the people of the Covenant faced with a crisis of history, with the apparent failure of the God of history: “What kind of a God is this?”‘ (48,1); “These things he has said (and done, failed to do) to those who believe in him and serve him!” (48,13ff.). Such expressions of existential anguish are not without parallels in our own generation of history “after Auschwitz.”
Historical existence in an age of historical crisis, for a people whose God after all had been the Lord of history and of the created order, can, and apparently did, bring about a new and revolutionary look at the old traditions and ‘assumptions, a “new hermeneutic”. This new hermeneutic arising in an age of historical crisis and religiocultural syncretism is the primary element in the origin of Gnosticism.
Pearson, Birger. Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1990. p. 51
How to explain Paul’s letters if we see signs of Philo and Seneca in them?
. . . at a minimum, the Saturnilians are addressing the same kind of issues we see in addressed in Paul’s letters. At a maximum, . . . 1 Corinthians could be providing us with a window . . . on the Saturnilian church sometime between 70 and 135 CE.
Continuing . . . .
…
What we would have in Galatians is not Paul’s version of events but Saturnilus’ version of Paul.
There have been biblical scholars who rejected—and not for religious reasons—the Galatians version of events and, on some points, were willing to accept that of Acts.
4th Jan 2021: See comments below for revisions by Roger Parvus to his original post:
If in the Pauline letters someone—whether Saturnilus or someone else—has made Paul the recipient and bearer of a new gospel i.e., the Vision of Isaiah, it would mean that our knowledge of the real Paul is more questionable than ever. The widely accepted rule in New Testament scholarship has been to give Paul’s letters the nod whenever their information conflicts with that of the Acts of the Apostles, especially concerning Paul himself. His information is first-person and earlier than Acts. The author of Acts seems to be more ideologically-driven than Paul. So Paul’s account in Galatians 1:1-2:14 of how he came by his gospel and became an apostle is considered more accurate than what Acts says about the same matters. Likewise regarding Paul’s account of how in the presence of James, Peter and John he defended his gospel and received their approval of it. But this preference for the Galatians account of events takes a hit if it was in fact written by someone like Saturnilus who was looking to promote the gospel he had projected onto Paul. What we would have in Galatians is not Paul’s version of events but Saturnilus’ version of Paul.
There have been biblical scholars who rejected—and not for religious reasons—the Galatians version of events and, on some points, were willing to accept that of Acts. Alfred Loisy was one:
The legend of Paul has undergone a parallel amplification to that of Peter, but on two different lines: first, by his own statements or by the tradition of his Epistles designed to make him the possessor of the true Gospel and of a strictly personal mission for the conversion of the Gentile world; and then by the common tradition for the purpose of subordinating his role and activity to the work of the Twelve, and especially of Peter regarded as the chief instrument of the apostolate instituted by Jesus.
Relying on the Epistles and disregarding their apologetic and tendentious character, even in much that concerns the person of Paul, though this is perhaps secondary, criticism is apt to conclude that Paul from his conversion onwards had full consciousness of an exceptional calling as apostle to the pagans, and that he set to work, resolutely and alone, to conquer the world, drawing in his wake the leaders of Judaic Christianity, whether willing or not. And this, indeed, is how things happened if we take the indications of the Galatian Epistle at their face value. There we encounter an apostle who holds his commission from God only, who has a gospel peculiar to himself given him by immediate revelation, and has already begun the conquest of the whole Gentile world. No small claim! (Galatians i, 11-12, 15-17, 21-24; ii, 7-8).
But things did not really happen in that way, and could not have so happened…
Interpret as we may the over-statements in the Epistle to the Galatians, it is certain that Saul-Paul did not make his entry on the Christian stage as the absolute innovator, the autonomous and independent missionary exhibited by this Epistle. The believers in Damascus to whom Paul joined himself were zealous propagandists imbued with the spirit of Stephen, and there is nothing whatever to suggest that he was out of his element among them. Equally, he was quite unaware at that time of possessing a peculiar gospel or a vocation on a different level from that of all the other Christian missionaries. That idea he certainly did not bring with him to Antioch, where he found a community which others had built up and which recruited non-Jews without imposing circumcision. For long years he remained there as the helper of Barnabas rather than his chief... (La Naissance du Christianisme, ET: The Birth of the Christian Religion, translation by L.P. Jacks, University Books, 1962, pp. 126-7)
My hypothesis supports Loisy’s claim that the real Paul was commissioned as an apostle in the same way that other early missionaries were: by being delegated for a mission by a congregation which supported him. And that the real Paul’s gospel was no different from theirs: the kingdom of God is at hand and Jesus will be coming to establish it. But if that is the way the real Paul was, why does Acts try to take him down a notch? Continue reading “Revising the Series “A Simonian Origin for Christianity”, Part 3”
Thus I think we need to look between 70 and 135 both for the author of the Vision and for the one who projected it into Paul’s letters. We are not necessarily looking for two people. There is no reason why one and the same person could not have done both tasks.
Continuing . . . .
…
The Best Candidate
To my mind easily the best candidate for both tasks is a man whose name is variously rendered as Saturnilus, Saturninus, or Satornilos. A Latin mistranslation of the name in Irenaeus’ Against Heresies is believed to be the source of the confusion. The original Greek version of that work is not extant, so there is presently no way to be sure. In this post I will use the first rendering: Saturnilus
Antioch of Syria
The information available on this man consists primarily of two paragraphs in the aforementioned Against Heresies (1.24.1-2). Though meager, I think it is sufficient to establish him as our lead candidate. He lived in Syrian Antioch and founded a Christian community (or communities) sometime within our target period of 70 to 135 CE. Prior to becoming a Christian he was a Simonian. Irenaeus says he was a disciple of Menander, Simon of Samaria’s successor. At some point, however, Saturnilus apparently switched his allegiance. Although Simon and Menander had put themselves forward as Savior figures, it is Jesus who is named as Savior in the teaching of Saturnilus. Alfred Loisy puts it this way:
In many respects, therefore, he (Saturnilus) was a forerunner of Marcion. Though much indebted to Simon and Menander, he, unlike them, does not set himself up as the Saviour sent from on high, but attributes that role to Jesus. Consequently, heretic though he be, we cannot deny him the qualification of Christian, while, from the Christian point of view, Simon and Menander qualify rather for Antichrists. (La Naissance du Christianisme, ET: The Birth of the Christian Religion, translation by L.P. Jacks, University Books, 1962, p. 302).
Justin Martyr includes Saturnilians among those who consider themselves Christians, though he himself views them as “atheists, impious, unrighteous, and sinful, and confessors of Jesus in name only, instead of worshippers of him” (Dialogue with Trypho, 35). Justin’s doctrinal objection is that “some in one way, others in another, teach to blaspheme the Maker of all things, and Christ, who was foretold by Him as coming, and the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.” According to Irenaeus, Saturnilus believed God to be “one Father unknown to all,” and that the God of the Jews was in reality just one of the lower angels, one of the seven who made the world. Such beliefs are not explicitly present in the Vision of Isaiah but may be implicit. God there is called Father but never maker or creator of the world. In fact, the world is “alien” (Asc. Is. 6;9), and so is the body (Asc. Is. 8:14), and so are the inhabitants of the world (Asc. Is. 9:1). True, the angels of the world are not referred to as its makers either, but they appear to have been in control of it from the beginning and are not afraid to say “We alone, and apart from us no one” (Asc. Is. 10:13). Regarding Jesus, Saturnilus was a docetist, teaching that he only appeared to be a real human being (Against Heresies 1.24.2). As we have already seen, the Jesus of the Vision’s “pocket gospel” was docetic.
Saturnilus’ Simonian past, however, provides us with another connection to the Vision of Isaiah. The main storyline of that writing is an ancient one, going back, as Richard Carrier points out in his book On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 45-47), to the Descent of Inanna. It is a storyline that has been adapted and adopted many times in history, including by Simon of Samaria and Menander. The points of contact are obvious in what Hippolytus says about Simon’s teaching: Continue reading “Revising the Series “A Simonian Origin for Christianity”, Part 2″
I look forward to doing my own discussions of Detering’s views as a result of a reader very generously working on an English translation in association with Dr Detering himself.
April DeConick has written an interesting article, Who is Hiding in the Gospel of John? Reconceptualizing Johannine Theology and the Roots of Gnosticism (published as a chapter in Histories of the Hidden God) that coincidentally ties in remarkably well with the view of Roger Parvus (posted in part here) that the Gospel of John is an orthodox redaction of the Gospel of an apostate from Marcionism, Apelles. Not that DeConick argues Parvus’s thesis. In fact she has a different explanation for the evidence she reads in the Gospel. But I think readers of Roger Parvus’s posts here may well think the doctrines April identifies in the Gospel do indeed match the teachings of Apelles the ex-Marcionite .
The Father of the Jews is the Father of the Devil
The passage that sparked April DeConick’s particular interest in the Gospel of John was the Greek working in 8:44
ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστὲ you of the father the devil are
DeConick explains (my bolding):
With the article preceding πατρός, the phrase του διαβόλου is a genitive phrase modifying the nominal phrase έκ του πατρός.. Thus: “You are from the father of the Devil.” If the statement were to mean, as the standard English translation renders it, “You are of the father, the Devil,” then ‘the article preceding πατρός would not be present.
Look at the complete verse as it is normally translated into English:
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. (KJV)
“Father of it” does sound a wee awkward. Notice how Youngs Literal Translation treats that last phrase:
. . . . because he is a liar — also his father.
And that’s what April DeConick also points out is the “literal reading of John 8:44f
. . . . because he is a liar and so is his father.
In a recent post I wrote that the Jews in Mesopotamia who were responsible for the Babylonian Talmud would quite likely have had very little contact with the Christianity Westerners are familiar with. An interesting book that gives us a glimpse into the sorts of Christianities these rabbis probably knew is The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins. But be warned. If you pick it up for snippets of references to that question you risk being drawn into a far more engrossing narrative than you anticipated about the shining lights of civilization in the east at the time all we Westerners know from our schooling is a Dark Age.
On the question of the Christianity that was known to the Jews behind the Babylonian Talmud, what I learned from this book is
the Christianity of the Mesopotamian region was more directly linked historically and linguistically to the earliest Syrian forms of Christianity — with its focus on Thomas and mysticism; they were also known as Nazarenes and called Jesus “Yeshua”;
when the Christianity became the ruling religion in the West (4th century) Christians in the Persian kingdom were initially persecuted because they were considered potential fifth columnists;
but as the Western authorities sought religious unity by imposing strictures against “heretical” views, those “heretical” forms of Christianity found a refuge in the Persian dominated East.
The Jews who may have been responsible for those Yeshu and “Nazarene” references in the Babylonian Talmud almost certainly relied upon these Eastern/Syrian Christians who were outcasts from the West for their information about Christianity. (Jenkins does not discuss the relationship of these Christians to the Babylonian Talmud — I am only putting my two plus two together after reading the first few chapters of Jenkins’ book.)
Some excerpts of relevance to this question and that I found interesting follow. All the highlighting in the passages is my own. I have linked to names and terms that may not be so familiar to many of us. Continue reading “The Lost Half of Christianity”
I have copied Roger Parvus's recent comment here as a post in its own right. (Neil)
Couchoud’s books contain many valuable insights. He was rightly dissatisfied with the mainstream scenario of Christian origins, and he rearranged the pieces of the puzzle together in a new way that provides a fresh perspective on them. There is much that he says that I agree with. I would not be surprised, for instance, if he is right about the role played by Clement of Rome. But I am disappointed that Couchoud—like practically everyone else—still does not take seriously Marcion’s claim that the original author of the Gospel and Pauline letter collection was someone who professed allegiance to a God higher than the Creator of this world, to a God higher than the God of the Jews.
The automatic assumption on the part of confessional scholars
The automatic assumption on the part of confessional scholars is that Marcion must have been mistaken in his views regarding the origin of the Gospel and Pauline letters. I cannot recall ever having come across a single mainstream Christian book that even considered for a moment that Marcion may have been right. Their attitude is understandable since, if Marcion was right, it would mean that the original Gospel and the Pauline letters were written by someone who was basically a gnostic, by someone who sounds very much like Simon of Samaria or one of his followers. Perish the heretical thought! But even non-confessional admirers of Marcion like Couchoud seem likewise unable to take seriously Marcion’s claim. Instead they make Marcion himself the creator of the Gospel and say that he either created the Pauline letters or imposed his own religious ideas on letters that did not originally contain them. For some reason this solution is thought to be preferable to taking Marcion at his word. As far as we know Marcion never claimed to be the author of those writings. He claimed that when he came across them they were in a contaminated state. They had been interpolated by people who Judaized them, who turned their original author into someone who believed in a single highest God who was the God of the Old Testament and the Creator of the world. Is Marcion’s claim so unbelievable? Is it really out of the question that the original Gospel and Pauline letters were Simonian and that it was their opponents who Judaized those writings? (I say “Simonian” because the early record does not contain the name of any other first-century Christians who held the belief that the creators of this world were inferior to the supreme God, and that those creators tried to hold men in bondage by means of the Law.) Continue reading “Was Marcion Right about Paul’s letters?”
This post follows on from my earlier post on The Secret Book of John, possibly a Jewish pre-Christian work, as translated and annotated by Stevan Davies.
The Prologue is said to be a Christian addition to an earlier non-Christian book. But what sort of Christianity interested the scribe who added this? The disciple John is said to see Jesus appearing variably as a child, an old man and a young man. I am reminded of Irenaeus’s belief that Jesus had to have been past his 50th birthday when he was crucified so he could experience all the life stages of humanity and thus be the saviour of all. One is also reminded of the letter of 1 John that addresses the “children, fathers and young men” in the church. Of related interest to me are some of the earliest Christian art forms that depict Jesus as a little child – in particular when he faces an elderly John the Baptist to be baptized. Christ crucified does not appear.
The same prologue has Jesus say “I am the Father, the Mother, the Son. I am the incorruptible Purity.” The Holy Spirit in the eastern churches was grammatically feminine and so the Holy Spirit itself came to be regarded as feminine.
The Christianity that is appropriating this originally non-Christian gnostic text was one that viewed Christ as not only a discrete personality who had been crucified and risen as a saviour, but one that also accommodated gnostic-like ideas of Christ being identified in the different forms of humanity. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that the range of humanity is a representation of the divine.
Recently I began a series on the pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism but have recently read a book that I think may throw more direct light on that question — The Secret Book of John: The Gnostic Gospel – Annotated and Explained by Stevan Davies. Several things about this Gnostic gospel particularly attracted my attention:
The Apocryphon of John did not originate as a Christian Gnostic document; apart from a few annotations scattered in the main body itself the main Christian elements (those bits that present the work as a revelation by Jesus to his disciple John) were tagged on to the opening and closing of a much older text.
A clarification explaining that there are two types of religious metaphors: those that compare the divine to social and political models on earth (God as king or father, etc) and those that compare the divine to mental or psychological processes (e.g. Buddhism, Gnosticism).
A partial coherence with Walter Schmithals’ claim that Jewish Gnosticism is not strictly dualist — the material world is not a reality opposed to the higher world but in fact is not a reality at all.
More complete coherence with Walter Schmithals’ that among the saving powers are Christ, Son of Man and Daveithi, a word that “possibly means ‘of David'”
Coherence with Walter Schmithals with respect to the absence of an individual descending redeemer figure. Thus though there are descents they are not on the part of figures truly distinct from the one being saved.
Adam was created in a “heavenly realm” before appearing in a physical and worldly Eden.
Repeated emphasis that in mythology the modern mind should not expect consistent logical coherence.
Though I suspect Stevan Davies would recoil at the suggestion there is much here that overlaps with Earl Doherty’s arguments for the Christian Christ originating as a heavenly mythical figure. Schmithals himself argues that the false apostles and gospels Paul opposed were probably teaching something like this Gnostic Gospel. Nonetheless this text does help us understand another facet of the thought-world through which Christianity as we know it eventually emerged.
Oh, one more thing. I was not really aware before reading this book that the Apocryphon of John “is the most significant and influential text of the ancient Gnostic religion”. (But then I’m way behind many others in my knowledge of Gnosticism.) So for that reason alone it is worth close attention. Continue reading “The Gnostic Gospel of John (1)”
Here is my understanding of Walter Schmithals’ argument so far. (Others who have read ‘Gnosticism in Corinth‘ — Roger? — please do chime in with corrections. I have not found reading S easy and am quite open to being shown that I have forgotten or overlooked some significant aspect of his argument.)
Schmithals guiding principle appears to be that nature (or human culture) would produce a singular trajectory or evolutionary progression from a “system” which begins without a clear individualised redeemer myth (i.e. one in which a personalised redeemer descends from heaven to rescue mankind enabling them to follow him back into heaven and their true home). At the beginning the potentially saving power lies dormant in all humankind and is activated by saving knowledge (gnosis) of its origin and ultimate home. This power was part of the great power or creative force that produced all things.
Jewish influence or Jewish gnostics are said to have led to the adoption of the title of “Christ” as one of the names of this power. This adoption took only the title or term Christ and not the full conceptual embodiment of what that figure supposedly meant to Jewish thought. In this primitive gnostic thought the title Christ was thus amenable to being attached to the Primal Man or Adamus (heavenly Adam) concept.
This continues the series on an introductory chapter from Walter Schmithals’ Gnosticism in Corinth. The full series is archived here.
Now it is no longer a very long step to the identification of this system as “pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism.” When Simon identifies himself as the “Great Power,” he therewith makes the claim, not to be a definite divine emanation, but an emanated part of the one original God himself. We have seen that the Apophasis developed just this Simonian claim and how it developed it. It is immediately understandable that all the divine predicates can be claimed by Simon or can be attributed to him. Thus, following Irenaeus, Hippolytus rightly says that Simon tolerated “being called by any name with which people wished to name him.” Hence he is called not only Great Power or The Standing One, but also God, Son of God, Father, Holy Spirit, Kyrios, Savior, and so on. (p. 45)
The pre-Christian system of Simonianism did not use the Judaistic term Christ in the sense of being a unique redeemer but as a title only. So when Hippolytus says that
Simon had appeared as a man although he was not a man, and had apparently suffered in Judea, had appeared to the Jews as Son, and to the other peoples as Pneuma Hagion [Holy Spirit], it is still clear in this late report that Simon is the Christ not as the one Christ who has appeared in Jesus but as the Pneuma who has appeared in all, and only thus also in Jesus. (p. 46)
Dositheus who was reputed to have been Simon’s teacher presented himself as Christ, according to Origen (Celsus, 1, LVII).
But of course none of the above proves the existence of a pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism.
Schmithals holds that the Apophasis (c.f. Apophasis) attributed to Simon and from which (or from a summary or paraphrase of which) Hippolytus apparently drew his information was not itself written by Simon — at least according to what we can understand from the way Hippolytus speaks of it. Three points are singled out:
New Testament quotations are included in the Apophasis [VI.9.10 = 137.11ff; VI.14.6 = 140.3.4; VI.16.6 = 142.23 ff.]
The second century Galienus is perhaps used [VI.14.8 = 140.15 ff.]
The Apophasis appears not to have been a unitary work in all respects.
I don’t have access to a copy of Hippolytus with either of these numbering systems so am unable to pull out the quotations. The NT ones in particular could be significant — are they from Paul’s epistles or elsewhere?
But the question is not the age of the Apophasis but the age of the system of Gnosticism described in it. And that is the theme of this post.
But there is an argument that “gnosticism” emerged after Christianity. This argument denies that there was any kind of Jewish gnosticism before the gospels and letters of Paul. Edwin Yamauchi pointed out…
Continuing the series that is archived