Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism Week 12: Modern Gnosticism.

April 19, 2015 by Tony

Though titled “Modern Gnosticism,” the final lecture for my Gnosticism class covered more than the past century. We examined medieval forms of Christian Gnosticism, as well as Jewish and Islamic analogues, and some expressions of Gnosticism in modern literature, including Philip K. Dick and, well, Harry Potter. Our course textbook, Nicola Denzey Lewis’ Introduction to “Gnosticism,” does not cover this material, so I had students prepare for the class by reading Richard Smith’s essay, “The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism,” featured as an appendix to James Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Library collection.

We began with an overview of gnostic groups who came into existence after the demise of the Manicheans, tracing a path from the Paulicians, an Armenian sect operating from the 7th to the 10th centuries that combined aspects of Manicheism and Marcionism, through the Bogomils active in Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzogovina from the 10th to the 12th centuries, to the Cathars in France and Italy from the 12th to the 13th. For the Cathars we looked at the circumstances of their origin and their eradication in a Crusade called by Pope Innocent III. When asked what to do with the inhabitants of the town of Beziers when it became apparent it would be difficult to distinguish faithful Catholics from Cathars, Innocent famously said “Kill them all. God will know his own”—words remembered even today when someone says, “Kill ‘em all. Let God sort ‘em out.”

But that was not the end of Gnosticism. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought challenges …

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism Week Eleven: Judas and Mary

April 11, 2015 by Tony

Thanks to CNN’s Finding Jesus I was able to sit back and relax a bit this week and let the episodes on the Gospel of Judas and Mary Magdalene do much of the work for me. We began our look at Judas with an overview of his appearances in the canonical gospels, covering some aspects of Judas’ story not mentioned in the documentary, including the additional story about his demise from Acts 1:18-20 (it seems most documentary and filmmakers prefer the story of Judas’ repentant suicide to the one of his fall and bowels-gushing). I couldn’t resist also adding the third story of Judas’ death recounted by Papias of Hierapolis and a brief mention of two other Judas apocrypha: the Latin Life of Judas and the Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver. Then we looked at the well-loved scene from the Last Temptation of Christ where Jesus tells Judas that he has to betray him; Judas asks him, “Would you be able to betray your master?” Jesus replies, “No, that’s why I was given the easy job.”

I provided the students with a summary of the major acts in the drama behind the publication of the Gospel of Judas. I touched on a few of them that intersected with my own knowledge of the text (having access to Charlie Hedrick’s initial translation, hearing Louis Painchaud’s paper at the Ottawa Christian Apocrypha workshop). When it came time to mention National Geographic’s publication of the text, I showed them …

Finding Jesus Episode 6: Mary Magdalene

April 10, 2015 by Tony

The final episode of CNN’s Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery looked at the role of Mary Magdalene in the life of Jesus. The relationship between the two is probably the most burning issue in contemporary popular discourse about Jesus; most recently, the topic has been brought o public attention via the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson’s controversial book The Lost Gospel—neither of which, with good reason, were discussed in the documentary. But viewers did learn about three other apocryphal texts: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary.

But first, what does the documentary say about canonical references to Mary Magdalene? They begin with Luke’s version of the story of the woman who anoints Jesus (Luke 7:36-50). Luke sets the story in the house of a Pharisee named Simon. There “a woman of the city, who was a sinner” anoints the feet of Jesus with ointment contained in an alabaster jar. The Pharisee says to himself (not aloud), “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.” Traditionally, at least from the time of Pope Gregory, this woman has been identified (or better: conflated) with Mary of Magdalene, who appears immediately after this story in Luke’s description of women who “provide for [Jesus and the twelve] out of their resources” (8:3). Mary is further described as someone “from …

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism Week 10: Eastern Gnosis

April 5, 2015 by Tony

Much of our Gnosticism course to date has focused on western forms of gnosis (well, more westerly, I suppose), but this week we moved east for a look at Manicheism, Mandaeism, and Hermeticism. We were flying without a net for much of the discussion, as Nicola Denzey Lewis’ textbook has a chapter on the Nag Hammadi Hermetic texts but nothing on the Manicheism and Mandaeism. As I have said before, the textbook is self-consciously an introduction to the Nag Hammadi library and strays little from that corpus; the only exception is a chapter on the Gospels of Judas and Mary, which we will turn to next week.

We began the class with a summary of the rediscovery of the literary sources for Manicheism and Mandaeism, noting the Manichean documents discovered in Turfan in the early twentieth century, the Cologne Mani Codex in 1970, and the Mandaean literature that began to appear in the late nineteenth century. Then we focused on Manicheism with some basic introductory material on the life of Mani, a description of the Manichean cosmogony, anthropology, social hierarchy, literature, and dispersion. I find the Cologne Mani Codex particularly interesting as an artifact because of its size—at 3.5 cm high and 2.5 cm wide it is one of the smallest books from the ancient world yet holds 23 lines to a page. I illustrated how little the codex is by having the class take out a 5, 10, or 20 dollar bill (this doesn’t work with loonies and toonies) …

Finding Jesus Episode 5: “Inventing” the True Cross

April 2, 2015 by Tony

The penultimate episode of CNN’s Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery tells the story of the discovery of the True Cross by Helena, the mother of Constantine. Through a mixture of dramatic re-enactments, scholarly commentary, and relic-hunting sleuthery, viewers learn much about the life of Helena, her son Constantine, and the Christianization of the Roman Empire. But, as in previous episodes, the sources relating to the artifacts are not treated with the kind of critical rigor that they require. There are multiple versions of the inventio crucis, the discovery of the True Cross, not all of which even feature Helena, and they contain features that are fantastic (such as the method by which Helena determines which of the three crosses is Jesus’) and disturbing (they treat the Jews in the narrative as money-hungry, obstinate enemies of the church). Yet, the narrator of Finding Jesus more often calls the sources “tradition” and “church history,” and the finding of the cross is likened (both in the dramatizations and in the scholarly commentary) to an archeological dig. A 45-minute documentary cannot hope to present all of the nuances related to this topic, or any topic for that matter, but the episode would have benefited from some finer discussion of the sources, some of which are apocryphal texts.

The legend of the True Cross belongs to a genre of literature known as the inventio, each of which tell of the finding of relics associated with Jesus and other prominent first-century church figures. More …