Category: 2015 Gnosticism Course

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 …

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 …

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) …

The TA and Sessionals strike at York continues but some classes taught by full-time faculty have resumed, including my Gnosticism course. The few weeks off led to some confusion for me on the organization of the course (see below) but I was happy to be back in class.

We continued our journey through Nicola Denzey Lewis’ textbook, covering several more of her thematic chapters. This week we read the two chapters on apocalypses. Chapter 18 of the textbook focuses on texts with “apocalypse” in their titles (the Apocalypse of Adam and the Apocalypse of Paul, but not the Apocalypse of Peter and the two apocalypses of James, which are examined in other chapters) and chapter 19 focuses on Platonic Sethian Apocalypses (Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes). I made only passing mention of the Sethian texts in the lecture, in part because I discussed them in a previous class on the development of Sethianism, but also because they are difficult texts to read due to the damage in the codices, and because they really do not fit well the definition of the apocalypse genre, which states (from the Semeia definition), “‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.” The Sethian texts are identified as apocalypses by Porphyry …

Classes at my university (York in Toronto) have been suspended for the past week due to a strike by the teaching assistants and part-time instructors. Undaunted, I put together a Youtube video of my lecture so that the class could continue with relatively little disruption. The assigned readings from the textbook covered three topics: rituals relating to the Five Seals and death, martyrdom, and the Divine Feminine.

Ritual practices can be difficult to retrieve from texts. Consider, for example, Christian practices. A typical liturgy today contains various readings, prayers, responsories, and credal formulas derived from the New Testament (and sometimes the OT) but they were not intended to be used liturgically, so we could read these texts and not expect them to necessarily reflect early Christian practices. The Lord’s Prayer and the Eucharist are exceptions; both of these show signs that they were used in liturgy; so they have a liturgical existence both before and after the texts. What do we have in Gnosticism?

The Gospel of the Egyptians may be a handbook to Gnostic liturgy, specifically to the Five Seals ceremony. We have two other witnesses to this ceremony: the Trimorphic Protennoia and Irenaeus’ description of Valentinian (Marcosian) practice. My original goal of the class was to re-enact these three descriptions of the ceremony. We weren’t able to do that, so my Youtube video guided the students through the texts and considered what they may or may not tell us about the ceremony.

A hypothetical reconstruction of the complete …

As with the lecture on Valentinianism a few weeks ago, this week we looked at another prominent gnostic group, Sethians, and again squeezed in a lot of reading: three chapters from the textbook and two primary texts: the Three Steles of Seth and the Apocryphon of John.

The lecture was structured around a callout box on. p. 118 of Denzey Lewis’s textbook entitled “The Development of Sethianism,” adapted from the work of John D. Turner. This schema essentially has three stages: Jewish, Christian, and Platonic.

It can be hard for some to swallow the notion that Gnostic Judaism could have existed; so I tried to show how some elements of Sethianism were already present in Hellenistic Judaism—namely, an interest in Seth (based on Genesis 4:25-26; 5:3, 6-8; and also part of contemporaneous Christianity, observable particularly in Syriac tradition through the Cave of Treasures, the Revelation of the Magi, and other texts), and in hypostasized Sophia/Wisdom (particularly in Proverbs 9 and Sirach 24). Denzey Lewis’s discussion of gnostic creation myths (ch. 11) was helpful in this regard, as she demonstrates quite effectively the exegetical strategies employed in the texts to account for problems in Genesis—e.g., why are there two creation stories? why does God use the plural “us” in creation; why does God not want humans to have knowledge, etc. She notes also that the exegetes did not want to throw out Genesis, because they considered it scripture without error, instead they teased out its hidden meanings to …

This week’s class was comparatively lighter than last week’s look at Valentinianism. The students had to read only one textbook chapter and two primary texts. Mind you, they also had to hand in their book review of Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels. And if they were anything like me as an undergrad, most of them were reading the book up to the last minute in a mad scramble to get the review done.

It feels increasingly odd to teach the Gospel of Thomas in a Gnosticism class. Many scholars do not see it as really Gnostic; it does hint at Gnostic ideas, though perhaps no more than, say the Gospel of John. Gos. Thom. is such an important text for studying early Christianity that I discuss it in virtually all of my courses, and this week I had to repeat much of what I said about the text in my New Testament Apocrypha class from last Fall.

We began with a discussion of the so-called “School of Thomas.” Early Christian groups seem to have coalesced around certain apostolic figures: the Synoptic Gospels (especially Matthew) primarily around Peter, and the Gospel of John and the Johannine letters are seen as products of a “Johannine community.” The apostle in the texts is portrayed as a spokesperson for a particular theology, perhaps traceable to early missionary efforts by these personalities. The Thomas literature is typically held as the best example of this process. With Thomas you have three texts—the Gospel of Thomas…

I was overly ambitious this week. Denzey Lewis’ textbook devotes four chapters to Valentinianism; we covered all of it in one class. On top of that the students had to read an assortment of primary texts—Prayer of the Apostle Paul, Tripartite Tractate, Gospel of Truth, and Gospel of Philip—and hand in a short paper on the Gospel of Truth. Worse still, the Tripartite Tractate is really, really long! Even I had trouble getting through all the material before class.

The lecture distilled the textbook discussion of the life of Valentinus, the Valentinian schools that succeeded him, and the problems of reconstructing the Valentinian literary corpus—we use the statements by the heresy hunters to determine what texts are Valentinian, but then declare the statements of the heresy hunters to be inaccurate based on the differences we observe in the texts. We’re not even sure if the Gospel of Truth from Nag Hammadi is the same text that is ascribed to Valentinus! I mentioned briefly the fragments of Valentinus, including the one about Jesus not having to poop (“he ate and drank in a special way, without excreting solids”). That’s gold.

We turned next to an overview of the Valentinian myth drawn from Irenaeus, based on his knowledge of the works of Ptolemy. We noted along the way the differences between this version of the myth and what we find in the Tripartite Tractate. The myth engendered a lot of discussion, particularly about Valentinian anthropogony: …

Following the order of the textbook (Nicola Denzey Lewis’s Introduction to “Gnosticism”), we spent this week’s class on background. The students read the chapters in the textbook on “The Roman Empire” and “Christianity in the Second-Century Empire” and I had them read selections from a number of texts important particularly for understanding gnostic cosmologies—specifically, Plato’s The Republic (on the myth of the cave) and Timaeus (on the creation of the universe by the Demiurge), Plotinus’s Enneads (on the ascent of the soul), and Genesis 1-9. The lecture was essentially an encyclopedic tour of these texts with a smattering of historical context.

For the Genesis material, I had the students watch a few scenes from the recent Noah film (Aronofsky 2014), including Noah’s recounting of the creation story, the opening scene that mentions the line of Seth as the protectors of Creation, and the origins of the Watchers. Then we had a reading quiz on Genesis 1-3 to emphasize the problems in the twin creation accounts that Hellenistic Jews and Christians tried to reconcile. After a discussion of Greek myths and Plato, I asked the class how someone might integrate Platonic cosmology—with its heavenly and earthly realms, its twin deities (the Good and the Demiurge), the paradeigma (model) in the heavens, and gods as helpers in the creation of humanity—with the Jewish creation stories. As one student rightly pointed out, “you get Gnosticism.” But first you get Philo of Alexandria, and I demonstrated how Philo articulated the Genesis story using …

This week we continued working through our sources for Gnosticism, this time with some discussion of the heresiologists. Before the manuscript discoveries discussed last week, the writings of the heresy hunters were virtually our only sources for gnostic Christianity. But as we saw in our discussion, their accounts are not dispassionate—they did not like gnostic forms of Christianity and tried to eradicate it; but in their attempts they preserved a lot of information about gnostic groups they had encountered and even sometimes provide us with texts that otherwise would be lost.

We began with a look at the beginnings of heresiological literature in apologetic literature: texts written by Christians to Romans to argue that Christians are not deserving of punishment and persecution. The most well-known example of this literature is Justin Martyr’s two Apologies. We discussed how the apologists sought to articulate Christianity as a philosophy and tried to reconcile Christianity with Greco-Roman philosophical thought. Not everyone at the time agreed on the extent to which that should be done. Tertullian famously said “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians?” Gnostics were far more comfortable about integrating Greco-Roman philosophy into Christianity, particularly Platonic thought; though today these texts look bizarre, they would have been considered more consistent with the intellectual pursuits of the day than the texts that ended up in the canon.

The heresy hunters were less concerned with presenting Christian views …

As mentioned on my blog entry from last week, the textbook we are using for the course focuses almost entirely on the Nag Hammadi Library, leaving other sources for Gnosticism relatively unexamined. So we began class this week by redressing this deficiency with an examination of the discoveries made before Nag Hammadi, namely the codices Askew (British Museum, Add. 511; 4th cent.; published in 1851), Bruce (Bodleian Library, Bruce MS 96; 5th cent.; published in 1891), and Berlin (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502; 5th cent.; published in 1955). To these discoveries we owe the existence of the Pistis Sophia, the Books of Jeu, several untitled texts, and copies of the Gospel of Mary, the Sophia Jesus Christ, the Apocryphon of John, and the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles. Though much study has been made of the Berlin Codex (due to its important contents), the Askew and Bruce codices tend to be neglected in the field (note that the Bruce texts are included in the Meyer and Robinson collections but not Askew and Bruce; and none of them appear in Layton’s collection). We discussed also the discovery of the Greek Gospel of Thomas fragments in the excavations at Oxyrhynchus and, only generally, the Manichean and Mandaean texts published in the early twentieth century.

These early discoveries were significant because they provided scholars with the first real firsthand literary productions by, apparently, “Gnostic” Christians. Prior to the publication of these texts, all that was available were …

My New Testament Apocrypha course came to an end in December but that doesn’t mean studying apocryphal texts has to end too. So, let’s continue our examination of noncanonical early Christian literature in my Winter course: Gnosticism (the syllabus can be read HERE). As with the New Testament Apocrypha course, I will post some reflections on the week’s activities to encourage discussions of pedagogy and to provide a forum for my students to participate in the course outside of the classroom.

This  is my fourth time teaching Gnosticism at York, but the first using Nicola Denzey Lewis’s new textbook Introduction to “Gnosticism”: Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). In previous years I have used Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1983) and Birger Pearson’s Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), neither of which were ideal. Denzey Lewis’s book is structured very much like Bart Ehrman’s introduction to the New Testament (also published by Oxford) and thus is very reader-friendly. Strangely, however, the textbook focuses almost entirely on the Nag Hammadi Library material, with only casual mention of the traditions preserved by the church fathers (e.g., the Epistle to Flora) and the pre-Nag Hammadi discoveries (in the codices Askew, Bruce, and Berlin) and no discussion at all of Manicheism, Mandaeism, and gnostic movements of medieval and modern times. Mind you, this can be of benefit to me as it gives me the …