Apocryphicity

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 …