The Gnostic Gospels, Transcript

The Gnostic Gospels - YouTube

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(00:01) What we're talking about tonight is the Gnostics and specifically a bunch of Gnostic writings, Gnostic Gospels, that had been lost. These are parts of the large corpus of ancient Judeo-Christian, now Christian, writing that was deemed heretical by the early church. Therefore, it did not make it into the Christian New Testament. Largely because all ancient texts, in order for them to make it to us, normally had to go through medieval monks and nuns copying them by hand.

(00:40) Essentially, if the monks liked somebody like Pliny or Cicero, then Cicero got his works all copied. If it was somebody they didn't like as much, then that didn't make it. If you were a heretic, it especially didn't work. In many cases, the texts might have been erased or even destroyed. However, one of the things that could happen is if you happened to be living in the Near East, especially in Egypt, and you took all of your texts and writings and scrolls, put them in a jar, and walked away from the Nile far enough so that there's no water in the air, and buried it in the desert, it turns out that can last for over a thousand years. A bunch of monks did that, and we ended up finding all of these lost Gnostic Gospels in the middle of the 20th century. They've all been translated, and now we have been able to access them for the last half-century.

(01:51) Traditionally, the Christian story is told by the Christians, sometimes history is told by the victors. The Christians who won tell the story that there was a guy named Jesus Christ who founded a church. He lived in the 30s AD in Galilee and Judea. He claimed to be the Messiah, which is to say in Greek, the Christ, the anointed one. He founded a church and commissioned all these apostles to spread the good news, which is the English for the word gospel. In the course of those gospels, he predicted his own death and resurrection. He's executed by the Romans, returns from the grave, and appears to the female disciples and then to the male disciples. Those apostles then spread the gospel first to other Jews, as all of those initial disciples are Jews. They spread that news to other Jews, and afterward, they begin to convert Gentiles, as Jews call the Greek-speaking pagans that are the majority of people in the Eastern Roman Empire. All of those initial apostles meet martyr's deaths like Jesus, so they're also all executed in various ways to seal their testimony.

(03:06) Meanwhile, the apostles have all founded individual congregations or churches in different towns and cities. According to the tradition, as the traditional way of telling it, they've appointed overseers or bishops of those churches. This takes us to the line of bishops or what's called the apostolic succession. Apostles appoint bishops who appoint bishops, and so forth, all the way down to this day. This is definitely the narrative as it was understood and promoted by the bishops. As you can imagine, this is a very pro-bishop message, who led the mainstream Christian churches by the time of the second and third centuries. The narrative explained why bishops were in charge and justified their authority by apostolic succession back to Jesus.

(04:19) As far as the bishops are concerned, some people would occasionally wonder what happened to all these apostles. Why don't we have apostles anymore? The reality is the bishops got rid of them because apostles ended up being a very disruptive element after a certain amount of time. The idea of an apostle is a person who is not in any one particular place leading a community but rather people who are going in twos around anywhere, wherever they're led by the spirit, and speaking by the spirit, speaking different kinds of revelation, often chastising congregations for what they're not doing, chastising bishops for their behavior or the way they're operating things. At a certain point, the bishops are not having any more of it. They more or less think for all of these spiritual people, isn't there something else you guys would rather be doing than going around and this kind of traveling and begging for your meals? Why can't we have this wonderful monastery here, and wouldn't you all like to go and live in there and maybe even take a vow of silence? That might be a great idea for all of you. That's more or less functionally what happens.

(05:19) For the bishops, the narrative of the church's foundation is that there was this mainline Christian church led by bishops, which has brought us to what in antiquity was the one Catholic and Orthodox church. It's before all of the church splits apart into the various denominations today. In the meantime, from the perspective of those proto-Orthodox leaders who become the Orthodox and Catholic leaders, all of the other people that have different views are simply heretics. They're heretics who are breakoffs, as far as they're concerned, from the actual church as it was. The breakoffs include people like the Ebionites, the Marcionites, and the Gnostics, who we're going to talk about tonight.

(06:01) However, as we've talked about in previous lectures, the simple narrative written retrospectively from the perspective of the group that won is really not the way it actually goes. The story as it really was is much more complicated than the story as the bishops retold it. When we look back to the first century and then when we have way more evidence by the time we get to the early second century, there's not simply one church at all. Rather, there are multiple Christianities that have different ways of understanding what the religion is supposed to be about. These ways are vastly different from each other, and they are at odds with each other. In fact, people often hate each other more than they hate anybody else because you almost always hate the person who's closest to you more than a completely alien person. They can only spend so much time being mad at pagans because there are these heretics right next to them that they don't like.

(07:16) Before the Emperor Constantine, before the conversion of the head of the Roman Imperial State, there wasn't one single Christian church structure or centralized authority. Constantine actually brings that together by creating the institution of the church council, the ecumenical council. "Ecumenical" is this Greek word for the whole world, and so it's a council that brings together all of the bishops of the whole world. The ecumenical council creates a creed that is able to explain what all Christians are supposed to believe, and that puts everybody on the same page for the first time. The council creates for the first time an actual hierarchical structure. In addition to bishops, now there are bishops above bishops, which are called metropolitan bishops or, in English, archbishops. Now suddenly, there is a hierarchy, so it's changed.

(08:28) But back before Constantine, there are multiple competing Christianities. The proto-Orthodox group, we call them, are the guys before they win, in which case once they win, they are the Orthodox or Catholic group, which is to say Orthodox means people who have the right teaching. Nowadays, we use Orthodox to refer to the Eastern church and Catholic to refer to the Western church, but it's one church until the breakup in the Middle Ages. I'm just going to interchangeably say Orthodox or Catholic or, before they win, proto-Orthodox, which is to say the people who the Orthodox people's foundation is built on but before they are the winners. They ultimately win, but there's no reason to believe that they're even the earliest group among these groups.

(09:08) So what do the Orthodox look like? These proto-Orthodox guys have this very complicated Christology that we've talked about a bunch in our different lectures and complained about how complicated it is to try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. Generally speaking, all the Christians who come here, I more or less defy almost any Christian to talk about it for more than seven minutes without accidentally saying something that's heresy. At a certain point, you're going to suddenly make an analogy which is modalism, or you're going to make an analogy which, unfortunately, is essentially Arianism, and you're going to get into trouble if you don't just keep saying the same thing over and again, which is the creed. If you have to say new words for seven minutes, I defy you not to say heresy. But anyway, it's very tough.

(09:47) They have this idea of a complex Christology: Jesus is understood to be fully human, fully divine. There's this very complex theology: the Father, Jesus, and the Spirit are God. Jesus is not the Father or the Spirit. The Father is not the Spirit. The Father is not Jesus. All that is complicated and very starkly monotheist. It's not dualist in the sense that Satan is not some kind of alternate God. Satan is clearly an inferior being who is a creation and is in rebellion against God. So it's different in that sense. There's only one God, even if the God has three persons. Very complicated.

(10:24) About these other groups, though, the Ebionites, for example. The Ebionites are sometimes we can say the Jewish Christians. These are the Christians who had been converted. I mean, the original followers of Jesus and his original followers are all Jewish. But these are especially groups that continued to convert primarily among other non-Christian Jews and then continued to live essentially as Jews who are also Christians. In other words, Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They still believe, for example, that it's essential to practice the law of Moses and are also therefore keeping kosher and all this kind of thing. There are a whole bunch of things even in the canonical gospels, there are precepts that could be used in favor of an Ebionite interpretation of how Christians should act. For example, in Matthew's gospel, Jesus says things like, "I'm not coming to eliminate the law but to fulfill the law. Not one jot or tittle of the law is put away; it all is still in force." Essentially, the community that the Gospel of Matthew is written in is definitely in favor of practicing Jewish law.

(13:00) So yes, I'm sorry, I don't think I need a mic, but you do because the people online need to hear you. All right, I was just wondering, can you clarify what year this was for each of the, in this case, the Ebionites? So most of our information for any of these groups is coming from the 2nd century AD. Everything's AD because it's all after Christ. These are Christians. The Ebionites will possibly date all the way back to Jesus's lifetime. We don't know because we just don't have any data that is helping us out. There's very little Christian writing outside of the New Testament that is from the first century, and so we have to kind of piece it together by the time the groups have emerged and are yelling at each other. It's the second century and the third century, so it's still before Christianity becomes the state religion, but it's this time period where we now have a little bit more of a window into what's going on, and we have to kind of then unpack it. I believe that the Ebionites go back to the first century, and I also believe that the proto-Orthodox go back to the first century. The same thing with these other two groups. They all go back to the first century, but they're all still very active in the second century.

(14:14) Joe, I just want to know, are there any Ebionites today that date back to that time, like that fall? No, the Ebionites have died out. Oh, I see. There are definitely revivals. So the idea is you may have heard of Jews for Jesus or Messianic Jews or any number of modern Jewish groups that have become, let's say, Christian in the sense of thinking that Jesus is the Messiah or deciding that for themselves, or Christians who have decided to Judaize because they believe that the law is important. That's still a theme that continually recurs, and so people will, from both of those different directions, even sometimes come together. So it may be Judaizing Christians and Messianic Jews, and they get together and make a church or synagogue of Jews for Jesus or whatever it would be. But they don't have any continuity with the Ebionites. The Ebionites died out, and we don't have many of their writings even.

(15:26) Yes, it's actually late. They had died out in the Roman Empire by, let's say, the 600s or 700s. They might have continued to live in, for example, the Arab Middle East and influenced Islam well into the Muslim period. I met some Jews for Jesus back in the 70s who believed in all the Jewish rites and customs and all that. Yeah, it's very interesting. When we did a lecture, it was a year ago now, on Jesus's Jewish roots, we actually had the rabbi who came here from, I believe I was given to understand anyway, what he was telling me is from a Messianic Jewish synagogue church. A lot of his followers, so he is from, I can tell, from a regular Jewish background but had decided that Jesus is the Messiah. Anyway, he was quite informed about Jewish custom and law and everything like that, whereas a lot of his, so he had brought four people from his synagogue who all were from a Christian background who had now studied Torah and everything like that because they had become essentially Judaizing Christians. It's an interesting crossover, and I think it's really neat. Unfortunately, we don't have the continuity, and we also don't have that for the Gnostics, as we'll see.

(16:49) The ancient proto-Orthodox Christians, when they became Orthodox, it turns out they ended up being pretty good at stamping out these other groups, and so we don't have continuity. But in a lot of cases, these are ideas that continue to inspire people, and so there are new Gnostics in the 21st century. So the Ebionites, in addition to this, anyway, like we're mentioning, are Christians who still follow Jewish law or Jews who essentially believe that the Messiah is Jesus. They're that crossover. They have their own gospel, which is sometimes called the Gospel of the Hebrews or the Gospel of the Ebionites. We don't have it; it's lost. We only have some quotations from proto-Orthodox people who believe these guys were heretics. They indicate that they think it's related to the Gospel of Matthew. We don't really know because we can't tell. Anyway, we don't have it, sadly.

(17:56) This group, the Ebionites, may have grown out of the group that's called the Poor or the Poor of Jerusalem. So Ebionim or Ebionim, that kind of thing, is essentially the Ebionite. In other words, the word Ebionite may come from the Hebrew word for poor. Paul, when he's talking about the church in Jerusalem that is being led in Paul's day by James, the brother of Jesus, he calls that group the Poor of Jerusalem. So all through Paul's letters and then also the letters of James and the related letters Jude and Peter, they talk about the poor and they talk about the rich. So the people in the poor church, the Ebionites, possibly the proto-Ebionites, they call themselves the poor. If you think of the thing of Jesus saying, "Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom," so the kingdom of this church belongs to the poor. "Woe unto you rich," essentially all of these Gentile converts who have, in the cities of the Greek-speaking world, joined up and become part of Paul's church. "Woe unto you rich," because you aren't the true Christians as far as the Poor of Jerusalem are concerned. So it's possible that's where this group comes from. We don't know.

(19:14) One of the ideas we had when we had a lecture on lost Christianities, as opposed to that timeline that I gave before where the bishops more or less say that the Orthodox proto-Orthodox was founded directly by Jesus and they are the inheritors of that, I'm suggesting that one way that could be, one way these are possible, this isn't for sure, is that this poor followers of John the Baptist and Jesus and his brother James, this Jacobian or Jamesian church, becomes the Ebionites, the Poor of Jerusalem. Whereas the church that Paul founds among the Gentiles, among the Greek-speaking people who had been pagans but now have become Christian but without having to follow the Jewish law, Paul's church then possibly is what emerges and becomes the proto-Orthodox, the Orthodox and Catholic church, and out of which further ideas, the Marcionites and the Gnostics, emerge out of that Paul church and diverge even further away from Judaism. By the time we're getting to the Gnostics, in some sense, we've left a lot of the Jewish roots of this religion behind, and it has become way more especially Platonist, but we'll see that.

(21:09) So those are the first two, the proto-Orthodox and the Ebionites. Now we'll talk about the Marcionites. These are a group founded by a guy called Marcion. Of Marcion's work, these are kind of dualist Hellenistic Christians. They're essentially, like I say, these Greek-speaking ones that have very little connection to Judaism. For them, Paul is the chief of the apostles and the chief source on Christianity, and they got rid of everything else except for their scripture, which is essentially just some of Paul's letters and just the Gospel of Luke, and actually even just an edited version of that. For them, that's the idea, and really that Paul is the basis for that. They have a different overall theology, which is dualist, which is to say they believe that there is good and evil that are two very balanced powers, as opposed to what we were talking about, a monotheism where God is simply good and evil is the absence of good or evil is in rebellion from good. In this case, there is a good God and an evil God that are in a cosmic battle, and the Old Testament God specifically, as far as Marcion is concerned, is in fact that evil God. The evil God that occurs in the Old Testament that tries to destroy everybody with the flood and all this kind of thing, and does all kinds of gets wrathful and this sort of thing, that's the evil God. The good God is the true God of spirit who is Jesus's father, the God of the spirit world.

(22:59) Were the Marcionites the first or the early ones to propose Christ's sacrifice as a redemption in a sense? Because there's the whole line of God having to send his only son as a sacrifice. I heard somewhere that it, and I don't know if it was the Marcionites that were being talked about, but it was a similar kind of ideology, and that they were the ones that proposed this idea of Jesus having to come as a sacrifice because the good God had to send his son as a sacrifice or the old God would just let things go. For all of the early Christians, they all come up with very different ideas about why Jesus had to die. That's like you say, one of the ideas, and it isn't, by the way, it's not even necessarily doctrine to this day because in fact, there are multiple different reasons why the atonement is necessary. In fact, it's not like there's just one theory for atonement theory. In terms of this being, I get your reasoning, which is to say this makes a lot more sense because this idea of a ransom theory, so ransom theory is this idea that since the devil is owed something, it's not necessarily clear why, but in this case where you actually have the devil as an actual God that is more or less just as powerful as the good God, then that kind of makes more sense than if it, why do you have to ransom to a lesser power? God is omnipotent. God doesn't need to do that, you'd think, right? In that sense, it seems like it would make more sense, but in fact, the Marcionites and the Gnostics don't even think that the crucifixion ever really even happened because they have gone to a place where the true Jesus is just entirely a God and is entirely a being of spirit. In that sense, the crucifixion is itself just a trick. Probably not, but it would make, in some sense, make more sense for them, but in fact, Christians are all very divided over this, and in fact, that division remains. People still have different views about why that would have occurred.

(24:53) So for these guys, for Marcion, so this alternate answers for these non-proto-Orthodox Christians, so this is not what ended up happening in Christianity, but some of these early Christians like Marcion read the Hebrew Bible and they felt they couldn't reconcile the literary actions of the God of Israel with their own understanding of ethical behavior. So, I mean, we had here, for example, the flood, right? So this idea that God decides he's going to destroy all of creation except for Noah and the people and the animals that make it on the ark. Many then determined that if Christ is truly divine, he must have just appeared to be human, and they probably had been influenced then by the dualism that occurred or that was also going on in the Zoroastrian religion. So the primary religion of Persia that had been incredibly important in the Middle East and still continued to be even in the Roman period, or also from Platonism. So Plato, who also has a very strong dualism, and his philosophy continues to be resonating at this point in, you know, anyway, all the way much longer than this.

(26:01) So what are the two different kinds of dualism? In Zoroastrianism, we have this thing that we've just been talking about, that the cosmos is governed by two competing principles. These are Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, and Angra Mainyu, the destructive principle. For Zoroaster, the prophet of this religion, this answers this problem of evil because a lot of times we wonder, well, why do the righteous suffer? If you have been good, you've been following God, you've been doing everything, and God is good, why is it that you get punished with cancer? Why is it that some horrible villain, why does he make a billion dollars and not get cancer, whereas this wonderful widow has to suffer through all these different ideas? The answer then for dualists of this variety is, well, Angra Mainyu here is actually thwarting, actively thwarting what God would want to do because there is this cosmic battle going on between good and evil, which is why the good are afflicted. That's one way of having a dualism.

(27:16) The other kind of dualism that we have is like Plato's kind of dualism that we talk about, which is the separation of the world into the ideal, which is to say the immaterial, so the eternal forms, things like justice, things like love, things like math, things that are perfect and eternal and not perishable, and then everything else, all this material stuff that is mortal, that's going to die, that's continuously corrupting and corrupted. In this kind of dualism, the reason why suffering happens is that this whole physical world that we see, that seems to be where you're getting sick and all these other things, that's all nonsense, meaningless ultimately anyway, because your true eternal self is the immaterial soul or spark of divine light that's inside of you that will ultimately be liberated from this mortal coil that is all about suffering and perishability and everything like that. Those are two different dualisms. Both of those dualisms actually affect Christianity in ways that Christians often have a very muddy idea about which one it is. For example, people often think of themselves as having this immaterial soul that's like a ghost and things like that. When you die, it's kind of liberated, and so that's kind of the, you go to heaven, and heaven's this wonderful spiritual place, and all the dogs are gone there, and everything like that. When you have that, in a way, that's the kind of Greek spiritual heaven, but then you also have the Persian, everybody's going to get bodily resurrected in the kind of post-Armageddon afterlife when the world is renewed and the evil principle is finally defeated. You also have that one, and so both of those kind of get merged together into Christian theology, Abrahamic theology.

(29:08) Okay, so we've been talking about Marcion. Marcion is the founder of this, it's called Marcionites because he's the leader of it, and the proto-Orthodox didn't like him, and so they called it a heresy, and so anyway, they called them Marcionites. Marcion, as I mentioned, wanted to take Christianity all Paul. He thought the Old Testament was talking about essentially communication at best that prophets are having with the evil God, and then all of the rest of the scriptures of the New Testament is often written by Paul's detractors, and he just wanted to cut all of those out so those wouldn't be used in Christian worship.

(30:21) Who would you say purported the idea mainly that, in regard to dualism and good versus evil, Satan runs the Earth? That was usually the, I mean, that's in Genesis, that was, as I understand it, the general thesis of the whole piece. Yes, so the idea, so yeah, so who has the idea that Satan's running, yeah, so Satan is, in fact, yeah, so just mentioned, Satan is not actually in Genesis. No, yeah, it's Lucifer. No, the snake, the snake, just the serpent, and so the serpent is later interpreted by this time by Christians to be Satan, but when the text of that part of Genesis is written, the ancient Hebrews don't have an idea of Satan yet, and so that is not what's meant. It's really just a serpent in the original story. So back in Old Testament times, this idea of Satan and the devil and all these things just hardly exist. In almost all of the oldest part of the Old Testament, that character doesn't recur. If you think of even Genesis, the serpent, if the serpent actually was Satan, you'd think he'd show up in the very next chapter when he's inspiring, let's say, Cain to kill Abel. That happens totally without Cain talking to the devil or anything like that. By the time it has come around to Jesus's time, this has been heavily brought into Judaism, probably because the Jews were part of the Persian Empire for several centuries, and so probably as a result of Zoroastrian influence, this idea of an evil cosmic force is imported into Judaism, and it's there as of the time period of Jesus, Second Temple Judaism. But it is open for debate. For example, the different Jewish sects, some of them are very much believers in Satan and a cosmic battle and things like that. For example, the people who are writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, those guys are pretty excited about cosmic evil, and they're very excited about a Messiah and an apocalypse and all that kind of thing. Whereas the people that are in charge of the temple at the time, the Sadducees, the Sadducees do not believe in any of that stuff. They think that all of that is not in the oldest part of the Bible, and so that people have added new things, and they reject all of that. They also, for example, reject the idea of afterlife at all because that's not in the oldest part of the Bible. There was a big diversity of beliefs at that time.

(33:10) In terms of this, though, Christians are pulling out largely out of the Judaism that is apocalyptic and that does believe that there is a devil that is a tempter, and that's certainly mentioned, like you say, in Luke's gospel. So what becomes these, the four canonical gospels do have the figure of the devil in them, but it isn't clear how powerful the devil is. So it was allowed for the early Christians to then debate amongst themselves how powerful this figure is. So for the Marcionites, for the Gnostics, this becomes a much more important, powerful cosmic devil. For the proto-Orthodox, he's essentially a rebel angel, and he might have gotten knocked out of the story entirely for the Ebionites, so depending on where we're at.

(34:22) So just looking at this, then Marcion, like I said, rejects the Old Testament because he believes that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a different evil entity, and then he created actually his own rival church structure, and it becomes actually quite successful and popular in what's now Turkey, so Anatolia. He is, for a while, a pretty serious competitor to the proto-Orthodox.

(35:02) Lastly, we get to these guys, the Gnostics, who are actually the topic for tonight. Like Marcion, they're dualists generally, but unlike him, they also then create a very elaborate mythology. They have an amazingly complicated cosmology. They create essentially new stories that explain their philosophy or their theology in the form of very long expansions of the Genesis story of creation. The Gnostics believed that they alone possessed the true secret gnosis or knowledge, and they rejected the idea that Jesus was human at all. Actually, they also believed that the human body, so everything physical, is itself evil. The evil God created the whole physical world, and the evil God has captured true spirits, the divine sparks that are in true individuals, not everybody's got one even, but whatever the true sparks are, they're imprisoned essentially in these physical bodies. The mission of Jesus actually is to open that pathway for those sparks to get back to the real universe, the universe of spirit.

(36:14) One of the very first guys in this, who is a leader of the Gnostics, is a guy called Valentinus. He's from Egypt, which should come as no shock to everybody. The Egyptians like this kind of stuff, and so a lot of times esoteric things come out of Egypt. So he is in the 2nd century. He may well, at least he traditionally claims to be a disciple of a guy called Theudas, who was in turn then one of Paul's disciples. So he claims a fairly close lineage to Paul. He may have been influenced by Christian philosophers and also by pagan philosophers, so people who are Neoplatonists, middle Platonists, that are teaching at the schools in Alexandria. Alexandria is still the center of Hellenistic thought. This is where the museum is, this is where the library is, the museum is the school of all the muses, where they're teaching philosophy. He had a number of disciples, and he became really serious enemies with proto-Orthodox leaders of the time, so Tertullian and Irenaeus, who wrote treatises against his teachings.

(37:16) Essentially, if we look at the way the structure of those groups work, we essentially have the Ebionites, the Marcionites, and the proto-Orthodox. They each have their own structures, they have their own leaders, they'll have their own bishops in their own areas. They both have, the Orthodox are sort of in the middle in terms of their Christology. The Ebionites are going to have held more to the whole Jewishness and probably reject any divinity for Jesus and instead are focused on God as God only, and so they're probably more in that kind of direction. The Marcionites have kind of left the Jewishness really behind and are now sort of Platonist almost, and so the proto-Orthodox are kind of in between those two. The Gnostics, however, don't have their own structure in their own churches usually, but rather they are little groups that occur within the other Christian churches, especially the proto-Orthodox church. So what'll especially happen is you might have a little group of people inside your big congregation in a big city who are meeting then separately. It's like you have your own Bible study course on a Wednesday or something, and when they all go over to the other person's house, that person who has been initiated into the gnosis is able to share with them these secret teachings with this kind of elite inner circle. Those are the guys who really know what Christianity is all about, whereas the rest of the church are just meant to be kept in darkness because it's not given to them to know the secrets of eternal life and everything.

(38:50) If the Gnostics were just members of these different churches, wouldn't their own teachings be sort of modified versions of the teachings within the churches they were in, as opposed to just having their own set of teachings? So they're secret teachings. There would have been their own thinkers and things like that. In some cases, they're important leaders like Valentinus who wanted to become a bishop of a church and things like that. But I'm just suggesting that it's more complicated for the proto-Orthodox people to root these guys out because they can't just point to them and say, "Oh, there's a Gnostic church over there," like the Marcionites. Instead, "Oh, look, there are Gnostics in my church," is what they would kind of happen because, again, it's spread through sort of a secret way.

(39:26) We already have back in New Testament times what's possibly a warning that proto-Orthodox writers have against the Gnostics, and it's included in the Epistle of Second Timothy, which is a disciple of Paul who's writing, pretending that it's Paul who's writing, and is probably warning leaders about other leaders who are pro-Gnostic. He writes, "Avoid empty and worldly chatter. Those who indulge in it will stray further and further into godless courses, and the infection of their teaching will spread like gangrene. Such are Hymenaeus and Philetus. They have shot wide of the truth, saying our resurrection has already taken place, and they are upsetting people's faith." Essentially, they are teaching, we don't know anything more than this, but what they're saying is they're teaching a much more spiritual resurrection. The guy who's writing here is Paul in the letter to Timothy's church. He's believing, let's say, in a literal eschatology. There's going to be an end time where there's going to be a very physical bodily resurrection, maybe. Now instead, he is confronting these kind of leaders within his own church who are saying, "No, no, no, all this resurrection talk is entirely spiritualized. It's already occurred, and guess what? We have a lot of other gnosis that we can explain to you about how the actual salvation works and what's the true Christian gospel." Essentially, this is happening probably already then in the first century.

(41:07) So we've talked around a lot about it. What is Gnosticism in general? The word comes from the Greek gnosis, meaning knowledge, and the Gnostics' salvation comes through learning, learning the secret esoteric knowledge that allows you to mystically participate with the divine. It's a very particular, it's not just that knowledge is good, it's a very particular kind of esoteric secret knowledge. The word has been applied to a whole bunch of different groups, and so they don't all have continuity with each other. Even though lots of groups are called Gnostic because of a general belief they might have, those could be even, let's say, non-Christian Jewish groups from antiquity to medieval groups like the Cathars and the Bogomils to modern people today, new age people who are Gnostic but have no continuity with ancient Gnostics. They don't form a single continuous group. Today, the one traditional organized group of Gnostics that have survived from antiquity down are the Mandaeans. This is a group of Mandaeans, I think, in either northern Iraq or in Iran, who are, in some sense, look back to John the Baptist as one of the leaders of their religion and continue to practice things like baptism. They also have essentially a theology that's Gnostic and that possibly goes all the way back to the Gnostics. Then, of course, there's a whole bunch of neo-Gnostics now in the 21st century, people part of the new age, people who, when the Gnostic texts came forward, this was just a thing that people found really cool, and they decided they were Gnostics.

(42:44) We've just talked about how there's these possibly Buddhist ideas and other kinds of things that are in India, that are in through Persia, that are maybe also influencing the Zoroastrian or maybe influencing Jews and Christians. Same thing, Platonism is also introduced, you know, Jews that are Hellenized, it's also affected them. It all kind of comes together. There's Gnostic ideas anyway that are running all around, and so they're drawing from a wide variety of sources to get to Christian Gnosticism. All the way up until very recently, all of our knowledge from Gnosticism about Gnostics came from the proto-Orthodox, so essentially the people who won, and they wrote big long tracts against Valentinus, against the Gnostics as heretics, and so they wrote all the different things about why they thought Gnostics were bad. Irenaeus, for example, has things quite confused. He accused Gnostics of debauchery and hedonism based on their dismissal of the material world. Essentially, because nothing in the material world matters, he more or less accused them of not caring about marriage in this life, and so therefore they could have orgies or all kinds of things that you accuse your enemies of. In point of fact, the Gnostics were probably the opposite, like we say, where they believed that sex, all sex, is bad, so they would have been maybe, if anything, more Puritan than the proto-Orthodox in the sense of sex.

(44:03) We mentioned then that that changed in the middle of the 20th century when a bunch of codices, which is to say little books that are buried in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, were found right after World War II near an ancient Orthodox monastery. Ultimately, that collection was assembled and went to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. There are 12 little books plus eight leaves of a 13th book, and all of these contain a bunch of different tracts. When you take them all out together, there are 52 tractates, so there are 52 different little books that are inside these kind of bound together in books. They're all written in Coptic, which is Egyptian, but it's the Egyptian language that is written using the Greek alphabet. After the Egyptians have stopped writing as much in ancient hieroglyphs or in the demotic, the hieratic and demotic, which is to say the abbreviated and simpler versions of the hieroglyphics, they've been ruled by the Ptolemies for three centuries prior to essentially the Romans killing Cleopatra and ending the dynasty and it becoming a Roman province directly. In that amount of time, Cleopatra, even though we think of her as this queen of Egypt, everything like that, she's full-on a Macedonian, she's a Greek, and so is all her dynasty. In that amount of time, there has been a lot of Greek influence in her capital, which is Alexandria, founded by Alexander, and it's a center of Greek thought. Anyway, Egyptian has been being written, it's still the Egyptian language, and so it's related much more distantly, but it's distantly related to Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic, but it's a different language family that used to be called the Hamitic family, and it's now called the Afroasiatic. Well, yeah, so it used to be Hamitic, and now it's called Afroasiatic. Anyway, so it's like that, and so, but it's written now in Coptic here, which is to say the Greek alphabet, and it's still the liturgical language of the Coptic Christian church. So there's still a large percentage of the Egyptian population. At a certain point, Egypt was a Christian nation. It was conquered by the Arabs, the everyday language became Arabic, but anyway, Coptic continued to be the old Egyptian language, continued to be the liturgical language or church language of the Christian church.

(47:04) The Coptic texts are all translations, the ones in Nag Hammadi, these ones that got dug up, they're all translations of Greek originals probably, and there are multiple translators. Some of these translators are good, some of these translators are not so good, apparently, and there's a bunch of different scribes from the different translators. So just looking at all these books that we have, it's a collection made by a person or a group of people that are interested in Gnosticism, but it's not that they're necessarily all Gnostic texts or they weren't originally all Gnostic texts. For example, Codex 6 contains a very poor Coptic translation of Plato's Republic. However, that version of the Republic has now been also heavily modified so that it includes Gnostic ideas, so it's no longer a perfect translation or anything like that or a word-for-word or a literal translation. It's actually an expansion of Plato in order to make Plato work more Gnostic. Many of the texts then have been made Gnostic and Christian. For example, in Codex 5, there's a philosophical text called Eugnostos the Blessed, and that is essentially a pagan text, philosopher text, but then Codex number three uses the same source text, so the same things that this guy Eugnostos was saying, but now it's put into Christ's mouth and it's divided up into questions. The disciples will ask a question and Christ will answer, and now it's called the Sophia of Jesus Christ, but it's the same text, you know, but now, and even the people in the library might have figured that out themselves. There's not that many books, you know. In any event, that's what ends up happening. So the same wisdom has now been repurposed as Jesus's wisdom. Other texts have gone through similar Gnostic redaction, so there might have been an early Christian source. For example, when we think, when we get to the Gospel of Thomas, there might have been a very early sayings gospel that has now been expanded with Gnostic additions.

(49:19) I want to look at some of these gospels so that we can actually get into it and see some of these. I just picked some modern Gnostic imagery because it always looks cool, the esoteric stuff, right? Just to give you guys a feel for how esoteric all these texts are. We talked about Valentinus, who's one of these early Gnostic leaders. We only had what his detractors said about him. However, it's completely possible that one of the texts that's in the Nag Hammadi library, which is entitled The Gospel of Truth, is actually a text that's by Valentinus. We knew of a text that Irenaeus, who is a proto-Orthodox writer, condemned Valentinus for writing such a book, and so it may well be that we now have the book and we can actually look at it. I'm just going to read a little quote here from it that kind of shows the Christology, this Christological question from the Gospel of Truth.

(50:38) Now the name of the Father is the Son. It is he who first gave a name to the one who came forth from him, who was himself, and he begot him a son. He gave him his name, which belonged to him. He is the one to whom belongs all that exists around him, the Father. His is the name. His is the Son. It is possible for him to be seen. The name, however, is invisible because it alone is the mystery of the invisible, which comes to the ears that are completely filled with it by him. For indeed, the Father's name is not spoken, but it is apparent through a Son, since the Father is. But before he brought forth the aeons in order that the name of the Father should be over the head as Lord, that is the name in truth, which is firm in his command through perfect power. For the name is not from mere words, nor does his name consist of appellations, but it is invisible. He gave a name to him alone, since he alone sees him, he alone having the power to give him a name. For he who does not exist has no name. The name, therefore, is that of the Father, as the name of the Father is the Son.

(52:09) No wonder Gnosticism was so popular when you start spreading it around within the congregation, right? So we mentioned how complicated the Trinity is, right? What's going on here in the Gospel of Truth is that apparently here, you know, some, you know, Valentinus maybe has had a way that he's trying to work out the Christology and make it so that you can understand what the whole point of it is and what the sense of it is. The idea maybe, if we can kind of try to get through this and to figure it out, is that the God, the Creator God, is unknown, unseen, unseeable. You can't even say that God's name because that's not allowed. When we get to the four letters as they are written in the Hebrew Bible, you're not to say them, and so we're not even supposed to know, you know, that we might pronounce those letters Yahweh or Jehovah or whatever it would be. It's not to be known or not to be said, and it's also unseeable. The idea, though, is that God, who is ungendered, also begot a son who is him and who is that God. In other words, that son is still God, and then in so doing has given a name to that God, which is Father and is also Son, you know, which wouldn't otherwise be seen or known or knowable if it weren't for the fact of it occurring, right? If we didn't have this Christological nightmare, you know, we wouldn't have any way that we could describe God in positive terms. We would only have negative theology where we say God is infinite, invisible, all those kind of negative things, which is to say not bounded, not seen, all that sort of thing. That's essentially the idea then maybe that Valentinus has, but which also possibly isn't quite Trinitarian because it may well be more or less saying that the Father is the Son, but it depends. It kind of seems like he's saying that, if so, it's not Trinitarian.

(54:11) I want to define a couple of Gnostic terms as we go forward. One of them is the Monad, and so when we were talking about the Father here a second ago, this is the one absolute God, the Creator, which is to say that they use the word the Monad, right? The perfect Aeon who rules over what they call the Fullness, which is to say the Pleroma, the region of light and light. Then there are Aeons, which are emanations from the Monad, who are universals, and they are generally paired, and they are such things as things like thought and silence. These Aeons then aren't that different in some sense from Platonic forms, of which the last of the Aeons is Sophia, which is to say wisdom, the divine feminine form, wisdom. She gives birth to the Demiurge, which is the flawed God of the Old Testament who creates the material world. The Demiurge is also the name that Aristotle gives to the unmoved mover, the prime, the first cause, right? The cause of the physical world. Then there are Archons, who are the evil angels who serve the Demiurge, and then Gnosis, right, which we've already talked about, so that knowledge that brings the true eternal life.

(55:31) Overall, the kind of cosmology, the vision, the theology that the Gnostics have, although they don't all agree with each other, is the material world then is created by that flawed Creator, the Demiurge, whose work is a flawed simulacrum of the ideal reality, this kind of Platonic universe, the immaterial universe. The true God is a source then of the ideal universe of light and spirit that we can't see, the unseeable. This cosmic accident happened, can be understood by learning then this very complicated mythology that is like essentially an allegory drama about how the different Aeons were emanated from God in different order. Some humans contain this divine spark of light that can be returned to the divine realm through a process of enlightened awakening, and that's essentially what Gnosticism is about. You experience enlightenment, you experience wisdom when you rehearse and learn all of the secret Gnosis, and Jesus then is the one, the son of the one true God, who sent in the material world in order to bring about salvation through enlightenment as opposed to any other thing, so not ransom or any other way that that might be understood.

(56:43) Next, one of these texts in Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Mary, and specifically this is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. There's a bunch of different Marys in the New Testament. The proto-Orthodox folks emphasize their authority through Peter especially. If you look now to Rome, Peter and Paul are all over everything, and the pope has these keys because Christ gives Peter the keys in the Gospel of Matthew. Gnostics, by contrast, tend to denigrate Peter. Peter ends up usually being kind of a jerk or a hothead or an idiot in Gnostic Gospels, and instead, the kind of good people in the Gnostic Gospels or the authoritative ones tend to be Mary Magdalene and also Thomas. Thomas in the Orthodox gospel is the guy who's the doubter, who doesn't believe Jesus was resurrected. He's the wiser disciple in the Gnostic Gospels. We have fragments from Nag Hammadi of this Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and in this text, Jesus is said to have loved Mary more than the male apostles and to have told her alone secret teachings, Gnosis, which Peter doubts are true teachings. He doesn't believe that Mary actually got taught this, and so let's just quote a little from, then we'll read a little bit of this text, the Gospel of Mary.

(58:01) So he, Jesus, answered and said to me, Mary Magdalene, who's the author of this according to the text anyway, "Blessed are you that did not waver at the sight of me, for where the mind is, there is treasure." There's a lot of emphasis on thinking in mind and that kind of thing in Gnosticism. Mary then goes on to describe her vision about how the soul can overcome the various powers of ignorance, and it's a big long four-stage process, and then there's multiple sub-stages and things like that. When the soul goes through all of that, according to this enlightened enlightenment through Gnosis, the soul answers and says, "What binds me has been slain. What surrounds me, all of this physical matter, in other words, has been overcome. My desire has been ended." Just like in Buddhism, you try to eliminate desire. Desire is the cause of suffering, and ignorance has died. Now we're focused on true knowledge as opposed to ignorant desire for material things in a world. "I was released from the fetter of oblivion, all of this material realm that is worthless, which is transient, right? So it's all going to dissolve away. From this time on, I will attain to the rest of time of the season of the Aeon in silence." Now we've transcended this transient material realm.

(59:48) So when Mary had said this, she fell silent since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken to her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, "Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this, for certainly these teachings are strange ideas." So when Mary gives him this Gnosis, Andrew jumps up and says, "I don't believe it. This is strange stuff." Peter answered and spoke concerning the same things. He questioned about the Savior, "Did he really speak to a woman without our knowledge and not openly? Are we to turn around and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?" Mary wept and said to Peter, "My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart or that I'm lying about the Savior?"

(1:00:54) You could imagine actually that this is a kind of conversation that would occur in a regular proto-Orthodox church that you might be going to when a person who's a Gnostic kind of comes up to you as a member who's never heard of all this stuff before. Then you get told all of this Gnostic gospel stuff and the secret Gnosis, and it's all so different from everything you've heard. These are strange ideas, and so it's worked out actually in this gospel, essentially an internal apologetic to how that person works through it. Oh, Peter and Andrew both kind of felt that same kind of way, but it ultimately works out that we should be listening to Mary because Mary did not just make this up. This is the true teachings according to this gospel.

(1:01:30) Another one of the books that we have, one of these lost gospels, is called the Apocryphon of John. This is a second-century Gnostic text that claims to be a secret book of John, the son of Zebedee, as told to him by Jesus. It contains an elaborate mythology that explains the Gnostic creation story and the understanding and organization purpose of creation. There's plenty of these different Gnostic creations, and this is just going to be one of the examples that we'll look at. Quoting from that book, "I, John, asked to know it, and he, Jesus, said to me, 'The Monad,' so we remember that kind of Gnostic term, 'is a monarchy with nothing above it. It is he who exists as God and Father of everything, the invisible one who is above everything, who exists as incorruption, which is in the pure light into which no eye can look.'" Again, this is the same kind of idea, this Platonic immaterial idea, invisible and also incorruptible, right? The world of the forms is perfect. It's not like the material world that corrupts. "He is the invisible spirit of whom it is not right to think of him as a God or something similar, for he is more than a God, for he does not exist in something inferior to him since everything exists in him, for it is he who establishes himself." So he's the unmoved mover. "He is eternal since it does not need anything." He's the first cause. "He is therefore total perfection," is the idea here in the cosmology or theology that's in the Gnostic gospel here of John.

(1:02:46) His, the Monad's thought, performed a deed, and she came forth from his mind. She is the forethought of all. Her light shines like his light, the perfect power, which is the image of the invisible virginal spirit who is perfect, the first power, the glory of Barbelo, the perfect glory in the Aeons. Then after that Aeon, Barbelo, then there comes forth a pentad of paired Aeons: forethought, Barbelo, thought, indestructibility, eternal life, truth. Then comes the word of creation, which is Christ. Then the autogenes come forth. In other words, this unending stream, and this is a very long explanation of how creation works in terms of philosophical underpinnings, but it's become more of a mythological story narrative. Finally, the last of the Aeons, Sophia. The Sophia of the Epinoia, being an Aeon, conceived a thought for herself. She wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the spirit. He had not approved and without her consort. Even though she's wisdom at the end of all of these emanations, these spiritual emanations, Sophia, the last Aeon, decides that she's going to try creation, her own hand at creation, and that causes the catastrophe. The result is the creation of a flawed but powerful God, which is named Yaldabaoth, which is essentially the idea of the Yahweh or Jehovah of the Bible, the Old Testament. Yaldabaoth then goes on to enact Genesis, so the physical world's creation, and is the source, the Demiurge, that creates the physical world. Special roles are given to Adam, Eve, their sons, Noah's wife, Norea, which is not actually named in the Old Testament, and it ends then with the Savior explaining his role to John. It's a long, elaborate retelling essentially of the Judeo-Christian story now through Gnostic cosmology.

(1:05:24) Another one of these that has another one of those kind of stories is called On the Origin of the World, and so it's another elaborate Gnostic creation myth and cosmology. It's different, and so we might as well just see the range of these. The author then mixes Jewish, Manichaean, Christian, Greek philosophical, and mythological ideas within magic and astrology, and so it reworks Genesis, giving Eve a much more exalted role, which is interesting. This is just a little excerpt from On the Origin of the World. "And when they had finished Adam, he abandoned him as an inanimate vessel since he had taken form like an abortion in that no spirit was in him. Regarding this thing, when the chief ruler remembered the saying of Pistis, which is to say his mother, wisdom, he was less afraid lest the true man, the Adam of light, enter his modeled form and become its Lord. For this reason, he left his modeled form 40 days without a soul, and he withdrew and he abandoned it. Now in the 40th day, Sophia Zoe sent her breath into Adam, who had no soul. He began to move upon the ground, and he could not stand up. When the seven rulers came, they saw him and were greatly disturbed, and when they saw that Adam could not stand up, they were glad, and they took pity on him and put him in paradise, and they withdrew up to their heavens. After the day of rest, Sophia sent her daughter Zoe, being called Eve, as an instructor in order that she might make Adam, who had no soul, arise so that those whom he could engender might become containers of light. When Eve saw her male counterpart prostrate, she had pity upon him, and she said, 'Adam, become alive, arise upon the Earth.' Immediately her word became accomplished fact, for Adam, having arisen, suddenly opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said, 'You shall be called mother of the living, for it is you who have given me life.'" That's quite a different retelling anyway of the Adam and Eve story, but you can also see this idea that it has to also explain this complicated reason why true souls or light spirit sparks or whatever are trapped inside these mortal prisons of our bodies that we shouldn't actually, you know, that has been the cause of all this problem or how have all these good gods ended up with this terrible circumstance of the world as we now have it. The Gnostics, you know, have explained through elaborate cosmology why that has happened.

(1:08:00) One more of these, one's the text is called The Thunder, Perfect Mind. It's among then, like I say, this is a miscellany of these kind of texts. The text is, I think, the "I am" statements that are in the canonical Gospel of John. There's all kinds of different places where Christ says, "I am the way, the truth, and the light. I am the bread of life. I am the water," you know, all these kind of things. In all of those cases, essentially Christ is saying, "I am," which is echoing of the God of the Old Testament who says, "I am that I am," to Moses in Exodus. The female speaker here, however, is probably Sophia, it's probably wisdom. Here's what she says: "Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard. Do not be ignorant of me, for I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter. I am the bride and the bridegroom. It is my husband who begot me. Hear me, you hearers, and learn my words, you who know me. I am the hearing that is attainable to everything. I am the speech that cannot be grasped. I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name. I'm the sign of the letter and the designation of the division." A lot of esoterica here, but essentially of understanding the value of wisdom and the different ways that we can contemplate it.

(1:09:19) Oh, here's more, sorry, there's another little quote here: "Give heed then, you hearers, for I am the one alone who exists, and I have no one who will judge me. For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins and inconsistencies and disgraceful passions and fleeting pleasures which men embrace until they become sober and go up to their resting place, and they will find me there, and they will live, and they will not die again." Again, unlike what the proto-Orthodox are saying about the Gnostics here, the Gnostics are quite down on, let's say, fleeting mortal pleasures of the body, you know, so getting drunk and having sex and all the kind of things like that. Instead, what Gnostics want you to do is sober up, think about the big picture wisdom stuff, you know, go be a philosopher, and that's when you will not, you'll actually have true eternal life.

(1:10:32) We'll just talk about one last one of these, which is the most important text in the library, which is the Sayings Gospel of Thomas. It's sort of like the lost gospel Q that the authors of Mark and Matthew had access to very likely or hypothetically, and it preserves potentially an independent first-century source that has been edited by Gnostics in the second century and expanded to include Gnostic ideas. In its present form, it's attributed to Jesus's twin brother, and so you didn't know how Jesus had a twin brother, did you? But it's called in the text Didymus Judas Thomas, so actually his name is Jude or Judah or Judas, but in fact, he's the same guy as the Apostle Thomas. Thomas is simply the Aramaic word for twin, and you didn't maybe know that. The Greek word is Didymus, and so the guy is called Didymus Judas Thomas, which is to say, anyway, twin, twin Jude the twin, you know. The idea of it is then a lot of times in Greece, for example, in Greek mythology, when you have a divine being like Hercules, Hercules then has a, I think he's the mortal one, and he's got a divine brother, right? Or anyway, Castor and Pollux, for example, you might, so the one Castor is, you know, anyway, one of them's divine and one of them's mortal. A lot of times what happens is there'll be twins that are born, and the one, you know, in terms of the mythological stories, and the one is divine and the other one's the mortal one. This is the same thing that's happened, so there's essentially Jesus is the divine twin for the Gnostics, and then Thomas here is the mortal one.

(1:11:53) This is how it starts: "These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke to Didymus Judas Thomas, and Judas Thomas recorded, and he said, Jesus said, 'Whoever discovers the interpretations of these sayings will not taste death.'" This is how eternal life has happened because you'll actually find out that that physical death doesn't matter because the physical world is meaningless. "Jesus said, 'Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find,'" which isn't that different from, let's say, a bunch of different sayings in the canonical New Testament, but then it goes on, "When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and they will reign over all." When you realize the secrets of all of this Gnosis, you won't, you'll be like really disturbed that all of this is actually true, that this physical world, that everything that you valued is actually totally meaningless. But when you find that out, when you finally get it, you're going to really marvel, and then when you truly have that mastered, you actually are the master of everything because you no longer are victims to the whimsies of the world's physical nature that is impacting you.

(1:13:26) Another one of these sayings, "Jesus said, 'If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the kingdom of God, God's, the Father's imperial rule, is in the sky,' the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say it's in the sea, the fish will precede you. Rather, the Father's imperial rule, which is, might we say, the kingdom of God, is within you and it is outside you.'" That's not that different from one of the sayings that is recorded in Luke, but it goes on here now with the Gnostic addition, "When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty." You have to have knowledge, and when you do, you're going to know that you're the actual spirit child of the true spirit Father, and if you don't know that, you essentially are, you are the poverty, the physical world.

(1:14:35) Finally, here, "Whoever has come," Jesus said, "Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, the person of that person, I'm sorry, of the person, the world is not worthy." Once you realize the physical world is just a dead hulk, it's nothing, it's just the physical things, then the world is no longer worthy of you because you are that divine spark that has transcended it.

(1:15:09) So just to sum up, and I appreciate you guys for all of having gone through a lot of text here and through some fairly esoteric teaching that the Gnostics have, but one of the things I think that we can see, having now got a hold of these texts that we didn't have for millennia, is that many of the charges made by proto-Orthodox critics of Gnostics aren't actually justified. Certainly not the idea that they were hedonists and this kind of a thing, it's quite the opposite. Likewise, while Gnostic Christianity overlaps at its origin with the mainline tradition, it has undergone a rapid and very substantial divergence. One of the things that shows the fact that it has these vast pantheons where there's not only just the supreme God but then hundreds of Aeons and lesser gods and things like that that are emanating out, so a very complicated theology that is not replicated in ultimately Orthodox Christianity, it shows that there was a kind of an amazing diversity of early thought among Christianity. Finally, the overlap then between Christian Gnosticism and philosophical writings like Neoplatonism, so middle Platonism, heavily influences all of this kind of Gnostic thought. We even talked about how some of the words like Demiurge and some of the ideas of things like the forms and emanations and Sophia and everything like that are major crossovers with the philosophical tradition that's active in places like Egypt. Because of that and other wisdom traditions show that there's a big interplay and intellectual sharing occurring between Christian and pagan thinkers in general, and that will ultimately be important as much of that thought is incorporated also into mainline Christianity, as we'll see in future lectures. That is the Lost Gnostic Gospels.

[Applause]

(1:17:10) Questions? Yeah, I think this is a case of John, thank you for reading all this stuff so we don't have to. We should bear in mind that these accusations made against the Gnostics, we see it again and again and again. You don't like somebody, you accuse them of the sins that you are either committing or wish you were. Right, yeah, and also, by the way, the Cathars, who are, let's say, a Gnostic sect, they also get the same accusations in the Middle Ages, even though, again, they are probably, because of this idea of being opposed to the material world and actually, in the case of the Cathars, being opposed for their elite of creating new babies and things like that, they were actually quite opposed to imprisoning new sparks of life into mortal coil prisons, which is never a, it's a highly philosophical position, but it's not a great position in terms of not having your religion die out. Because you aren't really usually able to have a second generation, you have to continually convert people. But in any event, again, the Catholic medieval Christians who are opposing Cathars are again accusing them of orgies and things like that, like you're saying, as opposed to when they probably are not refraining from sex altogether.

(1:19:06) So when did those Gnostic ideas become removed out of the Orthodox religion? Was it the Nicaean Council where they decided to remove all that Gnosticism out of it? Well, so yeah, so the question is when did it get removed? What I would argue is that it's not so much a matter of removing because nobody has like some kind of a much more elaborate New Testament or something. There is no canon of the New Testament until actually centuries after the Nicaean Council, so it's actually another couple of centuries before everybody's agreed what belongs in the New Testament. There are simply plenty of books running around everywhere, and there are different communities, and at some point or other, and it's actually in the first and second centuries, people are already arguing with each other, saying, "You're not really Christian, you're not Christian," and this kind of thing. Frankly, even then, the generation before that, "You're not Jewish anymore, you guys are false, you guys are Jews that have rejected the true Messiah, so God can raise up children of Abraham like he can raise up rocks," or whatever. So that's already in the first century. What they're doing is not that they have removed anything, but there are different people that have different ideas, and some of the people's ideas don't get included in what, once you get to the Nicaean stuff.

(1:20:07) Did remnants of that Gnosticism thought make its way into further centuries? You mentioned the Cathars, when were they? Right, so the Cathars are in the middle of the Middle Ages, and so it's like the 12th century, and they're occurring especially in the south of France and the north of Italy. They may have gotten some of the ideas from the Bogomils, who were a little bit earlier than that, who are in essentially Bosnia, that kind of area in Bulgaria, and they also have their kind of a separate sect. It's very hard for us to trace continuity. So whereas people would like to know that there was some kind of an extant Gnostic group that was hanging out in Syria somewhere, we don't have their texts, and so we can't prove that they were there to physically transmit it. So it's always possible that the ideas themselves can revive. Dualism is one of the obvious answers to when people are dealing with the problem of evil. The same questions that Marcion was facing, which is why does this Old Testament God just seem like such a jerk, or whatever, and why do I keep suffering, and all this kind of thing. So saying that the physical world is really bad and that we should renounce that, a lot of these ideas continue to resonate, and so they can also crop up anew without continuity. So we can't say for sure that there's continuity if they're hanging out somewhere in Syria or Turkey and then reinfect the Bulgarians, and then from there, the northern Italians, and then the southern French. What we do know is that between the creation of the Inquisition, which the popes did to handle the problem as the pope saw it, and also the use of an internal crusade for the first time, so declaring a crusade against other Christians, which is to say because they're heretics as far as the pope was concerned, that actually successfully wiped them out. So the Cathars did not survive either.

(1:22:34) I think you mentioned at one point the possible connection with Buddhist thought with Gnostics. How would that have happened geographically and chronologically? Yeah, so it's complicated. So there are interconnections between, so you know, Alexander gets all the way to India, and there is founded even before that on the boundary between the Persian Empire and India is actually a large set of Greek colonies in what's now Afghanistan. So one of the ways that when you rule an empire like Persia, so the Persian Empire went all the way from Bulgaria all the way across to the Indus River, right? So it's a huge, massive empire, and one of the ways that you divide and conquer people is, so they controlled all of what's now Turkey, which is where Homer and all of these Greek thinkers, the first philosophers, are all from that zone. When those guys rebelled, the Persians put down the rebellion, and they scoop up half the people, and they take them to Afghanistan, you know, and plant colonies there. So now those guys, since they're no longer next to a whole bunch of Greeks, they can't rebel very easily. Instead, they have to kind of be loyal to the emperor, the Shah, because they have to fight against Indians and stuff like that, right? So you now suddenly have made an enemy into a friend, and that's, empires did that from, you know, like that's what happened to the lost ten tribes of Israel, right? So there's a vast Greek kingdom in Afghanistan that ultimately also influences India because they conquer a bunch of India, and then also vice versa. When Alexander's expedition and things like that, they are aware of Indian religion and Indian philosophy in the form of what they called gymnosophists, which is to say naked philosophers, and they are really impressed by these guys who are not into material things. So whether they're like Jains or something, you know, but it's people who are Brahmin or Jains or something where they have renounced all of the physical form, they're eating very little, they're not eating meat, and all kinds of other things like that, and they have gotten rid of physical stuff. So there are connections, and so therefore some of the contact will have happened. There's a lot of people who would like to say, "Well, we don't know what happened with what Jesus was doing between the ages of 12 and the ages of 30. Maybe he went to India." So Jesus didn't go to India, so it doesn't happen through a direct connection like that, but there are crossovers where people who are in Alexander's camp are directly talking to people from India. There are merchants that cause direct connections, so there's the capacity to exchange thought.

(1:25:32) Elizabeth, yeah, there were certainly merchants. There were Jews living in China. There was a colony, I don't know how recently they died out, but I remember years ago up at Beth Tzedec, there was a display of artifacts, manuscripts from this Jewish colony. There were Jewish merchants who went to China, and I guess they settled there, and these manuscripts in Hebrew but with Chinese illustrations. I remember reading something about how other Jews would come there, and they would ask them all sorts of questions because they had forgotten a hell of a lot about Judaism, and they wanted to know. So there was not a lot of people, people didn't travel like we do today, no rolling suitcases, but they did travel. So in that sense too, it's not just Jewish colonies, but so for example, if you, I mean, in the 1001 Nights, the Aladdin story is actually, it's not set in Agrabah as in the Disney movie, it's actually set in China. So yeah, Aladdin is a Chinese, Arabs, Arab merchants are in China because again, that's going on. Also, we've talked about before, we did a whole lecture on Manichaeism, and so Manichaeism is a later Jewish, not Jewish, dualist religion that has both Zoroastrian and Judeo-Christian, like a synthesis of those kind of ideas that this guy Mani, who's a prophet, has. They convert, he's able to, ultimately his disciples are able to convert some Central Asian kingdoms, which allow the religion to kind of take off and flourish in the Middle Ages, and it actually, its last practitioners, it gets killed off in the West and everything like that, but its last practitioners were in China again, so there were some Manicheans that were off in China. So yeah, there are people around.

(1:28:35) The spread of ideas back and forth, Buddhism to the East and the Greek ideas from the West going East, a lot of that occurred what we call the Silk Road, but there's actually three Silk Roads, the one that we tend to be more familiar with, and it was all to do with trade, right? The one we're most familiar with is the land one, but there was actually two other. So where I'm from or where I was born in the south of India, there are just multiple religions going back millennia, right? St. Thomas went to that part, and so that's central to the Christianity in that south