Transcript

And welcome back to History of Christian Thought and Practice 1. We're in the second century now, and for the first class tonight, for the first hour or so, we're going to talk about the theological and Christological debate as it was in the second century.

Now, there is a handout, both on Blackboard and in your supplemental readings book, and I'm just double checking exactly what the title of that handout is.

I think it's Second Century Christology.

The way I see it, Christology is the understanding of Christ, okay, fair enough, but it's also about theology, the understanding of God as a trinity, and those two issues, theology and Christology, are so interdependent that it's very difficult to separate them as if they're two different things.

For our purposes in here, it doesn't matter to me whether you think of it in terms of Christology or Trinitarian theology.

The two are evolving and developing simultaneously.

In the second century, what you're going to see, and again, if you want to have that handout in front of you, that's fine, what you're going to see is the next evolution after what we talked about when we started last week with the first century.

I'm going to start here with a group called the Ebionites.

Now, The word Ebionite means, or comes from a word meaning the poor one.

So that's sort of how you translate it, the poor one.

And there was a group within the early church who called themselves this.

This is a name they chose for themselves.

Now, just so you realize, most of our so-called heretical groups don't get the luxury of naming themselves.

Most of them get labeled by the mainstream.

But in this case, this is the name that they chose for themselves because they saw themselves as following in Jesus' footsteps as voluntarily poor.

Now, within the church, though, within the writings that you're looking at, The term Ebionite comes to be applied as sort of an umbrella term for all early adoptionists.

And so we have no way of knowing who would have called themselves an Ebionite and who might not have.

And just as is always the case when we talk about these heretical groups, we're lumping a lot of people together who would not have all agreed with each other.

So again, even within the groups that we talk about, you can't assume that they're sort of theologically homogenous.

But we create these conceptual groups in our heads so that we can understand where they're coming from, more or less.

But you'll notice, depending on some of the documents you'll read, some of the mainstream or so-called orthodox writers don't even get that these folks called themselves this.

There's a tradition after a while that they must have been named after somebody named Evian, like as if there was a guy named Evian who started this movement.

And that's not true.

There was no guy named Evian.

So there are different ideas about how this started.

Now, you may have noticed when you were reading Ignatius' letters that he refers to the Evianites as the legacy of the Judaizers.

So remember we talked about the Judaizers last week If you'll notice, they're on the same side of the chart as the Judaizers in the first century.

While we don't know a lot about the Judaizers, they seem to have been a group that would have emphasized the humanity of Jesus, probably diminishing any idea of his divinity.

When we get into the second century, that really comes to the forefront.

The Ebionites are going to be the ones who accept the humanity of Jesus, but deny any divinity or divine nature of Jesus.

Now, according to the early Christian writers, their origins go back to the Jerusalem church.

But again, we don't really have any concrete evidence of that.

That may be simply based on the fact that Within the letters of Paul, the Judaizers are said to have come from the Jerusalem church, certain men from James.

According to the story, the Ebionites emerged as a true sect after the fall of Jerusalem.

And so, 70 CE, Jerusalem falls, and we have a situation When Jerusalem falls in 70 and the Temple is destroyed, the sacrificial system goes away.

Judaism, as a religion, is kind of stuck trying to figure out how to move forward.

If one of the central parts of its religion is now gone, sacrifices, what is going to replace it?

And for most Jews, what replaces the sacrifices is the Torah, the written word of God.

And for a minority of Jews, of course, who become known as Christians eventually, what replaces the sacrifices and the temple is the person of Jesus.

In fact, there's a strain within the New Testament even and beyond that basically says that Jesus, the person of Jesus, replaces the temple.

And you can see that in the Gospels, you know, the whole thing about, you know, tear this temple down and rebuild it in three days as a reference to his own death and resurrection.

But they want to stone him because they think he's, you know, talking about the destruction of the temple.

Even though he sees that coming, he knows that it's coming.

Alright, so the Ebionites then would have accepted the idea of Jesus as somehow Messiah or a prophet.

But in the sense that he's really a mere human and not in any sense really divine.

And so they would have rejected the birth narratives that we find at the beginning of Matthew and Luke's Gospels that describe the birth of Jesus in miraculous terms as, you know, a virgin birth.

Or if they had their own stories of Jesus' birth, it would have downplayed the miraculous.

even connecting the idea of a virgin will conceive from the Isaiah passage, but interpreting that virgin as simply a young woman who nevertheless conceived in the usual way.

And so, the Ebionites would have used their own versions of the apostolic documents.

Apparently they used Matthew's Gospel, but an edited version, no birth narrative, possibly a version written in Hebrew or Aramaic.

And actually, in the early sources, there's some discussion about whether Matthew's Gospel might have been written originally in Hebrew or Aramaic and then translated into Greek, although it's hard to say.

The Ebionites would have rejected Paul's letters because he opposed the Judaizers, who are sort of their founders.

They would have taught that Jesus was only a man, maybe a prophet like the Old Testament prophets, But since he's a mere human, he is created, and therefore not pre-existent, as we get at the beginning of John's Gospel.

So rather than being the pre-existent Logos, who then becomes human, as we read in John's Gospel, the Ebionites understood Christ as being a mere human who was born in the usual way, but was rewarded, but basically achieved a kind of perfection, Perfection of obedience to God and to God's law by personal discipline and by resisting temptation.

And so, because he was able to achieve this perfection, he was rewarded with the adoption as God's son.

So, he is called a son of God, but by adoption.

And this adoption would have taken place at his baptism, when, you know, as you read in the Gospels, The Holy Spirit comes to him and he's anointed.

And so the way the Evianites would have read that is that this is the first time Jesus receives the Holy Spirit.

He receives the Holy Spirit.

He's not a giver of the Spirit.

He's a receiver of the Spirit.

He's anointed in the sense that the Spirit has anointed him, but he becomes the Son of God or a son of God at his baptism And for the Ebionites, it would not be appropriate to call him a son of God before his baptism.

And so, he sort of achieves a status of sonship in relationship to God, but it's not a status that was his by nature.

Now, there are a couple of variations on this.

There's one called Spirit Christology, And there's another one called Angel Christology.

And you don't really necessarily need to know or worry about the nuances here too much.

But it has to do with whether the Holy Spirit is...

For the Spirit Christology, the Holy Spirit is a divine element or a divine spirit who descends on Jesus at his baptism.

And so...

For the proponents of Spirit Christology, they might say that Jesus was a man, but the Christ Spirit was the Holy Spirit who came to him at his baptism.

But the catch is that the Spirit leaves him at the cross.

So his anointing is just for this temporary period of time from his baptism to his crucifixion.

But when Jesus cries from the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

That's the moment at which the Holy Spirit left him.

And so, for proponents of spirit Christology, there is a divine element to Christ, but it's the Holy Spirit who fills him or indwells him.

For angel Christology, they might talk about the Holy Spirit as an angel, or they might talk about Jesus as an angel, but in a sense, an angel is still a created being.

So, we're still diminishing the divinity of Christ and emphasizing that he's created.

Proponents of angel Christology may have accepted the idea of a miraculous or virginal birth of Christ, but again, they would have denied any real pre-existence to Christ and any real resurrection.

For the Nebionites in general, the resurrection is not a bodily resurrection or a real resurrection in any sense.

It's really just a metaphor for eternal life.

So to say that Jesus was raised is to say the same thing as to say that Jesus went to heaven, that he received eternal life at the end of his life.

Ultimately what's happening here though is that for the Ebionites, the difference between Jesus and the rest of humanity is diminished.

So, in other words, Jesus is really just one of us.

The difference between Jesus and God is increased.

The distance and the difference between Jesus and God is increased.

He's not God.

He's really one of us.

And again, a couple of ways to do this.

Some of them might have separated the idea of Jesus from the concept of Christ.

As some divine or angelic being.

But ultimately the point here is that this is not really an incarnation, this is an indwelling.

Whatever you think the divine or quasi-divine element in the person of Jesus Christ is, whether it's an angel or the Holy Spirit or whatever it is, ultimately for the Evianites, Jesus is a human being who is indwelt by this spirit or this element.

In the same way that the prophets could have been said to have been filled with the Holy Spirit.

So Jesus becomes not really much different than one of the prophets.

They were inspired, and he was inspired.

But it's an indwelling, not an incarnation.

So he is a mere human who is rewarded with this Elevated status.

He's raised to an elevated status of adopted sonship.

Now, so notice what's happening here.

He's a human who receives an elevated status.

This is what we call a Christology of ascent.

A Christology of ascent.

This is different from a Christology of descent, which we see in the Gospel of John, for example.

the Word became flesh.

In the Gospel of John, which represents the mainstream, in the Gospel of John we see a divine being who becomes human.

Descent.

Starts out divine, acquires humanity.

What we've got here is the Christology of ascent, because it starts out mere human and acquires some elevated status.

Not quite divinity, we'll get there, but we're not there yet.

But in the second century, really, it's simply acquiring an elevated status as the adopted Son of God.

But this title, Son of God, is not something that Jesus has by nature.

It's something that he earned by perfectly obeying the law.

And in fact, the point is that anyone could have earned it.

And so the Ebionites saw themselves as Christ in the making.

They were moving on toward perfection and they expected to arrive at the point at which Christ had arrived.

He is kind of the pioneer.

He's the trailblazer.

He's the one who did it first, but they expect to follow in his footsteps.

That's why they call themselves the Ebionites, the poor ones.

They're following in his footsteps by following his example.

Which, to them, means doing the works of the law.

Just like the Judaizers, there would be an emphasis here on following the Jewish law and doing the works of the law.

It's almost like saying, you know, Jesus saved himself and you can too.

He did it first and the way you achieve salvation is by following his example.

Which means, his death for the Ebionites is not really an atonement in any sense, but it's an example to follow.

So, salvation is not by divine intervention, but by human effort, and by the application of willpower.

So ultimately, if you look at your handout, it summarizes that the Ebionites affirmed Christ's humanity, but denied any real divinity.

Which means that in practice, they would have rejected the practice of worshipping Jesus.

And there's some evidence that they also rejected the use of wine in the Eucharist, so that if Jesus' blood isn't salvific in any sense of an atoning sacrifice, then some of them seem to have used just water in their Eucharist instead of wine.

Now, questions about the Ebionites.

What about the idea of grace?

This is why they didn't like Paul's letters.

Paul argues against this very position.

He says, if we are saved by the works of the law, why did Jesus die?

What's the point of the cross?

This is why to take this point of view is really to stay more in the camp of Judaism than Christianity, but to call Jesus Messiah or prophet.

Good question though.

Yeah, Erin.

How do they identify themselves?

Do we still find evidence of places that they worshipped?

No, because remember one of the things you have to keep in mind is that for the most part, a lot of these so-called heretical groups were in the church.

I mean, that's why they're heretics, because they're in the church.

If they were completely outside the church, they'd be some other religion.

So they consider themselves Christians.

They're worshiping in the church, in terms of within the church structure.

What we don't really know, because they don't seem to have left us any documents, or if they did, we don't have them.

There are hints about these other gospels they might have used, but we really don't have any of that.

We're not really sure what it would have looked like, but maybe if you have five house churches in a city, maybe one of them leaned in this direction.

Maybe they leaned in that direction because the leader of that house church leaned in that direction and everyone just sort of went along with their pastor.

It might have been that there were whole towns.

Maybe there was a whole town that had five house churches, and all five of those house churches, including their bishop, leaned in this direction.

But this is why when it becomes known, when writers like Ignatius become aware that this is going on, they start writing against it and trying to clarify, okay, well look folks, I hear you're doing this, but that's not right.

Let's try to clarify what the What the position of the church should be.

And so, again, this idea of heresy forcing orthodoxy to define itself is happening because people are out there coming up with these alternative Christologies and there's a mainstream that's also evolving that responds in reaction to that.

Yes?

Do you think the whole idea of martyrdom I see what you're saying.

That's a good question.

They wouldn't see it that way.

I think across the board the idea was that if you die as a martyr, it's not that you're Dying as a good work to earn your salvation.

It's that you're refusing to deny your faith, which would cause you to lose your salvation.

If you deny your faith, you lose your salvation.

Now, to your point, they also said that if you die for the faith, it's like a baptism in your own blood, and it washes away all your sins, because ultimately, It all goes back to the stuff Jesus said about persecution.

He said, you know, if you deny me before people, I will deny you before my Father in Heaven.

But if you acknowledge me before people, I will acknowledge you before my Father in Heaven.

So it's like a promise from Jesus.

If you die as a martyr, you know, that's kind of guaranteed.

They didn't really see it as a work, and within the mainstream church, for the most part, they were not encouraging people to speak after martyrdom.

It wasn't like everyone...

Some people did.

Some people who maybe felt like they had so much sin on their conscience they couldn't confess at all, were actually seeking martyrdom to try and get into heaven.

But the bishops were saying, no, don't do that.

Don't try to get yourself martyred.

So, yeah, I mean, it could be that some people were thinking along those lines, but it wasn't really the official way that they were describing it or looking at it.

Now, as I always say, there's nothing new under the sun.

Actually, I didn't make that up.

That's from Ecclesiastes.

But it's true.

There's nothing new under the sun.

What was still is, and what is always was.

And what I mean by that is...

This way of thinking about Christ isn't something limited to the early church, right?

And this is still around today.

So if you were to think about it, and when I do this I'm not trying to criticize anyone, but I'm just trying to point out how these alternative ways of understanding Christ are still around.

So if you were to think about, well, who are these modern-day Ebionites?

Who are the Ebionites today?

Any ideas?

Well, by definition, a lot of people would consider them on the fringe of Christianity.

But think about it this way.

Within the mainstream, what we're seeing evolve here is a doctrine of the Trinity, right?

Where Jesus Christ is the second person of a Trinity, which is divine.

Ebionites wouldn't really accept that concept, would they?

For the Evianites, Jesus isn't the second person of a Trinity.

So they're not really Trinitarian, are they?

And if you're not Trinitarian...

Unitarian, exactly!

So the Unitarians would be one example of modern day Evianites in the sense of seeing Jesus as a good man, not really the son of God in any sense of being divine by nature, and his Contribution to humanity is really more as someone who set a good example and was a good teacher than any kind of savior.

Now, I know I've oversimplified Unitarian thought there, but you get the idea.

They're Unitarians precisely because they're not Trinitarian.

And they've been first to admit that.

Okay.

Let's move on, once you've got any burning questions at this point.

Because as you know, there's going to be Another side to this story.

And on the other side here, we have the Docetics, whom we've already met in the first century.

And if you remember the Docetics, remember the word Docetism, or Docetic, comes from that Greek verb, doceo, meaning to appear or to seem.

Because ultimately what the Docetics said was that Jesus appeared to be human, or seemed to be human, but really wasn't. And you hopefully will remember that this is based on an extreme dualism, which says, you know, whatever comes from the spiritual realm is good, but whatever is of the material realm is inherently evil.

And so, therefore, the word can't become flesh because the divine cannot come in contact with real flesh.

So, ultimately, This is going to be the opposite of the Ebionites, right?

The Docetics would affirm Jesus' divinity, no problem with that, but would deny his humanity, because they couldn't agree to a Christ, a Logos, a God who becomes human.

And so, to them, he is really a phantom.

And because he's a phantom, there's no real passion of Christ, and there's no real resurrection.

For them, the resurrection is a sign of Jesus' true non-human self.

That at the resurrection, he was revealed as his true self.

What you get is, of course, both extremes denying things like the birth of Christ as presented in the Gospels.

Evianites denied the virgin birth because it was miraculous.

The docetics denied the birth because it was a birth of a human being.

Both extremes denying the resurrection, or at least the bodily resurrection as the majority of the church seems to understand it.

So what you have here with the docetics then is exactly what we've already seen in I mentioned the Johannine literature.

Remember 1 John?

Whoever says that Jesus Christ did not come in the flesh is an antichrist.

And then of course you saw it in Ignatius as well.

And so the docetics or docetism evolves now in the second century.

And I may have gone into this a little bit already, but at the risk of repeating myself, I'll say it just to make sure.

There's a reasoning here that if creation is evil, if the material world is evil, then creation is evil.

And if creation is evil, then the Creator who created it must also be evil, or at least incompetent.

And so depending on what version of the story, the Creator God of the Old Testament It's either an evil God who created the material world out of spite or mischief, or is an inept, sort of incompetent God who tried to create something good but screwed it up.

Either way, what you get then is that the Creator God of the Old Testament is not the real God, not the God that Jesus came to talk about, but is a secondary or inferior God a demigod, or a demiurge, and that the God Jesus came to talk about is the real God.

So what you have in the Old Testament and the New Testament, then, are books about two different gods.

The Old Testament is a book about a God of justice, who is mean and nasty, and the New Testament is a book about a God of love and mercy and goodness, who is the Father of Jesus.

And, ultimately, what many Docetics did, based on that, is simply reject the Old Testament out of hand, either as not worthy of anyone's attention, or as completely fictitious, and deny the reality of any kind of judgment or law or whatever.

In fact, ironically, again, there are two possible responses to Docetism.

Either one can say, that because the material world is evil, I will reject it and I'll distance myself from it and I'll live the life of an ascetic and deny myself all physical pleasures.

Or, the other option, which was probably more popular, is the one that says, you know, because there's this great disconnect between the material world and the spiritual world, I can do whatever I want with my body and it won't affect my soul.

And this is sometimes called antinomianism, which means no rules, or libertinism, or something like that.

But you get the idea.

There's two extreme responses, in terms of lifestyle, from the same assumptions.

But ultimately what you end up with is that it's a kind of a denial of any human responsibility for evil.

It's really one possible answer to the question of evil, right?

The problem with evil is, if God is great and God is good, why is there evil in the world?

Now, many people might say, well, there's evil in the world because people misuse their free will.

That's one possible answer.

God didn't create evil.

People do.

This answer says the reason there's evil in the world is because the God that created the world created evil.

It's not our fault.

It's that Old Testament Creator God's fault.

And Jesus came to tell us about the real God who's going to save us from it.

Now, the most famous docetic is a guy named Marcion.

Marcion was a teacher who came to Rome and who taught this sort of Christology and theology.

According to one story, Polycarp, the bishop Polycarp, once met Marcion, and Marcion says, you know, do you know who I am?

And Polycarp says, I know who you are.

You're the firstborn of Satan.

So anyway, that's one story.

But anyway, Marcion is probably most famous for having written a list of what books ought to be in the Bible.

A canon, a canonical list.

He wrote this list about 140 CE, and basically the list says, these are the books that you should consider authoritative, right?

Well, of course, there's no Old Testament books on his list, because he throws that out, but he greatly edited what we would consider the New Testament, too, because, you know, taking out any references to the Old Testament God as Jesus' Father, or in any way connected to Jesus, taking out all references to Jesus as any kind of fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies.

And he said, you know, Jesus isn't the Messiah promised in the Old Testament.

That whole thing is a mistake.

Of course, taking out the story of Jesus' birth because, you know, Jesus isn't human to him, so he can't be born.

For Martian, he would have used the Gospel of Luke, but it would have begun with I think it's chapter 3, beginning of chapter 3, that in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, Jesus appears on the earth as a full grown adult.

So he wasn't born as a baby or wrapped in swaddling clothes or anything like that.

Now, Marcion justified rejecting the Old Testament basically because he interpreted it literally.

And we're going to talk about this next week when we get more into early church exegesis.

If you interpret the Old Testament literally, you have all these anthropomorphisms of God, right?

Where God walks through the garden.

What, God has feet?

And things like that.

And so by interpreting the Old Testament literally, he reasons, well, if that's the kind of God that this document, that this book talks about, this God isn't worthy of our worship.

And so he rejects it.

And to whatever extent he believes in that God, He makes that God the creator of evil.

The demiurge, the good God or the bad God?

Oh, sorry, the bad one.

The demiurge, think demi, like, you know, half or less or smaller, you know.

So, yes, the demiurge would be, in Marcionite terms, the Old Testament God.

So, Marcion's followers become known as the Marcionites.

You saw that coming, right?

Now, it's interesting slash disturbing how the Docetics, and this is going to evolve into Gnosticism, you probably saw that coming too, but the Gnostics lean heavily towards a kind of anti-Semitism that, because look, if the God of the Old Testament is evil and inferior and created evil, then the people who believe in that God are going to be looked down upon.

I would argue that whatever anti-Semitism you see in the mainstream church is worse within the Docetics and the Gnostics.

But keep in mind that right around this time, in 135 CE, was the last Jewish revolt in which Jerusalem was sacked again.

The Romans literally kicked all the Jews out of Jerusalem and turned Jerusalem into a pagan city.

What's going on there within the Roman Empire is that Jews are coming to be seen by some Romans as rebellious and seditious.

A lot of the anti-Semitism that you see in the early church comes from a desire to distance the church from Judaism.

Even though Christianity has come out of Judaism, now the Christians have a problem because they're trying to argue that Christianity is good for the empire, but the empire has just gone through these Jewish revolts and so it's a real dicey problem.

So part of, you know, Marcion's rejection of the Old Testament might have something to do with that as well.

Just worth keeping that in mind.

Now, in 144, he was excommunicated by the bishop of Rome and started a separate movement, like created his own school, kind of like a philosophical school, which eventually became a separate group.

The Marcionites were ascetic, so that means they did not marry or have children.

So, you know, arguably that could be one of the reasons why they died out eventually, but they stuck around for a while.

They also accepted certain aspects of philosophy that put them at odds with Christianity in general, like they believed in reincarnation.

They seem to have used the water instead of wine in the Eucharist, again, because, you know, in a docetic sense, Jesus had no blood, so why have a symbolic blood?

And so again, you notice how it's interesting that both extremes, if they had a Eucharist at all, tended toward this Aquarianism where they use the water instead of the wine.

Now the Marcionites may also have had or continue to have women in leadership in ways that the mainstream church was no longer doing.

And so apparently the Marcionites may have allowed women to preside over baptism.

Now that's, you know, you might think that's good, but it's actually going to work against that in the mainstream church because within the mainstream then people are going to say, well we don't do that because that's what the heretics do.

So it becomes problematic either way.

But that may have been going on.

But the Marcionites continued as a separate sect, at least for another century.

Now, what I want to point out though is Marcion was not a Gnostic.

Some textbooks will tell you that Marcion was a Gnostic, but he was not, and here's why.

Gnosticism evolved out of Gnosticism.

But Gnosticism is named after this Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge, In fact, you can see in Greece the GN with the silent G becomes the KN in English with the silent K, right?

So Gnosis is knowledge.

And the hallmark of Gnosticism is a belief in secret knowledge.

And Marcion doesn't seem to have had that.

So he's Docetic, but he's not really Gnostic.

And in general, in general, All Gnostics are Docetic, but not all Docetics are Gnostic.

You know what I'm saying?

So Gnosticism sort of evolves out of Docetism, but not in the sense that Docetism turns into Gnosticism, because even when you have Gnostics around, you've still got Docetics around who are not Gnostic.

Now, I know that's very complicated.

You don't need to worry too much about all the minute details of this.

I'm going to give you as much detail as I think I want to, and then when it comes time to write your papers, you'll put it together and make sense of it at that time.

The good news is, those papers are all open book, open note essays, so you're not going to be tested on this with any kind of memorization thing.

But basically, if you think about it, you see this word, syncretism?

I may have talked about this.

Syncretism, in the contemporary world, sometimes it's used in a different sense.

But when we talk about it in the early church, what we mean by syncretism is the Adding together of elements of different systems of belief or faiths or religions to create something new.

If you want to think about it as a sort of salad bar method of religion, go ahead.

The idea is that you pick what you want and leave the rest behind.

In fact, in a lot of cases, one of the critiques of syncretism is that if Each individual gets to make those choices, then every individual is his or her own religion and ultimately his or her own god because each person puts him or herself as the higher power or gets to choose what's in and what's out.

The point I'm making here though is this, that Docetism goes through a syncretism which incorporates elements of philosophy and Greco-Roman mythology, and that's how you get Gnosticism.

So in a sense, you've got this sort of equation.

Docetism plus syncretism equals Gnosticism.

And that's how Gnosticism evolves.

And pretty much everything that we've talked about in terms of Docetism is part of Gnosticism, but Gnosticism takes the whole thing to the next level.

If the Old Testament God is the evil or incompetent creator of evil and the evil material world, then in one sense, Humans are also created by that God.

So we are, in a sense, the creation of this incompetent or evil Old Testament God.

But in another sense, we're also the victims of that God.

And so now what we need is to be rescued from that God.

We need to be rescued from our own Creator.

And the Gnostics would point to the story of the flood as an example of just how evil this Old Testament God is, trying to kill all the people he created, But then the New Testament God swoops in and saves a bunch with the Ark.

See, that's kind of how they would interpret that.

So, for the Gnostics then, the way to honor the real God, the Father of Jesus Christ, is by opposing the Old Testament God.

And so it becomes a battle between these two gods.

And actually, because of the element of syncretism, depending on which variation of Gnosticism you're looking at, There can be many, many gods or many, many divine angelic beings because, as I said, the Sagratism incorporates Greco-Roman mythologies as well as all kinds of other things like philosophy, astrology, numerology, magic, all of this stuff.

Hippolytus, whom you will read in a week or two, Hippolytus It refers to the Gnostics as like cobblers patching something together out of pieces.

So that's the image there.

What that means then is that there is no such thing as Gnosticism.

There are just many variations of Gnosticism, or many Gnosticisms, many Gnostic sects.

Again, don't think of Gnosticism as one thing, or as a group of people, and they all agreed on stuff, and there was the first Gnostic church on the corner, and they all met together.

It wasn't like that at all.

You have different Gnostic teachers.

There's another handout, which I actually put it on the syllabus for next week, but you can look at it this week.

It's called the Gnostic Family Tree.

Most of that comes from Irenaeus, and it just sort of shows You'll never be tested on that, just for fun.

But it shows how the different Gnostic groups or teachers are said to have been influenced by prior ones.

But it just shows you how diverse Gnosticism was.

There's no institutional unity within Gnosticism.

There's no connectionalism, nothing like that.

They're Gnostic teachers who gain followers like they're running a philosophical school, and that's about it.

But the thing that they seem to have in common is this idea of secret knowledge.

It's a salvation by knowledge.

And the idea is that Jesus, when he was on the earth, had his disciples and had crowds gather.

He would preach to them and give them nice little platitudes to make them happy.

And then after hours, He would take aside his favorite disciples, you know, depending on which Gnostic teacher you're listening to, it could be Thomas or Matthias or whoever, and whisper in their ears the real deal, the secret knowledge, that they then pass down to their disciples who, you know, the Gnostics claim to be.

Now, the problem is that, you know, I know your next question is going to be, well, what is this secret knowledge?

Tell us, won't you?

I don't know, because nobody wrote it down.

In the Gospel of Thomas, My favorite passage there is where Thomas is off talking to Jesus, and he comes back to the other disciples, and they say, tell us, what did he tell you?

And basically Thomas says, well, I can tell you, but then I have to kill you.

He doesn't say it in those words, but it's something to the effect that, you know, if I told you, you'd try to stone me, but then the rocks would blow your heads off or something.

I don't remember exactly, but you get the idea.

They never wrote it down.

Now, I have a guess.

If I had to guess what the secret knowledge is, it probably has something to do with a couple of things.

First of all, the concept of the divine spark.

We see this in some of what Irenaeus and Hippolytus tell us about what the Gnostics believed.

But it boils down to this.

We are all divine sparks trapped in material bodies.

And the fact that we're trapped in a body is kind of a punishment.

We're stuck in this fleshy prison.

And our goal is to escape from it.

But ultimately, if you imagine a bonfire, you know how you make a bonfire outside, and little sparks will fly off of it, and then as they cool, they stop glowing, but they fall to the ground?

Well, imagine God is this cosmic bonfire, and you were once one of those little sparks that flew off of it, but then you cooled off, and you fell, and you landed in the material realm.

And now you're stuck in a body.

But your goal is to get back to the divine bonfire.

And depending on which Gnostic system you're talking about, some of them, the more advanced ones, had this idea that there were levels of the heavens.

And eventually you get to where, you know, there's three, then there's seven, then there's ten, then there's twelve.

Eventually you get to 365 levels of heaven.

Each one created by one of 365 angelic beings.

Christ being one of those angelic beings.

And the idea is that when you die, you want to ascend through the levels back to the highest heaven and reunite with the divine bonfire.

But to do that, you need to know the secret passwords to get past the divine angelic gatekeepers.

And my guess is, and this is just completely an educated guess, But my guess is that the passwords are the names of those angels, because in the Gnostic systems they seem to have gone to great lengths to name all of these divine or angelic beings.

And usually they're named for theological or philosophical concepts, or really what they are is sort of divinized, personified theological or philosophical concepts.

Like, you know, one is called mind, one is called truth, one is called Spirit, one is called Christ, one is called Wisdom.

You get what I'm saying, right?

So, in other words, if you know their name, because in the ancient world, knowing someone's name sort of gives you some kind of power over them.

So, if you know the names, then you can ascend back to the highest level.

All of this is just a guess.

But the point is that this is a salvation by knowledge.

You will be saved if you know the right stuff.

a that you're a divine spark, so knowing about your own divinity, and b these passwords or whatever they are.

What this leads to is, ultimately it leads to a kind of a spiritual caste system where a lot of the Gnostics believed that they were among the spiritual elite and others were not.

They were destined to return to the highest heaven And others were not.

And so the Gnostics, they didn't call themselves Gnostics.

Some of them called themselves simply spirituals.

They were the spirituals.

And the other people were the carnals, or whatever.

And so they, you know, a lot of these Gnostics, they saw themselves as the highest illuminated spiritual elite, and then they saw the other non-Gnostic Christians as sort of a middle level, and everyone else was, you know, going to be just stuck in this reincarnation, go around for eternity, and that's all they could ever hope for.

And so, you know, so ultimately, the spiritual then would claim to already be living the resurrected life.

This is this idea of the realized eschatology, and we saw in 2 Timothy chapter 2, where the author of that letter actually names two people who were teaching this.

And I can't remember their names, but it's 2 Timothy 2, 17 and 18. Alright, now, let me stop there for a second and see if there are any questions about Docetism, the Marcionites, or Gnosticism so far.

Alright.

You still with me?

Alright.

Well, just like there were two types of Evianites, there's two types of Gnostics.

And you've got a handout somewhere in your stuff.

The name of the handout is Christology Continuum.

It kind of tries to show in a chart form some of the nuances here.

But again, this is more for information.

I don't necessarily expect you to go into this kind of detail.

But there were a couple types of Gnostics when it came to Christology.

In other words, when it came to what they thought about Christ.

So, for example, One type would be the pure docetics.

To have a docetic Christology would be to believe that Jesus was just a phantom.

Let me do this.

So, a docetic Christology, Jesus is a phantom, which means he is not tangible at all.

If you tried to touch him, you couldn't. He's just a ghost.

But, there was another branch of Gnostics that saw passages in the Canonical Gospels about Jesus being touched and eating and people touching and such.

So, they wanted to, or maybe felt compelled to give Jesus some sort of tangibility.

Now, I don't have a good name for this other than this is just sort of a hybrid Christology.

But the hybrid Christology is still Docetic, but in this way of looking at Jesus, Jesus is tangible.

You could touch him.

He could eat.

He didn't have to go to the bathroom, though.

And so, he's still not really human, but in some way tangible.

They would talk about Jesus having a luminous body, or an ethereal body.

So, still not really human.

The interesting thing about this is that Depending on which one of these Christologies people gravitated toward would sort of determine what their lifestyle choice was going to be.

In other words, a docetic Christology leads to asceticism.

Whereas a hybrid Christology leads to a libertine lifestyle.

Does that make sense?

So if you had a docetic Christology, you're probably going to be ascetic, meaning deny yourself physical pleasure.

If you have a hybrid Christology, you're probably going to end up as libertine, which is, what I do with my body won't affect my soul.

And again, on the handout called Gnostic Family Tree, I indicate which groups had which kind of Christology.

Now, with the hybrid Christology, if Jesus is tangible, he has a luminous or an ethereal body of some kind, Then there is an allowance for some sort of crucifixion.

Except in some versions of this, what ends up happening is, Jesus is carrying the cross, and then you remember Simon of Cyrene is conscripted to carry the cross, and so the stories, the Gnostic stories, have Jesus miraculously switching forms with Simon, So that Simon gets crucified instead of Jesus, and Jesus stands there laughing, like it's a whole big joke.

It's sort of like the ending of Life of Brian, actually.

Anyway, except 2,000 years earlier.

And so, again, you know, it's all a way of sort of mocking the mainstream church's understanding of Jesus as human, and as having a human, a real death.

And so the Gnostics would say, you know, martyrs are fools because they're not following the footsteps of Jesus, they're following the footsteps of Simon of Cyrene.

And they just don't know it.

The most famous Gnostic teacher, and there's a lot of them, so we're not going to go into too much detail here, but the most famous Gnostic teacher is a guy named Valentinus.

Also came to Rome and taught in Rome because that was the thing to do.

If you wanted to be a teacher and gain followers, you went to Rome.

So the middle of the second century, Valentinus was in Rome.

And by this time, Gnosticism is splitting from the church.

It's moving out of the church.

So it's becoming no longer a heresy within the church, but it's becoming a completely separate religion.

And when that happens, The Gnostics start to write their own documents, like their own Gospels.

And in this case, we do have some of these documents.

You can read them, they're on the internet, they're collected in books.

The only problem is that, in most cases, the versions that we have of their documents are from later, from like the 4th century, so they've got layers of edits on them.

So we really don't know what it would have said in the 2nd century.

So if you read them, just keep that in mind.

But for example, in the Gospel of Thomas, Which is a Gnostic Gospel.

You can see already a rivalry between the mainstream bishops and the Gnostic leaders.

Because in the Gospel of Thomas, Thomas is held up as the apostle, and Peter and the others are like, you know, secondary.

And there's even sort of a dig at, you know, your leaders are no good.

And so, we can already see that.

Which means, and we'll talk about this a little bit more next week, it means that when the church was figuring out what documents ought to be in the canon, they never considered the Gnostic Gospels.

If anybody tells you that the Gnostic Gospels almost made it in the Bible, or that they're somehow the lost books of the Bible, or that the church somehow scandalously excluded these from the Bible, none of that's true.

The Gnostic Gospels were written specifically because the Gnostics were leaving, and they were written to differentiate themselves from the mainstream church.

And so, those documents were never considered for inclusion in the scriptures.

Yes?

I thought the Gospel of Thomas wasn't found until pretty recently.

If I remember right, the Gospel of Thomas is part of the so-called Nag Hammadi collection that was found in Egypt In the 20th century it was found.

I think it was before I was born.

Those documents are really from the 4th century.

So the version of that that we have is not the original version.

It would have had edits and layers of additional material.

We assume they're Gnostic.

We're not as positive as we are as far as Paul's letters or the early church letters.

Well, I mean, yeah, that's a good question.

In some cases, depending on the document, in some cases, we know this is Gnostic.

In fact, there's one called the Gospel of Truth, which we think may have even been written by Valentinus himself.

In other cases, it's like, well, we don't know where this comes from, but when you read it, it sounds Gnostic, sounds docetic, you know, so we make an assumption based on the content.

So, that's a good question.

Okay, were there other questions?

So, for the Gnostic then, since there is no real human responsibility for evil, you're not saved from sin, you're saved from ignorance.

So, you think that you're that you're meant to be in that physical form, then you're just not enlightened and you need to know about your true divinity, etc. And so therefore there's no atonement.

The cross is either a joke or it's an object lesson by Jesus to show us how to reject the flesh and strip off our flesh, etc. What really brings us close to God is knowledge.

Specifically, knowledge of our own divinity, in some cases.

And the way we get that knowledge is because the Savior, the Redeemer, who is Christ, brings that secret knowledge to help us ascend to the highest heaven.

Keep in mind, everything I'm saying here is kind of a generalization, because remember, no two Gnostics would necessarily agree on everything.

So, I'm kind of combining things into a What seems like a coherent story, but it wasn't that coherent.

So, if it's true, then, that there's nothing new under the sun, what or who would be the modern versions of Docetism or Gnosticism?

Anyone want to take a guess at this?

I think Hilarious Mormonism.

Hold that thought.

And actually, I'll sort of give it away a little bit now.

Mormons are more on this side of the board.

But hold that thought for the future.

Any other ideas?

I mean, think in terms of the syncretism, especially.

I mean, If I said to you, new age, what does that mean to you?

I mean, it's maybe not, what's that?

Yes, Christian science.

I would say that would fall in that camp.

The concept of the new age movement really comes from a few decades ago, I suppose, but it's, you know, the Gnostics were really the sort of new agers of the ancient world, and the new age movement is Modern Gnosticism.

In fact, when the New Age movement had a magazine, it was called Gnosis.

But of course, like Gnosticism, there was no institutional connection or anything to the New Age movement.

Erin, were you going to throw something out there?

Oh, no, I was just kind of...

You know, I think the New Age spiritual, like Eckhart Tolle, or people like that.

Right, right.

Any sort of mind over matter, or anyone who tells you that you're a divine spark...

This sort of thing, this idea that what you really need is to know yourself.

In fact, one of the Gnostic documents is called Know Yourself.

Anything where you sort of get to choose and take the role of your own higher power in terms of picking and choosing different aspects.

Anything else?

Well, what about Scientology?

Things like that.

Scientology is interesting because if you join, you sort of have to move up through the ranks to learn the different information.

And what I want you to see here is that, at its essence, Gnosticism says, join us and we'll tell you what we believe.

And everybody else says, here's what we believe, you decide if you want to join us.

See the difference?

Tertullian, whom you'll read later, criticized Gnosticism and said the attraction of Gnosticism was that you could call yourself a seeker and you'd never have to find anything.

Now, does that sound familiar?

Does that sound like anything going on today?

So, just to wrap up here, Notice how, in terms of both extremes, you have the Ebionites on one side, you have the Gnostics, Docetics, and Marcionites on the other side.

In both extremes, Jesus is not unique.

To the Ebionites, he's not divine and neither are we.

To the Gnostics, he's divine and so are we.

So, we have this sort of mainstream church that's saying, you know, Yeah, he's one of us, but he's also unique among us.

And so there's this paradox there.

Both extremes rejected the concept of a bodily resurrection.

Both extremes, if they had a Eucharist, rejected the use of wine in the Eucharist.

Both extremes could lend themselves or end up with an ascetic lifestyle, although the Gnostics had their other option as well.

One of the things you're going to read is the Helen Reed book about the Apocryphal Acts documents.

And I don't know how much time we're going to have to talk about that in class, but that's an excellent book.

And, you know, one of the things you're going to notice is that we can't quite pinpoint who wrote those documents or where they come from.

But the Apocryphal Acts, like the Acts of Paul and the Sacrileges, have affinities With some of these ascetic groups, like some of the Gnostics and also the Ebionites, because in those documents, the apostles in those documents are made to preach what they call the gospel of self-control, as if the way to be saved is by being celibate, so that somehow celibacy is the calling of all Christians.

So again, notice how we have these documents that come from the fringes of the church, and we're not quite sure which side in some cases, but look for that, and that's an excellent book.

What else do I want to say before we quit here?

Yeah, I think I pretty much covered everything.

So any last minute questions before we take a break?

Okay, go ahead and stop the camera.