Overview

In the Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels sets out to accomplish several things: to give a general overview of the movement, to advance an argument about the diversity of early Christian thought, and to show the ecclesiastical and political ramifications of gnostic versus orthodox belief.

An overview of gnosticism is not easy since it was not a unified movement by any means. Pagels finds broad areas of agreement, however, that could be said to characterize the majority of gnostic sects. These characteristics are as follows:

Belief in texts or traditions that offer secret knowledge about Jesus Christ and/or reality

Some of this has echoes in the regular books of the New Testament such as Matthew 13:11-13 when “[Jesus] answered and said to them,“Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given…Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.” Or consider Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:4 who describes a vision of a “third heaven” where one “heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”

A focus on inward devotion rather than outward

Pagels calls it “a philosophy of pessimism about the world combined with an attempt at self-transcendence” (p.xxx), which, to be fair, could describe many religions. The gnostics, however, were very much on the individualistic side of the scale when it came to personal rather than ecclesiastic salvation. Some of their most extreme, yet appealing, doctrine is found here. Consider this from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, attributed to Jesus speaking to Thomas: “For whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but whoever has known himself has simultaneously achieved knowledge about the depth of all things” (as quoted in Pagels, p.18).

Creative license

Orthodox critiques of gnosticism often centered on gnostic tendency to, in the words of the early Christian Iraneus, “put forth their own compositions” or “generate something new every day” (as quoted in Pagels, p.18-19). Gnostic authors appear to often have invented fictitious dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in order to convey a deeper spiritual truth. Although not a point raised in Pagels, the dialogues in gnosticism were surely influenced by the Platonic dialogues. Plato used real historical characters (like Socrates) in literary dialogues in order to teach philosophical points, much like the gnostics used Jesus and his disciples. They saw no division between historical truth and spiritual truth, and indeed the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth was largely ignored by gnostic authors. They tended to focus on visions and teachings of Jesus after shedding his mortal body.

Gnostic books, then, should be read a little differently than the New Testament gospels. Those purport to be an accurate description of the events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth; such a description would not interest gnostic authors much. Much of their writing is descriptions of visions that convey secret knowledge or literary dialogues that teach spiritual truth and which can be seen as evidence of the divine creative process; “the harmony that can be seen in creation…and whatever they recognize themselves as experiencing, to the divine Word. On this basis, like artists, they express their own insight–their own gnosis–by creating new myths, poems, rituals, dialogues with Christ, revelations, and accounts of their visions” (p.19-20). Thus, they were less interested in reading about accounts of the physical Christ than they were in directly experiencing God themselves. Why rely on the testimony of strangers when you can experience the truth for yourselves? Or as one gnostic put it “at first, people believe because of the testimony of others […] but then they come to believe from [experiencing] the truth itself” (p.20).

Chapter Summaries

Introduction

The Nag Hammadi has a rather exciting discovery story. Some Egyptian peasants were digging and hit an earthenware jar. They were reluctant to open it lest it contain a jinn, but thinking that it also might contain money, eventually they did smash it only to discover (with disappointment) some papyrus scrolls inside. They went home and dumped the papyrus on a pile of straw next to the oven, where (both tragically and incredibly), they later admitted that much of the papyrus was used to kindle fire. How many other ancient discoveries have met a similar fate? The only reason we have any of them is that the peasants later murdered someone and, anticipating a visit from the police, thought it best that the surviving papyrus go somewhere else in case the police asked about it. They gave it to a priest, who recognizing that it was probably ancient and thus valuable, started trying to find a buyer on the black market for antiquities. The chain of ownership passed from a one-eyed bandit to antiquities smugglers. Nobody knew quite what they were until a scholar who knew Coptic managed to have a look and was startled to read the first line “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down”; realizing that it was ancient scripture, and more particularly the gnostic Gospels which we have a lot of writing from ancient orthodox Christians denouncing, but not the texts themselves. The scrolls buried in the jar were fifty-two books of these lost gospels. When the Egyptian government learnt their worth they confiscated them and put them in the Coptic museum in Cairo, although some were smuggled out of the country too. A discovery story fit for a movie.

The Nag Hammadi was such a valuable discovery because virtually all that was known about the gnostic gospels previously came from orthodox Christian rebuttals against them, rather than the actual works themselves. In fact, only in 1896 was the first of the gnostic Gospels found by an Egyptology in Cairo, and this was only a single book, let alone fifty-two. What the gnostic gospels also show is that the early Christian movement was much more fragmented than previous commentators had imagined; what we call mainstream Christianity chose to use only a few of many potential sources of authority (p.xxxv). And the reason for selecting some sources over others is not typically clear.

Chapter 1: Figurative Resurrection

A common belief among gnostic Christians which differentiated them from their orthodox peers was that the resurrection of Christ should be understood symbolically. This fits in with their general emphasis of spirit over body. It also, claims Pagels, fits into the political or ecclesiastical struggle within Christianity. If Christ rose bodily from the dead and personally directed Peter (called “the First Witness of the Resurrection” in the Catholic Church), that gave stronger authority to Peter and his successors. The Apostles’ authority was derived in part form being literal witnesses of his resurrection. If, however, the resurrection was merely Christ’s spirit living on, the question of authority over the church was less definitive.

Chapter 2: The Demiurge

Many gnostics appeared to follow the logic of the early Christian thinker Marcion. Marcion, noting the difference between the vengeful, justice-seeking God of the Old Testament, and the loving, forgiving God of the New Testament, concluded that they must be different gods.¹ Similarly, many gnostics separated God from the creator of this world, termed the demiurge (a term borrowed from Greek philosophy, where the problem of evil was sometimes resolved by suggesting that a flawed creator god (not THE GOD) created the world and thus introduced evil). When Old Testament sources talk of God saying things like “I am God, there is none apart from me” or “I am a jealous God”, gnostic authors see this as evidence of the demiurge striving to convince human beings that he is alone in the universe, and he alone is God. As the Secret Book of John relates “By announcing this he indicated…that another God does exist; for if there were no other one, of whom would he be jealous?” (as quoted on p.29). Likewise, they interpret the command in Genesis to Adam to avoid eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge as further evidence of the demiurge’s jealous protection of his power. Instead, gnosis involves the realization that the demiurge is not the preeminent power in the universe, there someone or something beyond the creator. In a ritual called apolytrosis (release) the gnostic candidate would declare his independence from the demiurge, declaring (see p.37):

“I am a son from the Father–the Father who is pre-existent […] I derive being from Him who is preexistent, and I come again to my own place whence I came forth.”

Chapter 3: The Gender of God

While Orthodox Christians tend to describe God in typically masculine terms, gnostics often spoke of God as a dyad, both masculine and feminine, or father and mother. For example, one gnostic prayer began by invoking Heavenly Parents:“From Thee, Father, and through Thee, Mother” (p.49). And when the Old Testament spoke of “let us make man in our image…male and female”, some gnostic commentators concluded that God must be both male and female (p.49-50). There were many different gnostic interpretations of what this might look like in practice. For example, in the gnostic text The Great Announcement, the origin of the universe is described thusly: first appeared “a great power, the Mind of the Universe, which manages all things, and is a male […] the other […] a great Intelligence [..] is a female which produces all things” (p.50-51). Another interpretation was that the female power of God was the Holy Spirit (p.51-52). They used the scriptural suggestion of Jesus being conceived by the Holy Spirit despite being the Son of God as evidence (p.53). Another conception was the female power as the “Wisdom” frequently mentioned in the Bible (p.53). For example, when Proverbs talks about “God made the world in Wisdom” while using a feminine term for Wisdom, they thought that perhaps God’s creation was “conceived” as a union between masculine power and feminine wisdom (p.54).

Chapter 4: Passion and Persecution

In a point of radical departure from orthodox Christians, many gnostics (following a pattern that would be used later by Muslims) rejected the necessity of Christ’s Passion. The Apocalypse of Peter, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, and the Acts of John, all give versions of the Passion that contain Jesus being swapped out with a sinner who is crucified in his stead (p.72-73).

As a natural outcome of disbelieving Christ’s own suffering, gnostics were not bound, like orthodox Christians, to seek out martyrdom as a type or echo of Christ’s suffering (p.76-77).

Chapter 5: Contested Authority

I have been using the word “orthodox” to separate mainstream Christianity from gnostic Christianity, but that word has the connotation of correctness. It is a connotation which the gnostics would reject. They spurned the authority of the orthodox’s “true church” as much as the orthodox spurned them as heretics. Gnostic writing is full of denunciations of the mainstream Christians:

“Those who think they are advancing the name of Christ [but] they [are] unknowingly empty, not knowing who they are…[or] the truth of their freedom” (p.102-103).

“They will boast that the mystery of the truth belongs to them alone” (p.103).

Others called the Catholic church an imitation church, a counterfeit of true Christianity.

Chapter 6: Self-knowledge

A key commonality in gnostic thought is looking inward for truth, or in searching one’s own psyche for manifestations of the divine. Self-knowledge is the highest form of knowledge. Lacking this, a person spends their whole life being driven by phenomena they don’t understand. For the gnostics, ignorance is the primal state of humanity on Earth, and gnosis is the process of learning what is illusion and what is real, particularly in regard to one’s own divine potential. The psyche bears within itself the potential for liberation or slavery, and gnosticism required intense meditation designed to achieve self-discovery. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells his disciples that the Kingdom of God can only be found in this state of self-discovery or transformed consciousness: “the Kingdom is inside of you…When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father.” And in the Gospel of Philip, we are told that whoever achieves gnosis is “no longer a Christian, but a Christ.” Likewise, in the Gospel of Truth, each person is instructed to receive “his own name” which represents their true identity as “sons of interior knowledge.”

Consider also these gnostic passages:

“When he comes to have knowledge, his ignorance vanishes…in fulfillment.”

“If one does not [understand] how the fire came to be, he will burn in it, because he does not know his root…if one does not understand how the wind that blows came to be, he will run with it. If one does not understand how the body that he wears came to be, he will perish with it…Whoever does not understand how he came will not understand how we will go.”

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

“Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as on a straight road…open the door for yourself that you may know what is.”

“[Having] seen the light that [surrounded] me and the good that was within me, I became divine” (p.138).

Although there is little material preserved in terms of how this self-knowledge was achieved, a couple of texts such as Zostrianos and Allogenes do provide evidence of meditative exercises partnered with ascetic practices as precursors to the necessary visions and experiences (p.135-136).

Points of Interest for Latter-day Saints

Pagels is not writing for a Latter-day Saint audience, but there is much in her portrayal of gnosticism that should interest Latter-day Saints, especially points of similarity in doctrine and practices. Of course, there are far more differences than similarities, but nevertheless, there are enough similarities to have attracted a significant amount of attention from Latter-day Saint scholars on the topic. See for example: Gnosticsm Reformed in Dialogue and The Nag Hammadi Library: A Mormon Perspective from the BYU Religious Studies Center, among others. I highlight a few points of commonality from the Gnostic Gospels that I found interesting below.

A division of the heavens

The early Christian critic Tertullian ridiculed gnostics for their elaborate cosmologies with multi-tiered heavens: “with room piled on room, and assigned to each god by just as many stairways as there were heresies: The universe has been turned into rooms for rent!” Other gnostic authors describe different heavens with passwords required for each (p.xxxii). A more extreme version of Kingdoms of Glory perhaps.

Secret or sacred initiations

Latter-day Saints are in many ways the modern successors to this gnostic tradition of believing in ancient rites or ceremonies which teach self-knowledge. When gnostic authors have Jesus “offer to teach them the secrets of the holy plan of the universe and its destiny” (p.16), that does not sound too dissimilar from Latter-day Saint Temple worship. I am referring to the style of worship rather than the content here, although some of the content certainly fits. And just as modern Christians thoroughly reject Latter-day Saint Temple ceremonies as not appearing in the New Testament in any clearly recognizable form, early Orthodox Christians abhorred gnostic traditions for the same reasons: the church father Ienaeus says “for what they have published […] is totally unlike what has been handed down to us from the apostles: (p.17).

Human divinity

Orthodox Christians typically have a fairly sharp delineation between ourselves and Christ. Many gnostics, on the other hand, took a position more like a Latter-day Saint one, where Christ is literally our brother and we are all joint-heirs with him under God. At least that is one interpretation of Latter-day Saint thought, in practice I have observed that Christ is often viewed the same as he is in other faiths. The more radical one I just articulated, however, would fit in line with Pagels’s description here of gnostic literature where “you, the reader, are Jesus’ twin brother. Whoever comes to understand these books discovers…that Jesus is his twin” (p.18).

Indeed, the self-knowledge that gnostics sought was so important because it was self-knowledge of one’s own divinity. I mentioned this quote earlier, but consider again this passage from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, attributed to Jesus speaking to Thomas: “For whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but whoever has known himself has simultaneously achieved knowledge about the depth of all things” (as quoted in Pagels, p.18).

Also, Orthodox Christians view human beings as the creation of God, who is an uncreated being. Some gnostics disagreed, as described in the On the Origin of the World text: “I am God, and no other one exists except me. But when he said these things, he sinned against all of the immortal ones…you err, blind god. An enlightened, immortal humanity exists before you!” (as quoted in Pagels, p.29). Similarly, Latter-day Saint theology has comparable teachings in its catechism. In Doctrine & Covenants 93:29 it says that “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” And Joseph Smith declared that “the Spirit of Man is not a created being; it existed from Eternity and will exist to eternity. Anything created cannot be eternal, and earth, water, etc.—all these had their existence in an elementary state from Eternity” (Ehat & Cook, 1980). Elsewhere Joseph Smith is quoted as saying:

“We say that God himself is a self-existing God; who told you so? it is correct enough but how did it get into your heads? Who told you that man did not exist in like manner upon the same principles? The mind of man is as immortal as God himself. . . . Is it logic to say that a spirit is immortal, and yet have a beginning? Because if a spirit have a beginning it will have an end . . . intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle, it is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it. . . . The first principles of man are self-existent with God” (as quoted in Top, 2016).

And in yet another sermon he says: “I am dwelling on the immutability of the spirit of man…All men say God created it in the beginning. The very idea lessens man in my estimation; I do not believe the doctrine, I know better. Hear it all ye ends of the world, for God has told me so” (as quoted in Top, 2016).

Plurality of gods

By separating God from the creator god, gnostics were opening their doctrine to the idea of, if not multiple Gods, multiple divine beings or “immortal ones.”

God the Mother

Just as the gnostics acknowledged either a female side to God or sometimes a separate female deity, Latter-day Saints believe in a Heavenly Mother, a god in her own right.

Historicity

Of course, the chief point of interest for many Latter-day Saints is the fact that before 1945 we knew almost nothing about gnosticism since the Nag Hammadi texts had not been discovered, which makes it astounding that so much gnostic thought (and more pointedly, practice of worship) is found in Latter-day Saint religion. Latter-day Saints will take that as evidence of Joseph Smith’s prophethood since he would not have had access to these texts.

I will not speculate on that given my opinion that trying to prove or disprove religious truth through an appeal to historicity is a fruitless task. Religious truth, in my opinion, is best taken on faith and experience, not rational argument. I see it as an alternative path to knowledge about oneself and the universe; perhaps a division similar to the one described by Aristotle when he compares poetry and history. Poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular. There may not have been a historical Odysseus, but the facts of his life are irrelevant to the more profound truth about the human condition revealed in his story. Religion functions in the same way. Indeed, early Christians’ distinction between dogma and kerygma tap into this phenomenon (see Armstrong, 1993, p.37 & 114 for more discussion on this). Kerygma was the public teaching of scripture, an intellectual exercise. Dogma was the deeper meaning of biblical truth which could only be apprehended through religious experience and expressed in symbols, an acknowledgement that much religious truth is incapable of being defined logically but must be experienced. And that experience is touching some ultimate reality that is beyond expression in speech or reason. One can no more prove or disprove such religious truths logically than one can teach about love intellectually. You’ll feel love or you won’t; it would be impossible to describe accurately to one who has never felt it. So, it strikes me that the stories and symbols and characters can tell us something deeper about ourselves even if rational science proves scriptural facts “wrong”. If one could somehow prove that a person named Job never walked the earth, for example, it would be immaterial to the profound truths the story of Job teaches about the human condition and our relationship to God. Furthermore, as intimated previously, much religious truth is experiential only; or rather, it needs to be experienced through commitment to it. One cannot understand the truth of the love of God if one has not experienced it. St. Anselm of Canterbury expressed this beautifully when he wrote:

“I yearn to understand some measure of thy truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to have faith but I have faith in order to understand. For I believe even this: I shall not understand unless I have faith.”

That is not to say that it is inappropriate to bring intellectualism to one’s faith; I do so constantly myself, but I do not try to prove or disprove that faith by an appeal to intellectualism or by a strictly rational method.

Long tangent aside, I do think gnostic thought should be of interest to a Latter-day Saint audience. Many similarities in ideas and practice (although more dissonance than similarity to be sure) but more so the feeling of being a group of Christians apart from orthodox Christianity. A group of Christians that the majority of orthodox Christians consider dangerous deviants from the main body of Christ; a group claiming to possess secret or sacred knowledge revealed by initiation that one cannot find in orthodox Christianity.

Works Cited

Armstrong, K. (1993). A history of God: The 4000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ballentine.

Ehat, A.F. & Cook, L.W. (1980). The Words of Joseph Smith. Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. 

Kirk, G.S. & Raven, J.E. (1957). The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge University Press.

Pagels, E. (1979). The Gnostic Gospels. Random House. New York.

Top, B.L. (2016). “The First Principles of Man Are Self-Existent with God” The Immortality of the Soul in Mormon Theology. From Let Us Reason Together Essays in Honor of the Life’s Work of Robert L. Millet. BYU Religious Studies Center. https://rsc.byu.edu/book/let-us-reason-together