The Gnostic Gospels

Listed below are excerpts Tim found to be especially interesting.

Introduction:

…the Gospel According to Thomas; … itself as a secret gospel. …

Jesus said, “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.”
Page xv

Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from “the many” who constitute what, in the second century, came to be called the “catholic church.”  These Christians are now called Gnostics, from the Greek word gnosis, usually translated as “knowledge.”  For as those who claim to know nothing about ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, “not-knowing”), … As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself.Page xix

…But every one of these – the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure – emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century….
Yes, by A.D. 200, the situation had changed.  Christianity had become an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, who understood themselves to be the guardians of the only “true faith.”…  Members of this church alone are orthodox (literally, “straight-thinking”) Christians.  And, he claimed, this church must be catholic – that is, universal. … When the orthodox gained military support, sometime after the Emperor Constantine became Christian in the fourth century, the penalty for heresy escalated.
Page xxiii

Bauer’s critics, notably the British scholars H.E.W. Turner and C. H. Roberts, have criticized him for oversimplifying the situation and for overlooking evidence that did not fit his theory.  Certainly Bauer’s suggestion that, in certain Christian groups, those later called “heretics” formed the majority, goes beyond even the gnostics’ own claims; they typically characterized themselves as “the few” in relation to “the many” (hoipolloi).  But Bauer, like Jonas, opened up new ways of thinking about gnosticism.
The discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945 initiated, as Doresse had foreseen, a whole new epoch of research.  The first and most important task was to preserve, edit, and publish the texts themselves.  An international team of scholars, including Professors A. Guillaumont and H.-CH. Puech from France, G. Zuispel from the Netherlands, W. Till from Germany, and Y. ‘Abd al Masih from Egypt, collaborated in publishing the Gospel of Thomas in 1959. 
Page xxxi

Gnostic Christians undoubtedly expressed ideas that the orthodox abhorred.  For example, some of these Gnostic texts question whether all suffering, labor, and death derive from human sin,…  Others speak of the feminine element in the divine, celebrating God as Father and Mother.  Still others suggest that Christ’s resurrection is to be understood symbolically, not literally.
Yet orthodox Christianity, as the apostolic creed defines it, contains some ideas that many of us today might find even stranger.  The creed requires, for example, that Christians confess that God is perfectly good, and still, he created a world that includes pain, injustice, and death; that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin mother; …
Page xxxv

Chapter 2/ “One God” : The Politics of Monotheism
… According to the Hypostasis of the Archons, the creator’s vain claim to hold an exclusive monopoly on divine power shows that he
is blind… (because of his) power and his ignorance (and his) arrogance he said… “It is I who am God; there is none (other apart from me).”  When he said this, he sinned against (the Entirety).  And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, “You are mistaken, Samael,” which means, “god of the blind.”…

…  he boasted continually, saying to (the angels)… “I am God, and no other one exists except me.”  But when he said these things, he sinned against all of the immortal ones… when Faith say the impiety of the chief ruler, she was angry… she said, “You err, Samael (i.e., “blind god”).  An enlightened, immortal humanity (anthropos) exists before you!”Page 29

…we can see throughout the history of Christianity how varying beliefs about the nature of God inevitably beliefs about the nature of God inevitably bear different political implications.  Martin Luther, more than 1,300 years later, felt impelled by his own religious experience and his transformed understanding of God to challenge practices endorsed by his superiors in the Catholic church, and finally to reject its entire papal and priestly system.  George Fox, the radical visionary who founded the Quaker movement, was moved by his encounter with the “inner light” to denounce the whole structure of Puritan authority – legal, governmental, and religious.  Paul Tillich proclaimed the doctrine of “God beyond God” as he criticized both Protestant and Catholic churches along with nationalistic and fascist governments.Pages 46 – 47

Chapter 3/ God the Father/God the Mother
Another gnostic writing, called the Great Announcement, quoted by Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies, explains the origin of the universe as follows:  From the power of Silence 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.”  Following the gender of the Greek words for “mind” (nous – masculine) and “intelligence” (epinoia – feminine), this author explains that these powers, joined in union, “are discovered to be duality… This is Mind in Intelligence, and these are separable from one another, and yet are one, found in a state of duality.”  The means the gnostic teacher explains, that

there is in everyone (divine power) existing in a latent condition…  This is one power divided above and below; generating itself, making itself grow, seeking itself, finding itself, being mother of itself, father of itself, sister of itself, spouse of itself, daughter of itself, son of itself – mother, father, unity, being a source of the entire circle of existence.

… Proponents of these diverse views agreed that the divine is to be understood in terms of a harmonious, dynamic relationship of opposites – a concept that may be akin to the Eastern view of yin and yang, but remains alien to orthodox Judaism and Christianity.
Page 51

… But the author  ridicules those literal – minded Christians who mistakenly refer the virgin birth to  Mary, Jesus’ mother, as though she conceived apart from Joseph: “They do not know what they are saying.  When did a woman ever conceive by a woman?”  Instead, he argues, virgin birth refers to that mysterious union of the two divine powers, the Father of All and the Holy Spirit.
… Here the Greek feminine term for “wisdom,” sophia, translates a Hebrew feminine term, hokhmah.
Pages 53 – 54

Chapter 5 Whose Church Is The “True Church”?

… catholic Christians practice baptism as an initiation rite which guarantees them “a hope of salvation,” believing that only those who receive baptism are “headed for life.”
Against such “lies” the Gnostic declares that “this, therefore, is the true testimony: when man knows himself, and God who is over the truth, he will be saved.  Only those who come to recognize that they have been living ignorance, and learn to release themselves by discovering who they are, experience enlightenment as a new life, as “the resurrection.”  Physical rituals like baptism become irrelevant, for “the baptism of truth is something else; it is by renunciation of [the] world that it is found.”
Page 111

On what counts does the Gnostic accuse these believers?  First that they “do not seek after God.”  The Gnostic understands Christ’s message not as an offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching:  “seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as god as this.”  The rational soul longs to
see with her mind, and perceive her kinsmen,
and learn about her root… in order that she
might receive what is hers…
Page 112

Chapter 6 Gnosis: Self-Knowledge as Knowledge of God

… Some who seek their own interior direction, like the radical Gnostics, reject religious institutions as a hindrance to their progress. …
… the New Testament term for sin, hamartia, comes from the sport of archery; literally, it means “missing the mark.”Page 123

New Testament sources teach that we suffer distress, mental and physical, because we fail to achieve the moral goal toward which we aim:  “all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.”…
Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering. … Both gnosticism and psychotherapy value, above all, knowledge – the self-knowledge which is insight.  They agree that, lacking this, a person experiences the sense of being driven by impulses he does not understand.
Page 124

Most people live, then, in oblivion – or, in contemporary terms in unconsciousness.  Remaining unaware of their own selves, they have “no root.”  The Gospel of Truth describes such existence as a nightmare.  Those who live in it experience “terror and confusion and instability and doubt and division,” being caught in “many illusions.”  So, according to the passage scholars call the “nightmare parable,” they lived
As if they were sunk in sleep and found
themselves in disturbing dreams.  Either
(there is) a place to which they are fleeing, or, without strength, they come (from) having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air though they do not even have wings.  Again, sometimes  (it is as) if people  were murdering them, though there is no one even pursuing them, or they themselves are killing their  neighbors, for they have been stained with their blood.  When those who are going through al these things wake up, they see nothing, they who were in the midst of these disturbances, for they as nothing.  Such is the way of those who have cast ignorance aside as sleep, leaving [its works] behind like a dream in the night… This is the way everyone has acted, as though asleep at the time when he was ignorant.  And this is the way he has come to knowledge, as if he had awakened.


Page 125


How – or where – is one to seek self-knowledge? Many gnostics share with psychotherapy a second major premise: both agree – against orthodox Christianity – that the psyche bears within itself the potential for liberation or destruction.  Few psychiatrists would disagree with the saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel  of Thomas:

“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.”

…
Such Gnostics acknowledged that pursuing gnosis engages each person in a solitary, difficult process, as one struggles against internal resistance.  They characterized this resistance to gnosis as the desire to sleep or to be drunk – that is, to remain unconscious.  So Jesus (who elsewhere says “I am the knowledge of the truth”) declares that when he came into the world

I found them all  drunk; I found none of them
thirsty.  And my soul became afflicted for the
sons of men, because they are blind in their
hearts and do not have sight; for empty they
came into this world, and empty they seek
to leave this world.  But for the moment they
are drunk.

Page 126

The Gospel of Thomas also warns that self-discovery involves inner turmoil:

Jesus said, “Let him who seeks continue seeking
until he finds.  When he finds, he will become
troubled.  When he becomes troubled, he will
be astonished, and he will rule over all things.

Page 127

… Discovering that for oneself is, apparently, the first step toward self-knowledge.  Thus, in the Gospel of Thomas, the disciples ask Jesus to tell  them what to do:

His disciples questioned him and said to
him, “Do you want us to fast? How shall we
pray? Shall we give alms? What diet shall we
observe?” Jesus said, “Do not tell lies, and do
not do what you hate…”

Page 135