The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Peter, not Paul, is the true authority for understanding the message of Jesus. Paul has corrupted the true faith based on a brief vision, which he has doubtless misconstrued. Paul is thus the enemy of the apostles, not the chief of them. He is outside the true faith, a heretic to be banned, not an apostle to be followed.

  The Pseudo-Clementines, then, especially in their older form, which came to be modified over time, appear to present a kind of Ebionite polemic against Pauline Christianity and against the proto-orthodox of the second and third centuries who continue to follow Paul in rejecting the Law of Moses. For these Ebionite Christians, the Law was given by God, and, contrary to the claims of Paul and his proto-orthodox successors, it continues to be necessary for salvation in Christ.

  Gnostic Assaults on Proto-orthodoxy

  Of all the polemical literature that must have been generated against the proto-orthodox by their opponents, we are best informed now of that produced by the Gnostics. This is the direct result of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, which contains several treatises that attack proto-orthodox positions. Before this discovery we knew that battles must have been raging, but we heard only the voluminous assaults by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and their successors—page after page of harsh polemic meant to destroy their Gnostic enemies and obliterate their views. We will examine these proto-orthodox tactics in a moment. For now we should consider what the other side had to say.

  The Gnostic polemic is somewhat different from what one might expect. The Gnostics—at least the ones about whom we are best informed—did not maintain that the proto-orthodox views were utterly wrong. Instead, these views were inadequate and superficial—in fact, laughably inadequate and superficial. That is to say, Gnostics did not deny the validity of the proto-orthodox doctrinal claims per se; instead, they reinterpreted them in a way that they considered more spiritual and insightful. Gnostics could confess the proto-orthodox creeds, read the proto-orthodox Scriptures, accept the proto-orthodox sacraments. But all these things were understood differently for Gnostics, based on their fuller insight into their real meaning, a fuller insight available to them because of their superior knowledge (gnosis) of divine truth. And so, as the proto-orthodox heresiologists themselves bemoaned, the Gnostics were not the enemies "out there" somewhere. They were the enemy within, worshiping in proto-orthodox churches but understanding themselves to be a spiritually elite, an inner circle who recognized the deeper spiritual meaning of doctrines, Scriptures, rituals that the proto-orthodox took (simply) at face value.

  Among the Gnostic attacks on the superficiality of proto-orthodox views, none is more riveting than the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, discovered at Nag Hammadi. This is not to be confused with the proto-orthodox Apocalypse of Peter in which Peter is given a guided tour of heaven and hell. The Nag Hammadi "apocalypse" or "revelation" portrays the true nature of Christ and castigates the ignorance of the simple minded (the proto-orthodox) who do not recognize it.

  The book begins with the teachings of "The Savior," who informs Peter that there are many false teachers who are "blind and deaf," who blaspheme the truth and teach what is evil. Peter, on the other hand, will be given secret knowledge (Apoc. Pet. 73). Jesus goes on to tell Peter that his opponents are "without perception." Why? Because "they hold fast to the name of a dead man." In other words, they think that it is Jesus' death that matters for salvation. That, of course, had been the proto-orthodox view from the beginning. But for this author, those who maintain such a thing "blaspheme the truth and proclaim evil teaching" (74).

  Indeed, those who confess a dead man cling to death, not to immortal life. These souls are dead and were created for death.

  Not every soul comes from the truth nor from immortality. For every soul of these ages has death assigned to it. Consequently, it is always a slave. It is created for its desires and their eternal destruction, for which they exist and in which they exist. They [the souls] love the material creatures that came forth with them. But the immortal souls are not like these, O Peter. But indeed as long as the hour has not yet come, she [the immortal soul] will indeed resemble a mortal one. (75)

  Gnostics in the world may appear to be like other people, but they are different, not clinging to material things or living according to their desires. Their souls are immortal, even though this is not widely known: "Others do not understand mysteries, although they speak of these things which they do not understand. Nevertheless, they will boast that the mystery of the truth is theirs alone" (Apoc. Pet. 76). Who are these who fail to understand, who do not teach the truth? "And there will be others of those who are outside our number who name themselves 'bishop' and also 'deacons,' as if they have received their authority from God. . . . These people are dry canals" (79). This is scarcely complimentary to the leaders of the Christian churches: They are not fountains of knowledge and wisdom but dried up river beds.

  But what is this knowledge that is accessible to the immortal souls that are not riveted to material things? It is knowledge about the true nature of Christ himself and his crucifixion, which is only mistakenly thought (by the proto-orthodox) to refer to the death of Christ for sins. In fact, the true Christ cannot be touched by pain, suffering, and death but is well beyond them all. What was crucified was not the divine Christ but his physical shell.

  In a captivating scene, Peter is said to witness the crucifixion, and he admits to being confused by what he sees:

  When he had said those things, I saw him apparently being seized by them. And I said, "What am I seeing, O Lord? Is it you yourself whom they take? ... Who is this one above the cross, who is glad and laughing? And is it another person whose feet and hands they are hammering?"

  Jesus then gives the stunning reply, which shows the true meaning of the crucifixion:

  The Savior said to me, "He whom you see above the cross, glad and laughing, is the living Jesus. But he into whose hands and feet they are driving the nails is his physical part, which is the substitute. They are putting to shame that which is in his likeness. But look at him and me." (Apoc. Pet. 81)

  Only Christ's physical likeness is put to death. The living Christ transcends death, literally transcends the cross. For there he is, above it, laughing at those who think they can hurt him, at those who think the divine spirit within him can suffer and die. But the spirit of Christ is beyond pain and death, as are the spirits of those who understand who he really is, who know the truth of who they really are—spirits embodied in a physical likeness who cannot suffer or die. The vision continues:

  And I saw someone about to approach us who looked like him, even him who was laughing above the cross, and he was filled with a pure spirit, and he was the Savior.... And he said to me, "Be strong! For you are the one to whom these mysteries have been given, to know through revelation that he whom they crucified is the first-born, and the home of demons, and the clay vessel in which they dwell, belonging to Elohim [i.e., the God of this world], and belonging to the cross that is under the law. But he who stands near him is the living Savior, the primal part in him whom they seized. And he has been released. He stands joyfully looking at those who persecuted him. . . . Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception. Indeed, therefore, the suffering one must remain, since the body is the substitute. But that which was released was my incorporeal body." (Apoc. Pet. 82)

  The body is just a shell, belonging to the creator of this world

  A closely related attack on the proto-orthodox may be found in another Nag Hammadi tractate, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, which, like the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, ridicules those who have a superficial, literalistic understanding of Jesus' death:

  For my death, which they think happened, happened [instead] to them in their error and blindness. They nailed their man up to their [own] death. For their minds did not see me, for they were deaf and blind. ... As for me, on the one hand they saw me; they punished me. Another, their father, was the one who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They were hitti
ng me with the reed; another was the one who lifted up the cross on his shoulder, who was Simon. Another was the one on whom they put the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing

  This notion of Jesus changing forms calls to mind one of the most disturbing versions of the crucifixion to be propounded by a Gnostic teacher, one not found among the Nag Hammadi tractates but in the now lost writings of Basilides, as retold by Irenaeus. The New Testament accounts indicate that on the road to crucifixion, Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry Jesus' cross (see Mark 14:21). According to Basilides, Jesus used the opportunity to pull a supernatural switch, transforming himself to look like Simon and Simon to look like himself. The Romans then proceeded to crucify the wrong man, while Jesus stood to the side, laughing at his subterfuge (Against Heresies 1.24.3). Simon, presumably, did not find it so funny.

  But Jesus' laughter is not simply about the tricks he can pull. In these accounts the laughter is directed against those who do not have eyes to see, who do not understand Jesus' true nature or the significance of his alleged death on the cross. The true "Gnostics," on the other hand, do understand: knowing where they have come from, how they got here, and how they will return. After the death of this mortal shell, they will return to their heavenly home, having found salvation not in this body or in this world but salvation from this body and from this world. Anyone who fails to understand the nature of that salvation, who looks only to the surface of things, only to the outward, material side of reality, is rightly subject to ridicule, both by Jesus and by those who have received his truth.

  The Proto-orthodox on the Attack

  In another sense, however, it was the proto-orthodox who had the last laugh. Through their polemical attacks the proto-orthodox managed to weed Gnostics out of their churches, destroy their special Scriptures, and annihilate their following. So effective was the destruction that it was not until recent times that we had any clear idea just how significant Gnostics were in the early centuries of Christianity and how they tried to fight back. For the most part, our only evidence of the confrontation was the virulent opposition written by the Gnostics' proto-orthodox opponents. To be sure, this opposition, carried out in the literary realm, was enough to make us suspect that the proto-orthodox were up against something they genuinely feared; and we had good reason to think that the fears were grounded in a substantial social reality. But before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, we were more or less at a loss concerning the counterstrategies of the Gnostic opponents.

  The strategies of the proto-orthodox heresiologists, on the other hand, were all too clear. They were repeated time and again throughout the literature until they became virtually stereotyped.

  Part of the proto-orthodox strategy involved stressing the notion of "unity" on all levels. The proto-orthodox stressed the unity of God with his creation: There is one God, and he created the world. They stressed the unity of God and Jesus: Jesus is the one son of the one God. They stressed the unity of Jesus and Christ: He is "one and the same." They stressed the unity of the church: Divisions are caused by heretics. And they stressed the unity of truth: Truth is not contradictory or at odds with itself.

  Moreover, as we have seen, proto-orthodox authors insisted that their views were handed down from the very beginning: There was thus a continuity in the history of their belief, rooted in the unity of Jesus with his apostles and the apostles with their successors, the bishops of the churches. Wherever, then, there was disunity, there was a problem. And the problem was not simply on the social level of community; it was a problem that went deep, as deep as the truth of the gospel. Disunity shows division and division is not of God.

  This understanding came to be applied early on to "heresies," in that heresies were claimed to bring not unity but division. They divided God from his creation, the creator from Jesus, Jesus from the Christ. They divided the church, and they divided the truth. Moreover, the fact that heretics were divided among themselves provided clear evidence that their views could not be from God. At one point Irenaeus laments his own inability to grapple with the internal sects of Valentinian Gnostics: "Since they differ so widely among themselves, both as respects doctrine and tradition, and since those of them who are recognized as being most modern make it their effort daily to invent some new opinion and to bring out what no one ever before thought of, it is a difficult matter to describe all their opinions" (Against Heresies 1.21.5).

  Not only was it difficult to describe all their opinions, but the widespread diversity among the Valentinian Gnostics showed Ireneaus that the whole system contained nothing but lies: "The very fathers of this fable [the Gnostic myth] differ among themselves, as if they were inspired by different spirits of error. This very fact forms an a priori proof that the truth proclaimed by the Church is immovable and that the theories of these men are but a tissue of falsehoods" {Against Heresies 1.9.5). Or, as Tertullian somewhat more succinctly put it, "Where diversity of doctrine is found, there, then, must the corruption both of the Scriptures and the expositions thereof be regarded as existing" {Prescription 38).

  It was not simply the heretics' internal contradictions that were attacked, however; it was also their contradictions to what the proto-orthodox considered to be good sense and logic. Many of these contradictions involved the complicated myths underlying the views of different Gnostic groups. Before detailing some of these proto-orthodox objections, I should point out that some scholars have come to suspect that Gnostic Christians did not, in fact, treat their myths as literal descriptions of the past, in the way modern fundamentalist Christians might treat the opening chapters of Genesis. In the modern world, most nonfundamentalist Christian churches agree that Genesis contains mythical and legendary accounts; one scarcely has to believe in a literal six-day creation or in the existence of Adam and Eve as historical persons in order to belong to one of these communities. Gnostic Christians evidently took a similar approach to their own myths. Proto-orthodox heresiologists, however, interpreted the myths in a Iiteralistic way, treating them as propositional statements about the past and then showing how ridiculous they are. This may have been a case where an attack was both completely off the mark and rhetorically convincing to an outside audience.

  Simply recounting the myths at length, one after the other, can have the effect of making them appear absurd, and Irenaeus and his followers appear to have known it. How could such complex and involved descriptions of creation possibly be right? Moreover, as pointed out, one set of myths cannot be reconciled with another—assuming both contain "propositional" statements about what happened in the past. But the heresiologists did not stop with providing all the details, page after page. Instead they went on to pick the myths apart to show they could not be true. For example, in discussing the Valentinian Gnostic theogony (the account of how the divine realm came into being), Irenaeus observes that in one of the prominent myths, among the first group of aeons to emerge from the one true God were both Silence (Sige) and Word (Logos); but this doesn't make any sense, since once there is a word, there can be no more silence (Against Heresies 2.12.5). Or a second example, drawn from a multitude: In the account of how the cosmic disaster took place leading to the creation of the world, the twelfth aeon, Sophia (Wisdom), frustrated by her ignorance, attempts to understand the Father of All, overreaches herself, and falls. But this is nonsense, argues Irenaeus, since Wisdom, by its very nature, cannot be ignorant (Against Heresies 2.18.1)."

  Some of the proto-orthodox objections to the logic of the heretical systems did not involve such minor details, but strove to get to the heart of the matter. Tertullian's five-volume attack against Marcion, for example, starts off by dealing directly with the question of whether it is logically possible to have two gods. Tertullian states the principle he will stand by: "God is not, if he is not one" (Against Marcion 3). Tertullian's logic is that for any theological discussion to take place, one must have an agreed upon definition of "God." Moreover, he indicates, everyone of conscience will acknowledge what tha
t definition is: "God is the great Supreme existing in eternity, unbegotten, unmade, without beginning and without end." But once that is conceded (and Tertullian assumes, of course, that everyone will concede it, since otherwise they are not "of conscience"), there is an insurmountable difficulty with having more than one God. It is impossible to have two beings who are "Supreme" because if two of them exist, neither one is supreme. And if one of them is greater than the other, then that other one cannot be God, since it is not supreme. Tertullian goes on to argue that it will not do to argue that two gods could each be supreme in his own sphere (e.g., one be supreme in goodness and the other injustice), because that would mean that in the overall scheme of things, each god is only partially supreme; but God, to be God, must be completely supreme.

  The failure or refusal of their heretical opponents to see logic occasionally drives the proto-orthodox heresiologists to sarcasm and mockery. Tertullian's quips in particular make for a lively read. Marcion's two gods, he indicates, come from his seeing double: "to men of diseased vision even one lamp looks like many" (Against Marcion 1.2). Physical realities disprove (the now dead) Marcion's views about being saved from the creator god: "In what respect do you suppose yourself liberated from his kingdom when his flies are still creeping upon your face?" (1.24). Marcion's phantom Christ is like Marcion's phantom intelligence: "You may, I assure you, more easily find a man born without a heart or without brains, like Marcion himself, than without a body, like Marcion's Christ" (4.1).