Heretics, Irenaeus warns, read wildly, concentrating on the enigmas, mysteries, and parables they find in the Scriptures, rather than on passages that seem plain; often they read incoherently, or in conflict with the obvious meaning of the text.12 Although some write commentaries, many more respond to what they find in Genesis, in Isaiah’s oracles, Paul’s letters, the Psalms, and the gospels by coming up with songs, poems, visions, and “revelations” of their own—even liturgical dance. As we shall see, the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi bear out Irenaeus’s suspicions, as well as his conviction about what was at stake: what is spiritual truth, and how it may be discerned.
Let us look, then, at a few of these “wild readings” to see how the Gospel of John became a center of controversy. Despite its simplicity of style, few readers have found John’s gospel easy to understand. Especially in the context of the synoptic gospels, even its earliest admirers noticed, for example, that it sometimes contradicts Matthew, Mark, and Luke. For example, as we noted, John begins with the story of Jesus attacking the money changers and merchants in the Temple, a scene whose violence John increases by adding that Jesus “knotted a whip out of small cords” and wielded it as he “drove them all out of the Temple, and the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables.”13 The other gospels, as we have seen, all place this incident at the end of Jesus’ life, when it must logically have happened, since this act, according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, was what impelled the chief priests to have Jesus arrested and turned over to the Roman authorities to be killed. When Origen, the brilliant Egyptian “father of the church” (later accused of heresy himself), was asked about this, he explained, as we have seen, that although “John does not always tell the truth literally, he always tells the truth spiritually”14—that is, symbolically. Origen even suggests that the holy spirit inserted such contradictions into John’s gospel in order to startle the reader into asking what they mean, and to show that these stories are not meant to be taken literally; he agreed with Valentinus and his disciples that the reader has to plunge beyond the shimmering surface of John’s words—or those of any of “the scriptures”—to seek their hidden meanings.
Valentinus, a poet himself, loved the power of biblical images, especially John's. Though orthodox Christians later sought to destroy his teachings, the surviving fragments show that he took the story of the cleansing of the Temple, for example, as a parable showing how, when God shines into our hearts, he shatters and transforms what he finds there to make us fit dwellings for the holy spirit.15 Another fragment suggests that Valentinus’s own spiritual awakening occurred when he received a revelatory dream in which a newborn child appeared and said to him, “I am the logos”16—in John’s language, the divine word revealed in human form.
Let us look at several examples of what Irenaeus calls “evil exegesis,” and then consider what he finds objectionable. Irenaeus identifies Valentinus as the author of what he calls the Gospel of Truth, and if this is the same one discovered at Nag Hammadi, we now can see, for the first time, how Valentinus praised the “hidden mystery, Jesus the Christ.”17 Whether written by Valentinus or, more likely, by one of his followers, the Gospel of Truth depicts a world devoid of God as a nightmare, a world like the one Matthew Arnold described nearly two thousand years later:
. . . the world, which seems
to lie before us like a land of dreams,
so various, so beautiful, so new,
hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
and we are here as on a darkling plain
swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
where ignorant armies clash by night.18
The Gospel of Truth, too, pictures human existence, apart from God, as a nightmare, in which people feel as if . . . they were fleeing, or, without strength they come from having chased after others; or they are . . . striking blows, or . . . receiving blows themselves; or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air, though they do not even have wings; . . . or as if people were murdering them, though there is no one pursuing them, or they themselves are killing their neighbors, for they have been stained with their blood.19
But unlike Arnold, the author of this gospel believes that we can awaken from horror to discover God’s presence here and now; and when we wake up, the terror recedes, for the divine breath—the spirit—runs after us, “and, having extended a hand, lift[s] [us] up to stand on [our] feet.”20 Thus, the Gospel of Truth continues, echoing John’s prologue, the “word of the Father, . . . Jesus of the infinite sweetness . . . goes forth into all things, supporting all things,” and finally restores all things to God, “bringing them back into the Father, and into the Mother.”21
The Gospel of Truth also says that what we see in Jesus—or God—depends on what we need to see, and what we are capable of seeing. For although the divine is “ineffable, unimaginable,” our understanding is bound by words and images, which can either limit or extend what we perceive. So, although God is, of course, neither masculine nor feminine, when invoking the image of God the Father, this author also speaks of God the Mother. Moreover, while drawing upon images of Jesus familiar from the gospels of Matthew and Luke (the “good shepherd”)22 and from Paul, who speaks of wisdom’s “hidden mystery,”23 as well as from John (“the word of the Father”), this author offers other visions of Jesus as well. Acknowledging that believers commonly see Jesus “nailed to the cross” as an image recalling sacrificial death, this author suggests seeing him instead as “fruit on a tree”—none other than the “tree of knowledge” in Paradise.24 But instead of destroying those who eat the fruit, as Adam was destroyed, this fruit, “Jesus the Christ,” conveys genuine knowledge—not intellectual knowledge but the knowing of mutual recognition (a word related to the Greek term gnosis)—to those whom God “discovers . . . in himself, and they discover him in themselves.”25
This gospel takes its name from the opening line: “The gospel of truth is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him,”26 for it transforms our understanding of God and ourselves. Those who receive this gospel no longer “think of [God] as petty, nor harsh, nor wrathful”—not, that is, as some biblical stories portray him—“but as a being without evil,” loving, full of tranquillity, gracious, and all-knowing.27 The Gospel of Truth pictures the holy spirit as God’s breath, and envisions the Father first breathing forth the entire universe of living beings (“his children are his fragrant breath”), then drawing all beings back into the embrace of their divine source.28 Meanwhile, he urges those who “discover God in themselves, and themselves in God” to transform gnosis into action:
Speak the truth to those who seek it,
And speak of understanding to those who have
committed sin through error;
Strengthen the feet of those who have stumbled;
Extend your hands to those who are sick;
Feed those who are hungry;
Give rest to those who are weary;
And raise up those who wish to rise.29
Those who care for others and do good “do the will of the Father.”
A second example of what Irenaeus calls “evil interpretation”—the so-called Round Dance of the Cross—illustrates what he means by “heretics” who often add “their own inventions” to the gospels. The anonymous follower of Valentinus who wrote the Round Dance offers to fill in a scene missing from John’s gospel, in which Jesus chanted and danced with his disciples “on the night he was betrayed.”30 The Round Dance author notes that John’s gospel leaves out an account of the last supper in which Jesus tells his disciples to eat bread as his body and drink wine as his blood—that scene which Matthew, Luke, and Paul all regard as central, for it shows believers how to celebrate the “Lord’s supper.” But in John’s account of that night, something quite different happened. After dinner, according to John, Jesus got up from the table, took off hi
s outer robe, and tied a cloth around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the cloth that was tied around him.31
John means to say that this act is significant—even necessary—for anyone who wants to share communion with Jesus, for as he recounts it, when Peter protested that his teacher must not wash his feet like a slave, Jesus told him that “you do not now recognize what I am doing, but later you will understand,” and added, “Unless I wash you, you have no share in me.”32 From ancient times to the present, many Christians have reenacted this scene as if it, like the last supper, offered directions for a ritual; so, on the Thursday before Easter, the pope of the Roman Catholic Church takes the role of Jesus and ritually washes the feet of his cardinals. Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church’s president washes the feet of the Mormon “elders”; and to this day many other Christian groups—various Orthodox churches and many Protestant groups, including some Baptists and Pentecostalists—do likewise.
Whoever wrote the Round Dance of the Cross boldly revised John’s account of that night by adding a different episode—apparently meant to be kept secret. In the Round Dance, which is found in the Acts of John, a second-century collection of stories and traditions inspired by John’s gospel, John begins the story of Jesus’ final night where the gospel account leaves off, and says that Jesus invited his disciples to dance and sing with him:
Before he was arrested . . . he assembled us all, and said, “Before I am delivered to them, let us sing a hymn to the Father, and so go to meet what lies before us.” So he told us to form a circle, holding one another’s hands, and he himself stood in the middle and said, “Answer Amen to me.”33
Then, as the disciples circled him, dancing, Jesus began to chant a hymn in words that echo the Gospel of John:
“Glory to you, Father.” And we, circling around him,
answered him, “Amen.”
“Glory to you, Logos; glory to you, Grace.” “Amen.”
“Glory to you, Spirit; glory to you, Holy One. . . .” “Amen.”
“We praise you, Father; we thank you, Light, in whom
dwells no darkness.” “Amen. . . .”
“I am a light to you who see me.” “Amen.”
“I am a mirror to you who know me.” “Amen.”
“I am a door to you who knock upon me.” “Amen.”
“I am a way to you, the traveler.” “Amen.”34
Although the phrase about the mirror could have come straight from the Gospel of Thomas, the primary source for the last two, as well as many of the others, is the Gospel of John.
Whoever composed this hymn, then, clearly found in John’s gospel inspiration for the kind of teaching we more often associate with Thomas; for here Jesus invites his disciples to see themselves in him:
“[W]hich I am about to suffer is your own. For you could by no means have understood what you suffer, unless I had been sent to you as word [logos] by the Father . . . if you knew how to suffer, you would be able not to suffer.”35
Thus, in the Round Dance of the Cross, Jesus says that he suffers in order to reveal the nature of human suffering, and to teach the paradox that the Buddha also taught: that those who become aware of suffering simultaneously find release from it. Yet he also tells them to join in the cosmic dance: “ ‘Whoever dances belongs to the whole.’ ‘Amen.’ ‘Whoever does not dance does not know what happens.’ ‘Amen.’ ”36
Those who loved the Acts of John apparently celebrated the eucharist by chanting these words, holding hands, and circling in this dance to celebrate together the mystery of Jesus’ suffering, and their own—and some Christians celebrate it thus to this day. In the Acts of John, John tells his fellow disciples that it is not “strange or paradoxical” that each of them sees Jesus in different ways, for he explains that what anyone can see depends on that person’s expectations and capacity. Once, he says, Peter and Andrew asked John and James about the young child they saw calling them from the shore, and my brother said . . . to me, “John, what does he want, this child on the shore who called us?” And I said, “Which child?” And he answered me, “The one beckoning to us.” And I said, “Because of the long watch at sea, you are not seeing well, brother James. Don’t you see the man standing there who is handsome, with a joyful face?” But he said to me, “I do not see him, my brother; but let us disembark, and see what this means.”37
John adds, “at another time, he took me and James and Peter onto a mountain where he used to pray, and we saw him illuminated by a light that no human language could describe.” Later, “Again he took the three of us onto a mountain, and we saw him praying at a distance.” John says, however, that “since he loved me, I went up quietly to him, as if he did not see, and I stood there looking at his back.” Suddenly, John says, he saw Jesus as Moses once saw the Lord—“he was wearing no clothes . . . and did not look like a human being at all . . . his feet shone with light so brilliant that it lit up the earth, and his head reached into heaven, so terrifying that I cried out”—whereupon Jesus immediately turned, was transformed back into the man that John could easily recognize, and rebuked John in words Jesus speaks to Thomas in John’s own gospel: “John, do not be faithless, but believe.”38
The Gospel of John inspired yet another example of “evil exegesis”—the famous and influential Secret Book of John, which Irenaeus apparently read, and which another anonymous Christian wrote, in John’s name, apparently as a sequel to the gospel. The Secret Book opens after Jesus’ death, when “John, the brother of James, the son of Zebedee,” walking toward the Temple, is accosted by a Pharisee, who charges that “this Nazarene” has deceived John and his fellow believers, “filled your ears with lies, closed your hearts, and turned you from the traditions of your fathers.”39 John turns away from the Temple and flees to a desolate place in the mountains, “grieving greatly in [his] heart.” There, as he struggles alone with fear and doubt, he says that “suddenly the heavens opened, and the whole creation shone, and the world was shaken.”40 John is astonished and terrified to see an unearthly light, in which changing forms appear, and to hear Jesus’ voice saying, “John, John, why are you astonished, and why are you afraid? . . . I am the one who is with you always. I am the Father; I am the Mother; and I am the Son.”41 After a moment of shock, John recognizes Jesus as the one who radiates the light of God and appears in various forms, including Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the last envisioned as feminine (suggested by the gender of the Hebrew term for spirit, ruah) and so as divine Mother.
But after Jesus consoles John with this vision, he says that “the God and Father of all things” cannot actually be apprehended in anthropomorphic images, since God is “the invisible one who is above all things, who exists as incorruption, in the pure light into which no eye may look,”42 invisible, unimaginable, wholly beyond human comprehension. How, then, can one speak of God at all? To answer this question, the author of the Secret Book borrows the language of John’s gospel: “To the point that I am able to comprehend him—for who will ever be able to comprehend him? . . . [God] is the light, the one who gives the light; the life, the one who gives the life.”43 Yet what follows, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a remarkable dialogue in which John questions the risen Savior, who gives him a breathtaking and wildly imaginative account of what happened “in the beginning”—mysteries hidden before creation within the divine being, the origin of evil, and the nature and spiritual destiny of humankind.
Of all the instances Irenaeus offers of “evil exegesis,” however, his prime example is part of a commentary on John that asks questions similar to those asked in the Secret Book—what John’s gospel reveals about “the origin of all things.” The author of this commentary, traditionally identified as Ptolemy,44 says that “John, the disciple of the Lord, wanting to set forth the origin of all things, how the Father brought forth all things,”45 reveals in his opening lines—although in a way hidden from
the casual reader—the original structure of divine being. This, he says, is the “primary ogdoad,” which consists of the first eight emanations of divine energy, rather similar to what kabbalists later will call the divine sephirot; thus, when Valentinus and his disciples read the opening of John’s gospel, they envisioned God, the divine word, and Jesus Christ as, so to speak, waves of divine energy flowing down from above, from the great waterfall to the local creek.
Irenaeus rejects this attempt to find hidden meaning in John’s prologue and explains to his reader that he has quoted this commentary at length so that “you may see, beloved, the method by which those using it deceive themselves, and abuse the Scriptures by trying to support their own invention from them.”46 Had John meant to set forth the primordial structure of divine being, Irenaeus says, he would have made his meaning clear; thus “the fallacy of their interpretation is obvious”;47 and he then, as we shall see, offers the true interpretation of John’s gospel.
Yet Irenaeus undertook his massive, five-volume Refutation and Overthrow of Falsely So-Called Knowledge precisely because he knew that many people might find his conclusions far from obvious. Worse, they might well see him and his opponents as rival theologians squabbling about interpretation, rather than as orthodox Christians against heretics. While his opponents say he reads only the surface, he replies that all of them say different things; not one of them agrees with another, not even with their own teachers; on the contrary, “each one of them comes up with something new every day,”48 as do writers and artists today, for whom originality is evidence of genuine insight. For Irenaeus, however, innovation proved that one had abandoned the true gospel. The problem he faced, then, was how to sort out all those lies, fictions, and fantasies. How to distinguish true from false?
Beyond Belief Page 11