Nag Hammadi:
The Meaning of the Gnostic Gospels
Eric
Rustad and Ann Britten Young
Introduction.
Nag Hammadi is a region in upper Egypt where local
farmers found an astonishing library of Gnostic Christian texts in 1945. These
texts, written in Greek and later translated into Coptic, had been considered
“lost,” known primarily through the polemical works of Ireneaus of Lyon and
others who sought to suppress the movement. The
thirteen codexes or books themselves are copies of earlier writings dating
between 50 and 140 CE, roughly contemporaneous with the Gospels. It
is thought that monks from a local monastery hid the library as the campaign
against Gnosticism intensified.
The
Meaning of Nag Hammadi Gnosticism. Jesus
said, “I am not your master....He who will drink from my mouth will become as
I am: I myself shall become he, and
the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.” – Gospel
of Thomas, 13, 108. In the
passage, you should note the implied identity of the divine and human. The
Thomasine Jesus assumes an entirely different relationship to his disciples. He
is a messenger and a spiritual guide, not the Lord.
The disciple, not Jesus, is the real subject-matter of the text.
An
approach to understanding Gnosticism comes by reflecting on the Gnostic usage of
the terms God, Cosmology, Ethics—and
especially, Knowing.
This is because in the Nag Hammadi schools of Gnosticism, the special
concern falls on the active and subjective process of human self-knowing, and it
is by careful and diligent cultivation of self-knowing that humanity
can secure its salvation. Mainstream
Christianity lays out a very different path to salvation:
in mainstream Christianity, salvation cannot be had by an activist
process of knowing, but must be received by revelation.
In mainstream Christianity, the human subject is passive, and God does
the work of coming to humanity. In
the Gnostic traditions, on the other hand, the human subject is the active
partner, and must do the work of going to God.
Revelation becomes a guide or tool to be used rather than a text to be
revered.
“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.” – Gospel
of Thomas, 70 (Pagels’ translation, Beyond
Belief, 53). In the Gospel of Philip,
Jesus says, whosoever experiences the conversion of spirit “no longer is a
Christian, but a Christ.” (II, 67, 26-27).
Who do we interpret these obscure words?
Of
Knowing.
Gnosis itself means “knowing.” But
while Gnosis means “knowing,” it is essential to emphasize that it is
a knowing obtained by experience and perception (as in “I know me”),
not of rational or propositional knowledge (as in “I know
mathematics”). It is a distinction
consistent with the Platonic tradition, on which Nag Hammadi Gnosticism strongly
draws. However the Gnostic
understanding of knowledge must equally be distinguished from the modern
empirical knowing of science or even of psychology.
Of
God. Beginning,
as Gnostics must do, from within the self,
it is difficult to arrive at a consistent depiction of God and the universe.
Beginning with received texts,
on the other hand, mainstream Christianity could develop a consensus view of God
and of the nature of the universe. Unlike
the mainstream Christian God, therefore, the Gnostic conception of deity can be
monistic, or by nearly any degrees of variation it can be non-monistic.
In general, it is fair to say, Gnostics understand God to be a primordial
substance, the Monad or One.
However, this God is at once the source of an ideal
“pleroma” understood as the totality or fullness of forms,
a region of higher existence not conceived in material or spatial terms.
Of
Cosmology.
Another way to look at it is that the Gnostic “philosophy” is
monistic from the standpoint of God, but is dualistic from the standpoint of
cosmology. It posits, in addition to
the ideal “pleroma,” a realm of matter called the “kenoma”—and assigns
to each not only ontological but ethical characteristics.
From God emanates a series
of manifestations known as the Aeons, which include: Power,
Thought, Grace, Silence, Truth and Love, typically denominated in male-female
pairs. Indebtedness to the Platonic
tradition should be clear (Codex VI contains parts of Plato’s Republic).
Of
the Aeons, the lowest pair is Sophia and Jesus.
Sophia separated herself from the pleroma to become the mother of the
Demiurge (acting without Jesus), an event of which she was ashamed, and so she
hid the Demiurge, such that the latter, knowing no better, considered himself
the solitary God. The Demiurge then
created the material world, which is sometimes considered benign, or more often
as an evil counterpart to the spiritual world.
This material world is controlled by servants of the Demiurge known as
Archons, including, in some texts, Yahweh, who holds the human spirit captive.
Jesus is represented as a messenger Aeon whose role is to remind humanity
of its divine origin, and guide it back to that.
As in the case of Scripture, the emphasis is less on revering him than
using what he offers. The emphasis
is on oneself, not on Jesus himself.
Of
Ethics.
In the Syro-Egyptian schools of
Gnosticism, of which the Nag Hammadi texts are representative, the material
world is more remote from the deity, and thus inferior (or more “evil”) than
the noumenal or spiritual. This has
given rise to systems of ethics placing value on asceticism.
However, the material world need not be deemed evil, deriving, as it
does, from deity. Rather “evil”
becomes a relative term describing the human condition of separation from the
divine spark or “pearl” within, not of the phenomenal world per se.
This gives rise to an important Gnostic conception of “duality seeking
unity”—that, if humans can overcome an antagonism of opposites, they may
reclaim their original divine nature. “Jesus
said to them, “When you make the two into one,…then you will enter [the
Kingdom]” (GT, 22). The conception
of “duality-seeking-unity” points to a non-ascetic ethics that embraces both
elements—spiritual and material, light and dark, male and female.
Sin is to be found in the separation of the
sexes, not in their union. Christ’s
purpose then is to teach humanity how to reintegrate its components parts.
Doing so, he restores life to the dead.
Of
the Style and Nature of the Gnostic Texts. The Gnostic
texts differ in style from those of the Christian canon.
One very important dimension of the difference is that the Gnostic texts
tend to be aphoristic and mythopoetic. Mainstream
Christian texts—the Gospels, Acts and the Pauline letters—tend to be
historical, didactic and proto-theological.
The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas is
comprised of 114 difficult and often ambiguous logia or sayings, which, in
Elaine Pagels’ characterization, are koan-like, designed to nudge the disciple
toward an ineffable self-knowing. The
Christian canon, in contrast, is designed to provide an efficient and clear set
of divine policies and laws.
Of
Salvation.
Gnosticism in all its permutations is therefore essentially a doctrine of
self-knowing. Its conceptions of
Knowledge, of God, of Cosmos and of Ethics all point to the reintegration of the
self from the self-evident separation
of humanity and deity. The onus of
reintegration, Gnostics insist, lies with the human.
Salvation follows, “You saw the Spirit, you became spirit.
You saw Christ, you became Christ. You
saw [the Father, you] shall become [the] Father” – GP,
II, 61, 29-31.
What if
Gnosticism Had Triumphed? If
the Gnostics had succeeded, the Old Testament might have been eliminated. The
tradition of systematic theology that characterizes modern Christianity would
probably not have been developed.
The
community of Christian believers would have been far more fragmented.
Quite possibly the light of Christianity would have been extinguished,
for the Christian message would have been dissipated across too many rival sects
and movements, and would have lacked the substance to compete with faiths able
to bring intellectual and political organization to bear (cf. Pagels, Beyond
Belief, p. 136.)
Sources
Davies, Stevan L., The
Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom, Seabury Press,
Http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm.
MacMullen, Ramsey, Christianizing
the
Http://www.nag-hammadi.com.
Pagels, Elaine,
Beyond
Belief: The Secret Gospel of
Pagels, Elaine,
The Gnostic Gospels, NY:
Random House, 1979.
Robinson, James M., The
Nag Hammadi Library in English, NY: Harper
and Row, 1977.
Http://www.wikipedia.org/gnosticism.