Why is gnosticism being revived

Gnosticism on the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Although the Gospel of Thomas makes no mention of the crucifixion and resurrection, other Gnostic texts give a new and completely different concept of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus from that found in the inspired writings of the apostles. And this people has done me no harm. It was another, their father, who drank the gall and vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder.

I was rejoicing in the height over all… and I was laughing at their ignorance. The Gnostic stories of Jesus have him mocking his executioners while the accounts in Matthew, Mark and Luke have the soldiers and chief priests mock Jesus. Matthew , 31; Mark ; Luke ; , 36 Furthermore, the Jesus of divine scripture, while suffering on the cross, prays for his Father to forgive his executioners. Luke In the teachings of Valentinus, the crucifixion and death of Jesus is presented as a very moving event, and yet he sees the purpose of the death of Jesus as being completely different from the purpose presented in the synoptic gospels.

It is no illusion, but it is truth! In deed, it is more fitting to say that the world is an illusion rather than the resurrection. In the Treatise of the Resurrection , the appearances of Jesus are through spiritual visions rather than physical appearance. Did Christ Really Suffer and Die? One of the most significant points of difference between the biblical account of Jesus and the Gnostic Jesus is the question of whether the Christ actually suffered and died.

Valentinus contended that Christ descended on Jesus at his baptism but left him before his death on the cross. To counter this teaching, Irenaeus a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of the apostle John wrote the treatise Against Heresies. Irenaeus contended that Christ would have never exhorted his disciples to take up the cross if he was to escape the pain and suffering of the crucifixion by flying away from it.

Furthermore, Irenaeus argues that the suffering of Jesus the Christ on the cross was absolutely essential to bring about salvation for all mankind. He who says, "I know Him," and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him.

By this we know that we are in Him. He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked. This is the true God and eternal life. Irenaeus contended that "it was not possible that the man Near the end of the first century, when the apostle John penned his collection of three letters known as 1 st , 2 nd , and 3 rd John, the heresy of Gnosticism was already troubling the church.

And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. Look to yourselves, that we do not lose those things we worked for, but that we may receive a full reward.

Whoever transgresses and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God. He who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into your house nor greet him; for he who greets him shares in his evil deeds. The apostle John said: "By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us.

The Matter of the Resurrection. Gnosticism categorically denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The reason being, to the Gnostic, the world and the flesh are evil. The soul or spirit of man is good. Therefore, to attain ultimate good, the soul must be freed from the flesh. When faced with the belief among Christians that Jesus Christ was bodily and physically resurrected from the dead, the Gnostic sees the whole resurrection story as completely absurd.

To their way of thinking a bodily resurrection would continue to confine the soul or spirit of man in a fleshly body. And yet, on Pentecost the apostle Peter preached that Jesus of Nazareth was "a Man attested by God… whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it.

Therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was glad; moreover my flesh also will rest in hope. Furthermore, the apostle Paul claims that if the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not a historical fact, the faith of every Christian is useless. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up — if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!

Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable. When Jesus was resurrected from the dead he had an identifiable body with nail holes in his hands and a spear wound in his side John Wisdom's Feast also traces Sophia's disappearance to the tensions at this time between the Gnostics and the mainstream Christians.

The Gnostics tended to downplay Jesus' humanity, and many rejected the notion that he was human. They adopted the association between Jesus and Sophia in order to de-emphasize Christ's bodily pain and suffering and focus more on the wisdom he imparted. Mainstream Christians, eager to separate themselves from the Gnostics, thus avoided reference to Sophia. Sophia and Feminist Spirituality.

Sophia, they insist, embodies this unity. It was the drive to keep things connected that was at the heart of the wisdom tradition. In the face of threats to Israel's national consciousness and to its provincial view of the world, the wisdom tradition sought to create a new more connected frame of reference. While groups within the priestly tradition in Israel and Judaism sought to separate and re-isolate the Hebrew faith, the wisdom tradition was trying to integrate the Hebrew perspective into the larger picture.

Sophia was not only a force for unity within Judaism. She also established continuity between Judaism and Christianity. And her fusion with Christ offers contemporary Christians a way to understand their Savior as a union of male and female. Similarly Johnson writes that through the filter of the Sophia metaphor, "new ways of appreciating Christ can be formed, less associated with patriarchal control and more in tune with women's daily life and collective wisdom, so often discounted as a source of insight" Johnson In light of this feminist revival of the Sophia figure, some Christian women have begun to speak of the "Sophia-God of Jesus" and of "Jesus Sophia.

Mollenkott also suggests that Sophia can replace the Virgin Mary as a positive role model for Catholic women. Mary, she insists, is an impossible model to follow, for no woman can be both virgin and mother. In addition, she argues that the strong, independent women of today cannot identify with Mary, for the Virgin Mother is a passive figure submissive to a masculine God.

Sophia, however, may be a much more viable role model: "Dame Wisdom is an especially important symbol for contemporary women because she gets us beyond the concept that femaleness finds its primary fulfillment in motherhood. Wisdom is busy in the public sphere; she is no shrinking violet, no vessel waiting to be given her significance by someone else" Mollenkott Sophia supports a two-way flow of energy--both give and take--and thus she is an especially important figure for women who need to learn to restrain themselves from giving excessively.

However, like the Virgin Mary, Sophia too was shaped by a highly patriarchal society. In fact, some biblical portrayals of Dame Wisdom are clearly sexist. Some depictions of Sophia seem to reveal concerns that her growing power threatens patriarchal society. Proverbs 7 thus picks up on the traditional "bad girl" stereotype, describing Sophia as an evil harlot who threatens the patriarchally dominated institution of marriage.

Ultimately, the authors of Wisdom's Feast have to admit that much of the treatment of Sophia in the Bible and in the Christian tradition reinforces patriarchal values, making Sophia a potentially dangerous symbol of the divine. Too often she has played a mediating role, pointing toward God rather than to herself, and thus upholding male power. Because Sophia did not develop co-equal status with Yahweh, because her voice is not identified in the Christian scriptures, it has been easy to keep her secondary and derivative.

She is compared to Eve because both women experienced a "fall from grace" which resulted in the creation of the material world into the form it is today.

In the myth she gives birth to a defective creature who she casts away, but who still retains power due to her holiness. In the end, most sources agree that Sophia can be developed into a positive figure for feminist spirituality. In more ways than one the Sophia figure suggests that that the gender stratification of Judaism and Christianity is centered in the body. Most revealing is the name of this extremely powerful female figure of Judaism and Christianity.

Her name "Wisdom" seems to lend her the power to transcend the "impurities" of her female body. Sophia's role in the Gnostic community also suggests that her power was rooted in her wisdom. Here, more divine than flesh and blood, she was capable of transcending any impurities that might have been associated with her female body.

Although she was sometimes described as a mother and a lover, these were only metaphorical depictions of Sophia. Clearly her wisdom was manifested in her bodilessness.

Wisdom's Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration. Camp, Claudia V. Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs. Decatur: Almond, According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor c. Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says:.

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself. Although they claim to offer secret teaching, many of these texts refer to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and others to the letters of Paul and the New Testament gospels.

Many of them include the same dramatic personae as the New Testament—Jesus and his disciples. Yet the differences are striking. Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from Its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding.

But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal—even identical. Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way: he remains forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source:.

Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out…. 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. Does not such teaching—the identity of the divine and human. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced gnosticism? The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, suggests that it had.

We note, too, that Hippolytus, who was a Greek speaking Christian in Rome c. There is. They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, nor like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge gnosis through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise. Could the title of the Gospel of Thomas—named for the disciple who, tradition tells us, went to India—suggest the influence of Indian tradition?

These hints indicate the possibility, yet our evidence is not conclusive. Since parallel traditions may emerge in different cultures at different times, such ideas could have developed in both places independently.

What we call Eastern and Western religions, and tend to regard as separate streams, were not clearly differentiated 2, years ago. Research on the Nag Hammadi texts is only beginning: we look forward to the work of scholars who can study these traditions comparatively to discover whether they can, in fact, be traced to Indian sources.

Even so, ideas that we associate with Eastern religions emerged in the first century through the gnostic movement in the West, but they were suppressed and condemned by polemicists like Irenaeus. Yet those who called gnosticism heresy were adopting—consciously or not—the viewpoint of that group of Christians who called themselves orthodox Christians. A heretic may be anyone whose outlook someone else dislikes or denounces.

According to tradition, a heretic is one who deviates from the true faith. Who calls it that, and for what reasons? We find this problem familiar in our own experience. Yet Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree that such diversity is a recent—and deplorable—development. According to Christian legend, the early church was different.

Christians of every persuasion look back to the primitive church to find a simpler, purer form of Christian faith. It was only after that golden age that conflict, then heresy emerged: so says the author of the Acts of the Apostles, who identifies himself as the first historian of Christianity.

But the discoveries at Nag Hammadi have upset this picture. If we admit that some of these fifty-two texts represents early forms of Christian teaching, we may have to recognize that early Christianity is far more diverse than nearly anyone expected before the Nag Hammadi discoveries. Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries.

For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution.