In Our Time - Gnosticism

Episode Date: May 2, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Gnosticism, a sect associated with early Christianity. The Gnostics divided the universe into two domains: the visible world and the spiritual one. They believed that a special sort of knowledge, or gnosis, would enable them to escape the evils of the physical world and allow them access to the higher spiritual realm. The Gnostics were regarded as heretics by many of the Church Fathers, but their influence was important in defining the course of early Christianity. A major archaeological discovery in Egypt in the 1940s, when a large cache of Gnostic texts were found buried in an earthenware jar, enabled scholars to learn considerably more about their beliefs.With:Martin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and CultureCaroline Humfress Reader in History at Birkbeck College, University of LondonAlastair Logan Honorary University Fellow of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of ExeterProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1945, an Egyptian farmer walked out into the mountains near his home looking for fertiliser. Instead, he found a buried earthenware jar containing a dozen manuscripts bound in leather.

Having no idea what there were, he used some of them as fuel. But eventually the others found their way into the hands of an expert who identified them as one of the most important archaeological finds of the century, a cache of religious text dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD. These documents known today as the Nag Hammani Library, Hamadi Library comprised the most extensive collection of texts relation to Gnosticism, a belief which was at its height in the 2nd century AD. The Gnostics believed that the physical world was evil

and that inner knowledge would allow them to escape to the true spiritual. world. Nosticism was an important religious movement for at least two centuries, and some scholars believe that early Christian theology was profoundly influenced, even defined by Gnostic thought. With me to discuss Nosticism are Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture, Caroline Humphreys, Reader in History, Berkbeck College, University of London, and Alistair Logan, Honor a University of University of Fellow of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter. Martin Palmer, who were the Gnostics and what were their central beliefs?

Well, between the first and fourth centuries AD, across the Roman Empire, particularly around the eastern end, around Egypt and Syria, and indeed even into the Persian Empire and what we would now think of as Iraq, there rose a variety of movements who all believed that they were in touch

with some kind of secret knowledge, the gnosis from which Gnostic comes, the word. The word is the Greek word, yes. The Greek word, meaning knowledge. And they believe that this knowledge would free them from this material world and would enable them to return to the source of life,

which was an unknown, unmovable, unapproachable, unapproachable, unapproachable God at Wonder, if you like. And these movements were enormously varied. They drew on all sorts of materials. Some trace themselves back mythologically to Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, given as a sort of compensation for the fact that Kane and Abel hadn't really worked out terribly well

and actually called in the Bible a sort of gift from God. Others trace themselves to Jesus, others trace themselves to Hermes and to Egyptian mythology. And as the movement spread further and further east into Persia, they claim to have descended from Zoroaster and even from Buddha by the time the tradition gets to China. And they were a very strange movement in many ways, so strange that they were persecuted not just by the Christians, but they were attacked by the neoplatonists such as Plotinus in the third century.

They were attacked by the Zoroastrians and they were even banned by Chinese emperors. So they were a movement that somehow managed to rile just about everybody. Can you define out of that upheaval of opinion, which is a way of looking for how life works with one of the tools they have, which was faith at the time, what specifically the Gnostics stood for? They were trying to answer in a particular way,

the sort of perennial existential questions of why is there evil, what is the soul, what is the fate of humanity, what does it mean to be human? And they answered this really through a dualistic worldview. Their view was, as you alluded to in the introduction, Melvin, that this physical world was an evil world. And in fact, within the Christian Gnostic material, and to some extent the material that derives from Judaism,

it was a view that the created God as depicted in the Torah, the Old Testament, was a demiurge, meaning in Greek an architect, simply a builder. He was not the real God, but he had taken upon himself the claims to be the real God. The real God was unknowable and beyond this rather bragging, materialistic God who had created a physical world. And in that physical world, sparks of the divine were trapped, which is what our souls were. And the aim of Nosticism was to enable the divine spark within each person to be released, to be got free of the physical world, the tomb, as it were, that it was entrapped.

of this physical world and be reunited with the divine source God. Are we talking about small groups, identifiable groups of 12, 20, 120,000 people? What are we talking about? We're talking about pretty much mass movements. And I mean, at one level, you could argue that in the second century, they are a major component of what would have seemed to outsiders to be the new movement of Christianity. And they were very strong.

I mean, they survive in China until the 14th century. They convert entire tribes of the Uyghurs, for example, were converted to manichyism, a branch of Gnosticism in the 7th 8th century. So they were mass movements, and at one point they seriously challenged the ability of Christianity to arise as the, if you like, the Orthodox religion. Caroline Humphreys, Martin has begun to outline the distinctive creation myth. Could you elaborate a little, please? Yes, absolutely. I think the first thing to point out is that there isn't one single creation myth that we,

can say is Gnostic. So perhaps it's more like thinking about jazz music, that there's a certain kind of theme, and then individual Gnostics rift on the theme. So very basically, if we take it as a composite whole, I think it has three parts. The first part relates to the structure of the divine realm. The second part relates to the creation of the cosmos. And then the third part relates to the history of the first generations of humans. So Adam, Eve, their children, and Noah, his wife and their children too. So I think in terms of the actual way in which these three parts of the myth fits together, it's much more, it's not a kind of history that you're meant to read a meaning into.

It's actually a myth that you're meant to have as a kind of experience yourself in a sort of psychodrama. So you're invited as a Gnostic to put yourself into the myth and to understand the way in which the world operates and the deep structure of reality and being by thinking about the myth and experiencing it. and then hopefully when you achieve nois, enlightenment, you can actually begin to add to the myth yourself. Martin outlined a great number of religions going on at the time. Very exciting theological stroke intellectual period.

What was distinctive about the Noxatics? I think that looking at the, if we are to think of them as a composite group, perhaps the most distinctive thing is this idea of redemption from ignorance. So whereas in Judaism and Christianity, we might think more in terms of redemption for the sins that we have committed ourselves, will lead us to salvation. For Gnostics, we have to be redeemed from the ignorance, which is not actually our fault.

It's part of the way in which the creation was made. It's part of the way in which the universe is structured. And if we can redeem ourselves from ignorance, we can be saved. We can achieve through that spiritual awakening a higher consciousness and we can actually be redeemed in the here and now. We don't have to wait until some future world or some future judgment,

like we might say Orthodox Christianity. tells us we have to. So how do we go about being redeemed for our ignorance, please? Okay, well there's three easy steps. No, there really isn't. So again, it goes back to this, to the myth. So in the myth of the structure of the way in which the divine realm is structured, there is a supreme, the unknowable father who generates all these various aeons, these emanations, these divine beings. And just a second, let's go slowly here, because this matters. Aons, emanations, divine beings.

It's going to have a little post-book to each one of those. They're equal to each other. So it's again, it's a problem which a lot of ancient philosophies deal with and not just ancient ones, but modern physics as well. If the world was created out of a unity, how do we get plurality? So the way in which Gnostic scriptures answered this was to say that in the beginning there is the unknowable father. So simply beyond being, we cannot know the father.

But how does the father become more than one? The father thinks and produces thought, pro noia, foreknowledge. And then from foreknowledge, there has generated all of these other emanations. And in fact, Tertullian, who today in the church is thought of as Orthodox, although it's slightly tricky at the time as to whether he was or not, Tutulian said that what the Gnostics do is that they treat heaven as if it's an apartment block with rooms for every God, kind of stacked up one on top of the other.

So these emanations of the divine being, they multiply and multiply and multiply, in some Gnostic strands, there are, you know, 30 and other strands there are 12. The very final one of these emanations, though, was called Sophia, wisdom. Now, Sophia conceived a desire to know the unnameable father, but without the unnameable father's permission. And as a result of that desire, Sophia created a kind of rent in the cosmos, a rent in the divine realm. She created a veil, and the shadow of that veil became the material world.

and she also created as a result of this desire, the evil demiurge, Yalda Bawath, who is usually associated with Yawa, the god of the Hebrew scriptures. So that's where the material cosmos comes from. Now, in terms of going back to how do we achieve enlightenment, if we know that is the case, then when we read the Hebrew scriptures,

we will know that they are actually telling us a story, which is the story created by Yalda Bavath, the evil demiurge. So we can go beyond that and we can begin to achieve. And we will also know that humans, as the apocalypse of Adam says, were actually originally created to be higher than the demiurge. So we are above the God of the Hebrew scriptures. And that's one of the reasons why the Gnostics were so incredibly incendiary to what we would now call institutional Christianity.

Yes. I mean, when you talk about that, just as a little aside, the language of mysticism in that is a wonderful metaphor of what's going on in physics at the moment, isn't it? But maybe that is certainly a different programme. Would you describe the Gnostics as a sort of an intellectual wing of the Christian sects and movements that were going on, as Martin described at that time? It's tricky because I think that even within institutional Christianity, there are branches of institutional Christianity between the second and fourth centuries who you could describe as intellectuals. There's no doubt about that.

But I think there are a very specific kind of intellectual wing. So Nosis, the idea of experiential wisdom, the idea of experiential wisdom, the idea, and the Gospel of Philip, I think, describes it as lighting the lamp within your soul. I think that's a very different kind of knowing. The divine spark is that. We were made by a mistake. But one thing that the mistake consisted of was a bit of the divine spark was accidentally left in there. And the thing is to seek it out and dig it out.

Well, in the classic myth, I think I'm right, it's Sophia, this last emanation, who actually recognises that Adam is lacking that spiritual part. So she sends her daughter Zoe, which means life, who appears as Eve, and Eve awakens Adam. So it's a kind of complete inversion, subversion, playing with the book of Genesis and the story that we are familiar with, if we're familiar with Christianity today. And also trying to make sense of the first sex which led to the whole evolutionary process. Absolutely. That's another program. Can you, let's just dig in before we move on to these Gnostics as people, different Gnostic sects.

Can you outline the main wounds and elaborate a bit more? I just want listeners to know who they were at that time between the second and fourth centuries. Were they significant? Were they rich or poor? How did they meet some material notion of their condition? Well, I'd like to focus on the specifically Christian Gnostics. And they seem to have been semi-intellectuals,

on the electoral wing of that kind of movement, who were perhaps some of them were ex-Jews dissatisfied with the Jewish god who seemed to have failed because of the destruction in Jerusalem and so on. So they were turning around, they were disillusioned, their apostate, they were looking around for some alternative kind of religious movement, and they were attracted to which, what I think is essentially in a Christian form of Gnosticism.

And these Christian Gnosticism, it was made up of sects, certain Gnostic sects, whom Irenaeus is the first to give an account of. And these Gnostic sects claimed that they had the true knowledge, the true gnosis. But they appealed, I think, more to intellectuals, I think, intellectual end of the spectrum.

But they claimed that they were the true Christians in the light of their knowledge and in the light of their initiation into the Gnostic sacraments of baptism and chrismation. They felt they had, in which the spirit had descended on them and they were therefore the true Gnostics, the true Christians. But I think they were at first quite small groups, but they did certainly expand,

particularly in the third century, into the dualist heresy of manichism, but it did seem to represent a kind of Gnostic religion. Manichism, the idea that there are two very close in the world. Good and evil, light and darkness. I think earlier on they were perhaps more smaller conventicles of Gnostics who often could go along to the Catholic services

but mentally have reservations and have their own true understanding of what went on. But they would meet as small groups discussing the Gnostic myth in sort of conventicles. So they wouldn't have a kind of conventional canon of scripture the Old and New Testament's, but they would have the Gnostic myth, which they commented on, wrote commentaries on,

and discussed in a kind of philosophical school, a bit like the philosophical schools of Plotinus and others at the same time. And in fact, some of the early Christians, like Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century in Rome, it has a little philosophical school of Christianity-Christian philosophy. So there would be people with interest in that kind of philosophical bent, perhaps, semi-intellectual intellectuals, I think.

So it would be an elite at the time, I think. But it became more popular later on. And this was all over the Roman Empire. Yes. It seemed to have started, I think, in Christian Gnostism, seemed to start in Antioch or Alexandria, Antioch in Alexandria and Egypt. And it spread to Rome, of course.

All roads lead to Rome. And we find Gnostics and Valentinians in Rome. Valentinians were the more Christian version of the Gnostics. Can you tell us something about their rituals and how they worshipped? Yes, well, as I said, there was this, they were very keen on that ritual and sacrament. in fact, because they felt that you became a Gnostic through this ritual of initiation,

that mediatornostic. So they're all very keen on sacraments, and they often very similar to orthodox sacraments, and often perhaps they helped to stimulate development of some aspects of orthodox sacraments. I'm very sorry. Yeah, yeah. Did they introduce the notion of baptism?

Not baptism, but they might have developed the idea of anointing chrismation. Baptism was already there as a Jewish rite, which the Christians took over. But they had a baptism, the Gnostics, to the baptism into a Gnostic Trinity of Father, Mother, Son, not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So you were baptized into the Christian Gnostic Trinity, and then you were anointed with chrism, ointment.

That made you a Christ, and that meant the descent of the Holy Spirit, which completed you, as Caroline said, that completed you as a Gnostic. You awoke from your, as it were, a semi-drugged state of oblivion. You were awakened by this saving knowledge. You were anointed, you were made a crudic. Christ, the spirit descended on you, and then you were able to live this ascetic life, trying to not get involved too much in the world and all its temptations and so on, until the time came in. In the final right, a deathbed right, you were again anointed.

You were given the passwords which allowed you to pass through the seven heavenly spheres controlled by the planetary rulers, the evil rulers of the al-daba oath, and you ascended up to heaven and union with the unknown transcendent God. So sacrament is very important. And the Valentinians were even more Christian, more orthodox. We'll come to the Palestinians in the minute. They also had a Eucharist. The Gnostics probably didn't believe in the Eucharist.

It's interesting, the playful almost desperate, not desperate, complications they introduce in order, I think just striving. No, I think it's absolutely fascinating. This is a body of knowledge that we have before us, and they're working it in every way they can to explain things that we're still trying to explain. But the seven steps, not just one, it's got to be seven because it's more complicated, interesting and so on and so forth.

Martin. What role did salvation play? Alice has led us towards it, but what role did salvation play in narcissism? Well, I think Alice has done a superb job of outlining much of it, but I think the core of it is it's very different, as Caroline was saying, from the Christian notion. The Christian notion is the... From the then Christian notion.

From the then Christian notion, and to a great extent what we know now, and to some degree that notion has been defined by the arguments with the Gnostics. It was a sense that rather than having to be, saved and plucked, as it were, from hell and doom. This is much more that through knowledge, you are able to appreciate to fully understand who and what you are. And in that moment, to realise... And what's the advantage of that?

The advantage of that is that basically it happens once, and it doesn't particularly involve guilt. And that's quite a major difference between the Gnostics and the Christians. A huge one. Now, obviously, the notion of original sin comes much, much later than the major period of the Gnostics that comes in the 5th century with St. Augustine. But nevertheless, this sense that somehow

you needed to be redeemed from your sins, from your follies, from your fall, to use the Christian interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve, not the Jewish or Muslim tradition, is abandoned. That you don't need. What you need is an awakening. And the Gospel of Philip, for example, says it's like a drunk who soberes up

and suddenly realizes is that what they thought and how they understood themselves when they were drunk was a complete illusion. So the wonderful poetry they thought they wrote when they were completely out of their heads actually turns out to be drivel. It's that sort of moment of, oh, blimey, that's not what it's all about. So salvation here is more like liberation. And in fact, I think the word liberation is a better word.

It liberates you from this evil materialist world created by this opponent god, if you like, of the real God. this God who claims, for example, to Adam and to Adam that if he eats of the tree of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would die. And as Caroline said, Sophia comes down as Eve and indeed is the snake and says, go on, go on, try it, see if it works, go on, he won't kill you. And he doesn't. He does and he doesn't.

No, he doesn't kill Adam. That's right, Adam does eat and he isn't killed. Yeah, he's still around. He does eat and he doesn't kill. Exactly. And so the... The Gnostics then go, you see, is lying. And it's that sort of moment of realizing that so much of what you've been taught

actually entraps you. And hence there's notion that once the nois, once you have the secret knowledge, once you know the truth, you are liberated from these illusions. Caroline, what interested the Gnostics have in ethics? This is a very interesting question. I think you can answer it two ways. So first of all, we should perhaps go back to what Alistair said about Gnosticism being a solitary thing.

But actually what you're doing when you're doing when you're, when you're awake, when you're enlightened, is that you're working on your own self. You realize that yourself is divine, that the divinity is self. But at the same time, in terms of historical communities, these people live together, they studied together, they worship together, they did ritual acts together. So I think that Nosticism does have an ethical element. A lot of the descriptions of how these communities functioned come from opponents of Nosticism. So Tertullian writes about how there's no structure, there's no teardomptychism. teaching that when Gnostics meet together in a group, they have to draw by lot to see who's

going to lead them. And of course, for Tertullian, who's more used to the institutional church with the rise of the monarchical bishop, the idea that the bishop should be in control of the community, this is just chaos. You know, how can any group function like this? But for a Gnostic, this is the principle of equality, that once you are awakened and enlightened, you don't need somebody to tell you what to do. You don't necessarily need a Christian bishop preaching fear and judgment and hellfire. That rift through Christianity, non-established Christianity, well until now, doesn't it?

Absolutely. That idea, choosing a leader or an elder, as Tyndall said, yes. Yes, many of the questions that I think are perennial throughout Christianity, as Martin said, you really can see when you look back and start looking at Gnostic, different Gnostic sects and Gnostic movements. I suppose when I said I think people listening would say, do they have ten commandments?

Do they have that? Well, you don't need the Ten Commandments because, of course, the Ten Commandments are part of Hebrew Scripture, and to a certain extent they derive from Yaldabaouf, this jealous evil demiurge. So part of becoming awake, part of waking up as a Gnostic, is realizing that the Ten Commandments were in fact put there by a jealous demiurge who wants to keep humanity down. And as the Apocalypse of Adam says, you know, humans are better than this jealous demiurge. When the jealous demiurge realizes that humans are better, he becomes genocidal. Bring us all at the speed on this demiurge. Who is this demiurge again?

He is created by Sophia, who's the last emanation in the divine realm. From this unknowable, unaccountable, unnamedable God? Well, she desires to know the unnameable father, without the unnameable father's permission or without his knowledge. And this desire creates... So she is tempted in that, we would say to know. No, she's not tempted. I think that's more of a Christianising idea.

All right. Well, what is she then? She wants it. She desires it. Yeah. She's, you know, she's this force, this feminine force. She desires to know. And this creates a veil in the divine realm,

which enables the material world to come into existence. And one of the Gnostic texts talks about this evil demiurge being created like matter from a miscarriage. So he's an aberration. You know, he's something which shouldn't have happened, and yet he does. Alistair, can I ask you, how did the... Was there an established church at the time? Let's say the second to the fourth century's AD. That's pretty loose, isn't it?

But leave it at that way. Was there something could be called an established Orthodox Church? And if so, how did it respond to Nostasis? Well, not such a thing as an established church, because then they came with the Roman... But there was a developing church structure of a hierarchy with the bishop and the presbyters and the deacons. That was emerging in the second century.

And it was profound. challenged by the Gnostics and forced into a more stronger structure in the sense that they strengthened that structure of hierarchy and they're also forced to develop a kind of counter strategy and a pattern of orthodoxy which began to emerge as a result of the Gnostic challenge. So you do get a much more focused church structure moving towards a clearer structure, much more like the pattern of orthodoxy, still have with us. So the Gnostics are actually pushing, the wrong word was established, I agree, but the predominating, I suppose I meant,

the, what word can use you use in the second and the fourth century, the most powerful, the predominating, the orthodox, the whatever, the biggest sect, the biggest, the biggest, the biggest, let's land on biggest, church, right, and but the Gnostics are pushing them,

they're intellectually challenging them all the time to define and redefine their position, and because of that, they do, define and redefine that position. And they've developed a form of Christian author, a pattern of Christian orthodoxy, which as a say still prevails. Such as? Well, the Gnostics forced the church to insist

there is a three-pronged development of the kind of orthodox response, a pattern orthodoxy. First of all, the Gnostics were their claim to all these secret gospels and revelations so on, force the church into, first of all, developing the idea of a kind of primitive creed

which Iron A's tends to develop and calls, the yardstick, the canon of truth, and this is a three-fold sort of pattern in which you have belief in the one God, who is both creator and redeemer, the one God of the Old Testament, is creator and redeemer, and the Father of Christ, not the supreme, a transcendent God and the ignorant demiurge. One Jesus Christ, who is really incarnate and really suffers on the cross, not a split Christ in which the Gnostics have a kind of heavenly Christ who can't suffer who descends temporarily on the earthly Jesus and disappears before the cross, so the earthly.

the Jesus suffers crucifixion, not the heavenly Christ, he's divine, he can't suffer. And the Valentine is a multiple Christ figure. So the church says, no, there's only one Jesus Christ who was crucified and rose. And thirdly, they insist on the resurrection, the literal resurrection of the flesh, because the Gnostics either denied that literal resurrection

because the body was evil, or they give a spiritual reinterpretation of resurrection. So the church had this three-fold pattern of, first of all, in terms of this creed. Secondly, they appealed to a canon, a kind of almost not entirely closed canon of scripture, involving, of course, the Old Testament, that was the Christian Bible, and now developing New Testament, with only four Gospels and so on, Acts, Revelation, against all these Gnostic Gospels and Gnostic Acts and Gnostic Epistles.

And finally, they appealed to a doctrine of tradition, open and public in the apostolic churches. The Gnostic's appeal to a secret tradition. Martin Palmer again, you wanted to come in when Caroline was talking, but can you obviously say that there, and then can we talk about, and the connection between Gnosticism and some of the sects, let's call them, you're talking about in your very opening remarks in Egypt and so.

Well, I think just to sort of clarify, perhaps, for listeners, the demiurge, this God that is evil, is essentially the God of the Old Testament, and it is the God that, as Alastair is saying, is affirmed in the creeds as being both creator and Redeemer, whereas for the Gnostics, the idea of a creator god meant that he created evil. So I think, just to clarify,

we're talking about the God of the Old Testament fundamentally as being the evil deity. In terms of the groups that it drew from, it's reacting to really a kind of collapse of traditional hierarchical or established religions at the time. I mean, nobody particularly believed in Zeus or Jupiter and Plato had done a fairly good demolition drop on the Greek myths

and had posited this notion of a spirit, spiritual world and a material world, but not seeing them as good and bad, so much as superior and inferior, which is why Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist writer of the third century, gets so agitated with the Gnostics for saying that this is an, that the material world is evil. In fact, he says, this is a beautiful world. It's a world that's been created to be a wonder and a joy and a delight. So he's very much reacting against this sort of sense that the material world is very bad. You've got the emerging

into the Roman Empire of mystical religions such as Mithraism, you've got the coming of the Sybil coming in from Syria. And these are all interacting with each other. All interacting in a cosmopolitan world of enormous variety.

I mean, very similar to contemporary society where traditionally established communities who've been largely agrarian were now moving into the cities. We're finding that the old gods, the old systems, no longer really made sense. of what they experienced, the old structures of authority and hierarchy weren't working any longer.

Suddenly they were rubbing up against, you know, devout Jews were rubbing up against people who worshipped ISIS from Egypt and others who worshipped Zoroaster and so forth. And it was a whole melting pot of ideas. And out of this, various groups are trying to make sense of a plethora of images. And Christianity is as much part of this experimentation as Gnosticism is. Caroline, when people began to criticize the Gnostics, in what way did they criticise it?

Alice has dwelt a bit on that, talking about I don't know whether you mentioned Hippolytus and I don't know if you're actually having only four Gospels out of all the Gospels, and Gnostics said we've got our own Gospels, and so on, can you just give us a bigger idea of the antagonism that they seemed to provoke? Absolutely, so if we start and work from the ground-up,

If we look at Ironaeus of Leon, he talks about how Gnostics are such a threat because they don't keep to themselves. So he identifies Gnostics in his congregation. This is something that the 4th century heresiologists, so a Christian writer who's interested in categorizing and classifying heresies, Epiphanius of Salamis, identifies Gnostic in his Christian congregation in the 4th century. Irenaeus says that they're so dangerous because just like common people can't distinguish between cut glass and emeralds, So too, they can't distinguish between the real Christians and the Gnostics. So really the idea is that the Gnostics are something that need to be excluded,

but they're actually already inside the church. So that's one, I think, angle of the threat that the established institutional church felt. The other angle, and this is only relevant to some streams of Gnosticism, is this idea that once you have achieved enlightenment, you don't need the institutional church anymore. So I think this goes back to something that Alistair was saying. So Ironaeus of Leon and Tertullian refer to Gnostics who used to call Christian bishops waterless canals. They didn't have the wonderful spirit running through them

like water should run through the canal. It's a great analogy, isn't it? It really is. And it's a huge threat. If you're a bishop to be told that the spirit doesn't run through your canal, that's a problem. So I think then we can also think about canon formation in the way that Alistair was mentioning this idea.

The canon being the number of permitted and approved Gospels. Exactly. What's to make it in and what should be excluded. And of course here, the Gospel of John is very interesting because there are many things in the Gospel of John, which to a Gnostic, I think they could have identified with. And yet that text made it into the canon. So I think the Gnostics, the Gospel of John perhaps left it open that it could be given an institutional interpretation

in a way that some of the other Gnostic text simply couldn't. And so there have been great arguments or thought, recently about those Gospels that included but those Gospels that were excluded and this discovery in 1945 this cash-abnostic text by this Egyptian farmer some of which were burnt

for fuel it's I mean the way that history develops is amazing isn't it? Were the best bits burnt or the thickest books or anyway enough for rescue to change the world of thought about that time could you tell us what impacted it however I've used to change the world too loosely You tell us the precise impact you think it had. Well, a word first perhaps about what these Gospels are.

Can I say that? I mean, they're called Gospels because gospel just simply means good news. It's not necessarily a particular literary genre. But they felt that giving the title of gospel made more influential. So the Gnostic gospel, like the Gospel of the Egyptians, which is a kind of a recounting of the myth of heavenly Seth, with a kind of baptismal section at the end of it. Seth being the third son.

Heavenly Seth being the third son of Adam, yes. There's also the Gospel of Judas discovered in Middle Egypt in the mid-1970s, which is a kind of revelation dialogue between Jesus and Judas about the heavenly, the true race of Gnostics, which although Judas is better than the other disciples, he's never going to get there. Then there are gospels which don't have that myth but are used by Gnostics, the Gospel of Thomas, which a sayings collection, a bit like the cue, which some scholars claim is the source of Matthew and Luke.

and the Gospel of Mary, which is, again, is a revelation dialogue, in which Mary has sort of revelations from Christ, and Peter criticizes her for that. And then there are Valentinian Gospels, the Gospel of Truth, which is a homily on the personal work of Christ, which maybe go back to Valentinus, and the Gospel of Philip, which is a homily on Valentine's sacraments.

So what did they bring? What did they, what reaction did the Orthodox be? have to these? Now, still having it. It is not what long ago. Arnaus mentions the gospel of truth that might be the same one as this work of Valentine's, which he rejects because it's so different from the canonical gospels.

You felt these were different. These were inventions. We mentioned Valentinus a lot, Andrew. So to interrupt you. Can you just briefly tell people who Valentinas says and why he's significant? He was a very significant figure. He was born and brought up in near Alexandria. And then he went to Rome and almost became bishop.

He was such a powerful and influential figure. He almost became Bishop of Rome. He was only beaten by a candidate who had suffered in persecution. But we've got to know what he stood for. He was the founder of this very profound form of Christian Nostas and Protestantianism with a much more refined and sophisticated myth than the Gnostic. He took over the Gnostic myth of Sophia, the fallen figure of wisdom, and he gave it a much more developed and sophisticated platonic interpretation.

And he was seen as a threat, wasn't he? He was, because he had very, very significant. We know more about the Valentinians. they're more named Valentinians than any other of any other Gnostic sect. What would this discovery, what would this add to the power that Valentinians had at that time? What would the... Well, given that we've discovered these Gospels. Well, they would have been written after.

Well, but some that might have been before him, but some were after. It's around the time. Yes, I mean, in the middle of the second century, there's a lot of these Gnostic original Gnostic texts have been written about that time. Others are rather later. So I was asking you to come back to the main question, what disturbance is created and what effect it had? Well, I think he was such a powerful figure, a poet and a mystic,

that his views were very influential. And there were many Valentinians who, in fact, passed themselves as Orthodox Christians. That's what Aronais was so annoyed about. He writes to a certain Florinus, who was a very influential figure at the court in Asia Minor. Then he goes to Rome, and he becomes a Catholic deacon in the church. And Aronais is horrified this.

He was a Valentinian at the heart of the church. Rome. But I just wonder, I really haven't, it's probably I'm not asking the right question, so please excuse me. You've got these things discovered. They knew nothing much has happened in that area for a very long time for 13, 14,100 years. Did it change the way that scholars thought of the Orthodox Gospels, the way they thought of the received word? Caroline, you were to come in. I was just very quickly to come into that. I think they were absolutely revolutionary and I think Alistair was actually involved in bringing the Gospels to light and actually doing scholarly work on them.

And for one very simple reason that previously a lot of the information we had about the Gnostics were from their opponents, but the Nag Hammadi texts gave us the opportunity to see the Gnostics actually opposing

institutional Christianity and also opposing each other and developing ideas with each other. So this was the first time we got a real insight into what these people wrote down for themselves, which was just,

it completely changed the way that we think about the early church, I think. I think what in. What they did was they legitimated a massive questioning of the orthodoxy of Christianity, which has fed into many of the contemporary movements such as the New Age movements and so forth. They, in a sense, said, so what's so orthodox about the four Gospels? And I think particularly the Gospel of Mary, which had been discovered earlier than the Nag Hammadi

had been published towards the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, opened this whole debate about sexism within the church and the degree to which the figure of women, and particularly Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the resurrection, had been suppressed and in a sense driven out of the story. So it opened up not so much within the scholastic world where it raised all kinds of fascinating issues, but at a popular level,

I think it's one of the major factors that has led to a serious questioning of whether conventional Christianity actually only, has a fraction of the story. Can we, so can I come back to you for this? What authority is given to these Gnostic Gospels? Are they all dismissed as, oh, they're too late and so on? What authority is now given in the scholarship, I'm not talking so much about faith,

but in the scholarship about authenticity of reports of what's going on in the religious sects at that time? Well, I think there's been great debate, particularly about the Gospel of Thomas, and the suggestion that many of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are perhaps more original than the synoptic than Matthew Mark Luke versions. So I think that's been taking very serious

and the possibility that Jesus is seen very much there as a kind of teacher of wisdom and there no mention the cross resurrection and so on. There's more focus on him as a kind of divine figure, the living Jesus, the source of truth, who you can become like him if you have the knowledge that he brings. So Thomas has been a very significant sort of feature in New Testament scholarship, much debate about that.

And as Martin has said, the other Gospels are very much put the cat among the pigeons about the understanding of the nature of women equality in the church and so on. So I think it has, and it's cast a whole new light, I think a new perspective on early Christianity, as these are very much a viable alternative to the developing orthodoxy. Would you like to talk about the influence to scholarship that the discovery of these Gospels brought?

I think also I'd just like to stress something that we have mentioned, but perhaps needs to have more focus put on it, is that the sheer visionary and poetic quality of a lot of this literature. So it's no accident that William Blake, for instance, was fascinated by accounts of Gnosticism. And this idea that individuals throughout the ages who have had this kind of visionary Pico and Della Miranda, all these incredible Renaissance humanists, were so interested in the Gnostics because of this great kind of, you know, power, this immense poeticism as a way to understand that it doesn't necessarily have to be rational knowledge in order to achieve nosis.

can be this visionary knowledge too. So I think that's another impact, that gnosticism. What influence among scholars did the Gospel of Mary have? What impact of? I think that when it was first discovered in the late 19th century, it definitely woke scholarship up and made a big difference, but then combined with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi literature, and then as the Nag Hammadi literature became published,

and you could begin to compare what was in the Gospel of Mary to what were in the other texts, then it really has completely changed. to the way that we think about early Christianity, to the extent that now scholars would talk about early Christianity's plural. Yes. Can you briefly, sorry about this, Alistair, but time is our enemy at this moment, the relationship between Gnostic thought and Judaism.

Is it possible to encapsulate that massive subject? Well, there's much debate about that. Clearly, Gnosticism has a very powerful Jewish element in it. The figures of myth, Adam and Eve, and so on the language, it invents, Semitic, sounding names for all these divine figures. It plays with the basic myths of

Judaism and therefore some have felt it comes out of Judaism as a kind of sectarian movement, a breakable movement, pre-Christian movement. A lot of scholarship goes that way. But I and some other scholars are not entirely convinced and people like Hans Jonas, the great German philosopher

and a student of Gnosticism, talked about the kind of metaphysical rebellion against Judaism. Could that happen within Judaism? Could Judaism give rise to this kind of belief, this rejection of the Jewish God and monotheism and so on? And no authentic text we seem to antedate Christianity have been discovered, no Jewish-nostic texts as far as no.

So Judaism is a very important element, but there's a kind of reaction, rebellion against Judaism within narcissism. Martin, now you were to say so, but after you've said it, could you tell us briefly the influence, how long the influence of Nazism went on as Nosticism? I'm just really going to briefly mention that I think one has to put contemporary Judaism of the first century into this melting pot world where anything could go because I think that's the context that Nostasism comes out of, a collapse of old authorities and structures and the rubbing up against others. But in terms of its continuing influence, in manichaeism, which begins in Persia in the fourth century, spreads to China, becomes very powerful.

in the West. Nosticism is pretty much suppressed and wiped out by the 5th century, but then it kind of bubbles up again. And we must bubble up. Oh, sorry, must bubble up as well. That's the third time of asking that we're going to do another programme on something.

But there we are, promises, promises. Thank you very much to Caroline Humphreys, Martin Palmer and Alistair Logan. And next week we'll be talking about the 13th century Icelandic sagas. There are many more radio for arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com. co.uk slash Radio 4