The Gnostic Gospels

Christianity began with a traveling Jewish teacher who would become known as Jesus Christ (“Christ” being a Greek title, meaning “anointed one”) and his 12 disciples, the Apostles, who were also all Jewish. Jesus was put on trial and executed under charges that he was trying to provoke a revolt among the Jewish people against their rulers, the Roman Empire. His disciples believed that after he was buried, Jesus returned, not as a spirit but as a resurrected human being with a physical body. Right away, there were divisions between Jesus’s followers. Under the guidance of Jesus’s brother, James, some Christians continued following Jewish practices, while other Christians, led by an early Jewish convert named Paul, increasingly eschewed Jewish customs and religious restrictions. As Paul’s views won out, Christianity would over time further separate itself from Judaism and become its own religion with core claims seen as incompatible with mainstream Judaism, such as the belief that Jesus was a human incarnation of God.

Writings that would become important to all Christians—even those, like the gnostics, who were later deemed “heretical”—included the four Gospels, biographies of Jesus that tradition claimed were written by four of the Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and letters written to early Christian communities by Paul. These writings would be the core texts in the Christian book, the New Testament (named in contrast to the Old Testament, referring to the collection of sacred Jewish writings). The New Testament was not officially made canonical until at least 393 CE, although there is evidence suggesting that Christians were already using what would become the New Testament as early as the third century. A majority of modern historians and religious scholars now agree that at least three letters attributed to Paul were not written by him (First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus) and that the four Gospels were not actually written by the Apostles. Still, many scholars also believe that the oldest of the four Gospels, The Gospel of Matthew, was written sometime around 70 CE, placing it just a few decades after Jesus’s crucifixion, and that it and the other Gospels may be drawing from oral traditions and older written sources that have been lost.

As Jesus himself was condemned and killed by the Romans, the Christians were persecuted by Roman authorities, although historians also debate how much some stories of persecution may have been exaggerated. The Romans were hostile to Christianity. While the Romans considered the monotheistic religion of Judaism to be a legitimate tradition because of its long history, they saw Christianity as an illegitimate challenge to the Empire’s authority. Because they refused to make religious sacrifices to the emperors and the traditional gods, Christians were accused of political treason. In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels makes the argument that this persecution offered a surprising advantage to certain early Christians, spurring them to form a self-protective, hierarchical institution that would eventually grow in power while furnishing material for inspirational propaganda. Other Christian communities—those that Pagels calls “gnostics”—largely rejected the valorization of martyrdom, and Pagels argues that this difference is one reason they lost out in the contest to define what Christianity would look like. The political situation of Christianity drastically changed with the reign of Emperor Constantine I, who ruled as sole emperor from 324 CE to 337 CE. He legalized Christianity, ending all Roman persecution, and sponsored the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, where approximately 200 Christian bishops met to decide on matters of doctrine. The Nicaean Creed that arose from this council enshrined the notion that God and Jesus were equally divine and had always co-existed. As Christianity gained the support of the Roman government in the later fourth century, Christian leaders began to use their power to persecute what they perceived as heretical views, including those of the gnostics.