49 pages • 1-hour read
The Gnostic Gospels
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Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Passion of Christ and the Persecution of Christians”
Early Christian sources like the Gospels agree that Jesus was crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea. While gnostic texts do not doubt that the crucifixion occurred, many suggest that Jesus himself was not actually crucified, since “he was a spiritual being who adapted himself to human perception” (73). For orthodox authors, a central tenet of Christian faith is that Jesus, while the Son of God, was also a human being who suffered and died from crucifixion.
The importance of the question of Jesus’s crucifixion was interwoven, Pagels argues, with the persecution Christians themselves suffered from Roman authorities. There are many historical accounts of Christians being persecuted, like the executions of the philosopher Justin and his students. While Roman officials tried to convince arrested Christians to recant and avoid torture and death, some Christians preferred martyrdom over abjuring their beliefs. Other Christians “considered martyrdom foolish, wasteful of human life, and so, contrary to God’s will” (82). Orthodox authorities who had experienced persecution themselves were the most supportive of martyrdom, with a few orthodox Christian authorities like Justin Martyr and Tertullian being inspired to convert to Christianity by seeing the martyrdom of others.
Meanwhile, gnostics seem to have been the most likely to be skeptical of martyrdom. Orthodox writers like Tertullian and Irenaeus countered that gnostics opposed martyrdom to excuse their own “cowardice” (88). The Nag Hammadi manuscripts suggest that gnostic attitudes were diverse, while orthodox attitudes toward martyrdom tended to be almost uniformly positive. Those gnostics who believed that Jesus physically suffered and died tended to also support martyrdom, while other gnostic texts, like The Testimony of Truth, denied Jesus’s suffering and opposed martyrdom. They challenged the orthodox view that martyrdom “offers forgiveness of sins” (92) and claimed that orthodox views of martyrdom were akin to arguing that God accepts human self-sacrifice. They argued that comparisons between Christian martyrdom and the crucifixion of Jesus were invalid because Jesus was a spiritual entity who had no real experience of pain and death.
Another gnostic text, The Apocalypse of Peter, attacked the orthodox for encouraging people to accept their own executions for the sake of a promise of salvation. Still, the text does not reject martyrdom entirely, assuring readers that those who are executed only see their bodies die, while their souls live on. Other texts view Jesus’s crucifixion not “as a sacrifice redeeming humanity from guilt and sin,” but “as the occasion for discovering the divine self within” (95).
The gnostic views of the students of Valentinus preceded what would later become a major controversy among orthodox Christians, “the question of how Christ could be simultaneously human and divine” (96). One follower of Valentinus, Heracleon, also considered that Christ’s disciples “confessed Christ” (97) through their personal conduct and faith, rather than just by stating they were Christians. Through this argument, Heracleon suggests that Christians who practice their faith through conduct rather than a verbal confession are superior to those who were martyred because they told Roman magistrates they were Christian.
Martyrdom was important for the orthodox because it gave their organized church a means to attract public sympathy and support and “to consolidate the communities internally and in relation to one another” (99). These beliefs also represented a deep divide between the gnostics and the orthodox. For the orthodox, Jesus’s nature as a physical being implicitly affirms bodily experience as the central fact of human life” (101) while the gnostics focused on the experience of spirituality.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Whose Church Is the ‘True Church’?”
The Nag Hammadi manuscripts contained the first known examples of gnostics denouncing the orthodox. Gnostics critiqued orthodox claims to “exclusive legitimacy” (103) and faulted the orthodox for granting excessive authority to their clergy. Gnostics also claimed that the orthodox counted too many people as Christians, since anyone could be baptized or say the creed. For the gnostics, only the experience of gnosis meant one was a true Christian. This was a response to how the orthodox church “rejected all forms of elitism, attempting to include as many as possible within its embrace” (104). In contrast, the gnostics judged themselves as true Christians because of “the level of understanding of its members, and the quality of their relationship with one another” (106).
This led to a core difference in how the orthodox and gnostics defined “the church” (107). For the orthodox, the church comprised all congregations gathered for worship. The gnostics only considered those who achieved gnosis to be the true church. When the majority of Christians in Rome elected a formerly enslaved person with controversial views, Callistus, as bishop, a Christian leader named Hippolytus tried to form his own sect. Like the gnostics, Hippolytus viewed the church “in terms of the spiritual qualities of its members” (109). Similarly, Tertullian joined a sect called the Montanists, who denounced the majority of professing Christians, arguing that only those who had had been “sanctified” (110) by the Holy Spirit represented the true church. Such divisions and denunciations of the majority were motivated by disagreements with church leadership.
Similarly, gnostic texts challenged “those who claimed exclusive access to truth” (111) and ritual over internal experience. For some gnostics, orthodox Christians remained ignorant, relying on church authorities rather than their own intimate connection with Jesus Christ. This reflected an even deeper difference, where gnostics believed there are different “approaches to truth” while the orthodox saw themselves as holding “the sole legitimate form of Christianity” (114).
However, there was disagreement even among the gnostics. The “Eastern branch of Valentinians” (115) asserted only those who experienced gnosis were true Christians and would experience salvation. However, the Western branch disagreed, holding that there were unspiritual and spiritual Christians, and eventually all Christians would be made spiritual, but for now all Christians are part of a true church. This ostensibly egalitarian view nonetheless placed Christians in a spiritual hierarchy. Pagels believes that this may be a major reason why gnostic Christianity did not survive for more than several centuries.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Gnostic and orthodox accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion, and their attitudes toward martyrdom, further illustrate The Subjective Distinction Between Orthodoxy and Heresy. As Pagels admits, gnostic views on martyrdom and Jesus’s crucifixion were “astonishingly diverse” (90). Since the array of communities Pagels identifies as “gnostic” did not constitute a single religious institution, they were under no obligation to standardize their views on these central questions. As much as the Nag Hammadi manuscripts reveal new information about the gnostics and the perspectives of gnostic writers, the differences reveal how much these categories are based on definitions of “heretic” created by ancient orthodox Christian writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian. What binds together the diverse groups Pagels labels “gnostic,” as much as anything else, is that they were all dismissed as heretical by the orthodox church. As Pagels points out, many gnostic writers themselves considered those with orthodox beliefs to be the true heretics (xxxv). The terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy” are essentially political—they describe the relationship between belief and authority.
In discussing orthodox and gnostic views on persecution, Pagels again emphasizes the political impact of religious beliefs, suggesting that persecution influenced the formation of early Christianity:
I suggest that persecution gave impetus to the formation of the organized church structure that developed by the end of the second century. To place the question in a contemporary context, consider what recourse remains to dissidents facing a massive and powerful political system: they attempt to publicize cases of violence and injustice to arouse world-wide public support (98).
Roman persecution motivated early Christians to establish a strong, hierarchical institution that could survive such persecution—another way that orthodox beliefs made them more competitive against gnostic Christianity, with its focus on insular knowledge, loose organization, social egalitarianism, and The Primacy of Direct Spiritual Knowledge.
Arguably, the gnostic focus on interior, mystical knowledge is the most unifying belief among the different gnostic groups and teachers. Pagels summarizes the gnostic emphasis on spiritual knowledge this way: “But those gnostics who regarded the essential part of every person as the ‘inner spirit’ dismissed such physical experience, pleasurable or painful, as a distraction from spiritual reality—indeed, as an illusion” (101). One could argue that this difference, focusing on the spiritual over the physical, is at the core of all gnostic beliefs in not only persecution and suffering, but also in gender and the divine.
One of the criticisms levied against The Gnostic Gospels is that Pagels views gnostic Christians through an anachronistic lens, portraying them as avatars of modernity and especially of modern feminism in the ancient world. By focusing on the individual and rejecting hierarchy, Pagels’s gnostics bear at least a superficial resemblance to modern liberals. For example, there is the value they place in self-exploration and “free creativity” (21). Even so, Pagels does admit that the orthodox Christian church also expressed values that would be seen as desirable in the modern era, particularly in the church’s eagerness to expand by accepting new believers from all corners of society: “Desiring to open that church to everyone, they welcomed members from every social class, every racial or cultural origin, whether educated or illiterate—everyone, that is, who would submit to their system of organization” (118). The irony in this quotation—they welcomed everyone “who would submit”—highlights the paradoxical mix of egalitarianism and elitism in both groups. The orthodox church was egalitarian in that it accepted anyone, but elitist in how it divided power and authority among its members. By contrast, the gnostics were elitist in that they accepted only those who had achieved an intellectually and spiritually demanding state of direct contact with the divine, but egalitarian in sharing power and authority among those initiates. In considering the political impact of religious beliefs, Pagels argues that the orthodox model—authoritarian in structure but open to all—allowed it to win out in the battle for theological supremacy. Meanwhile, gnostic organizations “which rejected that system for more subjective forms of religious affiliation, survived, as churches, for only a few hundred years” (118).
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