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“Here the serpent, long known to appear in gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while ‘the Lord’ threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it.”
This is an example of how gnostic and orthodox Christianity can be so radically different while sharing many of the same traditions and beliefs. Here, the gnostic interpretation of the myth of creation from the Book of Genesis interprets the same story in a fundamental different way, with the serpent acting as an ally to humanity and the Lord (conceptualized as a lesser demiurge rather than the supreme being) acting as an adversary.
“But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard themselves as ‘heretics.’ Most of the writings use Christian terminology, unmistakably related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from ‘the many’ who constitute what, in the second century, came to be called the ‘catholic church.’”
Pagels emphasizes The Subjective Distinction Between Orthodoxy and Heresy. The gnostics of course did not consider themselves heretics, and indeed a few gnostic texts accused the orthodox of being the true heretics (xxxv). For some critics, this has raised some questions of how much Pagels is relying on ancient sources’ own biased concepts of heresy and orthodoxy.
“Rather than considering the question of the origins of gnosticism, I intend here to show how gnostic forms of Christianity interact with orthodoxy—and what this tells us about the origins of Christianity itself.”
The central argument in The Gnostic Gospels is a historical one: that the conflict between “orthodox” and gnostic Christianity can illuminate the history and development of early Christianity. This is not just a matter of ideas within Christianity, but also of how early Christianity intersected with broader social, political, and cultural forces in Pagels’s exploration of