The Gnostic Gospels

Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels was the first English language history analyzing the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, a collection of ancient papyrus texts containing “heretic” Christian texts. Most of these texts preserved the views of what modern historians term gnostic Christianity, an ancient Christian sect that emphasized gnosis, or mystic knowledge. The Gnostic Gospels was first published by Random House in 1979, two years after the first complete English translation of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts was made by James M. Robinson and published by Brill and Harper & Rowe as The Nag Hammadi Library in English. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and the Modern Library later named The Gnostic Gospels one of the top 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. The book explores themes including The Subjective Distinction Between Orthodoxy and Heresy, The Primacy of Direct Spiritual Knowledge, and The Political Impact of Religious Beliefs on Gender and Power.

This study guide is based on the 1989 Vintage Books edition of The Gnostic Gospels.

Summary

The Gnostic Gospels begins with Elaine Pagels describing how an Egyptian peasant farmer, Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman, discovered the 52 Nag Hammadi manuscripts by accident while digging for soil to use as fertilizer. From there, the manuscripts ended up on the black market and became the object of an academic dispute. Most of the manuscripts represented the viewpoint of gnostic Christians, named for the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis, whose views were focused on the idea that “to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God” (xix). Only a few manuscripts discovered in the late 19th century represented the gnostic viewpoint. Once the manuscripts finally became widely available to the scholarly community, Pagels argues that the manuscripts not only add to scholarly understandings of gnosticism, but they also provide more knowledge about the development of early Christianity.

One of the core theological disputes between gnostic Christians and what would become known as orthodox Christianity was over how to define Christian monotheism. Orthodox Christianity saw God as a being separate from the universe but deeply involved in the act of creation. For orthodox Christians, God existed as a triune being—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Gnostic Christianity instead taught that the true God was a higher, transcendent being, while some gnostics believed the creator of the material universe was a lesser, imperfect divine being known as the demiurge. For Pagels, this was not just a difference in ideals: It reflected how gnostics and the orthodox organized themselves. The gnostics often allowed all members to share authority, even women, while the orthodox had a strict hierarchy of leadership in the form of priests, deacons, and bishops, who eventually were all men. The gnostic openness to female leadership was rooted in the fact that gnostics were far more open to the idea that the characteristics of God encompassed both femininity and masculinity: “[I]nstead of describing a monistic and masculine God, many of these texts speak of God as a dyad who embraces both masculine and feminine elements” (49).

Orthodox and gnostic Christians also often disagreed over the significance of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. While the orthodox viewed both as historical events that culminated in Jesus returning in a physical body, many gnostics, while agreeing that Jesus was crucified and died, viewed the crucifixion and resurrection as mainly symbolic events, with Jesus returning spiritually rather than physically. Orthodox Christians emphasized that through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, God experienced humanity and human suffering. By contrast, the gnostics emphasized that “Christ transcended human nature so that he could prevail over death by divine power” (96). This also shaped the gnostics’ more skeptical attitude toward martyrdom.

Perhaps the most significant split, however, was in how the gnostics and the orthodox viewed salvation. The orthodox viewed humanity’s alienation from the divine and the problem of evil in the world as the result of the sins of humans. As a result, God’s creation was not fundamentally flawed, but instead it was in need of a cosmic redemption. In contrast, the gnostics thought humanity’s pain stemmed from ignorance, and the world and the human body were suspect, being possibly the creations of a flawed, lesser entity or the result of the suffering of the divine itself. Pagels argues that such differences explain why the orthodox succeeded where the gnostic churches failed. The orthodox organized a hierarchical church that emphasized its members’ relationships while making it easy for people to join. In Pagels’s words, “Adapting for its own purposes the model of Roman political and military organization, and gaining, in the fourth century, imperial support, orthodox Christianity grew increasingly stable and enduring” (149). Instead, the gnostics were not organized, and becoming a gnostic Christian required years of preparation to achieve the state of knowledge, factors that made gnostic Christianity simply less competitive against the growing orthodox church.