It is a long way from the Nile Valley of Egypt to the front page of The New York Review of Books but the fascinating story of The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979) by Elaine Pagels has traveled that far.
Books written by good scholars seldom achieve bestseller status. When the book is about a little-known collection of manuscripts associated with heretical religious sects and written in a dead language that few people have even heard of, best-seller status is even more remarkable. It is a tribute to the skill and ingenuity of Professor Elaine Pagels (with a “g” as in gelatin), formerly of Barnard College and now on the faculty of Princeton University, that her book The Gnostic Gospels has been so well received by the publishing establishment and the reading public. Summarized in a series of articles in The New York Review of Books, offered as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, and translated into several other languages, her book is a lucidly written account of the significance of the Coptic Gnostica documents found in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt.
The story behind the discovery and eventual publication of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts has all the ingredients of a spy thriller. The discoverers, Mohammed Ali and his brother Khalifah, lived in a village named el-Kasr in Upper Egypt. While digging for mineral-rich soil called sebakh at the base of the cliffs along the Nile near the village of Homra Dom, they discovered a large sealed pottery jar. Hoping for buried treasure, they broke open the jar only to find a collection of old books written in a language they could not read. They carried the books back to their home, where their mother reportedly used some of the pages to light the fire in her oven.
Not long after the discovery of the manuscripts, it was rumored that Mohammed Ali and his brothers murdered the son of the sheriff of Homra Dom in reprisal for the death of their father some six months earlier. One result of this feud was that Mohammed Ali was afraid to return to the site of the discovery. Fearing that the books would be found by the police, Mohammed Ali placed them in the care of a Coptic priest. The priest gave one to a relative, who brought it to Cairo. The rest of the books were gradually sold to other residents of the village for small sums of money, and they in turn sold the manuscripts to antiquities dealers in Cairo.
One of these books was sold to the Coptic Museum; another made its way out of the country and was sold to friends of the psychologist C. G. Jung. They gave it to him as a birthday present, and it became known as the Jung Codex.b Ultimately, however, the bulk of the material was confiscated by the Egyptian government after having been photographed by a young French scholar, Jean Doresse. Just as Doresse’s reports were alerting the scholarly world to the existence of an important new 055manuscript discovery, the Suez crisis 1956 made international cooperation even more difficult than usual. As a result, most of the Nag Hammadi Codices remained inaccessible to scholars. After the codices were declared government property and deposited in the Coptic Museum, an international committee of scholars working under the auspices of UNESCO was appointed, but the committee made little progress toward publishing the documents.
Not until the American Biblical scholar James M. Robinson of Claremont Graduate School entered the picture in 1965 and succeeded in gaining the support of other scholars in reorganizing the UNESCO committee did the Nag Hammadi story gradually emerge. Robinson concentrated his considerable scholarly influence, his organizational skill, and his seemingly limitless energy on the prompt translation and publication of the Nag Hammadi documents. As the secretary of the UNESCO committee, Robinson headed an international team that photographed the manuscripts and conserved them as 056057adequately as possible in their present repository, the Coptic Museum in Cairo. As the director of the Nag Hammadi Library project at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont, he organized a team of translators, many of them young American scholars, who learned the Coptic language as they worked with the new finds. And as organizer of the Nag Hammadi excavations, he delved into the early history of Christianity in Egypt.
Many other scholars subsequently have joined a growing movement to understand the complicated historical background of early Christianity assumed by the Nag Hammadi documents. Fortunately, the papers used to stiffen the covers of the Coptic codices were legal documents that referred to specific dates; therefore the manuscripts are solidly dated to the mid-fourth century. However, the codices are Coptic translations of documents that were written much earlier. Just how these translations fit into the complex picture of early Christianity and Judaism during the first two centuries of this era is a question that is currently a matter of considerable scholarly debate.
Elaine Pagels’s book is an attempt to answer this exceedingly difficult question. Pagels makes it clear that she approaches these writings as a church historian, and her special interest is in uncovering the social milieu and ecclesiastical politics reflected in the Nag Hammadi Codices that led to the rejection of the ideas they contain by the leaders of emerging orthodox Christianity. An analysis of the new texts from Nag Hammadi together with the previously known early Christian sources will make it possible, she says, to see “how politics and religion coincide in the development of Christianity … We can gain a startlingly new perspective on the origins of Christianity” (p. xxxvi).c
Pagels begins with a pivotal Christian doctrine, the resurrection of Jesus. Christian tradition is quite clear about this doctrine: Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross and arose bodily from the grave as a result of God’s miraculous intervention. The church father Tertullian, among many others, emphasized the necessity of believing in the physical resurrection of Jesus and said that those who denied the bodily resurrection were heretics. The reasons for this view were not purely theological, Pagels suggests, but also political. She asserts that the consolidation of the religious and political authority of the orthodox bishops was a major factor in the development of the orthodox doctrine 058of the resurrection of Jesus. Faced with a bewildering variety of opinions and reports about the nature of the resurrected Jesus, church leaders turned to the reports of the apostles as authoritative and rejected the reports of others whose views were different.
The Nag Hammadi documents have preserved some of the differing views of the resurrection. They tell us that the opponents of the orthodox bishops believed in a spiritual resurrection that made Jesus alive to them through visions and mystical experiences. From the resurrected Jesus, the Gnostics received revelations of heavenly secrets and insights into the nature of ultimate reality.
The leaders of emerging orthodox Christianity rejected these Gnostic revelations as frauds. They insisted upon belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus as reported in the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which they accepted as the measure (canon) of the truth. Gnostic teachers, on the other hand, claimed apostolic authority for their views also and criticized the orthodox believers for preferring a crude materialistic literalism that was inferior to their own spiritual knowledge. The dispute came down to a matter of authority: the traditional reports accepted by the church leaders versus the personal experiences of the Gnostic teachers and their followers. The political realities at stake in this dispute, according to Pagels, went far beyond the theological issues. The orthodox view, she concludes, “legitimized a hierarchy of persons through whose authority all others must approach God” (p. 27).
Another basic tenet of orthodox Christianity, the belief in one God, the Father, who created heaven and earth, came under strong attack from several fronts, including some represented by the writers of the Gnostic documents from Nag Hammadi. Several of these Gnostic works ridicule the creator God as a blind and ignorant tyrant who was not aware of a higher, purely spiritual deity, the ultimate source of all reality. In the Apocryphon of John, for example, the creator God is said to be weak and “impious in his madness … for he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come” (II,1: 11, 18–22).d
Why did the orthodox leaders such as Irenaeus reject 059this view of God the creator as blasphemous? Pagels’s answer is, again, that political and social realities played a significant role. A corollary to the belief in one creator God was the belief in one earthly representative of this God, the single monarchical bishop. Behind Gnostic rejection of the orthodox, monotheistic creator God was the implicit rejection of his representative, the bishop, and the clergy of the church that represented the bishop’s authority in the congregations. Pagels finds clear evidence of Gnostic anticlericalism in The Apocalypse of Peter from Nag Hammadi, where the author states, “Others … outside our number … call themselves bishops and also deacons, as if they had received their authority from God. Those people are dry canals” (VII,3: 79, 22–32). In contrast to hierarchically organized orthodox Christian congregations, Gnostic fellowships were led by spirit-filled leaders chosen by lot with men and women participating as equals, Pagels tells us.
In a chapter entitled “God the Father/God the Mother,” Pagels analyzes the traditional Christian language about God and contrasts it with Gnostic imagery and ideas found in the Nag Hammadi writings. She concludes that “many of these texts speak of God as a dyad who embraces both masculine and feminine elements” (p. 49). Aware of the diversity of the texts, she asserts that they depict God as having a female dimension, often complementing a male dimension. The female side exists in a kind of polarity akin to the yin and yang in Eastern views of ultimate reality. Furthermore, she says, the Gnostic texts present the deity as a divine mother who is Holy Spirit. A divine trinity made up of Father, Mother, and Son is also found in some of the Nag Hammadi documents. The divine mother is sometimes characterized as the personification of wisdom or ultimate truth. In this 060role she bears the name Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom.
This feminine imagery in the Gnostic writings was suppressed, to use Pagels’s term, by orthodox church leaders who rejected the social consequences of such ideas, namely, the inclusion of women as equals, especially in the life and leadership of the church. According to Pagels, “ … from the year 200, we have no evidence for women taking prophetic, priestly, and episcopal roles among orthodox churches” (p. 61). This is surprising, she says, in the light of the openness to women she finds in earlier Christianity and a general cultural trend toward an expanded role for women in later Roman society. Conflicts over the status of women and related questions of sexuality are reflected in the Nag Hammadi writings, Pagels says. Her conclusion is that “The Nag Hammadi sources, discovered at a time of contemporary social crises concerning sexual roles, challenge us to reinterpret history—and to re-evaluate the present situation” (p. 69).
Pagels also discusses two other basic Christian theological affirmations, the crucifixion of Jesus and the nature of the church. In both cases, she contrasts the dominant early Christian view that came to be accepted as the orthodox faith with views found in the Nag Hammadi Codices. The contrasts are striking. Was Jesus a human being who really suffered or a spirit who only appeared to suffer? Is the Christian church a holy, catholic family of believers with a common creed, a recognized canon of sacred scriptures, and an apostolic hierarchy headed by the bishop or is the true church a fellowship of enlightened brothers and sisters whose spiritual experiences and knowledge unite them in a spiritual bond?
Even more significant, in Pagels’s opinion, are the implications for everyday life that these differing theological views implied for their adherents. Those who emphasized the physical nature of Jesus’ suffering placed a high value on the suffering of Christians who were persecuted for their faith. Thus, the cult of martyrs and saints who died at the hands of Roman persecutors became a part of orthodox Christian belief. While some Gnostics seemed to value highly the sufferings of Jesus and saw him as a forerunner who triumphed over physical oppression, other Gnostics emphasized Jesus’ spiritual nature and minimized the significance of his suffering. They identified themselves with the spiritual Jesus who never actually died. Quite logically, from this point of view, they rejected the value of martyrdom and considered the eagerness of some Christians to suffer persecution as misguided enthusiasm. In its most extreme form this enthusiasm was turned against the Gnostics themselves, Pagels suggests, when zealous orthodox Christians later persecuted Gnostics for their heretical views.
In a concluding chapter entitled “Gnosis: Self-knowledge as Knowledge of God,” Pagels summarizes the Gnostic view that human suffering is the result of ignorance rather than sin. Salvation, then, is to be found in the form of knowledge (gnosis), and knowledge is to be understood as liberating insight into ultimate reality and personal identity rather than factual data. According to the Gnostic documents, such insight comes from the Gnostic revealer, the Savior—usually Jesus, but other figures sometimes are named—who is described as a heavenly messenger. His message is one of internal illumination, self-understanding, and symbolic truth often cast in mythological language. Inner confusion and self-contradictions give way to inner peace and mystical ecstasy when gnosis replaces ignorance and when light replaces darkness. Such a religion, says Pagels, understandably appealed to only a few, and “was no match for the highly effective system of organization of the catholic church” (p. 140).
This effective organization led by the bishops accounts for the survival and character of Christianity, Pagels concludes. She readily acknowledges her appreciation for the theological and political acumen of the winners in the struggle for dominance in early Christianity. Nevertheless, her sympathies for the losers in the struggle to define orthodox Christianity are equally clear. She admires “those restless, inquiring people who marked out a solitary path of self-discovery” (p. 149) and implies that they embody more of the values of Jesus of 061Nazareth than their orthodox opponents were willing to admit. She does not advocate a revival of Gnosticism or take its side against orthodox Christianity. Instead, as a historian, she has written her book in order to explore the evidence—especially the newly discovered and published evidence—pertaining to the origins of Christianity.
As a popular presentation of a difficult and complex topic, The Gnostic Gospels has enjoyed success rarely achieved by such books. Pagels has demonstrated that she is a gifted writer as well as a technically proficient scholar. It takes courage to tackle such an assignment and do it well; she has succeeded where few others have dared to try. As a scholar who is familiar with the documents as well as the historical and theological complexities Pagels deals with, I applaud her book as a provocative contribution to the world of serious religious writing.
As one might expect, Pagels has her critics. They tend to be scholars who challenge the accuracy of her details or dispute what one of them has referred to as her tendency toward “the greening of the Gnostics.” Roman Catholic 062scholars in particular have suggested that she has put the Gnostics in far too favorable a light, while at the same time putting the orthodox church fathers in a correspondingly bad light. Others suggest that she has not examined her sources with full rigor and has extracted from them only those passages that fit her own contemporary feminist biases or those of the book-buying public. To some extent such criticism may reflect bruised piety or sour grapes. It may also be the result of expecting more from a popular book than that genre permits.
Pagels’s work is certainly not beyond criticism. My own view is that she has offered more than she can deliver. The promise of revolutionary new insights at the beginning of the book diminishes by the end of the book to provocative questions she only begins to explore. At times she seems to move almost unconsciously from a possibility suggested in the subjunctive mood or in a rhetorical question to a probability or an assumption of the same idea.e To me, the linkage between theological views and social/political practices is asserted rather than demonstrated in the book. Of course such a connection is extremely difficult to establish conclusively, especially when our historical sources are incomplete and the products of those who were themselves involved in the complex process of doctrinal development. Her use of the term “political” will strike some readers as unusual, because she means ecclesiastical politics for the most part instead of the broader area of governmental and civic activities.
For people interested in Biblical archaeology, Elaine Pagels has done a masterful job of describing and summarizing a major manuscript discovery that is extremely important in the history of early Christianity and contemporaneous Judaism. Gnostic writers were clearly indebted to both traditions and have preserved elements of those early traditions that were pushed to the periphery or excluded altogether from orthodox Christianity and rabbinical Judaism. Traditions about Jesus from the Nag Hammadi 063writings, especially collections of his sayings such as The Gospel of Thomas, provide new and potentially very significant material for New Testament studies. They may provide important clues to possibly authentic words of Jesus not preserved in the New Testament. Interpretations of the early chapters of the book of Genesis according to Gnostic writers help illumine Jewish and Christian interpretations of those important chapters, such as those of the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, as well as the Apostle Paul. The Nag Hammadi documents have also been used to shed light on the Gospel of John and the epistles of Paul. Pagels’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard University (published in 1973) and another book she wrote on Paul in 1975 investigated the relationships between John and Paul, on the one hand, and the ideas of Gnostic teachers such as Valentinus and Basilides, on the other. Scholars are still trying to resolve these complex issues with the help of the Gnostic writings.
The Nag Hammadi Codices surely help us understand the tendency toward a mystical piety based on revelation or ecstatic experience as one of the varieties of religious experience in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity. These writings also provide new material for understanding the many types of ancient Gnosticism. How Greek philosophical thought interacted with early Christianity in both its Gnostic and emerging orthodox forms can also be illumined by these new writings.
Attempts to uncover the circumstances that led to the burial of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts have not been as successful as the archaeological excavations that were so helpful in shedding light on another major manuscript discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls. An excavation carried out by the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont, California, under the leadership of Robinson and Dr. Bastiaan Van Elderen, has uncovered significant remains of early Christian monastic communities near the discovery site. Direct links with the Nag Hammadi Codices themselves have not been found, however, and even the precise location of the find is not known for certain. The broader questions of how a collection of mostly Gnostic literature came to be buried near the center of early Christian monasteries considered to be bastions of orthodoxy are yet to be answered conclusively by scholars. How Gnostic and orthodox leaders interacted in the development of Christianity in Egypt and other centers of Christianity such as Alexandria and Rome is one of the concerns of a new project being undertaken by Dr. Birger Pearson and several associates under the auspices of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity.
For now, there is no better popular introduction to the difficult but fascinating subject of Early Christianity and Gnosticism than Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels.
It is a long way from the Nile Valley of Egypt to the front page of The New York Review of Books but the fascinating story of The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979) by Elaine Pagels has traveled that far.
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Coptic refers to the language and culture of Christians in Egypt from approximately the second century A.D. until today. Coptic is the final stage in the development of the ancient Egyptian language; Coptic is written in the Greek alphabet and incorporates many Greek words. Before its use as a popular language gradually died out after the Moslem conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, Coptic was the language of a rich but little-known literary and liturgical corpus of which the Nag Hammadi manuscripts are one of the best-known representatives.
Gnostic (pronounced “nostik”) refers to the beliefs and practices of a variety of religious groups that relied on secret knowledge revealed only to a select few. (Gnosis is the Greek word for this non-empirical insight.) Gnostic teachers frequently combined spiritual wisdom from several sources and traditions, including Christian, Jewish, Greco-Roman, Egyptian, or Iranian thought, into syncretistic systems reserved for their own devotees. In these systems, physical and historical ways of understanding reality and human experience were rejected in favor of spiritual and mystical modes of understanding. Some scholars reserve the term “Gnostic” for the developed systems of heretical Christian teachers of the second century A.D. such as Basilides and Valentinus. Others use the term “gnosis” (note the lower case “g”) as a general term. It is important to remember that “Gnostic” does not always mean “heretical,” since the definition of orthodoxy was an ongoing process that was not complete when Gnostic ideas and practices flourished.
2.
Codex (plural codices) is the Latin word for “book.” In English it has come to refer to handmade books, of which the Nag Hammadi Codices are among the oldest surviving examples.
3.
Page references are to the hardcover edition of The Gnostic Gospels.
4.
In the scholarly literature devoted to the study of the Nag Hammadi Codices, a system using Roman numerals for each codex followed by an Arabic number in italics for the tractate within that codex is generally accepted. Most scholars add the page and line number of the original Coptic manuscript after the codex and tractate reference, while others omit the tractate reference at times. Thus II,1: 11, 18–22 is a reference to lines 18–22 on page 11 in the first tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II. This tractate is known as the Apocryphon of John.
5.
Her use of the term “Gospels” both in the title of her book and the text itself is only partially justified by the use of Gnostic writings such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of the Egyptians (once mistakenly referred to as the Gospel to the Egyptians), and The Gospel of Truth. She uses the other Gnostic writings and even the writings of the Church Fathers more than she uses the Gnostic Gospels. Her publishers may have had something to do with the provocative use of the term “Gnostic Gospels” in the title of the book.
