Bible Books

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When and how did being a Christian become synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs? One might suppose that it was always thus. But as an historian, Elaine Pagels knows that it was not. She knows that people in the first two centuries of Christian history chose to involve themselves in Christianity for a number of reasons. Some came seeking community, even family. Others found in their gatherings an egalitarian spirit that was attractive, especially to women and slaves, who were not used to receiving an equal share. Others came looking for practical help from a group known for its care of widows and orphans. Others came fearing death and believing that baptism could shield them from the plague and other ancient threats. Others came for miracles—and mystery. It was not creed that held the church together in those early years. It was the experience of being part of an alternative community of care, friendship, solidarity and deep mystery.

When Pagels, now a professor of religion at Princeton University, wandered into a church in the middle of life, having wandered away from the church early in life, she found, much to her surprise, that these things were still present. As she stepped into the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York to escape the chill of a February morning, and heard the “soaring harmonies of the choir singing with the congregation, and the priest, a woman in bright gold and white vestments, proclaiming the prayers in a clear, resonant voice,” Pagels reports, “I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine.”

The unimaginable thing weighing on Pagels’s own heart was the impending death of a child, her’s, which was followed by a series of life tragedies that would bring grief upon grief. Elaine Pagels’s new book is her account of a pilgrimage, a journey not unlike that many have taken back into the places of worship left behind long ago in search of solace and meaning in the face of life’s terrible realities. What she heard on that February morning was not an explanation for tragedy and death. “Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable.” What she found as she began to come more regularly to that place was not a set of beliefs to be embraced, but a community of hope and encouragement.

Beyond Belief is also a journey through an obscure part of Christian history, the time spanning the second through fourth centuries, during which the church was gradually transformed from a counter-cultural community of hope and encouragement into a state religion centered on a set of orthodox beliefs. Pagels’s account is a complex and subtle one, not given to blanket judgments about the villains and saints too facilely identified in less sophisticated treatments. She focuses a great deal on Irenaeus (c. 140-202), arguably the father of Christian orthodoxy, the first architect of creedal Christianity. It was Irenaeus who first began to limit and restrict early Christianity’s diversity, the disappearance of which Pagels now laments. His motives, she acknowledges, were not without merit. In attempting to craft a set of core Christian doctrines, including the idea that Christ alone bears the image of God, Irenaeus was trying to create a church less vulnerable to the fracturing produced inevitably by those high-pressure times. But Irenaeus’s efforts had effects that, from Pagels’s point of view, impoverished the richness and diversity of early Christian experience, an impoverishment with which we are still living today.

Her account goes something like this: In the years following Jesus’ death, his followers, still Jews to themselves and others, continued to gather in Jesus’ name, especially to eat together and to celebrate a 039communion of agape—love and care for one another. The rituals and meanings attached to these gatherings were diverse, drawing from the diverse cultural traditions of the Hellenistic and Jewish world in which they came to be. Especially important, though, was the retelling of the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, a story “through which they could interpret their own struggles, their victories, their sufferings, and their hope.” They were bound together in community through their embrace of a common way of life. “What mattered most,” writes Pagels, “was to share—and practice—the values of ‘God’s people’,” not a set of beliefs or doctrines about Jesus.

But conflicts would and did arise. One can be seen most clearly by comparing the similar, but decisively different views of Jesus expressed in the Gospel of John and the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, both written near the end of the first century C.E. Both of these gospels view Jesus as a divine messenger from God sent to tell the people of God about their true home in Heaven, where they will return someday. But they differ in how they understand this hoped-for salvation will come. In John, salvation comes from believing in Jesus, the only Son of God. It is in Jesus and Jesus alone that one finds God incarnate. In Thomas, salvation comes from listening to Jesus’ words, which direct one to discover the divine nature resident in oneself. Both gospels, for example, use “light” to symbolize the presence of God in the world. But their understanding of where and how one might discover that divine light is quite different. Pagels describes the difference:

For John, identifying Jesus with the light that came into being “in the beginning” is what makes him unique—God’s “only begotten son.” John calls him the “light of all humanity” [John 1:9], and believes that Jesus alone brings divine light to a world otherwise sunk into darkness. John says that we can only experience God through the divine light embodied in Jesus. But certain passages in Thomas’s gospel draw a quite different conclusion: that the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made “in the image of God” [Genesis 1:26–27]. Thus Thomas expresses what would become a central theme of Jewish—and later Christian—mysticism a thousand years later: that the “image of God” is hidden within everyone, although most people remain unaware of its presence.

Pagels might have pointed out (and later says as much) that such ideas were not only the subject of later Christian mysticism but were also present earlier in the mysticism of the Apostle Paul, who speaks of all who look upon the glory of the Lord—a reference to the beatific vision of the mystic—as “being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Similar statements throughout Paul’s letters reveal that the apostle was deeply rooted in Jewish mysticism.¹ Such ideas were part of the diverse array of Christian practices and beliefs from the very beginning.

These ideas remained an important part of Christianity into the second century (and 040beyond). But in the middle of the second century, they were at the heart of a dispute that forms the next chapter of Pagels’s story. Christianity had grown enough by now to attract the notice of local officials, who did not like what they saw. Christians would not perform sacrifices, and so were seen as disloyal. As a result they were often victimized by local magistrates and made the object of mob violence. In the midst of these trying times, the church experienced a resurgence of “spiritual” activity. The best-known example of this is the ancient heresy known as Montanism, which focused on the apocalyptic prophecies of Montanus, a church leader from Phrygia, and two women prophets, Priscilla and Maximilla, who followed him. A lesser-known example from Irenaeus’s home province of Gaul was the spiritual movement led by a certain Marcus, a follower of the second-century Christian Gnostic teacher Valentinus of Rome. Marcus believed that the Holy Spirit could fall upon anyone—including women—and cause them to prophesy. This led to a remarkably egalitarian view of revelation and authority: Lots were cast to determine who would prophesy on any given day.

Marcus crossed the gender line—and so crossed Irenaeus, who was not an egalitarian—not only in terms of leadership, but in the content of his revelations as well. Quoting from Irenaeus’s account, Pagels writes:

Marcus claimed that divine truth had revealed itself to him naked, “in feminine form, having descended upon him from invisible and ineffable space, for the world could not have borne [the truth] coming in masculine form.”

Irenaeus’s chief objection to the movement spawned by Marcus and other followers of Valentinus, however, was its non-egalitarian approach to the life of the church as a whole. According to Pagels, “What he found most objectionable was not so much what they said as what they did.” What they did was draw a line between themselves, the “spiritual Christians,” and the common herd of Christians, the “ecclesiastic” Christians. Pagels maintains that they actually distinguished themselves ritually by receiving a second baptism, quoting Jesus in the Gospel of Mark for support: “I have another baptism with which to be baptized” (Mark 10:38). It was this spiritual elitism that Irenaeus saw as most threatening, since it created divisions in a movement already struggling for survival in a hostile world—a movement desperately in need of solidarity.

In this account of a relatively unknown chapter of Christian history, Pagels demonstrates the qualities that have attracted such a wide audience to her work. On the one hand, she brings the conflict between Irenaeus and the followers of Valentinus to life with great clarity and vividness. Especially valuable is her concise and expert exposition of the theology to be found in such obscure, noncanonical texts as the Gospel of Truth, the Acts of John and the Apocryphon of John. Pagels presents these texts not as heretical literature to be lampooned and dismissed, but as religious literature to be read with an open mind and an appreciative attitude. She cites, for example, the following beautiful passage from the Gospel of Philip, a kind of midrash on Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:

Faith is our earth, in which we take root; hope is the water through which we are nourished; love is the air through which we grow; gnosis is the light through which we become fully grown.

(Gospel of Philip 79:25-31)

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She then explains what Philip means by becoming fully grown in gnosis, or knowledge. Many people confess faith in such things as Jesus’ virgin birth or his resurrection, and believe in them literally. But Philip believes otherwise. The virgin birth is not to be taken literally, as something that happened once, to Jesus. Rather, it is what happens to anyone who is baptized in the Holy Spirit, the “virgin who came down.” Pagels recounts Philip’s beliefs:

Thus, as Jesus was born to Joseph and Mary, his human parents, and later was born spiritually when the Holy Spirit descended upon him at his baptism, so we, too, first born physically, may be “born again through the holy spirit” in baptism, so that “when we became Christians we came to have both a father and a mother,” that is, both the heavenly Father and the holy spirit.

Likewise, for Philip the resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus, but a symbol for what happens to anyone who undergoes spiritual transformation. Furthermore, anyone who “undergoes such a transformation,” says Philip, “no longer is a Christian, but a Christ.”

But while generally sympathetic in her description, Pagels does not pander to the iconoclast in search of a theological Shangri-La amongst the discarded texts of the Christian past. The spiritualists did distinguish between two classes of Christians, and they considered themselves the upper class. So Irenaeus, who might easily be depicted as the villain in this episode, receives her sympathies as well. He was, she says, “by no means intolerant of all difference.” He simply did not like the elitism and schismatic tendencies in such thought. And so he opposed it.

How he did this would prove decisive for the emergence of Christianity as a set of orthodox beliefs confined to certain canonical norms. On the one hand, he disputed the authenticity and veracity of all gospels, save those four which have come down to us as canonical: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But the spiritualists drew upon the Four Gospels as well, using allegory and other spiritually inspired methods of interpretation to find secret teaching encoded within them. (It was in Mark 10:38, for example, that they found warrant for a second, more elite baptism.) Irenaeus therefore needed a way of limiting the terms under which these Gospels could be understood and interpreted; he needed what he called a “canon of truth.”

To produce this, Irenaeus focused on the Gospel of John. He did so for two reasons. First, John was a favorite gospel among the spiritualists, who favored its mysterious language and other-worldly theology. But secondly, Irenaeus thought he saw in John the key to the spiritualists’ undoing: John’s insistence on the uniquely divine nature of Jesus. The issue over which the writers of John and Thomas had argued at the end of the first century was still on the table for Irenaeus and his spiritualist opponents: Was Jesus unique in his divinity, or do all believers share in that divine status? According to Pagels, Irenaeus chose the Gospel of John to “prove the heretics wrong by using their own favorite gospel against them.” Irenaeus focused especially on the Prologue to John (John 1:1–18), where Jesus’ oneness with God is most fervently stressed. When the Prologue states that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … and all things were made through him,” John is saying, according to Irenaeus, that there is

One God all powerful and one Jesus Christ, “through whom all things came into being”; he says, the same one “Son of God”; the same one “only begotten”; the same one “Maker of all things”; the same one “true light enlightening everyone”; the same one creator of “all things”; the same one “coming to his own”; the same one that “became flesh and dwelt among us.”

(Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.9.2-3)

Pagels explains:

What Irenaeus’s successors would derive from this was a kind of simple, almost mathematical equation, in which God=word=Jesus Christ. That many Christians to this day consider some version of this equation the essence of Christian belief is a mark of Irenaeus’s accomplishment—and his success.

For Irenaeus, Christ is not one of us. He is different. He is fully divine. We are entirely not. It was this conviction that he thought would unite the church theologically. In the years that followed, this measure of orthodoxy would win out over other formulations that brought Christ more into the human sphere and humans more into the divine. Assent to this proposition came to be seen as necessary for salvation. The Apostles Creed, and the great creed of Nicea would be formulated around it. The rest is history, so to speak.

Specialists in second-century Christianity will no doubt find much to quibble about in this sweeping account. Students of Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi writings will take issue with one or another of Pagels’s readings. But these are minor flaws in a work of historical scholarship that plunges us deep 042into the most essential questions of Christian faith. What is Christianity? Of course it is a set of beliefs. Who would think to question this? Pagels does. And she shows that she is right to do so. There was something else there—something “beyond belief”—in the early years of the church. There was a way of life. There was a community of hope and encouragement. And there was mystery. In a time like our own, when so many find it hard to accept the creeds of an age long passed, Pagels gives us reason to think beyond the creeds, to consider these other realities that still attend authentic Christian community. Perhaps these other things are the thing after all. Must religion be about holding certain beliefs, or is there something “beyond belief” that is worth embracing? There is a way of life. There is a community of hope and encouragement. And there is mystery.

When and how did being a Christian become synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs? One might suppose that it was always thus. But as an historian, Elaine Pagels knows that it was not. She knows that people in the first two centuries of Christian history chose to involve themselves in Christianity for a number of reasons. Some came seeking community, even family. Others found in their gatherings an egalitarian spirit that was attractive, especially to women and slaves, who were not used to receiving an equal share. Others came looking for practical help from a group known […]