It’s scandalous to say, because so much pop theorizing about early Christianity is anchored to it, but it turns out, Gnosticism was never actually a thing. It was an invention of modern scholars; an interpretive category, it turns out, that refers to no actual thing that existed in antiquity. Or worse, when defined vaguely enough to actually encompass anything real, it refers to every sect of Christianity and thus distinguishes none of them. The word is therefore useless and ought to be abandoned. I find myself having to point this out a lot, so clearly this memo hasn’t made it to the public yet. So I am writing this article to get you up to speed.
I came to this conclusion on my own, from my extensive postdoc research project on the historicity of Jesus. Which is why (in case readers didn’t notice) the words “Gnostic” or “Gnosticism” never appear anywhere in my book On the Historicity of Jesus (except incidentally as the title of a couple of books I cite, but not on that subject). I never use Gnosticism as an interpretive category there, or as an explanation of anything. And yet, as soon as that was published, the Westar Institute (best known for The Jesus Seminar, and of which I am now a fellow) published a report declaring the same thing, and on the same basis. That a large group of prestigious Biblical scholars independently came to the same conclusion I did, and for pretty much the same reasons I had uncovered on my own, is fairly powerful evidence we are correct about this. The odds of that all happening by coincidence are pretty low.
The Westar Report on Gnosticism
You can read Westar’s Fall 2014 Christianity Seminar Report on Gnosticism yourself. There is also a whole issue on it in the Spring 2016 edition of Forum. This is a segment of their Christianity Seminar, which will eventually become a book on leading new perspectives on the origins and early development of Christianity (part of which I participated in). As the report puts it:
The Christianity Seminar took votes of historic proportions, collectively setting aside what had been assumed for the last five generations and opening up a new collaborative path forward. With at least twenty-five internationally known scholars in attendance, the Seminar voted with substantial majorities to rule “gnosticism,” the reigning boogey man of early Christian history, out of order.
Indeed, there was not much disagreement: the votes were all solid red (which means, almost every single scholar concurred, without any significant doubt in the matter); except for on two minor points that came up pink, the more significant one being whether the decision to eliminate the concept “removes a confusing category” from further discussion. The pink vote on that likely is because some scholars thought discussing the non-existence of Gnosticism could still be valuable to the seminar’s future work, or that it should be eliminated because it is merely false, and not because it was “confusing.” But that’s a nitpick. There was no significant disagreement on several other points voted on, including the central finding that “the category of Gnosticism needs to be dismantled” because it “no longer works” to describe any ancient religion or sect. Consequently, “the idea that such a thing as ‘Gnosticism’ even existed is simply off the table.” And all this is due to “cutting-edge scholars,” including Michael Williams, David Brakke, Denise Buell, and Karen King, “who, over the past fifteen years or more, have made a thorough case against the existence of Gnosticism.” Thorough enough, indeed, to persuade a representative majority of mainstream scholars. And they’re right.
They also voted “pink” the idea of reserving the word Gnostic for one specific sect associated with the Gospel of Judas, but confusingly, in that use the word does not mean what Gnostic has traditionally meant, so in my opinion that is just confusing. Even scholars who voted the possibility of reassigning the word that way, agreed the traditional definition and category has to be abandoned altogether. So it’s time to stop talking about Gnosticism. Purge it from your vocabulary. And abandon every idea linked to it. It was all a construct of modern scholars, one with zero utility in explaining ancient Christianity.
Their Reasoning (and Mine)
To exemplify the problem, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy still has an entry on Gnosticism that says, “Gnosticism (after gnôsis, the Greek word for ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight’) is the name given to a loosely organized religious and philosophical movement that flourished in the first and second centuries.” That’s a pretty typical statement. But the Westar Institute scholars have concluded, as I did, that no such “movement” existed. What was mischaracterized as some sort of sectarian pedigree is really just a random collection of “ideas” shared by numerous diverse philosophers and theologians and sects, in varying degrees. “Gnosticism” was no more a distinct “movement” than “dualism” or “henotheism.” In fact, less so; as those at least are real coherent things that developed and spread in antiquity; Gnosticism as a whole isn’t. Only individual pieces of it.
Hence when the IEP claims, for example, “certain fundamental elements serve to bind these groups together under the loose heading” of Gnosticism, there actually is no group that possesses all of the usually-attributed features, and nearly every group possesses one or more of them, or some modified version of them, and there was no particular relationship among any set of groups one could distinguish as “Gnostic” as if in opposition to some other set of groups. For instance, every sect of Christianity on which we have any information on the point believed in a separate Logos who created the universe at God’s behest; likewise, believed some kind of secret knowledge (“gnosis”) was essential to ensuring one’s salvation; likewise, had a dualist view of the cosmos in which the lower world was corrupted by meddling divine beings and the upper world’s God was awaiting a chance to destroy it and start over, and help us escape our corrupt bodies and locations by fleeing into celestial ones.
Hence the paradigmatic “Gnostic” sect is a fiction; no such thing existed. Nearly all religious sects shared one or another Gnostic idea, including what we anachronistically call “orthodox” sects. So in fact there was no such thing as Orthodoxists against the Gnostics. In fact there was no ancient discussion of any such “group” as the Gnostics, neither calling them that, nor describing them in any of the ways modern scholars imagine it, nor conceiving any “grouping” of sects in such a way. Every sect claimed it was “orthodoxy” and every other “heresy,” and what Christianity ended up looking like in the later fourth century corresponded to no sect prior to that century. And the sects usually categorized as “Gnostic” actually bear no consistent or coherent relationship to each other, and differ from each other as much as any of them differs from the sects that eventually merged to become the ascendant “orthodoxy” of the fourth century. So there were just “sects.” Not “Gnostic” and “non-Gnostic” sects. The term “Gnostic” thus leaves us with no meaningful distinction to make with it.
I came to this realization when trying to see, in my research for On the Historicity of Jesus, if Gnosticism would be a useful category for explaining the origins of Christianity and whether Gnostic sects could be shown to be closer to the original teachings of Christianity. What I found was no sect matching what historians had come to call “Gnosticism,” just diverse sects, each having some elements of it, and no sects with no elements of it, nor all of them. Moreover, I found that anything that was being distinguished as “Gnostic” either had zero evidence of existing in the first century, or if evidenced, was evidenced as a component of what later became orthodoxy; in other words, the Christians who supposedly were attacking Gnostic sects as heretical, were from “Gnostic” sects themselves, just with their own evolved and modified ideas; which describes every sect. Every sect we find in the late second century was an evolved, modified, and different version of the original sect; and there is no way to “group” them in any meaningful sense along Gnostic lines; nor any real way to call one “orthodox” and the others “heretical.” As I wrote in OHJ, “I believe all sects deviated from the original religion and innovated freely and in equal measure, and the victorious Churches of the early Middle Ages looked nothing at all like the original faith of Peter or even Paul” (p. 64).
Hence I found the term “Gnostic” to have no explanatory utility. And let me be clear: I’m not saying that I found “no Gnosticism” in the first century, but rather, that anything called “Gnosticism” after the first century is just an evolved or elaborated version of the originating sect, launched by Peter and modified by Paul, which also evolved into so-called “orthodoxy.” In other words, everything simply evolved from that—each sect modifying in its own way what Paul meant by gnosis, or how his cosmic dualism was to be explained, or how he imagined the task of creation was delegated or corrupted, or the specific names used for that corruptor or delegated creator, and every other peculiar thing—and there was no coherent “pattern” of evolution in this that could be called “Gnostic” as distinct from “not” Gnostic. Every teaching usually listed as “Gnostic” is actually found, in some form, in nearly every Christian sect, including those now deemed “orthodox” or “proto-orthodox.” There are just different sects, each as divergent from the original sect as from each other, and with no particular pattern of change to group them by.
The Docetism Analogy
To illustrate by analogy, I also think this same fate will eventually befall another made-up category, Docetism, the supposed existence of sects that claimed Jesus only visited earth in a fake, illusory body. I think this is bogus for much the same reasons. As I discuss in OHJ (pp. 317-20; and see my more recent discussion here), I found no evidence that that actually existed as a distinct movement. Though (unlike Gnosticism) ancient authors did use the label, they imagined it was a distinct “sect,” yet used the word to label anything they thought “denied the humanity of Christ,” no matter how; and all of the texts categorized by modern (or indeed even ancient) scholars as “Docetist” are so divergent from each other and modern definitions of Docetism as to render the category completely useless. It is largely a fiction modern scholars made up, and then imposed on diverse texts it does not actually correctly or demonstrably describe. Consequently I suspect we should do away with it as well.
There were sects that taught something like what scholars mean by “Docetism,” but no two of those teachings is the same in what they teach, and most diverge significantly from how the term is usually intended. For instance, the Gospel of Peter was originally called “Docetic,” and indeed Serapion’s epistolary condemnation of it in the second century (quoted by Eusebius in the fourth century) is our earliest surviving record of that label, yet that Gospel contains nothing Docetic in it—a point scholars keep trying to point out: the body of Jesus in it is real, is mortal, actually is crucified, and Jesus rises in it. The entity that “leaves” that body upon its death on the cross is self-evidently the Holy Spirit, since the line about “he was taken up” corresponds with the line in the Synoptics that “the spirit left him” or “he exhaled the spirit” (probably the same spirit that entered him at his baptism), which the Gospel of Peter simply interprets as the soul of Jesus, which leaves (as souls always do upon death), and then returns on the third day to reanimate the corpse it left behind, just as all other Christian sects taught.
The term “Docetae” thus meant something else to Serapion than modern scholars think, who for example mistake Ignatius speaking of Christian heretics (whom he does not call the Docetae) claiming Jesus only “seemed” or “was imagined” to live and die as speaking of the same thing Serapion was, or Clement of Alexandria a half-century later (who gives us our next mention of “Docetae” as a sect that, Clement imagined, “denied the true humanity of Christ,” a notion Clement never clearly explains). But there is actually no evidence these authors were referring to the same thing at all, much less to what modern scholars think Docetism means.
Likewise, scholars will claim the Apocalypse of Peter is Docetic, but in fact it is not. In that text, as I wrote before, “there is not one Jesus in heaven and another on earth, but the real Jesus is the same person the villains seize and crucify as occupies the fleshly body they drive nails into,” it simply imagines soul and body as separable, which every Christian believed (that text is also reporting a vision, not represented as a real event anyway). Nor is the Second Treatise of the Great Seth Docetic, as it portrays Simon of Cyrene being sneaked in to be crucified in place of Jesus, which is not Docetism either, nor at all what Ignatius, Clement, or Serapion were talking about.
Conclusion
The more you dig, the less you find Docetism to have been a distinctive thing at all, much less the thing modern scholars claim. So, too, Gnosticism. Which concept not even ancient authors had invented. As King wrote, “the variety of phenomena classified as ‘Gnostic'” today “simply will not support a single, monolithic definition, and in fact none of the primary materials fits the standard typological definition” (What Is Gnosticism? p. 226; italics hers). In other words, Gnosticism simply didn’t exist. The collection of ideas claimed to be Gnostic was a random hodgepodge of notions scattered across all Christian sects, most shared in some form by all of them, and the complete collection held by none of them.
Even the proto-typical Gnostic myth (about demiurges and what not) was fabricated by modern scholars by lifting ideas found in diverse sources from completely different sects. It did not exist in that form in any ancient sect. Yes, each idea did, somewhere (some sects introduced the notion of an incompetent Demiurge being delegated the task of creating the universe and screwing it up), but the entire collection of features, nowhere. And even those ideas have counterparts in every other sect so far as we know. The Demiurge story, for example, is just a reimagined evolution of the original Satan’s Fall story, where the incompetent or evil “sub-god” ruins creation after the fact, rather than from the start—a distinction of barely any relevance. Otherwise, the idea that this creation is corrupt and evil and we have to escape it is not only entirely orthodox, it’s canonical (2 Peter 3, 2 Peter 2, 1 Thess. 4, Jude, Romans 8, Galatians 4, 1 John 2, 1 John 5, Ephesians 6, Colossians 2, 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 4-5). It is thus not distinctive of any such thing as “Gnosticism.” Likewise, the role of secret knowledge (literally, gnosis) in ensuring salvation—a fact which many orthodox authors speak of approvingly as actually a component even of so-called orthodox Christianity; as we see from Paul and Hebrews, to Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen (see OHJ, Elements 11 & 13, Ch. 4).
So the bottom line is, “Gnosticism” and “Gnostic” sects and texts has been a phantom, a fabrication of modern scholarly “interpretation” that turns out to be wrong about almost every single thing. The individual beliefs that were cobbled together and “claimed” to be Gnostic existed; but all together in no sect we know, and in part in every sect we know enough about. There was thus no such distinctive category of Christianity, no movement. Ancient authors never mention it. And there is no ancient evidence of it. Time to drop that concept and move on.
Wow! Thanks for reducing the number of garbage categories that I thought were important. Jung had written forwards to early Tibetan translations comparing Vajrayana Buddhism to Gnostic sects. The early translations by Evans-Wentz – Tibetan Book of the Dead and others – included long forwards by Jung. Long ago – before I read your work on the historicity of Jesus – I seriously planned to read the Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The last few years seem to show that Jung’s ideas didn’t hold up. Now his comparisons don’t hold up either. Perhaps Jungian archetypes are helpful in comparing similar categories in mythology and literature. I suspect though they are totally made up categories of little use like Gnosticism and Docetism.
I read Elaine Pagels book, “The Gnostic Gospels,” and I felt I learned a great deal. Now I’m wondering if I was hoodwinked! She seemed to group the texts she described as having commonalities that allowed them to be labeled “gnostic.” So if I understand what you are saying, since there was no sect or movement in the first century that fulfills a complete set of these imagined “gnostic” characteristics, there is no value in such a classification today, regardless of the set of characteristics one chooses. I think I get that, but are you equally saying that the texts that ultimately became orthodox and canonical have no distinguishing characteristics that separate them from characteristics of the texts that others have labeled as “gnostic?”
On the Pagels book, see my other comment. That might clarify some things.
On the implications of the non-existence of Gnosticism, obviously it would be tautologically untrue to say that there are no differences between sects, much less between sects declared heresies and sects that gained imperial endorsement. That isn’t what we are saying. What we are saying is that none of those differences can be coherently grouped under the heading “Gnosticism.” No such grouping existed in antiquity either. They were just “heresies” (to the ascendant victorious sectarian conglomerate). Full stop.
That said, it is also true those differences have often been exaggerated or misinterpreted or misunderstood when forced through the distorting lens of the modern fiction of “Gnosticism.” To give you an example, see my comment elsewhere here on the Demiurgic theology: that differed from ascendant orthodoxy in many trivial ways, but functionally and structurally, not in any way that actually mattered. Both are different ways of marginalizing and demonizing the Jews through a revised cosmology. So the differences are more superficial, and not as significant as the Gnosticism construct tried to pretend.
Similarly, all sects spoke approvingly of secret teachings and gnosis as a component of achieving salvation. What those secret teachings were, what the gnosis was supposed to be of, may have differed, but often again ultimately trivially. That you needed secret knowledge to be saved is simply by every sect acknowledged, even by Ignatius, Origen, and Clement of Alexandria. So there is no “distinction” to be made here that substantively matters. And what distinctions remain to be made (the trivia of what weird doctrines different sects were pushing or using as this gnosis) are hugely diverse and can’t be categorized into any dichotomous narrative of “Orthodox vs. Gnostic.”
We also, most often, don’t even know what they are—because these were secrets, we rarely find them discussed, or only so by polemicists (we can rarely trust any Christian to always correctly or honestly describe the heretical teachings they are attacking)—so the “Gnosticism” construct was instead over-used to “invent” knowledge of those secret doctrines that actually we don’t have and should never have claimed. Historians really have a hard struggle with accepting they can’t know things, creating a strong tendency to invent knowledge like this. There are many examples beyond this one (like, the vast range of scholarly “histories” of the imaginary “Q” document).
I should also add, regarding gnosis in all Christian sects, even so-called Orthodoxy, I think I see some signs of second and third century Christians deviating from Paul’s notion that everyone needed gnosis of the mysteries to be saved (probably for him even a requirement before being baptized), and pushing this secret knowledge more into the purview of church authorities, rather than rank-and-file brethren (Paul already started this, speaking of deeper mysteries reserved for Christians of higher rank); gnosis thus seems to then become the means to spread the Gospel to keep the flock saved, e.g. secrets about demonology to defeat demonic opposition, or whatever it was Ignatius thought was important about his having secret gnosis about angelic orders (he never says, and we have no idea).
I own Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels but have not read it. Am I well advised to toss it, unread?
It’s been too long since I read that, so I don’t know. Insofar as it’s a book that should have been titled “The Other Gospels” it may still have use. It would only be defective insofar as she uses Gnosticism as a category to attribute things to those “other” Gospels that actually aren’t in them, or uses Gnosticism as a causal category to explain their formation or what sectarian interests they served. Anything like that is likely to be obsolete.
So I would just caution to read it critically and pay close attention to what in it is a simple fact (that a Gospel exists, said a specific thing, and so on) and what is an inference (something she is trying to infer or deduce to “fill out” those facts). A common failing across historical academia is the tendency to over-confuse those two things and present them as the same. History as a profession has gotten a great deal better at that since 1950 but it can still happen. And sometimes the lines get really blurred; for instance, if she uses “Gnosticism” as a tool to estimate the date a text was written: that sounds like a simple fact (when a Gospel was written), but would probably not be valid anymore; so you’d have to attend extra carefully to how important her statements about Gnosticism are to any of her conclusions (like, when a certain Gospel was composed, or what it’s sayings “meant”).
I’m reading Pagels’ “The Gnostic Paul” at the moment and what I’m getting from it so far is “Gnosticism” is just another artefact of inventing the historical Jesus: nothing she writes of goes much, if any way at all,
beyond legitimate exegesis of the Pauline texts.
She seems oblivious to erasing the distance between Paul and e.g. Valentinus and rendering “Orthodoxy” and “Gnosticism” a distinction without a great deal of difference. One is just the exoteric milk and the other the esoteric meat. It’s all rock n’ roll to me!
The “Orthodox” so-called go much further and more often than not fall into eisegesis: I can’t find the “canonical” gospels or a “historical” Jesus in Paul even if I squint. Neither can I find a great deal of what makes for “Orthodoxy” in those “canonical” gospels
The puzzled and affronted followers of Valentinus were legitimately hard done by in my opinion: their inferences from Paul I don’t have to squint to see and they genuinely didn’t believe anything staggeringly different than him. This is obvious when you have binned Jesus or didn’t have that conception of Christ in the first place.
Holding on to an invented Jesus, whether it is the invented Jesus of “Mark” or the invented Jesus of Ehrman, just leads to a garblage of epicycles a la Ptolemy and his epigones.
I’m glad for the Westar Institute; but how long will it take for the loons to realise roofs are impossible without a supporting structure, the one they have spent the last thirty or forty years demolishing and being oblivious to so doing?
I think your observations are fairly on point.
sounds a lot like how the British invented the Hindu religion
I’m not sure what you mean. Can you link to some authoritative discussions?
I agree with the article’s conclusion, but I would like that you don’t ignore at least a feature of the ‘Gnosticism’: the fact that some sects hated the Jewish God and claimed that Jesus was the Son of an unknown Father (not YHWH) and he was not the Jewish Messiah of YHWH. We have evidence of the existence of this sect even in Mark, since their Jesus was reduced (by midrash from Lev 16) to the role of ‘Jesus Bar-Abbas’ (another Jesus with the only difference who he is not ‘called Messiah’, that is all his true “crime”).
This feature (worship of Jesus + hostility against YHWH) may be called anti-demiurgism to distinguish it from the abstract category of gnosticism. If you recognize his early existence, then mythicism may have a good explanation about why Jesus was euhemerized by ‘Mark’. I know that your defense of minimal mythicism doesn’t require by you to clear what moved ‘Mark’ and his insiders to invent the ‘historical Jesus’, but often I see that a criticism addressed against mythicism is its presumed not-inability of explain WHY Jesus was euhemerized.
My point is that the anti-demiurgism was the real reason and impulse to euhemerize Jesus: by reducing Jesus to a pious Jew (not only to a mere creature, but to an adorer of YHWH), then the anti-demiurgists couldn’t say that Jesus was killed by YHWH (=one of the 7 “archons of this age”) in outer space. They couldn’t say more that Jesus was the Serpent of Genesis (seen as a positive figure). Their threat could be neutralized by fabricating the Gospel of Mark.
This would explain why Jesus is provided with a mother and brothers and sisters: while the anti-demiurgists rejected the carnal procreation (in the world of the demiurge YHWH), the invented carnal family of Jesus would prove that the procreation is a good thing. In the same time, the hostility of Jesus against her mother and brothers believing him “out of himself”, would eclipse the antidemiurgist hostility against carnal procreation, by replacing it with a more banal misunderstanding between a man and his relatives.
This would explain why all that midrash from OT to prove that Jesus was the Messiah of YHWH: not only the Jews had to be persuaded about that point, but also the anti-demiurgists.
This would explain why Jesus was placed under Pilate: the Messiah of YHWH was expected in recent times.
What do you think about all these points ?
Thanks in advance for any answer.
The sectarian move to denigrate the Jewish God is not “Gnostic,” is the point. It does not distinctively come along with any other specific baggage, but just as diverse a baggage as any other sect. This is what I already point out: yes, each particular thing credited as Gnostic existed somewhere. But the collection of all of them in any one sect, much less group of sects, existed nowhere.
Hence there is no point in calling this Gnosticism. Just call it what it is. You can find weird new developments and features in every sect, including the sects that merged into later orthodoxy. They all deviated from the original.
In this particular case, this is just a different way of dealing with the same problem: distancing Christianity from the Jews. Which became increasingly important after the Jewish War. The sects that later merged into “orthodoxy” chose a different method: blaming the Jews for killing and rejecting Christ and thus accusing Jews of being unfaithful to their own God, even blinded by their own God for their wickedness, and as such deserving of everything they get (as we see in John; which is an evolution of the more nuanced critique of the Jews in Mark, on which see my discussion of the Barabbas narrative in On the Historicity of Jesus, index).
Thus we got Christian antisemitism. Other sects accomplished this same goal in a different way, by simply redefining the cosmic order by having the Jews worshiping literally a false God (the Demiurge), which simply recreates the entire antisemitic apparatus under a different set of schematic trivia. (One more borrowed from Plato than Jewish literature.)
In other words, there is no meaningful structural difference between Marcionism (which is the earliest form of what you are talking about, which was not actually “Gnostic” by any modern definition) and what evolved into Nicene Christianity. They both reinvented new understandings of cosmic history to ground their antisemitic rejection and denigration of the Jews. The minor trivial details of how they did that hardly matter in practice. And “Gnosticism” as a concept is wholly unhelpful in understanding it.
No ancient writer used the word “Gnostic”? What about Ireaneus’ book “On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis”, which is basically the Constitution of the Apostolic Church?
No ancient writer used that word of a group or sect or collection of distinctive ideas. Even that book is not about Gnostics, hence illustrates exactly my point. Irenaeus is using the word as just the Greek word “Knowledge,” i.e. that title should be translated as it is written: “On the Detection and Overthrow of False Knowledge.” It’s about heretics in general; meaning everyone Irenaeus disagrees with. Not anything modern scholars mean by Gnosticism.
This is a central point in the works of King and so on: they extensively demonstrate that it was modern scholars who tried to “spin” that title to mean something else. Once we abandon that modern construct, we can finally translate a title like that correctly, and not attach a bunch of false baggage to it the author never meant.
So you think that Irenaeus considers all heretics, including the Ebionites and Marcionites, to be Gnostics? Because the word only seems to come up in relation to particular sects like the Valentinians and Sethians.
“The first of them, Valentinus, who adapted the principles of the heresy called “Gnostic” to the peculiar character of his own school, taught as follows…” -Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.11
“And so it happens that the doctrines which have grown up amongst the Valentinians have already extended their rank growth to the woods of the Gnostics.” -Tertullian, Against the Valentinians 39
Would you say the word “Celtic” is similar since it also denotes many various groups who believed different things? Would you likewise say there are no Celts?
As for Docetism, the Gospels of Luke and John have incidents in which Jesus walks directly through people, which is not something he seems able to do in Mark and Matthew. The Marcionites had a version of Luke in which Jesus descended from heaven and they were Docetic. The Valentinians had a version of John and Valentinus’ disciple Cassianus was said to be Docetic. Do you see a connection there?
Irenaeus does not say Valentinus was a “Gnostic.” He says Valentinus borrowed some ideas from the “heresy called gnostic,” by which he means the heretical practice of claiming supposedly “new” secret knowledge about God, which heresy included any sect Irenaeus believed was doing that, not the specific secret knowledge attributed to Valentinus. Much less to anything modern scholars mean by “Gnosticism.” It would be better to translate this as “those who claim to ‘know’ things,” complete with scare quotes.
Thus, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, are not talking about the modern construct of Gnosticism, but just the generic practice of claiming any secret knowledge whatever (against what they deemed true knowledge), which corresponded to no specific sect or concepts, modern or ancient.
Docetism the modern construct, meanwhile, is not “Jesus could do miraculous things with his body.” It’s the view that that wasn’t Jesus. It was an illusion pretending to be, or fooling people into thinking it was. So far as I know, no such belief ever really existed in antiquity. Every example pointed to is not only of a completely different belief than that, but a completely different belief from every other example. That’s why I don’t think Docetism, in the modern sense, existed. Likewise, “Gnosticism.”
P.S. Someone elsewhere asked a similar question about Plotinus’s essay Against the Gnostics in the Enneads. That’s exactly the kind of thing these scholars are talking about. That has nothing to do with Christianity. It isn’t about the modern notion of Gnosticism at all, or even about a group, movement, or sect of any kind. It is simply a tract against a specific (and he means pagan) doctrine of the gods—in fact it’s simply a criticism of middle Platonist theology that followed the Timaeus. It’s title should just be translated “Against Those Who Claim to Have Knowledge,” in reference to Plato’s Socratic principle, “Only he knows who knows that he knows nothing.” The word was never intended in the way modern scholars translate and interpret it. So by rendering it “Gnostics” we completely mistranslate and misunderstand what this text even is and what it’s about.
This is the kind of thing they mean when they say we need to stop doing this. The tract is simply “Against Those Who Claim to Know Things” not “Against the Gnostics.” The latter doesn’t exist as a thing.
It is funny that when a scholar points something out, it seems blindingly obvious. Yet I would have never taken the leap to think this way. Once stated it alters the whole narrative of the triumph of orthodoxy over heterodoxy, because it ceases to be seen as one defined group against other defined groups. Rather it becomes an accretion of diverse ideas into what grew into the orthodox fold. I’m not putting this very well but I can say it will influence how I see the development of Christianity from now on. I think the phrase is paradigm altering. Thanks Richard.
Gnosticism struck out, Docetism struck out…Judaizing struck out? Is it an inning?
I don’t know what you mean by “Judaizing.”
Do you think that the scholarly assumption that a proto-orthodox sect existed at the incipient stage of the religion made it natural to group the more weird cosmic ideas together as a separate movement (i.e. gnosticism)? If they assumed the religion started with sect that worshiped a recently remembered earthly Jesus believed to be resurrected, it may have seemed like the other stuff had to come from some outside polluting movement of more mystical ideas. I take your point that such an outside monolithic movement never existed, since all those weird ideas clearly come from the earliest evidence and evolved from the beginning of the Christianity. But it just reminds me of how Bart Ehrman made the assumption that a proto-orthodox sect believing the basic historicist line was present from the start, despite being contradicted by Paul’s high christology. Just trying to make sense of the impetus of the scholarly construct of “gnosticism”. I hope that makes sense.
That’s sort of what King and others point out (with extensive historiographical analysis of scholars inventing and using the Gnosticism construct).
Man, I’m glad you wrote this. This was what I started to think when reading Bart Ehrman’s book ‘Forged’. He seemed to think it was a legitimate concept rather than a modern invention, yet everything he said about it seemed applicable to every sect (e.g., that they believed in secret knowledge necessary for salvation).
Glad to know my gut was onto something. Thanks for this!
Note: I didn’t make an issue of it in my published work citing or quoting it before, but the usual derivation of “Docetism” from remarks by Ignatius seem to mistranslate the Greek.
For instance, in To the Smyrnaeans 2, the key line in Greek is οὐχ ὥσπερ ἄπιστοί τινες λέγουσιν τὸ δοκεῖν αὐτὸν πεπονθέναι αὐτοὶ τὸ δοκεῖν ὄντες, with minor variations in word order, and the usual translation of this is something like “not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that he [i.e. Jesus] only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be,” which is often expanded to “as they themselves only seem to be Christians,” but that addition is nowhere in the text itself, not even across multiple redactions and manuscripts.
But even without that, this cannot be a correct translation of the Greek. The word “only” is not in the text (on either side). The word “as” in “as they” is not in the text. And the infinitive dokein is in the present tense, not past, so it cannot mean “seemed” to suffer; it would sooner translate, “seems to suffer.” Present continuous action. But how can they be saying Jesus continually “seems” to suffer, when it’s supposed to be a past event?
If we were to ignore the modern construct of Docetism, and thus not try to force a fit with it here, and we just translated the sentence as it appears to be written, what we have is an articular infinitive (a neuter to dokein), the Greek gerund, which translates as “seeming” not “seems” or “seemed”; or even “imagining” (dokein has diverse meanings). It would take an object in the accusative, so to dokein auton could simply be “imagining him” to have suffered (peponthenai being the perfect infinitive of “to suffer”).
This is therefore not likely indirect discourse. Indeed the presence of the article to argues against that. So it’s not “as they say, that,” but simply “as they say, imagining him to have suffered,” with the following clause something like “they themselves imagining being,” the exact meaning of which is difficult to discern (which is why translators often try to conjecture a lost word like “Christians”).
Whether that’s a correct retranslation or not, it remains a fact that the standard translations of this sentence are not correct. We therefore can’t reliably extract anything of the modern construct of Docetism from this passage.
“(A)s they say, imagining him to have suffered, as they themselves imagining being,”. That seems(Sic!) straight-forward enough. They don’t think Jesus’ suffering was “real” as they don’t think themselves “real”, a common enough claim about the world that pops up most everywhere. It might be they imagined Jesus’ suffering as they suffer, which just reverses what is commonly said of believers but doesn’t mean anything different, but you have to add language to make that work, so – even though you have to add language to Greek often to make it intelligible in English – I lean to the former. Neither ideas are docetic when you think the Greek through, nor unintelligible.
The concept of “Gnosticism” was always very appealing to me because it’s based on knowledge rather than faith. I was curious about the origins of the movement but now you’re saying that it never existed! Why do you think scholars invented this category? Were they simply mistaken?
Follow the link I provided. That’s a whole article on why Gnosticism is a modern fabrication and didn’t really exist in antiquity.
I suspected something like this for a long time, ever since the Earl Doherty days. Whenever I found writings on or about gnosticism, it would either be general explanations without going into specifics about who they were or where and when they got their ideas from, or it would be something like this: I remember watching discussions on message boards about Jesus origins where Doherty participated. People would say things like “wow, it sounds like Paul was a gnostic!” And Doherty would be like “errmm more like proto-gnostic”. When I researched other discussions about early Christianity, people would say things like “Origen has traces of the gnostic heresy in his theology.” I was getting frustrated at that point, wondering “why is it that when gnosticism comes up in discussions, something is either proto-gnostic or has traces of gnosticism? Where are the full blooded concrete gnostics?”
Of course Gnosticists would say that there were, but when you actually try to find a “true” Gnostic, you don’t succeed. They all end up being “partially Gnostic,” indeed even the most orthodox Christians. Which is why Westar came to the conclusion that there actually is no such thing. The word simply does not describe any sect. It was an arbitrary modern-made collection of “stuff” that is really just randomly scattered across all sects and authors of Christianity.
Sorry but I have to disagree because there was ancient Gnosticism, Ancient Gnostics. Gnosticism is not a modern invention, there were ancient Gnostic groups like the sethians for example, and the Essene were considered Gnostic. I have the Gnostic Bible which contains Gnostic Godpels and other Gnostic works. Another Gnostic group is the Mandeans and Manichaeism.
Please read the article before commenting on it. The entire article refutes everything you just said. So the fact that you don’t know that tells me you didn’t read it. Read it.
Regardless, “Gnostics and Their Remains” by CW King 1887 is a great read. IMO
I wouldn’t trust anything from the 19th century. There was no reliable methodology then, and vast amounts of progress in understanding since then has changed practically everything pertinent (from manuscript and text-critical discoveries, to less biased translation and better contextualization).
For more on this point see History Before 1950.
If the Gnostics didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent them.
Correct. That’s the finding: the idea was a modern construct.
Though whether we “had” to build that construct is questionable. I see no need of it. It was just an accident of fashionable trends.
Can I offer some contrary evidence that you do not discuss, either here or in “The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus”. As you are no doubt aware, one of the treatises in Plotinus’ Enneads, Enn. II.9, is known by the common title “Against the Gnostics”. However, Porphyry actually has two lists of the treatises from the Enneads in his “Life of Plotinus”, one arranged chronologically, and one arranged according to topic. In his chronological list, he calls Enn. II.9, Πρὸς τοὺς Γνωστικούς, i.e., “Against the Gnostics” (5.33). In his subject list, he calls the same treatise Πρὸς τοὺς κακὸν τὸν δημιουργὸν τοῦ κόσμου καὶ τὸν κόσμον κακὸν εἶναι λέγοντας, i.e., “Against those who say that the Universe and its Maker are evil” (24.56-57). Doesn’t this indicate that for Porphyry, the term “Gnostic” was synonymous with “those who say that the Universe and the Demiurge are evil”? That is, it has a specific meaning.
First, Ennead 2.9 isn’t about Christians, but a pagan school of Platonists, disputing whether evil comes from matter or the soul (they say soul, Plotinus says matter). So, already, we’re done. This isn’t a Christian sect or anything to do with any Christian teaching.
Second, that chapter never mentions that school being called “Gnostics.” So it can’t be cited as doing so. The description “Against Those Who Say That the Universe and Its Maker Are Evil” is Plotinus’s title for that chapter. He never names his opponents.
Third, Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 5.33 reads Πρὸς τοὺς γνωστικούς and then gives the first line of the text, which relates to the first chapter of 2.9 (2.9.1–4) which is about theory of knowledge and why and how God has knowledge and his opponents don’t. The line thus should read “Against those [claiming] to understand,” in reference to the people claiming divinely correct knowledge of the soul, which Plotinus denies his disputants have.
Porophyry likely gets this from the central thesis which appears in 2.9.13, “What, after all, is there so terrible in these Spheres with which it is sought to frighten people unaccustomed to reasoning, never trained in an instructive and coherent gnosis?” Thus Plotinus (like Irenaeus) is for gnosis, not against it. His opponents merely falsely claim to have it. Hence when Porphyry says he writes against “the knowers” this means those of false knowledge, not those of knowledge.
Plotinus covers a lot of weird things these false knowers claim, among which just happens to be the idea that the creator is evil and the whole world is evil, which is being described at 24 by quoting Plotinus’s actual title, as there Porphyry says the second ennead “following the more strictly ethical First” ennead “is physical, containing the disquisitions on the world and all that belongs to the world,” and thus he there describes the Ennead-Tractate 2.9 as being on the physics of evil rather than, as its opening part, the question of who really knows what. Earlier he merely emphasizes that earlier part and its theme across the rest of the chapter, thus emphasizing its epistemology rather than its physics.
So Porphyry’s brief line is not the “name” of Plotinus’s opponents, but a description of them: they are being described as knowing things they don’t. Just like Irenaeus did. And their false knowledge ranges widely, only just happening to include the question of malogenesis and its attribution to a separate Creator that Plotinus denies exists (their “Demiurge” theory). This is what led modern scholars to misread this in light of their invention of a Gnostic sect of Christians.
For example:
Notice the emphasis on true vs. false knowledge being the actual distinction between Plotinus and these “false” Platonists he is attacking.
And:
So, again, not Christians (who certainly discoursed endlessly on virtues), but rival Platonists; and the dispute is over their claiming to know things they don’t. Which ranges beyond Demiurge theory and includes all sorts of peculiar Pseudo-Platonist notions that Plotinus is annoyed with.
This is also why none of Plotinus’s arguments against them are what their own peers (orthodox Christians) use to refute and denounce them, and he draws none of those arguments in here—because these aren’t Christians, but fellow Platonists.
Certainly many Christian factions adopted Platonism, and thus some (e.g. Marcion) adopted this faction of Platonism Plotinus is refuting. But that is not what Plotinus is talking about (nor what Porphyry ever says or assumed he was talking about either). It was modern scholars who came up with that idea and turned it into a dogma, until a recent “re-look” convinced scholars now that that was an error.
Thanks for your reply Richard. I appreciate your comments. I’m not convinced by your interpretation of the titles of Enn. II.9 (which relates to Porphyry’s use of the term “Gnostic”, not Plotinus), but very briefly I would respond to some of the points you raise as follows:
In chapter 16 of the “Life of Plotinus”, Porphyry says “There were at this time many Christians and other, and sectarians who had abandoned the old philosophy …”, and goes on to mention Zostrianos (amongst other works) as being circulated amongst these people. He goes on to say that “Against the Gnostics” was written against these people, and then says, “Amelius went to forty volumes in writing against the book of Zostrianus”. According to Turner, “Indeed, Plotinus’ antignostic critique in Ennead II 9 [33], 10 seems actually to cite Zostrianos (Zost. NHC VIII 10.1–20), which raises the question of the extent to which the doctrines he read in these Sethian texts may have made positive contributions to his own metaphysical philosophy.” (Turner, J.D. (2017). Sethian Gnostic Appropriations of Plato. In Renaud, F., Baltzly, D., Layne, D. A., & Tarrant, H. (eds.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity (Vol. 13). BRILL. Footnote 4, page 294).
What you describe as “weird things” actually make perfect sense if read as a critique of the kind of Platonizing Sethianism found in Zostrianos and other works. Every detail matches. It is true that Zostrianos may be classed as pagan rather than Christian. However, it would be hard to deny its close relationship to specifically Christian (Sethian) texts such as the Secret Book of John, and Porphyry mentions Christians as noted above. It is true that Plotinus does not mention any specifically Christian doctrine in his critique. That is in part because Zostrianos is not Christian, but it also reflects the fact that Plotinus could care less about Christianity. He was a Platonist, and he was annoyed at what he saw as the misrepresentation and distortion of Platonism.
I would also make the following point. Even if the term “Gnostic” was never used in any ancient writing to denote a specific set of beliefs, as you argue, that does not mean that it cannot serve as a useful technical term for modern scholars. The term “Neoplatonism” is not found in any ancient author but is a 19th century invention. It would be odd, though, for someone to claim that “Neoplatonism did not exist”.
I accept that many scholars are in agreement with you on this issue. However, I just want to end by demonstrating that the scholarship is not one-sided on this issue. Let me quote Dylan Burns:
“Anglophone scholarship now fruitfully investigates sources formerly known as “Gnostic” without recourse to some modern construction of “Gnosticism,” but to other aspects of their ancient social and intellectual environments … While acknowledging that much has been learned by studying “Gnostic” sources without reference to some category of “Gnosticism,” the present contribution argues that some connotation of the term “Gnosticism” remains useful—even necessary—to denote the philosophical presuppositions regarding creation and salvation that underlie the body of texts that Brakke rightfully associates with the “Gnostics” …” (Burns, Dylan M. 2016. “Providence, creation and Gnosticism according to the Gnostics.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24: 55–79. Quotes from pages 55-57.
“many Christians and other” — and other. In other words, the target is Christians siding with the Platonists he is opposing, and he is lumping them all together. It is not a sect of Christians. And Plotinus never named them Gnostics. Neither is Porphyry. Who is also talking about anyone (not just Christians) who pushes the opposed doctrines. And he is describing them. Not naming them.
This is why none of Plontinus’s arguments relate to Christian arguments against any Christian adopting these views. His arguments are solely against the Platonists adopting these views, regardless of whether they are Christians.
The difference is that modern scholars admit this. They say outright that this is their label, not an ancient one, to describe an over-arching phenomenon, and it reflects chronology not an absolute assignment of beliefs. And that chronological reality actually existed.
This is not what happened with Gnosticism. Scholars claimed this was an ancient category (even, for example, mistranslating Irenaeus to invent evidence for that claim). When the new scholarship realized that was false, and then asked whether even the phenomenon existed and thus the word could be rescued as a modern label, then they found a different result than for chronological markers like “Neoplatonism.” This is all discussed in the cited literature. Dozens of scholars went through this process and wrung their hands over whether the term could be rescued like this, and all concluded it can’t. So if you really want to understand this, follow the bibliography (I give a most up to date one in Obsolete Paradigm).
The reason they concluded that way is that when we reclassify it as a modern label, it fails to have any consistent target, and produces too many mistaken conclusions. Every doctrine assumed to be Gnostic exists in Orthodoxy, just in a different way (e.g. Paul replaces the Demiurge with Satan, but otherwise his worldview is broadly identical). And when you define Gnostic as any conjunction of those things, then you end up with no generalizable category.
For example, it ends up in one mix with “Marcionites” and their subsequent subsects and later thinkers. Not “Gnostics.” So you may as well drop “Gnostic” and talk about “Marcionites.” Conversely, too many sects were being roped in with the label, e.g. some sect says one thing, which sounds “Gnostic,” and so scholars concluded that that sect believed other things that they (not any ancient author) attribute as “Gnostic,” producing false conclusions about what diverse sects believed.
This is why the label needs to be abandoned. It does too much damage to reliable understanding of the ancient world to be retainable. No such grouping existed in antiquity. No conjunction of criteria makes any sect Gnostic rather than, just, whatever it actually is (like Valentinian etc.). And no criteria for what is Gnostic distinguishes any sect from any other. For example, you can say “which sects adopted Demiurge theory” and the answer is “Marcionites and their successors,” not other sects that adopted any or all other components of the modern construct of Gnosticism (like Paulinism).
So the conclusion of modern scholars is to avoid Gnostic as an unhelpful and confusing term and just talk about individual sects and thought-leaders and what they taught, and not assume we can know what they did if we don’t have any evidence they did (so you can’t use Gnosticism to “guess” at unevidenced beliefs for a sect by spotting its adoption of a few or most things moderns attach to the word “Gnostic”). Moreover, “Gnosticism” distorts understanding the other way, too: e.g. that Irenaeus actually meant by gnostics everyone he disagreed with and that he was not attacking gnosis but false gnosis (while advocating for his own gnosis) completely changes how we understand ancient Christianity and its polemical literature.
That’s why the word “Gnosticism” is disinformative and needs to be abandoned. It does no useful work and in fact does a great deal of harm to a correct understanding of ancient Christianity and its literature.
Thanks again for your reply. I think your position is perfectly reasonable, but, like Dylan Burns, I still am not persuaded by it. I am familiar with the scholarship you refer to. I approach the problem particularly from the point of view of philosophical theology. My arguments are presented in a recent (2025) article in Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, but very briefly:
I think that early Christianity is, in theological terms, fundamentally a result of the collision between Judaism and Platonism. I also think that there are ultimately only two possible ways of reconciling these two traditions in a reasonably stable and coherent manner. One of these approaches came to its completed form in what is traditionally called “classic Gnosticism” (i.e, Valentinianism, Sethianism, and related schools), and the other one came to its completed form in the aftermath of Nicaea, particularly with Augustine. What label we give to these two distinct intellectual streams aimed at reconciling Judaism with Platonism is ultimately immaterial, but I think that “Gnosticism” and “orthodoxy” are appropriate. Also I don’t think that the theological dialectic of early Christianity can be understood without some terms with these basic meanings.
Regarding the alleged difficulty with a definition, I give a precise definition of Gnosticism in the paper, which I haven’t seen anyone point out any flaws in it (yet). In particular, it clearly demarcates Gnosticism from Marcionism, which seems to be one of your major issues. Here is my definition:
A movement is Gnostic in the narrow sense (sensu stricto) if it has all three of the following characteristics:
(1) The belief that the creator of humans as physical beings is an inferior deity, not the first principle of reality, who is ignorant and/or malevolent.
(2) The identification of this inferior deity with both the God of the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh (even if not by that name), and the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus.
(3) This inferior deity is contextualized within a broader metaphysical system which is recognizably Platonic.
Note that Marcionism is excluded because it fails criterion (3). Paul fails all three criteria.
As regards Paul, I think the problem here is with trying to apply terms that are perfectly applicable in one period of time, to an earlier period of time. “Gnosticism”, in the classic sense as defined above, did not exist until the second century CE. Similarly, “orthodoxy” did not exist until Nicaea. So it is quite inappropriate to call Paul either Gnostic or orthodox. His beliefs do not represent a coherent final phase in the development of early Christian thought, and can be seen as an origin point for both of the later developments. He is both proto-Gnostic and proto-orthodox. I do not actually think this view conflicts much with your own. My interpretation of Paul is slightly different from yours (I am a “Jesus sceptic” rather than a “Jesus mythicist” – that is, I think Jesus was probably historical but also think we can know very little if anything about him), but everything I have said here is perfectly compatible with your view and with the mythicist interpretation of Paul. My view on the chronology of the New Testament writings is also very similar to yours.
Anyway, that is why I think the term “Gnostic” is still important and useful. Without it, an important philosophical stance aimed at reconciling Judaism and Platonism gets swept under the carpet, or treated as bizarre and ridiculous and not worthy of serious philosophical consideration. Whereas I think that it is both significant and worthy of analysis in its own right.
I fear this conflates different periods. Early Christianity (e.g. Paul, Hebrews) is philosophically eclectic, with influence from Stoicism (e.g. pneuma theory) and Aristotelianism (e.g. sarx theory) as well as Platonism, and the Platonism at that stage is filtered: the syncretism of Judaism and Platonism was pre-Christian (e.g. Philo) and only inherited, not something newly developed by Christians. All the Platonism in Paul and Hebrews is probably Jewish, with no direct contact with the Platonic tradition.
More influx of Platonic ideas appears in the second century, not the first, and is initially of mixed popularity. Heretics went bonkers with it (with some rare and poorly understood exceptions, like the explicitly “Aristotelian” sect of Christians who revered the logical writings of Galen and whom Origen appears to have called his students to shun); while orthodoxists were appreciative but wary: e.g. Clement’s and Justin’s “takes” on the philosophical schools is illustrative (hostile and wary even of Platonism, but eclectic in adoption and adaptation), whereas Tertullian’s sarcicism reflects resistance to Platonism yet he loves using Platonism to attack opponents polemically, yet he is an unreliable narrator and thus cannot be trusted to correctly describe the views of men like Marcion. The Platonism of Origen is also illustrative: more honest than Tertullian’s, yet more Aristotelian in flavor, and he was declared heretical a century or so later, even though he was anti- everything you define as Gnostic.
So there just is no simple dichotomous narrative here.
“All in” on Platonism, with the mods of the resistance (e.g. sarcicism won), starts in the fourth century, though you can see the enthusiasm rise in the third. But it’s a much messier and inconsistent story before that.
So Christianity is not a product of “the collision between Judaism and Platonism.” That collision was centuries before and already mainstreamed by the time Christianity arose. And when Christianity arose, Platonism was just one of several influences, with Stoicism and Aristotelianism as or more prominent. Platonism crept more and more into Christianity after, as the sectarian fights washed out in finding Platonism the least problematic (but not unproblematic) worldview to build on, and so you get by the third century Origen condemning Aristotelians as atheists to be shunned and Platonists the only worthy philosophers to listen to. All the while still retaining Aristotelian ideas (like a hybrid form theory).
And the same tack is seen in the “gnostics” who went bonkers adopting Platonist ideas, even while adapting or mixing or matching them: soul-body dichotomy, denigration of appearance over reality, a layered spiritual cosmology with good and evil intermediary spirits, knowledge through pure reason over empiricism, and a supernaturalist theory of forms with an ethical system based thereon (knowing God through contemplation in the mind is the only path to knowing right from wrong). These are all exclusively Platonic ideas (no other school had them), all found in Plutarch and Philo and Marcion.
So there just is no dichotomy here that is of any explanatory value.
Because this story is so complicated and not at all straightforward, oversimplifying it this way is as folly as continuing to use the misinforming category of Gnosticism.
This theory is disproved by Origen and Justin, who went down the middle. And it creates false lemmas. Thinking “there are only two” or even “there are only three” will mislead you into falsely assuming things about early Christian thinkers, e.g. just because we have no clear outline of what philosophical school an author hitched his wagon to, does not mean we are safe to “plug him in” to one of those two or three models. He might have presented a whole other fourth or fifth model. This is the folly of “assuming” false dichotomies rather than taking each thinker as their own man with their own solution within a complex thread of influences.
For example, Clement was never an Origenist, yet he was also a Platonist, and yet his Platonism was eclectic and not straightforward—and different from the fix effected by Augustine. By contrast, Lactantius is a wholly other animal. And so on.
So we can’t do this “either this or that” stuff. That’s the same error as creating the non-existent category of Gnosticism and continuing to try and make it work when it doesn’t.
Now you are inventing a new definition of Gnosticism. That no one can agree on what it even refers to is why it is useless academically. It won’t communicate anything to anyone else who doesn’t know what you mean by it. So you should drop the term and just say what you mean, rather than calling it something with a compromised definition everyone thinks is different than the one you think. This is why the word has become operationally defective and useless for communication.
Drop the word. Just describe your theory.
That’s just Marcionism and its descendant sects (Valentinian was simply a copycat of Marcion). And you cannot assume any sect we can peg any other attribute to also adopted (1) so the definition isn’t even useful for understanding other sects. You are just identifying mammals with a list of mammals, not a useful category that can find mammals. And that’s why the word has no use anymore.
There is no Christian sect that adopted (2) and not (1). So this is just an elaboration of (1).
Whereas this is an impossible criterion to employ because all sects of Christianity, including Paulinism and Marcionism, adopted elements of Platonism, and vary only in how many or what they did with them; and vary completely (every sect is different). So there is no way to identify any sect as meeting or not meeting this criterion without arbitrary (and therefore useless) criteria for calling some sects “more” or “most” Platonic.
Hence if you drop the “this inferior deity” (which redundantly repeats (1)) you are describing almost every post-first-century sect of Christianity including orthodoxy. And (maybe?) not describing original Paulinism, which is more Stoic and Aristotelian than Platonic, but is still also Platonic, but is Platonic only because the Jewish intellectualism it inherited was already Platonic. So the reality is way too complicated and messy for this over-simplifying definition to be useful.
Again, better to just describe each sect and its multiple influences (Valentinianism is clearly an evolution of Marcionism, but as such is not identical to Marcionism), rather than try to create a grouping of sects that didn’t exist and isn’t interpretively useful.
I think we are going to have to agree to disagree about this, Richard. My basic response is that I think you are not seeing the forest for all of the trees, and are treating early Christianity as just a variety of eclectic collections of ideas, without any underlying identifiable coherency.
Of course the intersection of Judaism and Platonism predates Christianity, and I discussed that in my paper. But what I don’t think you acknowledge is that this intersection was not resolved coherently immediately. There was a lot of playing around with differing ideas over time, and the inherent problems with these ideas only became apparent gradually. A very common approach at the Hebrew/Platonic synthesis was the Angelomorphic approach of Justin, Clement and Origen, which is also found extensively in the New Testament. This has all been discussed in detail by both Jarl E. Fossum and Charles A. Gieschen. But it became apparent over time that this approach was flawed theologically and could not endure without revision. It either had to be taken in one of two directions, these being the “Gnostic” or the “orthodox”. Obviously, Gnosticism did not reach final form until the 3rd century CE, and orthodoxy until the 4th century. It is necessary to trace these streams backwards in time from the developed forms, otherwise you will just end up with an apparently incoherent diversity of ideas and you will fail to see the underlying developing dialectic.
You are basically correct in saying that there was massive diversity of viewpoints in early Christianity. What I don’t think you recognize, is that underlying this diversity are certain philosophical streams that ultimately flow into two distinct possible types of theology.
As regards my definition, I think you have misconstrued criterion (3) in particular. It does not mean merely “elements of Platonism”. It requires a hierarchical ontology with something corresponding to an ineffable first principle (the One), Intellect with the Forms (the Pleroma in Gnosticism), and then Soul. Marcionism simply does not have these identifiable features. Whereas the Classic Gnosticism of Valentinianism, Sethianism, and so forth does.
My primary concern with your approach is that it really is an attempt to erase Gnosticism from history as a coherent intellectual position. And I think that nothing would be more pleasing to Irenaeus and Tertullian, and Christian orthodoxy in general. But I will leave my paper to speak for itself.
There is a reason you aren’t an expert in this field and all experts specializing in gnostic studies disagree with you now.
To wit:
That’s exactly what it is, and that is exactly these specialists’ point: Christianity was an incoherent chaos of sectarian developments. You are the one being naive here. And you are on the other side of this very shift, where specialists used to be but left for a reason.
Christianity started as a Jewish messianic apocalyptic cult. Then shattered into endless diverse factions with a dizzyingly complex set of interacting pedigrees. Even Paul said there were multiple sects and some so divergent he had to condemn them as anathema and demand they be shunned. And that was just in the first two decades of the religion. By a hundred years later the explosion of divergent Christianities is beyond our ability to track, especially as almost all we know about them comes from unreliable polemics against them another hundred years later.
This was also true in philosophy. There were no longer clean divisions among sects. You could find a sect declaring for a trend (the basic five schools; most universities at the time even had endowed professorships for four of them) and declare for it, but in reality each sect was fractured into countless subsects, and worse, most philosophers did not declare for a sect but were eclectics. There is a whole literature on philosophical eclecticism in the early Roman Empire (I cite a bibliography on it in Scientist). So even philosophy was not “clean.” The evidence establishes that Christianity was way worse than philosophy in this regard.
It is naive to behave any other way. There are no false dischotomies. All Christianities were awash in Platonism and only differed in what pieces they took or how they adapted them. And they resemble each other only in respect to pedigrees and influences, which were complex and not linear.
Case in point: you still think there was a Christianity that wasn’t angelomorphic. There is actually no evidence there ever was. Orthodoxy was angelomorphic. Every heresy documented well enough to know either way, was angelomorphic. Marcionism was angelomorphic. Valentinianism was angelomorphic. They were all angelomorphic. They differed only in which angel, and in which way the incarnation was effected.
There simply is no “two streams.” And Irenaeus and Tertullian would have been horrified by your suggestion that there was. They well knew there were an array of “heresies” and only a few grouped even as you want, much less as the word “Gnosticism” has been defined and employed in the field for over a century (which is not at all your new attempt at a “fixed” definition that abandons even the relevance of Gnos- in Gnostic and thus makes no sense of why you want to keep the word).
Everything believed of Gnostics is true of Orthodoxists: cosmological dualism, the importance of gnosis to salvation (including secret knowledge), Platonist foundations (resulting in numerous distinctly Platonist elements, differing only in which ones and how apapted), elaborate angelological and demonological cosmologies, a divine enemy who caused the ruination of flesh, and “escape from a fallen world” ideation.
The Marcionite shift simply moved the enemy who corrupted creation from Satan to the Demiurge (making Christianity more Platonist) and thus replaced the Logos with the Demiurge as the creator; and subsequent sects that spun off of Marcionism retained or adapted that idea; but most sects traditionally classified as Gnostic (based on the mistranslation of the title of Irenaeus’s book) did not.
So there is no sect that has all the properties of Gnosticism; but every sect had some version of every property of Gnosticism (e.g. Satan or Demiurge, it’s the same thing, just one more Jewish-Zoroastrian, the original faith, and the other more Middle Platonist, the Marcionite strand of sects; they all had essential and even secret gnosis, and only differed on its content; they all had elaborate cosmological/angelological mysteries, e.g. as alluded to by Ignatius and Clement; etc.).
So there just is no distinction “Gnosticism” as a word can make. You can talk about the Marcionist wing of sects, but that’s simply that (Demiurgic Christianities). It is not distinctively “Gnostic.” It is not distinctively centered in gnosis. Most of its ideas overlap orthodoxy hazing any real (non-polemicized) distinction. For example, apart from the Demiurgic components of Marcionism, Marcion was an orthodox Paulinist about the incarnation and resurrection, just as Origen was, and Tertullian et al. were actually the heretics “revising” history to make Paul a sarcicist when, as Origen points out, he wasn’t. So there is no clean story. And nothing distinctively “gnostic” about any of these sects.
To simply “recycle” the word Gnostic (why “gnos-“???) to mean Demiurgist is not useful, but confusing. And this is why all specialists in this field have abandoned it. I strongly recommend you actually read what they have to say about why they gave up on the word. Again, the bibliography is in Obsolete Paradigm.
So Gnostcism is false? And Platonism? I understand your an Atheist but why do you not believe in gnostcism. It’s wonderful, it’s fantastic. I am currently studying Gnostcism aswell. I searched up Gnostcism is false on google and I got your article and read it but I am still not sure. I mean for your atheistic view, you think nobody made the world. Just the universe. When explain the natural world, rivers, water everything. Atheistism is a wrong belief.
I’m not sure what you mean by “Gnostcism is false.” The article explains that Gnosticism didn’t exist; but that doesn’t mean some of the disparate things stuffed under the term didn’t. I carefully explain the difference, so you should attend to the article and read it as carefully as it was written.
And Platonism has nothing to do with that question so I don’t know what you mean by including it here.
Nor even does theism. Nothing in my article changes, whether God exists or not. Atheism is irrelevant to this article.
But if you want to confront why it is your belief about that that is false, start with Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? and work out from there.