The Secrets of Judas

[Got a note from Robinson's publicist asking if I'd post this guest article: I think we all owe this man's scholarship a debt, and so I'm happy to shill for him just this once.]

Judas Iscariot is, if not the most famous, then surely the most infamous, of the inner circle of Jesus' disciples. He was one of the Twelve Apostles who stuck with Jesus through thick and thin to the bitter end, until the night of the Last Supper when he led the authorities to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was Judas just fulfilling prophecy, implementing the plan of God for Jesus to die for our sins, doing what Jesus told him to do? Why else would he identify him with a kiss, all for a measly sum of thirty pieces of silver? What do the Gospels inside the New Testament -- and then what does The Gospel of Judas outside the New Testament -- tell us about all this? . . .

A “Gospel”? By “Judas”?

The Gospel of Judas was composed after the canonical Gospels were written, at about the same time as the Nag Hammadi Gospels were written. No doubt, like them, The Gospel of Judas made use of the title Gospel to accredit itself over against the canonical Gospels that had popularized the title in their own quest for accreditation. As a result, we assume not only that The Gospel of Judas was not written by Judas – after all, he had been dead for over a century – but may not be what the public assumes a Gospel would be -- a collection of the stories and/or sayings of Jesus. For the four Gospels among the Nag Hammadi Codices have shown that the honorific title could be ascribed to works which we today would never call Gospels, if that title had not been attached to them in the tradition. The Gospel of Judas will in all probability teach us a lot more about the Gnosticism of the second century, than about the public ministry of Jesus, or sayings of Jesus, or Holy Week, or the like.

How has Judas been understood down through the centuries, after the New Testament presented him as giving Jesus over to the Jewish authorities, and The Gospel of Judas somehow vindicating him?

In antiquity, to fall on one’s sword when one’s leader is slain is considered a noble death. Should not Judas’ suicide after Jesus’ crucifixion be accorded this distinction of being a noble death? Apparently it was first Saint Augustine who decided that Judas’ suicide was in fact a sin.1 Listen to the way Augustine put it: 2 

He did not deserve mercy; and that is why no light shone in his heart to make him hurry for pardon from the one he had betrayed.



And so, irrespective of what one might think of Judas giving Jesus over to the Jewish authorities, as implementing God’s plan of salvation, or as a traitor betraying his friend, he cannot be forgiven for his suicide!

The most generous that early Christian monasticism could be to Judas was to suggest that Jesus forgave him, but ordered him to purify himself with “spiritual exercises” in the desert, such as they themselves practiced.

In the seventh century, the Bible commentator Theophylact thought Judas had not expected things to turn bad once he arranged a hearing between Jesus and the Jewish authorities, and in anguish at the outcome killed himself to “get to Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain salvation”: 3 

Some say that Judas, being covetous, supposed that he would make money by betraying Christ, and that Christ would not be killed but would escape from the Jews as many a time he had escaped. But when he saw him condemned, actually already condemned to death, he repented since the affair had turned out so differently from what he had expected. And so he hanged himself to get to Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain salvation. Know well, however, that he put his neck into the halter and hanged himself on a certain tree, but the tree bent down and he continued to live, since it was God’s will that he either be preserved for repentance or for public disgrace and shame. For they say that due to dropsy he could not pass where a wagon passed with ease; then he fell on his face and burst asunder, that is, was rent apart, as Luke says in the Acts.

A Dominican preacher, Vinzenz Ferrer, in a sermon in 1391, had a similar explanation for the suicide, that Judas’ “soul rushed to Christ on Calvary’s mount” to ask and receive forgiveness: 4

Judas who betrayed and sold the Master after the crucifixion was overwhelmed by a genuine and saving sense of remorse and tried with all his might to draw close to Christ in order to apologize for his betrayal and sale. But since Jesus was accompanied by such a large crowd of people on the way to the mount of Calvary, it was impossible for Judas to come to him and so he said to himself: Since I cannot get to the feet of the master, I will approach him in my spirit at least and humbly ask him for forgiveness. He actually did that and as he took the rope and hanged himself his soul rushed to Christ on Calvary’s mount, asked for forgiveness and received it fully from Christ, went up to heaven with him and so his soul enjoys salvation along with all elect.

Yet the all-too-rampant anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages exploited Judas as the arch-betrayer in order to arouse just such sentiments, by painting him as a caricature of a Jew, with exaggerated features, a large hooked nose, red hair, and of course greed for money. . . .

        1 A. J. Droge and J. D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (SanFrancisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), cited by Klassen, Judas, 168 and 175.
        2 Klassen, Judas, 47, quoting Augustine, City of God, 1.17 and Sermon 352.3.8 (Patrologia Latina, 39:1559-63).
        3 The translation, by Morton S. Enslin, “How the Story Grew: Judas in Fact and Fiction,” in Festschrift in Honor of F. W. Ginrich, ed. E. H. Barth and R. Cocroft (Leiden: Brill, 1972), is quoted by Klassen, Judas, 173.
        4 Quoted by Klassen, Judas, 7.
Copyright © 2006 James M. Robinson from The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel by James M. Robinson Harper San Francisco; April 2006;$19.95US; 0-06117-063-1
James M. Robinson is the founding director emeritus of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, and professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Trajectories Through Early Christianity and A New Quest of the Historical Jesus. He is widely known for his pioneering work on the Sayings Gospel Q and the Nag Hammadi codices and was the general editor of The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Robinson's latest book, The Secrets of Judas is available at all major booksellers.

The Feast of St. Joan of Arc, Gnostic and Martyr

Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
As she came riding through the dark;
No moon to keep her armour bright,
No man to get her through this very smoky night.
She said, I’m tired of the war,
I want the kind of work I had before,
A wedding dress or something white
To wear upon my swollen appetite.

Well, I’m glad to hear you talk this way,
You know I’ve watched you riding every day
And something in me yearns to win
Such a cold and lonesome heroine.
And who are you? she sternly spoke
To the one beneath the smoke.
Why, I’m fire, he replied,
And I love your solitude, I love your pride.

Then fire, make your body cold,
I’m going to give you mine to hold,
Saying this she climbed inside
To be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
He took the dust of Joan of Arc,
And high above the wedding guests
He hung the ashes of her wedding dress.

It was deep into his fiery heart
He took the dust of Joan of Arc,
And then she clearly understood
If he was fire, oh then she must be wood.
I saw her wince, I saw her cry,
I saw the glory in her eye.
Myself I long for love and light,
But must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?

– Leonard Cohen

GnostiQuaker

At the very centre of the Quaker faith lies the concept of the Inner Light. This principle states that in every human soul there is implanted a certain element of God's own Spirit and divine energy. This element, known to early Friends as "that of God in everyone", "the seed of Christ", or "the seed of Light", means to Friends, in the words of John 1:9, "the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world".

Friends generally believe that first-hand knowledge of God is only possible through that which is experienced, or inwardly revealed to the individual human being through the working of God's quickening Spirit.

[...] George Fox acknowledged that there is "an ocean of darkness and death" over the world. But he also saw that "an ocean of light and of love" flows over this ocean of darkness, revealing the infinite love of God. Friends believe that the power of God to overcome evil is available in the nature of anyone who truly wants to do the will of God. To a great extent, we are the arbiter of our own destiny, having the power of choice.

[...] There is always an element of mystery about love which people cannot fully penetrate, but Friends are convinced that it has a timeless quality. Love cannot be destroyed by death and cannot be limited by time and space.

– Meeting the Spirit: An Introduction to Quaker Beliefs and Practices

Bill over at Seeking the Light posted recently about the relationship between ideas in Gnosticism and the Society of Friends (Quakers). These similarities have been noted before, and even a quick reading will show that we in the greater Gn Ecclesia have much to learn from (and share with) our Friends.

Quaker-Gnostic, Gnostic-Quaker

Ostara

Spring, 1896, Alfonse Mucha

The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else's
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April-your last April.
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks-
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.


– from Daffodils, Ted Hughes

Abide in Peace and Love

The Holy Logos has put away all your sins. Abide in peace and love.

This is, or rather I think should be, the scariest part of the Ritual. Realizing (making real) that the mind of the Divine, the moving, hermetic Under Standing of all transcendent Being, has set aside every misstep, every harsh word, premature judgment, each sliver of malice poking nastily into your existence. Carte blanche. Do over. You hit the rim last time, but here's the ball again. (And here's the scary part: ABIDE IN PEACE AND LOVE.) This ain't no Sunday School la la la little fluffy bunnies dictum. This is the trickiest thing we, as humans, have going on.

How do you do that? How do you not only get to that place of peace and love, but actually stay there? This is the distinction, I think, between gnosis and charis: between Knowledge and Grace. So how to remain in a state of grace? I have heard this challenge, and offered it: abide in peace and love. It sounds easy enough. But how to do it? What does peace really mean? What does it mean to abide in love?

It is not peaceable to "carry on", to drive to work and watch tv and eat whatever it is we eat. Our daily existence is so at odds with our host organism/home planet that just having carpet is, in a way, an act of violence. My recycling boxes are likely made of some carcinogen, my children's clothes likely produced in conditions we'd find horrifying; and possibly by those whom the clothes would still fit.

Neither is it peaceful to hurl invectives outside of factories, waving placards and shouting slogans. Not peaceful to sneer at SUV drivers or "God Hates Fags" chanters. How then, to be discerning, responsible (able to respond) and non-judgmental? I do like the challenge "be the change you would see in the world"; the kind of fingertip charity that is in its own way a kind of long-view libertarianism. If I see you, I'll take care of you, and I trust that if you see another you'll take care of them.

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

The key, it seems, is compassion. To act confidently and compassionately; whether joyously or with solemnity. To bolt to our being the idea that those things which cause conflict – resources, materia, territory, physicality – are fleeting and in the long run not worth seeking to possess and control. The compassion of others toward us reminds us of the love that Wisdom has for us, of the sacrifice of the Fallen Word for our sake; to awaken us from the slumber of pettiness and malice into the waking maturity of gnosis. Our compassion for others is nothing less than kindling the Sacred Flame that is alive and present in the world.

Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.
– Dalai Lama

Abide in peace and love. I dare you.

Gnovena Candles

Gnostic Gnovena Candles from Fr. Troy+'s Gnostic Shop.

Hope for Civilization

I'm in the wine store buying a nice Languedoc (Cathar country!) Merlot for Mass, when someone, engaged in mid-conversation and clearly looking for a name, stops me and just points at me;

Him: Greek guy. With the rock. Starts with a T.
Me: Uhh... Sisyphus?
Him: That's him, yeah. So anyways....

and continues his conversation.

Now I think there's something to be said for a society in which one can, in the midst of buying wine, ask a a complete stranger for an obscure name from Greek mythology, and proceed as though it were no big deal.

Carry on.

Earth-based Traditions in Judaism

Kohenet, the Hebrew word meaning priestess, signifies both spiritual leadership and embodiment of and service to the Divine. The Kohenet Training Intensive seeks to revitalize the Jewish connection with the Divine feminine and to reclaim the ancient role of women as facilitators of sacred experience. Looking deeply into our ancient tradition, we find thirteen archetypes of women serving, nurturing and strengthening spiritual community through embodied, ecstatic and earth-centered practice.

Drawing on legends and mystical teachings from the Jewish tradition, Near Eastern myth, and women's wisdom across the generations, the Kohenet training innovates uniquely feminine models of Jewish spiritual leadership, cultivating a network of women devoted to serving the Shechinah through weaving traditional Jewish practice with the emerging and evolving needs of Jews, women and the planet as a whole.


– Kohenet


Look into Jewish texts and find the heartbeat of the earth. Follow the moon's phases and feel the Shekhinah, the Divine presence. Walk among the elements and the seasons. Enter Tel Shemesh, the hill of the sun, and warm yourself by the sacred fire.

According to the story in the Torah, the mishkan, the Divine dwelling-place, was a place where God encountered the world in a tangible way, hovering in a cloud inside the innermost shrine. Above the Ark of the Covenant, where the presence of God, the Shekhinah, rested, two golden cherubim faced one another. Aviva Zornberg, a renowed biblical interpreter, once proposed that “God is in the place where the two gazes intersect.” The cherubim faced each other on the Ark, in spite of the Israelite prohibition against images, to remind us that we meet the Divine through encounter. This is the meaning of covenant. Though Jews understand God as a unity, there is always a “twoness” to the Divine presence, for in order to be felt, the Presence must meet with another.


– Tel Shemesh

[tip o' the yarmulke to Aviel for tasty links. The problem with Gnosticism is that it's not Jewish enough.]

When God Is a Monster

Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

..."Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

...Dr. Sultan is "working on a book that — if it is published — it's going to turn the Islamic world upside down."

"I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."


– NY Times

I am deeply moved by the doctor's courage and integrity on this issue, despite repeated threats of violent death against herself and her family. In the article, Dr. Sultan states that she no longer identifies herself as a Muslim. It does sound like she's using the language of another religion here...

Gnosticism: It's Not Just for 2nd Century BCE Hellenized Alexandrian Jews Anymore!™

Church of St. Coelacanth, Reformed

So Much to Choose From: A Tour of Vanished Christianities
Gnostics, Sethians, Encratites...what if Christianity had remained as diverse as it was when it first began?

By Richard Valantasis

Excerpted from "The Beliefnet Guide to Gnosticism and Other Vanished Christianities."

Alternative Christianities are only "alternative" because other, competing forms of Christianity rose to dominance. As a historian I often wonder what the world would have looked like if one of these now-vanished forms of Christianity had assumed the mantle of orthodoxy—or if Christianity had remained as pluralistic as it was when it began. Imagine for a moment that Gnostic Christianity had survived this early process of natural selection and that what we now call orthodox Christianity had become extinct.

You are a devout Gnostic Christian who has just moved to a new city. In the parish you moved away from, you had participated in a Gnostic spiritual group that eagerly devoted itself to Bible study, prayer and meditation, both solitary and communal; you also engaged in intense theological and spiritual debate. You and the members of your spiritual group expected far more out of church than what could be garnered from a Sunday morning worship service and coffee hour.

You believe in the superiority of the spiritual world; you distrust the material, created world. You believe that the Bible provides instructions for an ascent out of the material world and into God’s realm—and the Bible you study includes books that don’t appear in Catholic or Protestant Bibles today, such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, and the Apocryphon of John. You log onto the Internet to find a similar church in this new city...


– BeliefNet

Gosh! Just imagine if there were actually real live Gnostics! With, like, Gnostic Churches and Bishops and everything! Too bad they all died of "natural selection" (failing to become fireproof) in the face of superior orthodoxy.

The author's overwhelming ignorance saddens me. Our people were slaughtered, our scriptures burned; the murderers of Hypatia, The Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition do not constitute "natural selection". I do wonder if he realizes how tremendously offensive this is, and the degree to which he paints himself as a dilettante. Give me five minutes alone in a locked room with this man; with access to Google. Would Valantasis be surprised, I wonder, at our curious resurgence, hooked like a Coelocanth from the depths of history?

V for Vendetta

"I've read the screenplay," Mr. Moore said. "It's rubbish."


–NY Times interviews Alan Moore on the upcoming release of the film.

Despite Moore's protestations (and adaptation track-record including The Pile of Extraordinary Crap, er, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) I intend to see the film, dealing as it does with the Gnostic themes of identity, memory, and resistance in the face of totalitarianism. A story by a Gn author, brought to the screen by Gn directors... hmmm... could go either way.

Quotations: Henry Miller

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

• • •

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

• • •

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

• • •

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.

• • •

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

• • •

The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

• • •

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.

IN MEMORIAM

PROFESSOR GILLES QUISPEL
May 30, 1916 - March 3, 2006

There are not enough candles in the world to light in honour of the tremendous gift he has given us. Rest, Professor, in much deserved Peace.

[zooch tip to Terje for bringing this sad news]

"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."

The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.

For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.

He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary. A professor wrote in the margin:

"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."

As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.

– The Book of Bart

This is the heartbreaking journey of one man, an NT scholar, who loses his faith after finding out the bible isn't entirely factual. Bibliolatry is the cultish obsession with scriptural authority, looking for absolutist prose in a cloud of poetry, of metaphor. I think its price is an inevitable sadness.

It seems to me this is the invariable result of "Jesusism" when it confronts reality. It is the great poverty of Protestantism, in its mechanistic rejection of mystery, is that it tends to put all its eggs in one basket; which is to say, that the core of the religious experience is dependent upon the verifiable impeccability of literalist history. If the Bible is the unerrant word of God, then any error that can't be explained away makes God vanish in a puff of analysis. This is a losing game, looking for logic and history and artifact when one rather ought to be looking for meaning and inspiration.

When we climb Mt. Olympus looking for the sandal-straps of Zeus, we come away empty handed. If in doing so we decide to chuck the lot of Homer away to the shredder, we come away impoverished. The Great Lie of Christianity, if there is one, is to mistake the universal for the specific. To pretend that Christ isn't Bacchus, isn't Osiris, isn't here, but rather a Gallilean paragon separated from us not just by thousands of years and thousands of miles but also by unattainability, is to pretend that, except for the Jews, God was just elsewhere for the entirety of the human experience. It's evil. And it misses the point, like forcing a haiku to rhyme. The fetishizing of scripture, whether Mark or The Gospel of Philip, is to ask too much of their fallible, human authors, and too little of their redactors.

The "cheap seats" myth of Judaism is that Moses wrote the "Old Testament" himself. This gets repeated, even though Torah scholars know that it isn't true. But the dissolution of that myth does not in any way discount the moving power of Genesis – which is ultimately the font of Gnosticism, in my opinion. Likewise, you can tell a Buddhist that Buddha is an amalgam of centuries of teachers, schools, and individual practitioners, and they will certainly refrain from both burning their texts and conversely attacking the Buddha-disprovers. For Gnostics, "The Word of God" is not a book, but trather the living, everpresent Logos.

This article too had me reflecting on the distinctions within our movement, between Christian Gnostics and Gnostic Christians:

A Gnostic Christian is a Christian exploring his or her Christianity through Gnostic symbolism and language.

A Christian Gnostic is a Gnostic celebrating his or her gnosis via Christian symbolism and language.

This latter circumstance seems to me perhaps more ultimately forgiving.

Your Own. Personal. Jesus.

I love a good, well-researched criticism of Gnosticism. There are very rare and precious things. This is part of a lecture by New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham, who has been hailed as "The C.S. Lewis of our time":

Second, the Nag Hammadi codices have taken a large step away from a narrative world and into detached aphorisms and isolated teachings. There is no attempt to tell the story of Jesus or even stories about him, or to see that story and those stories within the context of the larger story of God and the world, of God and Israel. They show all the signs of having been abstracted from that setting, as though someone were to go through Shakespeare’s plays and extract all the great one-liners without any attempt to show where they belong within the dramas of which they form part.

This is a very fair comment, and too often missed by many contemporary Gnostics. We don't have the background. We're not sure who the authors are, what they were thinking, or even if the versions of Gn Scripture we have are in their original languages.

You may salve your own conscience by embracing Gnosticism, by telling yourself how very wicked the world is and how you are going to escape it once and for all by following the path of spiritual self-discovery and enlightenment. But if Caesar takes any notice at all, all he will do is sneer at you and go on his way to yet more triumphs of sheer power. And if that happened in the second century, we can be sure it’s precisely what’s happening today. Heidegger and Bultmann couldn’t prevent Hitler; Derrida and Foucault and their numerous disciples can’t do anything to stop the new empires of today.

Again, a very true criticism. As I have said repeatedly, Gnosticism – like Buddhism – is not in the social engineering business. When we act collectively and charitably, it tends to be out of immediate compassion and local action. Gnosticism per se would not have prevented Hitler: But neither of course did Christianity. And yes, Caesar sneers. "The empire never ended."

Neo-Gnosticism is the philosophy that invites you to search deep inside yourself and discover some exciting things by which you must then live. It is the philosophy which declares that the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find when you engage in that deep inward search. But this is not a religion of redemption. It is not at all a Jewish vision of the covenant God who sets free the helpless slaves. It appeals, on the contrary, to the pride that says “I’m really quite an exciting person, deep down, whatever I may look like outwardly” — the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today’s world. It appeals to the stimulus of that ever-deeper navel-gazing (“finding out who I really am”) which is the subject of a million self-help books, and the home-made validation of a thousand ethical confusions. It corresponds, in other words, to what a great many people in our world want to believe and want to do, rather than to the hard and bracing challenge of the very Jewish gospel of Jesus. It appears to legitimate precisely that sort of religion which a large swathe of America and a fair chunk of Europe yearns for: a free-for-all, do-it-yourself spirituality, with a strong though ineffective agenda of social protest against the powers that be, and an I'm-OK-you're-OK attitude on all matters religious and ethical. At least, with one exception: You can have any sort of spirituality you like (Zen, labyrinths, Tai Chi) as long as it isn’t orthodox Christianity

Ouch, and yet. Where I think Wright falls down is in his assumptions that Gnosticism is easy and Christianity is hard. ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ – Know Thyself – is a simple enough imperative, but grasping that, living that, is a lifelong challenge on our road to Grace. Yes, please, I will forego the "Jewish vision of the covenant God who sets free the helpless slaves". Leave me instead the Sacred Flame that the Divine has placed within me, kindled by the love of the Holy Sophia. Leave me the responsibility (the ability to respond) for my own Salvation, armed with what the Trinity has bestowed; my Witch's wit, my capacity to love, my boundless ability to fail, my hunger, my absurdity, my imagination, my humanity.

At the beginning of the lecture, Wright bemoans the five elements of what he calls the "mainstream liberal-American myth of Christian origins", which are essentially;

1. That there are/were bazillions of first-century documents about Jesus, that give us the Real Deal™;

2. That the Canonical Gospels are post-Real Deal™, and were politically selected in the 4th Century;

3. That Jesus was not what or whom the Canonical Gospels say he is;

4. That Christianity is based on either a mistake or a lie, and is sexist, puts empty milk cartons back in the fridge and probably doesn't recycle;

5. That it's time to get back to the Real Deal™ which is practically anything (UFO Jesus, Married Merovingian Jesus, Che Jesus, insert the Jesus of your choice here) except traditionally accepted Ortho-Jesus.

I would say that he's hit the nail on the head, and that 21st Century Christianity is confused as all get-out. However, it seems to me that what he and other advocates of small-o orthodoxy propose is equally untenable;

1. That the Canonical Gospels present a non-contradictory accurate chronicle of historical events;

2. That they were produced in the first century;

3. That they represent the literal understandings of the overwhelming majority of Christians from the mid-first century up until the Council of Nicea in 325; and

4. That the Canonical Gospels represent the Word of God, and presumably the myriad redactions, censorings, and typos represent the Redactions, Censorings, and Typos of God. Presumably too the outright forgeries pseudoepigraphically attributed to Paul are the Outright Forgeries of God.

I don't see how we get much closer to the truth by replacing one set of literalist misunderstandings for another. How do we benefit from overthrowing the anachronism of totalitarian modernism, only to replace it with the anachronism of totalitarian medievalism? Some sticking points;

1. The Canonical Gospels are wildly contradictory and are clearly unintended to be read as historical chronology.

2. I do not believe that Wright is being truthful when he states that the Canonical Gospels date to around 90 CE or earlier. I would put good money on the fact that he knows perfectly well that they date from the mid-to-late second century, and are in fact contemporary with Thomas.

3. The first 300 years of Christianity were messy. Church X maintained one pivotal, fundamental point that was decried as heresy by Church Y half a days donkey ride away. It cannot be denied that there was never a point in the history of Christianity that it was not syncretic and coloured by local pre-Christian traditions. Nicea was no picnic. There was screaming and one notable punch in the nose. It was called specifically because there was no agreement, no widespread adoption of liturgy, canon, or theology. I'm not falling for the old "Christ became God by a narrow vote" nonsense, but the degrees to which Platonism and elements of Classical Paganism were allowed to contribute were hotly debated. The Council and Creed didn't exactly slow this down much, either.

4. Well, one can't argue with Faith. What's the point?

What I'm saying in all of this, is that when Christians criticize Gnosticism for being awkward, confusing, and self-contradictory, that they really ought to bring some credibility to the table and not go overboard. But oh how I do welcome the criticism! From someone who actually reads stuff! This kind of analysis is priceless to us, and keeps us from drinking our own bathwater.

Read the article.

Dies Cinerum: Sophia on the Day of Ashes

Shekhina Project, Leonard Nimoy
"Remember that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return."
For the Gnostic, this isn't maudlin, nor is it a sugar-coating our material existence. There is a tremendous virtue in contemplation of our impermanence, and the resulting detachment. The danger, of course, is the tempting slide into nihilism:

... our body will be ashes and our spirit will be poured abroad like unresisting air.

Even our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will recall our deeds. So our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and will be dispersed like a mist pursued by the sun's rays and overpowered by its heat.

For our lifetime is the passing of a shadow; and our dying cannot be deferred because it is fixed with a seal; and no one returns.
– The Book of Sophia, Chapter 2

In Wisdom these are the words of the unwise, who court despair at worst and frivolousness at best. What they learn in the remainder of the text is that, yes, earthly attachment is fleeting, but the point of existence remains through the love and alliance of Sophia:

Resplendent and unfading is Sophia, and she is readily perceived by those who love her, and found by those who seek her.

She hastens to make herself known in anticipation of men's desire; he who watches for her at dawn shall not be disappointed, for he shall find her sitting by his gate.

For taking thought of her is the perfection of prudence, and he who for her sake keeps vigil shall quickly be free from care; Because she makes her own rounds, seeking those worthy of her, and graciously appears to them in the ways, and meets them with all solicitude.

For the first step toward discipline is a very earnest desire for her; then, care for discipline is love of her; love means the keeping of her laws; To observe her laws is the basis for incorruptibility; and incorruptibility makes one close to God; thus the desire for Wisdom leads up to a kingdom.

If, then, you find pleasure in throne and scepter, you princes of the peoples, honor Sophia, that you may reign as kings forever.

...

The spirit of Sophia came to me. I preferred her to scepter and throne, And deemed riches nothing in comparison with her, nor did I liken any priceless gem to her; Because all gold, in view of her, is a little sand, and before her, silver is to be accounted mire.

Beyond health and comeliness I loved her, And I chose to have her rather than the light, because the splendor of her never yields to sleep.

Yet all good things together came to me in her company, and countless riches at her hands;

And I rejoiced in them all, because Sophia is their leader, though I had not known that she is the mother of these.

...

For Sophia, the artificer of all, taught me. For in her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, certain, Not baneful, loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly, firm, secure, tranquil, all-powerful, all-seeing, and pervading all spirits, though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle.

For Sophia is mobile beyond all motion, and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity.

For she is an aura of the might of God and a pure effusion of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nought that is sullied enters into her.

For she is the refulgence of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the power of God, the image of his goodness.

And she, who is one, can do all things, and renews everything while herself perduring; And passing into holy souls from age to age, she produces friends of God and prophets.

For there is nought God loves, be it not one who dwells with Sophia.

For she is fairer than the sun and surpasses every constellation of the stars. Compared to light, she takes precedence; for that, indeed, night supplants, but wickedness prevails not over Sophia.