For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied in thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he would eat if he had it—in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour, and viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was once a rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it advanced, the mender of roads would discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of many byways through woods.
Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather, as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he could get from a shower of hail.
The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill, and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these objects in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just intelligible:
“How goes it, Jacques?”
“Ancient Gnosticism, if you want to call it that, does not seem to have been one church. What I'm going to call Gnosticism is an intellectual movement that seems to have been around beginning in the second century certainly and becomes important through the second, third, and fourth centuries. It's not a church or an institution in the sense that we doubt that you could have walked into say the town of Antioch and looked for the Gnostic church. It seems like the people who wrote these documents and collected these materials that we find in the Nag Hammadi text in the Gospel of Thomas, they seem to have been intellectuals who were impressed with Jesus, impressed with the Jewish scripture in a lot of cases, impressed with a lot of the teachings of Christianity, but they interpreted them through the eyes of a certain popular Platonism at the time. That is, they seemed to have been influenced by different philosophical views and also just different intellectual views.
When they read the book of Genesis, for example, they would read the book of Genesis but read it as if they were reading it through the eyes of Plato's Timaeus, the great platonic dialogue in which Plato puts forth his own sort of cosmology and his own view of the gods and the world. So some of their writings sound like they were reading basically good scripture but reading it through the eyes of certain kinds of philosophy.
What we have come to call Gnosticism in the ancient world is a range of ideas that may have been actually embodied in particular people, or it may have been that some of these intellectuals were just playing around with ideas and writing about the books and having reading clubs, where they got together every Monday night and drank some beer and talked about their Gnostic ideas.
Platonism itself might be called proto-Gnostic, that is, Gnosticism before Gnosticism. For example, in Platonism, especially of this time, you have a strong emphasis of a dualism of body and soul or body and spirit.
In that dualism, often the body or the materiality, the fleshly existence that harder matter of things becomes less good, sometimes even probably borderline evil in some people's thoughts, and spirit or the soul or the mind is the good thing. So you have a mind/body dualism, a body and soul dualism and often there's the deprecation of the body and a deprecation of matter as morally inferior. Now why would matter be considered inferior to non-material substance? Because what happens to your body eventually? You all have gorgeous bodies now, but eventually you're going to look like me, your hair's going to fall out, your ear's are going to get too big, your nose won't stop growing, and then eventually you'll even get beyond me and you'll die, and you'll rot, and you'll disappear. The body is material and the ancient thinkers all knew that matter passes away.
Anything that is material is going to pass away and be destroyed and be gone, but things that are not material like ideas--the great thing about an idea is that it never need die. The Spirit or the soul in platonic theory was superior to material stuff because--and it was the only thing that could live forever, be infinite.
They also sometimes you see, especially in later Platonism, the idea that not only is the body temporary, not eternal and passing away, but the body is also a prison because your spirit, they believed, wants to get out of the body. Aren't you frustrated that you can't just escape your body and go off and go someplace else for a while and zoom out of your body and go to Argentina for the weekend? Not have to pay for airfare--the idea was that the body imprisons your spirit and your soul, and this comes to be a part of Platonism at the time. What scholars will call basic Gnosticism includes some basic themes that they hold in common.
First, The World itself which is material is Evil. Salvation, therefore, from The World, must be escaped from this physical world into something else. Gross materiality is not only temporary in some texts but even bad, it's evil. Salvation, therefore, must be the knowledge of how you, that is the real you, your brain--not your brain, your mind or your soul, or your spirit, not your body, that real you is this thing in this material body but salvation will be if it can learn how to escape the body and escape materiality. Salvation will come by knowledge and that knowledge is a secret, not everybody knows it, so only a few people know it. The content of this knowledge is related to human origins and destination.
So sometimes you get these elaborate myths developed in some of these texts. Let's say that the supreme, supreme, supreme, supreme god is in fact has no name, is not a particular thing, it's this thought, it's just thinking, it's just abstract thinking. That thinking thinks, well what does a thinking thing think? The thinking thinks thoughts. Those thoughts start becoming emanations out of the thinking, and then those emanations think and emanate, and those become lesser beings still. The different divine beings, there are lots of divine beings in the existing universe, and by thinking and being they emanate inferior forms of being after themselves. Eventually what happened is those inferior forms of being get less good and less like the most ultimate being.
One of them, according to one myth, Sophia which means wisdom, it's a female name but it also means "wisdom." Sophia decides she wants to emanate, and she supposed to do that with a male consort because by this these beings have male and female versions of themselves, she's supposed to only emanate or procreate by doing so with her male consort. She decides she wants to be like the supreme god and be able to emanate on her own, so she puts out a being on her own. In other words, she sort of gives birth without needing a man, just to be on principle. Well, of course when you do that you end up with a monster. The being that came out of Sophia ended up being a clumsy, maybe evil god, all of these are divine beings, that god decided at some point he wanted to create things and so he didn't really do it very well, so he made our earth, he made the world as we know it.
He made little human beings like you just out of dirt and clay, and that's why--we were all creation, not of the supreme God who would do nothing imperfect, but of some stumbling or evil, at least clumsy god, who made us. That explains why things go wrong. Why is it that my arthritis acts up all the time? Couldn't God have made a human body that didn't have arthritis? Well, that's because the supreme God didn't make this body, the evil clumsy god made the body. This happened--and so the world that we created, when you read in Genesis, it says God created the world, that's not the highest God, that's some clumsy god down further on the hierarchy of divine beings in the universe. That god created what we are. Now what happened was at some point, either Sophia or some other beings, they got sorry for all us claylike mud people and somehow a little spark of the divine itself either fell down, or got cut up or put in our bodies, or God placed in our bodies, or blew it into our bodies, but at least some human beings, not all human beings, in fact human beings are in different categories. There's the really low human beings like undergraduates, then there are beings who are a little bit higher like graduate students, and then you have the supreme beings, Gnostics, like professors.
The true Gnostics, it's not really like undergraduates and graduates, because some of you could be Gnostics. You would be the ones who really have a real spark in you, a spark of the divine. That spark of the divine wants to escape the mud body that it's trapped in, but you probably don't even know that you're really a spark trapped in a mud body until somebody comes along and tells you, and that's the job of the redeemer. That's what Jesus did: Jesus was a redeemer from the supreme God who comes in to find those people who have a spark of the divine in them, to blow on that spark, to get it going, and to get you to remember where you came from. You're not a mud body after all. The real you came from Godself, God's very self, the supreme God. The true message of Christianity, according to these guys, is to learn who you are, where you came from, to see if you're going to escape the body and get back to your true origin, that is, you will become one with God again. This was expressed in a poem by Theodotus, it went like this:
Who we were,
what we have become,
where we were,
whither we were thrown,
whither we are hastening,
from what we are redeemed,
what birth is,
what rebirth is.
You answer the riddle, the poem riddle. "Who we were?" If you're a Gnostic who were you? Answer?
Student: Divine being.
Professor Dale Martin: Divine being, thank you. See, it's not hard. I'm not asking questions--I'm just trying--you will remember this better if you answer. What have you become? Mud, entrapped in a dead body, trapped in materiality. Where were you? Heaven, with the divine Father, with God?
Professor Dale Martin: "Whither we were thrown," where have you been thrown?
Student: Into the earth.
Professor Dale Martin: Into the earth, into the world, into materiality. Where are you hastening, where are you going in a hurry--in such a hurry?
Student: Back to the divine.
Professor Dale Martin: Back to the divine God. What are you redeemed from?
Student: [Inaudible]
Professor Dale Martin: You're redeemed from Jesus?
Student: [Inaudible]
Professor Dale Martin: The material world. You're redeemed from being embodied. "What is birth?" In this system what is birth?
Student: [Inaudible]
Professor Dale Martin: Damnation, death. When you're born, your spark is entrapped in your body, that's not a good thing. You shouldn't be celebrating your birthday for crying out loud, that's like celebrating when you were thrown in prison. "What is rebirth?"
Student: [Inaudible]
Professor Dale Martin: Death or learning your true self, learning that the true self won't die at all, so this learning is your rebirth. So the little poem is a riddle that contains these doctrines within itself. Here's a true self, the spark of life is trapped in an alien body with all its sensual passions. Sex, therefore, sensual desire, erotic desire is a bad thing; it's an evil thing because that--you're just trying to trap more sparks into more mud bodies. You're just creating more sparks trapped in mud bodies when you have sex. Evil powers exist--all the different gods that were emanated, a bunch of those are evil, and they fly around the sky in the heavens and they try to keep the true self asleep or drunk in order to keep the evil world together. In other words, they don't want you to learn and they don't want your spark to be able to fly through. But really wise guys like me, we have the secrets and I can give you words, clues, secrets that if you know those things you can use these secrets to unlock the gates that lead back to God.
This is kind of a common storyline or myth, there's the Hymn of the Pearl, that I mentioned before, which basically tells this--that a king of the east sends a royal prince, by way of the region of Mycenae, to Egypt in order to get a precious pearl, which is being guarded by a fierce dragon, it's like a videogame. The prince is poisoned, or actually drugged would be a better accurate translation, and made intoxicated by the Egyptians. But he, the prince, is awakened by a message from the king. He, the prince, takes the pearl by defeating the dragon with the name of his father and returns to the east where he puts on a robe of knowledge, gnosis, and ascends to the king's palace, entering the realm of peace and living happily forever after. It's a nice little fable about a prince who goes to a foreign land, finds the thing of value, defeats the evil purposes and goes back. So some people, therefore, have read the Gospel of Thomas as being precisely this kind of--that some of the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas makes sense if you presuppose these mythological structures and ideas.
Again, some scholars would say, well you're just putting together as a modern scholar a bunch of disparate kind of text and ideas, and putting them in a system. Well, yes, that's where I disagree with some people because I want to say I believe that there's enough commonalities between enough documents that we can say that there were people who had these kinds of common ideas, and this basic structure that I've called the Gnostic structure, the Gnostic myth, certainly influenced ancient writings of some sort and there was some kinds of Christianity that were heavily influenced by this.
For example, look at--back to Thomas for our last closing minutes and let's read some of these sayings that sound puzzling to us, and if we assume this myth maybe we'll read them differently. Look at 21:
Mary said to Jesus, "What do your disciples resemble? He said, "What they resemble is children living in a plot of land that is not theirs. When the owners of the land come they will say, 'Surrender our land to us.' They, for their part stripped naked in their presence, in order to give it back to them, and they give them back their land."
It could be an allegory. Who are the owners of the land? The evil powers that rule the earth. Who are the children, who are the real disciples of Jesus? Those people who know enough to say, when the earth is demanded of you, when your body is demanded of you by these evil powers, give it up, just give it up, it's not valuable anyway. Look at 24:
His disciples said, "Show us the place where you are, for we must seek it." He said to them, "Whoever has ears should listen! There is a light existing within a person of light, that it enlightens the whole world. If it does not enlighten, that person is darkness."
Remember how I said some people are just dark people, they're just mud people, but some people have a light in them, and what it means to become a true Gnostic is to learn that you are one who has that light.
Look at 37:
His disciples said, "When will you be shown forth to us, and when shall we behold you?" Jesus said, "When you strip naked without being ashamed and take your garments and put them under your feet like little children and tread upon them. Then you will see the child of the living and you will not be afraid."
What's the Gnostic interpretation of that?
Student: [Inaudible]
Professor Dale Martin: Stripping the material world off yourself. When you strip your soul, your spark of the body, when you realize that it's not the real you and you come to know the real you, that's what's going to happen. Look at 56:
Jesus said, "Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse."
The world is just a dead body, so several of these sayings, if you go back through the Gospel of Thomas with some of this background information I've given you of these ancient myths and ideas, some of these sayings seem to fit that myth and fit that notion.
There are other things though about what I've just told you that you don't find in the Gospel of Thomas, and those are the things emphasized by people who say the Gospel of Thomas shouldn't called Gnostic. For example, there's no mention in here of an evil god that creates the world, like you find in some of these Nag Hammadi texts. You have the Father, you have apparently the good guy, you have Jesus, but tthere's no emphasis on creation here as being a bad thing. Some people said that's one of the fundamental things about the Gnostic myths and it's not in the Gospel of Thomas, therefore the Gospel of Thomas is not Gnostic. There are also simply no string of myths and evil gods' names which you often find in the texts of Nag Hammadi. Some scholars would say the Gospel of Thomas may have some things in common with Platonism of the time, maybe something in common with certain Gnostics, but that it itself is not. If you take the Gospel of Thomas as representing those ideas, then Jesus comes across--the Christology of the Gospel of Thomas becomes something different from the Christology of the other texts, or least Matthew, Mark and Luke.
As we'll see, the Gospel of John looks a lot more like this than the Synoptic Gospels did. Jesus becomes this redeemer figure, this Gnostic redeemer figure who comes into the world of materiality in order to find those who have sparks of life, to blow on their sparks of live, to transmit hidden knowledge to them, so they can get back. If you'll stay with me the rest of the semester, maybe I can give you those secrets and you can escape your mud bodies too. You have your sections this week, by tomorrow they'll be up online at the classes server, and the different instructions for the rest of the sections, and you'll need to look at that because at your section on Thursday or Friday you'll need to choose which day and which topic you'll do your paper for, so that will be online by tomorrow morning. Thank you, see you next time.
[end of transcript]
