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- [00:00]
Mark Gagnon
Gnosticism, one of the most mysterious and controversial interpretations of Christianity ever recorded. This is an interpretation of ancient texts where everything is flipped, where the God of the Old Testament might actually be a false God, where the universe was created by mistake, and where salvation comes not from faith in Jesus Christ, but from secret knowledge that can set your spirit free. These are the stories that the early church didn't want to survive, and it almost didn't, until a farmer in Egypt cracked open a berry jar in 1980, 1945, and completely rewrote what we thought we knew about the earliest interpretation of the Bible. So buckle up, because this is Christianity turned upside down. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp.
- [00:54]
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- [01:54]
Mark Gagnon
What's up people? And welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating and controversial stories from every religion from around the world. From all time. That's right, we cover every everything from Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, and today, something perhaps more mysterious. But as always, before we dive in, I just want to say thank you to everyone that supports this channel. Please check out History Camp. If you like more history stuff, please subscribe. Please check out Camp Gagnon, where I do a bunch of interviews and go through all sorts of crazy topics like the occult and UFOs and CIA agents. All sorts of stuff over there. And thanks for tuning in. I appreciate it. And as always, thanks to Christos for taking time out of his busy schedule of meeting and seducing Hundreds of women across the nation. He's a true Casanova. But he's taken a time out of his busy schedule just to be here with us. How are you? I'm doing great. All right, Christos, we don't have time. Okay. Because today we're talking about Gnosticism. You ever heard of Gnosticism? A couple times. A couple times we talked about on this show plenty of times actually. But today we're doing a full deep dive on what it actually is, where it comes from, and what the Gnostics claim to believe. And this is kind of an interpretation of like old biblical text, the Torah, and reworked in a way that is unsettling. If you're of the Christian persuasion. This is, you know, a version where the Adam and Eve story is completely changed and that the God of the Old Testament isn't the true God at all. Where the material world we live in was created by mistake, and salvation doesn't come from faith, but from the secret occult knowledge. And Gnosticism is one of the most controversial movements in early Christianity, for centuries was sort of suppressed and kind of erased from history. And today we're going to get into all of it, where it comes from, and why we even know about it at all today. So in order to understand Gnosticism, we got to go back to December 1945. In Upper Egypt, near the town known as Nag Hammadi, there is a farmer named Muhammad Ali Al Saman who's digging for like fertilizer from like ancient soil for one of his farms. And he's at the base of a cliff, just kind of just shoveling dirt. And all of a sudden the shovel hits something hard, but it's not a rock. It's this large, like sealed jar. Now Muhammad discovered this jar and is all of a sudden freaked out. He's like, I don't know what this is. Does it have like a gin in it? Which if you don't know what a gin is, we've done episodes on that. And he's near the clips of near the cliffs of Jabal al Tarif. Now inside were 12 leather bound papyrus codices, plus part of the 13th, and it contained over 50 texts. And now these texts are now known as the Nag Hammadi Library. And in these texts included the Gnostic Gospels, or what's known as the Gnostic Gospels, the Hermetic Works, and even a fragment of Plato's Republic. Now this Nag Hammadi Library, as scholars would come to call it, contained so many different writings and just became an absolute explosion of people interested in researching ancient interpretations of the Bible and of the Torah. Now some were gospels that never made it into the Bible and we can explain how and why. Others were, you know, philosophical treatises or mystical visions, spiritual guides. Many of them came from communities that the early church leaders had branded basically heretics. And for the first time in basically 2000 years, we can actually read what these so called heretics actually wrote and not just what their enemies were said about them. And what was found was pretty shocking. Now before this discovery, almost everything that we knew about groups like the Gnostics came from their opponents. This was, you know, church fathers who would write these scathing attacks against them. And for the longest time their writings were basically suppressed. But the ideas kind of persisted. And as a result the early church leaders would go and write against them. But now suddenly we had their actual books, their actual teachings and what they genuinely believed. And they painted a picture of early Christianity that was way stranger, more diverse and more controversial than anyone could have ever imagined. Now before I go any further, I just want to point out that I'm not Gnostic. I was not raised under the Gnostic tradition or the interpretation of the Bible. As a Catholic, I don't really subscribe to the Gnostic interpretation, but in the spirit of this show, I will give it a good faith attempt to try to understand and explain without prejudice. But I just want to put that out there. If it seems like I'm flirting with these ideas, I'm not. I'm just trying to actually understand where they come from. And for the most part, our understanding of them in the modern day comes from the Nag Hammadi library. Now what's interesting about these texts is that they reveal that in the early days of Christianity there was not a singular church with an agreed upon set of beliefs. Instead, there were many different Christian movements that were kind of competing and jostling for which ideas would actually be canonized as the one true church. And they each claimed to have a true understanding of Jesus's message. And the Gnostics were one of the most influential and, and controversial and radically different groups from what eventually became orthodox belief, which in my opinion is why it's so interesting to read about. Now before we go any further, we need to understand what we're even talking about when we say Gnostic. Now the word comes from the ancient Greek term gnosis, which literally means knowledge, but we're not talking about like regular knowledge, like, you know, in Pythagoras theorem or whatever. This is like, you know, this special kind of insight. This is a deep, intuitive understanding of spiritual truth that goes beyond everyday information. Information. Think of it this way. You could read like 100 books about swimming and memorize all the techniques, but that's not the same as actually knowing how to swim. And so Gnosis is that same sort of idea. It's, you know, it's like that direct experiential knowledge of God, except applied to, you know, understanding the divine and the universe and all that stuff. So in the ancient world, many groups talked about gnosis in positive terms. Even some mainstream Christian teachers, like Clement of Alexandria would use the word to describe this higher sort of spiritual understanding. Islamic mystics are often called Sufis and they are sometimes referred to as Gnostics because they would try to seek this type of direct knowledge of God. But when historians talk about the Gnostics with like a capital G, they're usually referring to something more specific. And this is a particular movement within early Christianity that developed an elaborate mythology about the nature of reality and salvation and God himself. Now, this is where it gets complicated, though, because scholars have spent decades arguing about exactly who counts as a capital Gnostic. Some experts use the term broadly to include all sorts of groups in the ancient world that valued secret spiritual knowledge. Christians, non Christians, just anyone that was into sort of understanding the knowledge of the divine. They would lump together groups like the Valentinians or the Marsonites or the Sethians or the Manicheans or even Hermeticists under, you know, this big umbrella of Gnosticism. Now, other scholars think that this approach is, like, too messy and too broad. They would argue that Gnosticism is a modern label that we've slapped onto a lot of these ancient groups that are actually really different from each other. And according to this view, there's no unified Gnosticism movement, just a bunch of separate communities that happen to share some similar ideas. Today, many historians take a middle path. Scholars like David Brack argue for a narrower, more precise definition. In his view, the Gnostics refer to specifically one influential school of thought within early Christianity, a group that's often called the Sethians, named after Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve from the biblical story. That's the approach that we are going to follow here. We're focusing on this core Gnostic movement, though we'll also touch on some of the related groups like the Valentinians, who were heavily influenced by Gnostic ideas. Now, understanding the Gnostics is tricky because the main sources we had for centuries was from a Group known as Heresiologists. Now this sounds like a medical term, it's not. These were early Christian writers who basically made it their mission to identify and attack what they saw as heresy or false teachings. The most famous of these was Irenaeus, a bishop who lived in what's now Lyon in the south of France in the late second century. So around the year 180, Irenaeus wrote a massive work with this crazy title that was the Detection and Overthrow of Gnosis, falsely so called, although it's usually just called against the heresies. And in it he viciously attacked the Gnostics and the groups that were inspired by them, like the Valentinians. He claimed that they completely misunderstood Christianity and created a demonic perversion of Jesus's true teaching. So he didn't really mince words and even traced their ideas back to a magician named Simon Magus and basically tried to discredit them by association. Now Simon Magus, if you don't know, fascinating story found in Acts in the Bible, also in the Acts of Peter, a non canonical book that basically talks about this sorcerer like super villain of Christianity that was like flying around the room, whole crazy side story. Maybe we do an episode on that later. But regardless, it's also important to understand that the word heresy didn't always mean what it does today. We think of heresy now as like, oh, you are speaking about, you know, things that are wrong, like you're basically what you believe is wrong. This idea is heretical and back then it simply was just like a school of thought or another way of thinking. And it was thanks to writers like Irenaeus that the term gradually became an insult, meaning a danger, false teaching. Now despite Irenaeus's obvious bias against the Gnostics, his writings have been incredibly valuable to historians because when we compare what he wrote about Gnostic beliefs to the actual Gnostic text discovered at Nag Hammadi, we find that he was surprisingly accurate. He clearly had access to their writings and understood their teachings, even if he thought they were completely wrong. So even though Irenaeus was writing a, you know, version of like church propaganda to get people on the right path, we can still trust much of what he says about Gnostic beliefs. And he remains one of the best sources for understanding the movement. But Irenaeus wasn't the only one attacking these heretics. To really understand what was happening in early Christianity, we need to look deeper at what these attacks reveal about the religious landscape of the time. The discovery at Nag Hammadi gave us a really great window into understanding the dynamics of early Christianity. So, for example, Athanasius of Alexandria, in the year 367, sent out a letter to all the churches in Egypt. And in it, he told them exactly which books they were allowed to read as scripture. The he was one of the first Christian writers to list the same 27 books that most Christians today recognize as the New Testament. And he wrote, in these books alone, the teaching of piety is proclaimed. Let no one add to or subtract from them. Then he went on to condemn anyone teaching from books outside of this official list. Now, what's fascinating is that the Nag Hammadi texts date roughly from the same time as Athanasius letter. Now, Christians living just down the road from him were probably reading and copying these, you know, Gnostic books. And some early scholars thought that Athanasius decree must have driven these writings into hiding, forcing these early believers of these Gnostic texts to basically bury them in the desert in order to protect them. But the scholar David Brack offers a different interpretation. He argued that Athanasius wasn't writing from a position of power and confidence. Instead, he was writing from a position of anxiety and fear. The Christian landscape was still full of competing groups and ideas, all with their own practices and their own scripture and really their own philosophy about what it means to follow Jesus. So Athanasius was attempting to create a closed canon of books, and it really reflected a deeper conflict about Christian authority and what it actually means to be a follower of Jesus. So, in other words, we're getting a glimpse into these competing versions of Christianity in that time when things were still not really settled. On the one side, you had, you know, Christians that were represented by Athanasius, that wanted a close set of scriptures that organized around bishops and parishes and claimed to have apostolic secession. Basically, the idea that, you know, the bishops could trace their authority all the way back to the original apostles. And on the other side, sort of represented by the Nag Hammadi text, you had other early Christian groups who saw no problem in interpreting and writing and reading new gospels. And they were interested in the mystical or philosophical speculation. Their authority structure also looked very different. Groups like the Valentinians would form these study circles around charismatic intellectual leaders, leaders rather than the hierarchical church structure. So when we read the harsh attacks written by the heresiologists, we need to sort of remember this context, right? These writers hadn't won yet. There's still a battle for what it means to be a Christian in the early church. Using an analogy from David Brack, they were still Racing. The race wasn't over. And we're not seeing a unified Orthodox church battling against splinter groups. We're seeing multiple varieties of Christianity, all trying to define themselves and trying to determine who was in the Christian bubble and who was out. So when we read the attacks written by the early church fathers against the heretics, we need to remember this context. The writers at this time hadn't won yet. Using an analogy from the scholar David Bracke, which, by the way, I said Brack before. It is Bracke. My apologies. I'm sorry. If you saw the spelling, you would understand. Okay, so sorry to your family and your ancestors. Anyway, David Bracke says that these early church fathers were still racing. The race wasn't over. We're not seeing, like a unified church Orthodoxy battling against, like, a splinter group. We're seeing multiple varieties of Christianity all trying to define themselves, trying to determine who's in the bubble and who's out. Now, the Nag Hammadi Library reflected the diversity of thought in this early church period really well. The collection includes texts that made up the orthodox canon, like the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But it also contained writings from the Gnostic school, like the Secret Book of John or the Gospel of Judas. There are Valentinian works like the Gospel of Truth, and there are texts from other Christian movements entirely like the Gospel of Thomas. In other words, early Christianity was a bubbling cauldron of different ideas and interpretations. So we've established that early Christianity was very diverse, and a lot of people were competing for who would actually take the orthodox position. Now let's zoom in on the Gnostic. Specifically, the Gnostic myth has become famous for its complexity and the radical reinterpretation of biblical teaching. So let's dive into some of them. According to Gnostic teaching, before the material universe even existed, there was a vast divine realm filled with these spiritual beings known as eons. And together, these eons made up what the Gnostics call the entirety, or the pleroma, which was basically a Greek word meaning fullness. Now, this all happened outside of time, so there's no before or after. And that framing doesn't even really make sense here. But let's start at the beginning. If there is one, at the center of everything is the ultimate absolute God. The Gnostics called this divine source by many names. The Platonic one or the Monad, the Father of the entirety, and most commonly, the invisible Spirit. Now, the ultimate God is beyond all human understanding. You can't describe it, you can't comprehend it, and yet it is the source of. Of everything that exists. Indeed everything exists within it. From the secret book of John, it actually says the one is the invisible spirit. We should not think of it as a God or like a God, for it is greater than a God because it has nothing over it and no Lord above it. It does not exist within anything inferior to it, since everything exists within it, for it established itself. It is eternal since it does not need anything, for it is absolutely complete. It has never lacked anything in order to complete itself. Rather, it is always absolute, complete in light. So you can understand that this is a very broad, big thing that is almost greater than God is kind of how they're describing it. This invisible spirit is pure consciousness. It thinks about itself and knows itself in a way that we can't fully understand. Through this self awareness, it evolves into the complex world of eons that make up the entirety. Now think of eons as God's thoughts about itself. They're both identical to God and somehow distinct from it. It's like a reflection in a mirror. Is both you but also not you at the same time. Scholar David Bracke explains it this way. The eons that make up the entirety result from the invisible spirit's knowledge or thought of itself. They are its thinking or its intellect in all of its complexity. They form also a spiritual realm, the equivalent of Plato's realm of ideal. For the Gnostics, the entirety that the eons constitute is truly real and eternal. The material world is a flawed imitation of the entirety and destined to perish. So these eons are divine beings, each one named after a divine attribute. They are pure concepts that are made into spiritual entities. 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- [21:37]
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- [22:32]
Mark Gagnon
So just to catch everyone up, you have the invisible spirit that is greater than anything that could ever be comprehended. Ever. And from its own thoughts come these eons that have these positive attributes, and then that trickles down into our actual reality, reality that we can just only appreciate a tiny fragment of even just the thoughts of this great consciousness. Fair now the first eon that emerges from the invisible spirit is called Forethought, also known by the name Barbelo. So from the secret book of John it says his in other words, the invisible spirit thought became a reality, and she who appeared in his presence in shining light came forth. She is the first power who preceded everything and came forth from his mind as as the forethought of the all. Her light shines like the Father's light. She, the perfect power, is the image of the perfect and invisible virgin Spirit. She, the first power, the glory of Barbelo, the perfect glory among the eons, the glory of revelation. She glorified and praised the virgin Spirit, for because of the Spirit she had come forth. She's the first thought, the image of the Spirit. She became the universal womb, for she precedes everything thing. So Barbelo is absolutely central to Gnostic thought. All other eons emerge from her. She is the cosmic womb, and every Gnostic text mentions her, though what comes after can vary between different writings. Now, Barbello is also crucial for understanding how the Gnostics actually interpreted Christianity. Together with the invisible Spirit, Barbello gives birth to another divine being called the self Originate, who is also identified with Christ. This creates a divine family, Father, which is the invisible spirit, the Mother Barbello, and the Son, which is Christ. We'll come back to Christ's role later, but for now just know that he serves as a bridge between Barbello the Mother and the multitude of other eons around Christ are four great luminaries, all with their own names. Their names are Harmozel, Oriel, Davathai, and Ellilith. Now, within these luminaries exist the archetypal forms of humanity, the original Adam and his son Seth. And from these four luminaries, more eons continue to branch out. You can see why this system is hard to grasp, right? It's super intricate and different Gnostic texts give different accounts of exactly how the divine realm is actually structured. So it's difficult to really make definitive statements about what they believe the details were. But typically there are 24 eons in total, so almost 24 thoughts of this divine, you know, monad, as I mentioned, they are named after these divine tributes, so truth, mind, life, and most important for our story, Wisdom, called Sophia in Greek. Even though the eons exist beyond gender, they're often described as male female pairs that actually complement each other. They're also distinct in some ways, meaning that they're all God in a general sense, because they are of the thoughts of God, but they also make up a more complex kind of divinity than simple monotheism that we're used to today. Now we get to the crucial point of the Gnostic creation story, and it centers around one of the outermost eons, which is Wisdom, or also known as Sophia. Now, according to the secret book of John, Sophia wanted to create something, a thought of her own. But she did this without consulting her male counterpart and without permission from the great invisible Spirit. So it says she, Wisdom, wanted to bring forth something like herself, without the consent of the Spirit, who had not given approval, without her partner and without his consideration, the male did not give approval. She did not find her partner. And she considered this without the Spirit's consent and without the knowledge of her partner. Nonetheless, she gave birth. The result was disaster. Because Sophia acted alone, without balance or approval. Her creation came out wrong, horribly wrong. And. And it was, you know, a mishap, imperfect being that existed outside of divine harmony of the entirety. It says it did not resemble its mother and was misshapen. When Sophia saw what her desire had produced, it changed into the figure of a snake with the face of a lion. Sophia was immediately horrified and ashamed. She hid her deformed creation away from the other eons and concealed it in a cloud. This being was given the name, name Yaldabaoth, and she sometimes called it Sackless. Now, here is where things get interesting. Yaldabaoth, this sort of snake with a lion Head, in his ignorance, doesn't know about the true divine world above him. He thinks he is the only God that exists. With only dim, distorted memories of the divine everything, the pleroma, he proceeds to create his own world, a flawed, imperfect imitation of the truth divine realm. And that realm that this being, this sort of bastard, misshapen snake with the lion head, the world that it created is the universe that we live in. And this is where the Gnostics make their most radical break from what we consider to be mainstream Christianity or Judaism. They're basically saying that our entire universe was created by mistake by an ignorant lesser being who thought that he was the only God. Now, the idea that the material world was created by this, you know, lesser being, often called the craftsman or the term the demiurge, wasn't that shocking. In the ancient world, many philosophers and even monotheists accepted a version of this concept, which, you know, was fairly radical for nowadays. But at the time, there were versions and sects of, you know, religious ideologues that actually thought this. What was radical was claiming that this creator was ignorant and, and in some way actually evil. This led to a stunning reinterpretation of the entire Hebrew Bible. Every story, you know, from the Old Testament, the creation of Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden, the flood, giving of the law to Moses was all the work of Yaldabaoth, the fake God, the lesser God that came from this bastardization of Sophia, this sort of eon of wisdom, the God of the Israelites, the God who appears throughout the Old Testament, is in, according to this interpretation, a false and ignorant deity. Now, again, this is not the view that I hold. This is just the Gnostic view. Now, in this view, the material world becomes something negative. It's the result of this mistake that actually needs to be corrected. We are prisoners in a creation made by this foolish being who is keeping us trapped here. But there's hope. According to the Gnostic story, human beings have a dual nature. Yes, we are material creatures created by Yaldabaoth, right? We are created in the image of God, which in this interpretation is this serpent like being with, you know, a lion head. But the true divine realm actually heard about this and intervened in order to help humankind. They tricked Yaldabaoth into breathing his spirit into Adam, just like it says in the Bible. But this was actually a way to infuse humanity with the divine spark from Wisdom and all the other eons. The divine spark within us allowed Adam to stand upright and challenge Yaldabaoth's authority. And gave us the potential to escape this sort of reality that we're imprisoned in and return to our true home in the divine realm. After Eve's creation, she and Adam had several children. The most famous sons, Cain and Abel, were born from an impure union. According to Gnostic texts, when Eve's spirit left her body, Yaldabaoth, her and Cain and Abel were the result. But Adam and Eve had another son son, and that son was Seth, who was conceived properly. And Seth became extremely important to the Gnostics. Seth was seen as the bearer of true Gnosis, the ancestor and the spiritual father of the Gnostic community. This is why they often call themselves the seeds of Seth and are known to scholars as the Sethians. They trace their spiritual lineage back to Seth, the true son of Adam and Eve. This creation story completely flips mainstream biblical interpretation on its head. I mean, just take, take for example the serpent in the Garden of Eden who tempted Eve and Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge. To mainstream Christians, that's Satan. That's the deceiver. To the Gnostics, the serpent was a messenger from the true divine world, the pleroma, trying to give humanity an escape from Yaldabaoth and this prison by giving them knowledge. Many people argue that this interpretation arose naturally from comparing the Old and the New Testaments. Even today, many readers notice what seems like, like a personality change in God between the these two parts of the Bible. The Old Testament God seems very harsh and, you know, orders executions and plagues and jealousy and, you know, anger. The New Testament emphasizes love and compassion. And even Christians that I talk to be like, yeah, it seems like these two gods aren't exactly the same. And the Gnostics noticed this contradiction as well. And to them, the only explanation was that these must be different gods. The false God Yaldabaoth described in the Old Testament and the true God who sent Jesus, the invisible spirit of the divine world, Yaldabaoth, in his ignorance and vanity, demands exclusive worship and punishes those who don't comply. At one point in the Hebrew Bible, he declares, according to the Gnostics, for my part, I am a jealous God and there is no other God apart from me. Now, the secret book of John points out the paradox. For if no other one existed, of whom would he be jealous? According to the Gnostics, that jealous statement accidentally reveals the truth. There is indeed another God, a true God beyond Yaldabaoth. And these, as we know, are the eons in a way. And then of course, the supreme Monad, this invisible spirit, that undergirds all existence. So humanity finds itself trapped in the delusional prison of this material existence. But we have the potential to escape and return to our true home in the divine pleroma. We just need to realize it. And this is where we have Jesus. The Gnostics, at the end of the day, considered themselves Christians. Their movement emerged as one response to the life and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they appointed and recognized as the Christ. This was the anointed one. This was the Savior of humanity. Different Gnostic texts describe Jesus nature in different ways. Some writings, like the First Thought of Three Forms, suggest that Barbelo herself took human form as Jesus. It says, for my part, I put on Jesus. I extracted him from the accursed wood and made him stand at rest in the dwelling places of his parent. The secret book of John, as we saw earlier, describes Christ as a distinctive divine aeon born from the union of the invisible spirit and Barbello. The crucial point is this. Jesus is a Savior sent by the highest God, the true God, to rescue humanity from the prison created by the ignorant Yaldaba. But the Gnostic understanding of Jesus differs dramatically from what became, you know, orthodox Christian belief. The Gnostics embraced a doctrine called Docetism. And this is the idea that Jesus didn't actually have a real material body, he only appeared to have one. Therefore, he never truly suffered or died on the cross in a physical sense. Now, if you know mainstream Christian theology at all, you will recognize this as a major departure. Jesus's full humanity and his real suffering are central to the orthodox salvation story. The whole point in mainstream Christianity as we know, is that God became truly human and died a real death to atone for human sin. But remember, the Gnostics viewed the material world as a negative thing in the first place. To them, matter was the creation of this foolish false God. So they didn't place the same emphasis on physical reality. In the Gnostic view, Jesus didn't save humanity by suffering. He saved us by by teaching us Gnosis, the true knowledge of who we really are and where we truly belong. Christ was sent by the invisible spirit to remind humanity of our genuine home in the divine realm of the entirety, right, the pleroma, the full divine existence that we should actually be in. And thereby Jesus was actually helping us escape the shackles of this material world. It's a completely different salvation narrative from orthodox Christianity. So the Gnostics saw themselves as the seed of Seth, those who had received the true teaching of Christ passed down from the apostles they possessed exclusive gnosis of divine reality which then they could pass on to new initiates. And they made up a significant portion of the early Christian world in a lot of ways. And their actual practices were a bit strange, you know, how did the Gnostics actually live this faith? So. So like many ancient religious movements, the Gnostics practiced some form of baptism with water. Their baptism likely differed significantly from mainstream Christian practice. It seems to have involved something called the five seals, though scholars aren't entirely sure what this actually means. Gnostics apparently get baptized multiple times, possibly corresponding with different stages or levels of initiation or the spiritual path that you are on towards this pleromatic. It wasn't like a one time event like it is in mainstream Christianity. The major characteristic of Gnostic practice seems to have been various methods and techniques to help practitioners basically ascend into the divine realm, progressing from different levels of eons until actually reaching Barbelo and then perhaps even contemplating the invisible spirit itself. So the scholar David Bracke explains, the Gnostics believed that the human intellect could experience Gnosis, basically acquaintance with God within this mortal life, however fleetingly. They portrayed this experience primarily as an ascent to higher knowledge that was both intellectual and cosmic. Intellectually, the Gnostic could ascend by contemplating increasingly abstract levels of existence, starting by understanding one's own existence and then that of other lower divine beings, advancing to the contemplation of higher eons. Ultimately, Barbelomember the the sort of the womb, the cosmic womb, and attempting to gain some imperfect acquaintance with the ineffable first principle, the invisible spirit.
- [36:31]
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- [37:03]
Mark Gagnon
And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates, excludes Massachusetts. So these practices often, you know, involved asceticism and the study of, you know, mystical and philosophical texts. But beyond this, we don't find any distinctive rituals that clearly characterized Gnostic communities, at least none that actually survived in the historical record. Interestingly, the Gnostics actually rejected certain practices that other Christians performed. So they thought that the Eucharist, for example, the ritual communion, you know, with bread and wine that ultimately transubstantiates to become Christ. They saw this as foolish. And this becomes clear in the Gospel of Judas where Jesus mocks some of the apostles for performing the Eucharist. By doing so, the text suggests that they're showing their ignorance and worshiping a false God rather than the true one. Now in this Gospel, Judas Iscariot becomes the hero, the only apostle who truly understands Jesus's identity. When he tells Jesus, you have come from the immortal realm of Barbelo, but as far for the one who sent you, I am not worthy to say his name. He basically is demonstrating his superior knowledge and understanding. Now again, I just want to point out the Gospel of Judas is not included in, you know, the Christian text. This is purely a Gnostic writing. Now these distinctive doctrines and, you know, scriptural interpretations set the Gnostics apart from many early Christians, including figures like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr, who would later be considered the, you know, Orthodoxy or the proto Orthodox. But remember, in those early centuries there was a lot of, you know, Christian movements that had, you know, some claim to what it actually meant to be truly Christian. And ultimately the Gnostics were kicked out out. The Gnostic school of thought, the Sethians, appear to have been very influential in their day. Their ideas spread through the Roman Empire and in some ways actually shaped many other movements at the time. Some of these movements are sometimes lumped together by this category of Gnosticism, like we talked before, but they're not actually perfectly Gnostic. They don't really fit this more narrow definition. So the Valentinians, for example, associated with the second century teacher named Valentinus from Alexandria, borrowed heavily from Gnostic myths, but adapted them using more explicitly Christian language. Nag Hammadi texts attributed to the Valentinians, like the Gospel of Truth and the Tripartite Tractate, show many similarities to Gnostic mythology. Although they're somewhat simplified. The Valentinian worldview wasn't quite as negative as the Gnostic one. They seem to have been a little bit more monistic with their thinking, a little bit more monotheistic. They also blended in mainstream Christianity much better, attending the same churches and services as other Christians. But they also met separately for special teaching sessions where they would discuss their particular interpretations. In fact, Irenaeus in his text against the Heresies, the Valentinians are his primary target and concern. And in some ways it kind of makes sense, right? He was probably more worried about them because they looked much more like regular Christians at the time from the outside, but supposedly harbored these, you know, very heretical teachings in secret, drawing unsuspecting believers into their study circles and ultimately getting them off of the path of orthodox Christianity. And then you have the Marcion and the Marcionites. So Marcion came from Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey, and shared many features with the Gnostics, including this belief in the divine realm and a demiurge who created the material world. However, Marcion's creator God wasn't ignorant or evil.
- [40:50]
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Evil.
- [40:50]
Mark Gagnon
Marcion described him as unrelentingly just. And instead of calling the highest God the invisible spirit, he just refers to him as the stranger. Now, Marcion is credited as being the first Christian to attempt to create a canonical New Testament. His version included a modified Gospel of Luke and several of Paul's letters. Unlike the Gnostics, who still found value in the Hebrew Bible for teaching purposes, even though, you know, they weren't actually praising the God of the Old Testament, Marcion actually rejected the Old Testament entirely. Other groups and thinkers were clearly inspired by Gnostic ideas in this period. Each of them could deserve their own detailed discussion. But the core Gnostic school, the Sethians, stand out as the particularly fascinating expression of this early Christ movement. So as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and orthodox doctrine was actually established through, you know, numerous church councils, the Gnostic school gradually just disappeared from the historical record. They didn't survive these developments, or at least not openly, but traces of the Gnostic thought persist in later movements. The religions of Manichaeism and Mandaism share many features with Gnosticism. Even in the Middle Ages, groups like the Cathars in Western Europe taught doctrines that actually might connect in some way to these Gnostic ideas. So where does that leave us? Like with a lot of these ancient religions, Gnosticism is kind of experiencing a resurgence of interest today. I mean, there's university courses and books that all, you know, kind of testify to this renewed fascination in this, you know, ancient heresy. And I've used heresy in quotes because, you know, I'm not going to claim to know the truth, but I don't subscribe to Gnostic philosophy. Now some people today even identify as Gnostics and are actually trying to revive this ancient form of Christianity. This shows just how complex the landscape is, you know, especially back then, but even today that you have different religions, you know, like Gnosticism, that are even creating temples in the modern day. But beyond modern interest, the study of Gnosticism teaches us something really interesting about Christianity and just religion in general. For centuries we told a pretty simple story, right? Jesus founded one true church and various heresies broke away from it. But the story might not be that simple. Simple, right. There might actually be many competing ideas and ultimately the winners are looking back on their own history. And in my opinion, you know, the truth is more interesting. Early Christianity was a very diverse, you know, movement with a bunch of different ideas and competing interpretations of Jesus message. And the Gnostics were just one voice in this chorus and albeit they were very influential and very controversial, but they developed an elaborate mythology that reimagined the entire cosmos and humanity's place in it. It they challenged the most basic assumptions about God and creation and salvation. And were their ideas right? That's not really for historians to say. That's, you know, kind of up to maybe you or your own personal experience with God. But here's what we can say with certainty that the Gnostics were part of Christianity's story in some way. They weren't necessarily outsiders the whole time. They were at some point, you know, inter, you know, identifying themselves as Christian. And they would even use the same scriptures and, and they worshiped the same Christ even if they understood him differently. And they actually believed that they were following on the right path that Jesus had laid out. And the Gnostics eventually lost out the Holy Roman Empire and the church that eventually took over Europe was not Gnostic, at least in institutional terms. And as a result, their books were buried in the desert, probably never to be found, and their communities faded away. And for more than a thousand years, they existed only as these villains, these heretics, in the writings of the early Church fathers. But now we can actually hear their own voices and actually reinterpret what they were trying to say in the first place. Thanks to one farmer that was digging for fertilizer out in Egypt, we can actually read their words and understand what they were trying to tell us. We can appreciate the creativity and the depth and they thought about this stuff a lot. And the radical imagination, no matter how crazy it might sound to you view, they did bring something to the early version of Christianity and if nothing else, maybe just reinforce the belief of the early Church Fathers and, you know, offered a counterbalance to understanding Christian orthodoxy. And although the Gnostics lost the battle for the, you know, soul of Christianity, the questions that they ask are still somewhat relevant, right? Like, what is the nature of God? How does so much evil exist? Where is God? And all of this, you know, this world that we live in, been, what is the meaning of salvation? What does it actually mean to believe in Jesus? And these questions are still vital today as they were 2,000 years ago. And for that reason, I think the Gnostic ideas are at least worth considering. And if nothing else, maybe having a counter argument can embolden your own faith. And there you have it. That is the philosophy of the Gnostics. Now, again, I just want to point out I wasn't raised Gnostic. I don't subscribe to the Gnostic ideas. So if I got anything wrong, wrong, I'm sorry. If you are Gnostic, please drop a comment. Let me know if I missed anything, let me know if I misinterpreted anything or I didn't give something a fair shake. I, I'll be honest, I find the idea is fascinating. Like, I find it to be, despite being Catholic, a really interesting interpretation of Christianity. If, like I said, if nothing else, it is a helpful exercise to kind of work out in your mind, like, okay, if I believe in, you know, the, the entire Bible, even the Old Testament, how do these ideas intersect with my ideas or my struggles with Christianity? I mean, I've noticed even things like going to church growing up, like, oh, yeah, the God of the Old Testament is a little angry. It seems like Jesus is much more calm, much more docile. I've heard people point this out before and their explanation, I find at the very least interesting. It's something that we should at least consider. If you consider yourself a believer now, if you didn't grow up in any type of Judeo Christian framework, what do you think of this? If you're a religious person, you know, Hindu, Muslim, does this counteract with your philosophy at all? Do you guys have, you know, arguments or apologetics against these ideas? I'd love to know what you think. Please drop a comment. Like I've always said, this space is an opportunity to explore all ideas and worldviews with a, you know, an open mind and a good faith attempt to try to characterize them properly. So I hope I did that today. As always, this is religion Camp. I appreciate you guys for tuning in. And these episodes come out every Sunday. Also, check out History Camp if you like historical deep dives, and Camp Gagnon if you like the interviews and all sorts of other miscellaneous deep dives that we will go on. Christos, you learn anything about agnosticism? I mean, you're Greek, you probably know a lot of these words. I tried to help you out with some appreciate Them. Yeah, we have a bunch of episodes on the main channel about this topic. So go check them out. Check those out. Listen to Christos finally for once. Okay. Anyway, thank you guys so much for tuning in. I appreciate you all dearly, and peace be with you. What's up, people? We're going to take a break really quick because I have amazing news. I'm coming on the road. That's right. My very first headlining tour. Where I'm going to every city that will possibly allow me to go there. I'm going to Salt Lake City. I'm going to Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, North Carolina in February. Those tickets will be announced soon. You can get all the tickets at Markagnon Live and I'll see you guys there. What's up, people? We're gonna take a break because we got new merch. That's right. It is the holiday season. And the good folks over at Camp R D have been cooking up in the lab. We got the Christmas sweaters with the aliens. We got the Christmas sweaters with the conspiracy vibes you already know. I mean, this one might be my favorite one. A Christmas tree full of aliens. Full Christmas sweater energy. And then, of course, if you just want something simple, you know, you bust out the camp logo tee with the little Christmas lights on it. Come on, bro, get cute for Christmas, okay? It is a holiday season, all right? We're celebr. Celebrating the birth of the savior, okay? And what better way to do it than to cop a couple threads for the person in your life that you know that loves a campsite that loves hanging with us every single week. And right now we're running a promo through the holidays. That's right. Use the promo code. Christmas camp for 15% off. I just made that up on the spot, but I think we can do it, right? I'll call some people. Christmas camp for 20 for 15% off. Off. Sure, 16% off. Whatever you say, Mark. Should we give them more? One more 17% off? People, we don't. I think this is going to work. I'm not positive we're going to see if we can do it, but I'll. Yeah. Check it out, guys. We got all the camp stuff going until the end of the year. Check it out. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show. I love you all. God bless.
- [49:13]
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