The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (12 page)

Finally, if we forswear the use of the word and category “Gnosticism,” we must do the same with the similarly vague labels of “Judaism,” “Christianity,” “Islam,” “Hinduism,” and “Buddhism,” since all of these possess within themselves far more theological and sectarian diversity than the menagerie of movements we have called Gnosticism. I plan on continuing to call them that in what follows.

I KNOW—BUT I WON’T TELL YOU!

Gnosticism was a pessimistic worldview embraced by those who felt themselves to be strangers in a strange land, isolated and superior to the slobs and fools around them.
¹
It was also an ingenious answer to the perennial problem of
theodicy
, getting God off the hook for all the evil in the world. How can a world like this have been the creation of a righteous God and be ruled by his justice? Whence all the tragedy and evil? Gnostics chose to resolve the dilemma by positing that the true God, the unknown one, hidden away within the fullness (“Pleroma”) of unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16), did not create the world. Instead, he emanated from himself a whole series of paired divine beings (
syzygies
, “yolkfellows”). At the end of this process there emerged a single divinity,
Sophia
(Wisdom). She felt alienated from the godhead, from which, of all the divine entities (
Aions
), she was furthest removed. She was also frustrated for having no partner with whom to beget further
Aions
.

But the divine essence was running out by this point, like a tenth-generation videotape, so when Sophia contrived to bear offspring by herself, a virginal conception and birth, the result was a brutish and malign entity called the
Demiurge
, that is, the Creator, Carpenter, or Craftsman. This character was borrowed from Plato, who had posited him as a mythic link between philosophical categories of eternal matter and eternal spirit. The celestial gods, he figured, were too aloof to get involved in creation, leaving it to the Demiurge, whose job it was to ceaselessly impose the likenesses of the eternal Forms (the spiritual prototypes of all things) onto hunks of unstable, shifting matter for as long as they can hold it.

The Gnostics were heavily influenced by the Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria, with its allegorical method of reading Plato’s philosophy into scripture. So they interpreted the Genesis accounts of the creation and the fall in Platonic categories, even as Philo of Alexandria did. But their shocking result was to identify the Demiurge as both evil and as the same as the Hebrew God Yahweh/Jehovah. Religious Modernists have made essentially the same move by saying that the Old Testament writers depicted God according to their limited, primitive conceptions and that the superior, more philosophically abstract concept became clear later. H. Wheeler Robinson comes, it seems to me, amazingly close to a Gnostic position when he says that “the limitations of the Old Testament idea of God . . . may be compared with those which attach to the Carpenter of Nazareth. As the Christian may see the manifestation of the Eternal Son of God within those limitations, so may be seen the manifestation of the Eternal God Himself through the limitations of ‘Yahweh of Israel.’”
²
We just speak of different “God-concepts” where the Gnostics spoke of different gods.

CREATION BY COMMITTEE

The Demiurge, imitating the ultimate godhead, of whom he was nonetheless ignorant, declared himself supreme and proceeded to create matter and a series of material creations, a kind of mud-pie substitute for the Pleroma of Light. He also made the Archons (“rulers”) to police his creation. (The Archons were based on the fallen Sons of God or fallen angels of Jewish belief found in 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and other apocryphal variations of Gen. 6:1-4). With their help he created a world, but it was inert and chaotic (“without form and void”). To get some action going, he managed to steal some of the spiritual light from the Pleroma. According to whichever Gnostic text you choose, this might have been accomplished by waylaying and dismembering another of the Aions, the Man of Light, Son of Man, or Primal Man. This was a very widespread mythic-theological concept in the ancient world. The Zoroastrians called him Gayomard. In the Hindu
Rig-Veda
he is known as Purusha. He is depicted as “the Man” in 4 Ezra 13:1-4. Or the light may have been taken from the reflected image of Sophia, who had stooped over to look into the dark pool of the newly created abyss of matter. In any case, the Demiurge and his evil lieutenants used these sparks of alien light as something like DNA to program self-replicating order into the otherwise stillborn cosmos of matter.

The trick worked. And just like it says in that old song by the Demiurges, that is, the Carpenters, “On the day that you were born the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true.” But they still couldn’t get the damn thing to move. This is where some stolen light came in handy. Light stolen from the Heavenly Eve (Eve was already a goddess in Jerusalem, Greece, and Phrygia and among the Hittites long before Genesis demoted her to a primordial Lucy Ricardo) animated the inert Pinocchio. “I’ve got him up and dancing.”
³
The Archons then got the hots for Eve and tried to gang rape her. They did rape her shadowy physical counterpart, the earthly Eve, and then presented her to the now-awake Adam in only slightly used condition. All of this reflects very ancient variants, alternative versions, of the Eden story, which people continued to remember and to pass down in defiance of the official canonical version in Genesis chapters 2 and 3.

LOST AND FOUND

Of the subsequent children of Adam and Eve, the descendants of Seth possessed the divine spark of light inherited from the Heavenly Eve, while the descendants of Cain were the bastard spawn of the Archon rapists. This is at least the version of events put forth by the Sethian sect, who regarded Seth as a messianic revealer and redeemer and later, upon assimilation into Christianity, reinterpreted Seth as a previous incarnation of Christ, or, more to the point, Christ as the second coming of Seth. Others, like the Ophites or Naasenes, rightly understood Adam and Eve to be a local variant of the myth of Attis and Cybele and thus made Jesus a later incarnation of the slain-and-resurrected Attis.

But, whatever name they might use, the various Gnostic sects believed their doctrine, their privileged knowledge (
gnosis
), had come to them from a heavenly revealer who had come to earth, incognito, in human flesh or at least in the likeness thereof, to awaken those possessing the divine spark by explaining to them their true origin and destiny. This would enable them to escape the vicious cycle of reincarnation and to ascend once and for all to the Pleroma, to rejoin the godhead.

As Walter Schmithals speculated, “pure” Gnosticism must have understood the sheer fact of self-knowledge as enough to effect postmortem liberation.
⁴
But later, more corrupt, superstitious forms of the doctrine pictured Jesus (or Seth or Melchizedek) providing not only self-knowledge but also a set of magical formulae, passwords that would enable the elect soul to slip unnoticed through the cosmic checkpoints in each of the crystal spheres concentrically encasing our world. At each sphere waited its ruling Archon (playing the role of the old Babylonian planetary gods), ready to turn back any escaping soul, like marksmen posted along the old Berlin Wall. And the escaping soul would have to know what answer to give if challenged. “If they say to you, ‘Whence did you originate? ’ say to them, ‘We have come from the Light, where the Light has originated from itself. He stood and he revealed himself in their image.’ If they say to you, ‘Who are you?’ say: ‘We are his sons and we are the elect of the Living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the token of the Father’s presence in you?’ say to them, ‘It is both a movement and a rest’” (Thomas, saying 50). Obviously, without such knowledge as the revealer provides, the elect could never even know to seek out their destiny. All they knew was that, as spirits lodged in matter, they felt like strangers in a strange land. Now they knew why.

Often this revealer was himself understood to be an aspect of the Primal Man of Light whose sparks were scattered among the elect. He was on a mission to save himself! Thus he is called the Redeemed Redeemer. The implications of this doctrine are twofold. First, it means that, in awakening the elect, the Redeemer is completing his own salvation, exactly as in Mahayana Buddhism, where it is taught that no one can be saved until everyone is saved. This attitude eliminates any possibility of smug complacence and disdain for others. Second, it means that, once one is awakened, one is united with the Christ as with one’s higher self. It was only the illusion of worldly existence that made Christ appear to be other than the Christian and vice versa. Again, for what it may be worth, this is exactly parallel to Mahayana Buddhism, where all possess the Buddha Nature but do not realize it till enlightenment, even though it is the very thing that makes enlightenment possible.

THE BAUER THESIS

Historically, Gnosticism has been like a centrifuge, diversity and pluralism giving birth to a fantastic variety of belief—the “hydra-headed heresy,” as the ancients called it. But the Catholic Church has always sought universality by enforcing uniformity by conformity. Both forces were at work in early Christianity. How did the imperialistic, orthodox side gain dominance? Walter Bauer has shed light on this question in his great book
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity
.
⁵
Bauer’s main project was to refute the traditional model of Christian history as set forth by Constantine’s court historian Eusebius, to wit: Jesus the Son of God taught the official, orthodox deposit of faith to the apostles. They, in turn, taught it to their appointed successors, the bishops, who taught it to the next generation of bishops, and so on. So far so good, but as soon as the apostles went on to their reward, Eusebius said, certain base fellows infiltrated the church with no other purpose than to spread the cancer of heresy, that is, unauthorized belief.

To fend off this threat, the bishops ratified the New Testament canon and formulated the great creeds to fortify the walls of truth and to smoke out heretics. Eusebius rewrote history to make it appear that non-Catholic Christianity appeared late in the day and that most of the heretical theologians were each other’s disciples, so as to localize and to minimize the existence of heretical Christianity, like the old joke about the small group of laundrymen who stayed in business only by taking in each other’s wash.

But Bauer found that the facts were otherwise: There had simply never been a single orthodox mainstream of Christianity. So, as early as we can form any picture of early Christians, there is no one single picture. Instead, the second century presents us with a theological kaleidoscope.

GALLERY OF GOSPELS

In Edessa the first Christianity attested was Marcionism. (More about Marcion in chapter 6, “Loose Canon.”) Marcionites were on the scene first and succeeded in claiming the name “Christian.” When “orthodoxy” showed up later, it had to be content using the name of the first Roman-leaning bishop Palut, calling themselves “Palutians.” In Syria, ascetic and Gnostic Christianity that claimed to stem from Thomas prevailed, giving us the Gospel and Acts of Thomas, plus the Book of Thomas the Contender. In Egypt Gnosticism held sway. In Ephesus and Asia Minor Gnosticism, Docetism (see chapter 5, “Constantine’s Christ”) and Encratism (the gospel of celibacy) occupied the stage, all tracing themselves to Paul’s ministry. In Palestine, Christianity was Jewish, Torah-keeping, and nationalistic, scorning Paul as a heretic and a Gentile, owing allegiance instead to James the Just and the other heirs of Jesus. Everywhere popular Christianity included docetic Christology (Jesus only seemed human) or adoptionism (God adopted Jesus as his Son) and angel Christology (Christ was an angel). As late as the eighth century in Christian Arabia, Christians believed Jesus had escaped crucifixion altogether and introduced that belief into Islam.

Nor was it only emergent Roman orthodoxy that claimed to have been taught by disciples of the apostles. Valentinus claimed to be the successor to Theodas, a disciple of Paul, while Basilides claimed to be the disciple of Glaukias, assistant and secretary to Peter. Some ascribed the so-called Gospel of John to the Gnostic Cerinthus instead. Others claimed Marcion wrote parts of it. Carpocrates claimed to have his teaching from Mary and Martha. Even Tertullian admitted Paul was “the apostle of the heretics.” The Gnostics Heracleon and Valentinus wrote the first known commentaries on John and Paul, and it was very likely Marcion who first collected the Pauline letters.

Dan Brown is doing the public a favor when he conveys a dumbed-down version of Bauer’s view of the history of Christianity to a wider readership. The danger, as elsewhere in his book, is that he mixes fact with fancy and threatens to make a straw man of the valuable lesson he seeks to teach. (And no one can be so naive as to think he is not trying to teach a lesson, several in fact, in
The Da Vinci Code
.)

TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS

How did this initial Christian diversity give way, and rather soon, to Roman Catholic orthodoxy? Eventually, once Constantine became its patron, the Catholic Church succeeded by means of intimidation and persecution. Before they had the iron fist of state power at their disposal, the bishops had to be content with nonviolent means like propaganda, literary polemics, and co-optation.

Late New Testament works, including the Acts of the Apostles, the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), and 1 Peter, try to rewrite history to suggest an early unanimity of faith, with Peter and Paul at one, each the mirror reflection of the other, both repudiating in advance the heresies that would one day appeal to their authority. Other documents were sanitized, censored, and rewritten, including John, Luke, the Pauline letters, and Mark. Still other early documents were fabricated and attributed to early martyrs and legendary bishops, including Polycarp, Ignatius, and Clement. All sought to impose a revisionist history upon the founding events.