The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (24 page)

PISTIS SOPHIA

This, the granddaddy of Gnostic revelation dialogues, incorporates two similar third-century sources depicting interviews of Jesus after the resurrection by his disciples. Both are taken up with wearying details of what the ascending Gnostic may expect on his postmortem heavenward journey. The title refers to a female divinity, one of the emanations from the Supreme God. She is “Faith-Wisdom,” often called simply “Sophia” in other Gnostic texts. Jesus here tells the story of her fall and redemption. Though the book is of the greatest value for our understanding of Gnosticism (it was about the only document we possessed that was actually written by Gnostics before the Nag Hammadi discovery), it is very tough going, making the Book of Leviticus look like a page-turner. One need not be a defender of the orthodox faith to ask oneself whether the exclusion of this bit of “chloroform in print” was a shame.

THE BOOKS OF JEU

These two second- or third-century texts are much like the Pistis Sophia in that in them Jesus explains the Gnostic doctrines of fall and creation, as well as the specific information needful to attain final salvation in the teeth of the opposition of the Archons (evil angels). Again, the resemblance to the Tibetan Book of the Dead is pronounced in that here we have all manner of specifics, names, formulae, baptisms, and so forth, with which the spiritual champion must equip himself. It is preparation for the ordeal the soul will face upon dying. Like Pistis Sophia, these texts were known before Nag Hammadi, and like Pistis Sophia, they are mighty slow going. Unusual for such books, the Books of Jeu contain diagrams! Copying these books cannot have been easy. Finally, the name “Jeu” has nothing to do with either Jesus or the Israelite King Jehu, still less with Jews. It refers to the ultimate Godhead and is presumably another form of the divine name “Iao,” though this is usually assigned to the Demiurge.

TOLEDOTH JESCHU

The Toledoth Jeschu, or Generations of Jesus, is a Jewish antigospel, extant in several variant versions, portraying Jesus as a false prophet and magician. The usual account of the Toledoth Jeschu is that it is a nasty parody of the Christian gospels, a safe way for Jews to vent their resentment for their hideous treatment at the hands of Christians. The texts are often considered to be late, medieval compositions, and thus historically worthless. But the wide distribution of various language versions and manuscript fragments, together with the numerous parallels with second-century Jewish-Christian polemic preserved in Tertullian, Celsus, and elsewhere, imply, as Samuel Krauss and Hugh J. Schonfield demonstrate, a date for the original version of about the fourth century, the 300s CE, with numerous of the traditions underlying it going back even further.
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Schonfield takes another step and suggests that the Toledoth Jeschu was based on a prior Hebrew gospel circulated among Jewish Christians. The reason for this is that the text treats Jesus with much more respect than one would expect if the Toledoth were merely a burlesque on a false prophet. It has certainly been worked over by a redactor hostile to Christianity; Jesus is regularly called “that bastard,” in a taunt against the virgin birth doctrine, but one would expect much, much worse, the sort of thing we do in fact encounter in later Talmudic references to Jesus the false prophet. Again, the huge number of Christian “testimonia” (proof texts from the Old Testament) marshaled to prove Jesus was the Messiah would be exceedingly strange in a work that started out as a lampoon of Christian messianism, all the more since none of these proof texts is ever refuted!

One of the chief points of interest in this work is its chronology: It places Jesus’s activity at about 100 BCE. This is no mere blunder (though it is not hard to find gross anachronisms elsewhere in the text). Epiphanius and the Talmud also attest to Jewish and Jewish-Christian belief that Jesus had lived a century or so before we usually place him.

SUFI SAYINGS OF JESUS

Some ancient writers found it difficult to distinguish between early Christian preachers and their Cynic counterparts. Cynicism was a post-Socratic philosophy begun in the late fourth century by Antisthenes of Athens, a direct disciple of Socrates, who taught in the Cynosarges building in Athens, and by Diogenes of Sinope, a wandering sage who adopted the roaming dog (κυνος) for his ideal. The name “Cynics” may have come from either root. Cynics taught that one ought to live in accord with nature by reason, rejecting with scorn and humor all social conventions and material possessions. Diogenes went about naked or “clothed” in a barrel or a tub. Cynics generally adopted the distinctive garb of a tunic or loin-cloth, a cloak, a shoulder pouch, and a staff, nothing else, especially not money. They were mendicant beggars and claimed to have been sent by God (Zeus) to witness to mankind that we may live as unencumbered and carefree as the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, that we have as little need for possessions, jobs, marriages, or government, as animals do. They loved their enemies and refused to retaliate when beaten. They flouted common decency with relish.

It is hard to miss seeing the similarity between Cynic teaching and many of the sayings attributed to Jesus in which he orders disciples to renounce job, possessions, family, and worldly cares, instead leaving all things in the hands of a caring Providence, imitating the creatures of the wild. Indeed, there is no other religious or philosophical movement in antiquity that provides such close parallels with the most characteristic and radical sayings of Jesus. It seems most likely that the Mission Charge of the Synoptics (Mark 6:8-11; Matt. 10:5-23; Luke 9:3-6, 10:2-12) frets over whether Christian missionaries may take with them a staff, a cloak, a shoulder bag, and so on, mainly in order to differentiate them from similar-appearing Cynic apostles.

Was the historical Jesus a Cynic? It is by no means impossible, as Gerald Downing, Burton L. Mack, John Dominic Crossan, David Seeley, and others have argued. Cynics had long been active in areas adjacent to Palestine, and it was a cosmopolitan age when Hellenistic culture penetrated Jewish Palestine. But as the case of Proteus Peregrinus (see Lucian of Samosata’s satire
The Passing of Peregrinus
) shows, Cynics were attracted to Christianity and even wrote what came to be Christian literature. Thus the sayings attributed to Jesus that sound like Cynicism may have been originally unattributed Cynic maxims brought into the Christian movement by Cynic converts and subsequently attributed to Jesus.

At any rate, it is striking that the Sufi mystics of medieval Islam venerated Jesus in much the same terms as the Cynic hypothesis casts him: an ascetical hermit who wandered homelessly though accompanied by disciples. These sayings may have been coined by Sufis and attributed to Jesus, who after all has high standing in all forms of Islam. But it is also likely that some or even many of these sayings came to the Sufis from their Syriac monkish forbears, and then the possibility presents itself that this sayings tradition may come from still earlier in the Christian movement. In large measure, they present a pre-Christian, pre-Christological vision of Jesus as a Cynic-like ascetic, just as Mack, Downing, and the others understand him. Thus it may be, not that the Christology has been trimmed from them, but rather that it has not yet been added! Though the largest share of these sayings appear in al-Ghazali’s
Revival of the Religious Sciences
, a twelfth-century Sufi work, there are indications that the Sufi author may have derived them all from a sayings source with earlier Christian roots.

THE GOSPEL OF NICODEMUS

Early defenders of the Christian faith, especially Tertullian and Justin Martyr, challenged readers skeptical of their claims about Jesus to go and corroborate them by checking the “Acts of Pilate,” the official report of the case, which these authors simply assumed must be somewhere on file in Rome. During the reign of Maximin, a document purporting to be the relevant file did surface, but it was a piece of anti-Christian propaganda. It appeared between 311 and 312. Christians expunged it when they got the opportunity. This lost text may have been a hostile smear against Christian claims, or conceivably it may have been the real thing. We cannot know. At any rate, in the fifth or sixth century, a new work called the Acts of Pilate appeared. It was also known as the Gospel of Nicodemus, which tips one off immediately as to its sympathies. In it Pilate interrogates a series of witnesses for Jesus, including people he has healed. Eventually he hears the reports of Roman soldiers and others who have seen the Risen Jesus himself. There is even a report of the Harrowing of Hell, a major medieval theme, first expounded here: After his crucifixion and before his Sunday morning return, Jesus went, in spirit, to Hell and trashed the place, sending its wardens, Beelzebub and Satan, scurrying before his fury. He rescued the elect (Adam, David, Isaiah, et al.), who were only now permitted to go to heaven, since only now had redemption been won on the cross. Then Jesus departed, “leading captivity captive,” and leaving their Satanic majesties holding the bag.

THE APOCALYPSE OF PETER

The Nag Hammadi library contained an Apocalypse of Peter quite different from the one we already had, which was a typical tourist guide to the afterlife. In the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Peter, Peter is with Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple when the savior vouchsafes his chief disciple a series of visions. In them Peter beholds various enemies, both members of the Jewish establishment in Jesus’s own day and future Christian rivals, including both the Catholic/orthodox institutional church and competing Gnostic sects. He also sees an advance view of the crucifixion, which he is told is a docetic sham even though the blind (both conventional Christians and their enemies) believe the real Christ was crucified. The book seems to come from the third century, based on the hinted state of ecclesiastical conflict it tries to depict.

THE PREACHING OF JOHN

This intriguing document comes to us as part of a larger work (itself somewhat fragmentary) called the Acts of John. This portion provides the apostle’s ostensible recollections of Jesus. It seems likely that the Jesus material originally formed a separate work, the Preaching of John. As such it is implicitly a kind of rival or counterpart to the Gospel of John. The Preaching of John attempts to set forth a consistently docetic version of the story of Jesus.

The Preaching of John was no abstract treatise written by a speculative theologian off in an ivory tower somewhere. Rather, it was a scripture that guided the life of a pious sect. We can be sure of this because of the inclusion in the text of the liturgy for the Round Dance of the Savior, a celebration analogous to the Eucharist and the ritual washing of the feet. It would no doubt be most impressive to see the rite performed today. What sort of a community stands behind this text? Were they full-fledged Gnostics? The hallmark of Gnosticism was an elite grasp of saving truths not to be shared with the rank and file. Not only does the Preaching of John have something of a Gnostic (not just a docetic) tinge, but also John says he was laughing to scorn the poor chumps who imagined they were crucifying the real Christ. That rings of the contemptuous Gnostic elitism bemoaned in 1 John 2:9-11 (“Anyone who claims he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still,” etc.). Also, the lyrics to the Round Dance of the Savior pictures the angels and Powers of the Ogdoad, the Eighth Heaven, participating invisibly in the rite, implying a Gnostic world picture.

As to authorship: ancient writers grouped together five works—the Acts of John, Acts of Paul, Acts of Peter, Acts of Thomas, and Acts of Andrew—as all being the works of a Gnostic teacher Leucius (another form of the common name Luke). While they do all share certain important features, they were certainly not the products of a single author. The strategy behind this disingenuous claim was to make it appear that these writings represented the wild imaginings of a single mischievous author rather than being repositories of widespread early Christian belief. We thus have no idea who really wrote any of them. But it is well worth noting that at least here in the Preaching of John we have a sample, albeit fictive, of what “memoirs of the apostles” (as Justin Martyr called the gospels) would have looked like. Though we read in Eusebius that Mark represents the recollections of Peter and Luke of Paul, these texts do not at all read like apostolic table talk. By contrast, the Preaching of John does sound, formally at least, like an eyewitness’s reminiscences. The Preaching of John is not actually apostolic table talk, but the Gospel of Mark is not even trying to sound like it.

THE APOCRYPHON OF JAMES

Presenting itself (fictively) as a secret writing, not to be shared around by the recipient, this writing takes the superficial form of a letter from one of the two or three apostles named James.

The premise is that, while the apostles were busy all together in one place, writing down what Jesus had privately revealed to each one of them, the writer James, along with Peter, experienced a private return of Jesus from heaven. He tells them he is about to ascend again and challenges them to join him, even to get there in advance of him, if they wish! There is much exhortation, some of it surprisingly orthodox for what otherwise appears a solidly Gnostic text: “Truly I say to you, no one shall be saved unless they believe in my cross. But those who have believed in my cross, theirs is the Kingdom of God.”

The most important thing about the Apocryphon (or Secret Book) of James may be the valuable clue it gives as to how books like this came to be written. It was not, of course, the original apostles who wrote them but rather mystical sectarians and monks who gathered to meditate, hoping to induce visions of the heavens and of Jesus, hoping he might reveal the soul’s secrets to them. Then, each would write down what came to him, and they were circulated under the name of Jesus and/or apostles.