When I was in high school, I had a teacher called Mr. Day. He was my hero. He wore a bow tie to class and could do standing backflips. Once upon a time, Mr. Day had been a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Boston, but he quit after losing his faith. So, naturally, he was hired to teach Religious Studies at a Catholic prep school.
Mr. Day really was a great guy. He was the first person to encourage me to study theology. (Now you know who to blame.) I was amazed by the world he opened up to us. He told us about the Q Source and the Pantera Thesis. We read apocryphal texts such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where the Christ Child kills several of His playmates.
Above all, it was the Gnostic Gospels that fascinated me. When the Nag Hammadi codices were unearthed in 1945, the very concept of “orthodoxy” was completely debunked. Contrary to what religious conservatives might claim, there was no consensus in the Early Church. The first followers of Christ couldn’t agree on the nature of His teachings or the events of His life.
Even their cosmologies were radically different. For instance, the Psalms say, “The gods of the nations are demons.” Yet, to the Gnostic Christians, they were actually Archons: celestial “rulers” who corresponded to the seven planets. For instance, the god Saturn is actually the demiurge Yaldabaoth; he was known to the Jews as the Samael, the angel of death.
As contemporary scholars such as Marcus Borg and Bart Ehrman point out, such a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the Heavenly powers in itself disproves the very concept of “orthodoxy.”
Right?
The field of religious studies is full of myths and absurdities. The most pervasive is that of the “Dark Ages.” Supposedly, every library in the West was destroyed in the years after the Fall of Rome (A.D. 467). The Greco-Roman tradition was virtually unknown in Europe until these manuscripts were reintroduced by Byzantine scholars who escaped the Fall of Constantinople (A.D. 1453).
Yet this is absurd. The writings of Thomas Aquinas should single-handedly put this myth to rest. Aquinas quotes broadly from classical sources including Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca.
Granted, Medieval Europeans access only to a limited number of texts. The influx of Byzantine manuscripts did cause a major shift in the intellectual life of Western Europe. There’s no doubt about that. Yet it’s also undeniably true that Aquinas and his confreres were more familiar with the classical tradition than any Doctor of Philosophy alive today. They were far from intellectually impoverished.
That intellectual shift that occurred following the death of Byzantium—the Renaissance—had little, if anything, to do with access to texts. It had more to do with a growing popular interest in those texts. Bell-bottoms are making a comeback thanks to Gen Z, but that doesn’t mean Gen X and Millennials were unaware of their existence.
So, too, with the myth of the “Lost Gospels.”
Popularized by Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, and others, there is a prevalent myth in all fields of Religious Studies that, for most of modern history, scholars were basically unaware of the existence of heterodox Christian traditions and had little (if any) access to their primary sources. This is why the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library is considered such a turning-point in the history of biblical scholarship.
But the “Lost Gospels” theory fails to explain the frequent reappearance of Gnostic heresies in Medieval Europe. How do we explain the origins of groups such as the Massalians, Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathari?
As Yuri Stoyanov explains in The Other God (Yale UP; 2000), these Gnostic revivals originate from two sources.
First is the influence of Zoroastrianism upon Christian churches in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. As a result of the Sassanian crusades against Christianity and, later, the the Islamic conquest of Iran, the Zoroastrians’ dualistic doctrines bore a certain influence upon Christian theology, mainly via Armenia.
Secondly—and, for our purposes, more importantly—is the survival of Gnostic manuscripts. To quote Stoyanov:
In the Early Middle Ages traces and elements of Gnostic and dualistic teachings in varying degrees of intensity were also preserved in diverse apocryphal works from late antiquity which, despite being banned, were preserved and maintained their circulation, mainly in the east Christian world, in heterodox, sectarian, or simply learned circles.
It is true that orthodox religious authorities such as Emperor Justinian and Pope Innocent III launched their own crusades to stamp out these movements. Yet these are major world-historical events. The very fact that they happened is proof that Medieval Europeans had access to Gnostic texts, and that these texts were sufficiently diffuse that they actually led to popular revivals of Gnosticism.
True, there are texts in the Nag Hammadi library that were not known to Medieval Europe. But this isn’t relevant to the larger point being made by these revisionist scholars: that the existence of rival “Christianities” was suppressed by Early-Church authorities.
It is also well-known that most Gnostic groups were not persecuted violently. Most simply faded into obscurity. This was the case with the Valentinians: arguably the largest and most influential Gnostic sect in the Early Church. Others were re-converted by the orthodox. This was the case with Bogomilism. In his Study of Gregory Palamas (SVSP; 1964), John Meyendorff explains how, as a young bishop, Palamas would go into the mountain villages where this heresy was most prevalent. He would debate with the Bogomils until the renounced their errors. He would then bring a delegation of their elders to Constantinople, where they would make an act of submission to the Ecumenical Patriarch.
Like the myth of the Dark Ages, the myth of the Lost Gospels severely underestimates our ancestors’ familiarity with ancient texts. Yet so much of our understanding of Christianity (or lack thereof) is built upon this assumption of Medieval Europeans’ ignorance.
Why, then, did the Gnostics keep dying out, despite repeated attempts to revive their doctrines? The answer is deceptively simple. It’s because Gnosticism is—quite literally—unbelievable.
For instance, St. Augustine of Hippo embraced the Manichean faith in his youth. Following his conversion to Christianity, however, he wrote a treatise refuting their doctrines. He famously mocked their belief that plants contain the divine essence—and that “some portion of that divine part escapes in the eating of vegetables and fruits: it escapes while they undergo the infliction of rubbing, grinding, or cooking, as also of biting or chewing.”
Likewise, the prayers of the Gnostics are usually nothing more than a restatement of their bizarre cosmologies or flat dualism. Foe example, in 1997, Gerd Lüdemann—an associate professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School—published Suppressed Prayers, a collection of early Gnostic Christian texts. This one is fairly representative of the collection:
Now at this time may all material things rejoice;
Seek the light, all of you, that the power of your souls which is in you may live.
For the light has heard the material things and will not leave any material thing,
without having purified it.
Let the souls and the material things bless the Lord of all the aeons,
and the material things and all that are in them.
For God will save their souls from all material things.
Likewise, their rituals were frequently revolting. Epiphanius of Salamis records one such practice in his Panarion (which you should not read if you are morally or physically sensitive):
After copulating, as if the crime of their whoredom were not enough, they offer up their shame to heaven. The man and woman take the man’s sperm in their hands and stand looking up to heaven. With this impurity in their hands, they pray . . . offering to the natural Father of the universe what is in their hands, saying “We offer you this gift, the body of Christ.” And so they eat it, partaking of their own shame and saying, “This is the body of Christ, and this is the Passover…” Similarly with the woman’s emission at her period: they collect the menstrual blood which is unclean, take it and eat it together and say “Behold the Blood of Christ…”
What’s critical to note is that, as anyone who reads the New Testament knows—and as reputable scholars increasingly admit—these unwholesome doctrines and practices have nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ.
Indeed, it’s now posited, by Jorunn Buckley and others, that Gnosticism predates the birth of Christ. As Christianity began to overtake “traditional” Gnostic sects like Manicheanism, devotees infiltrated the Church and attempted to replace Christian orthodoxy with their own belief-system.
Every couple of generations, the Gnostics are “rediscovered” by a new generation of scholars and enthusiasts. Each time, they believe they have discovered the key to understanding Christianity. Some, like the Cathari, embrace Gnosticism. Others, like modern biblical scholars, simply use it as an excuse to dismiss Christianity. Yet the neo-Gnostics and the post-Christians have something else in common: they vastly overestimate Gnosticism, both as a religious system and an historical force.
Again, there are no “Lost Gospels.” There are no “Suppressed Prayers.” The Gnostics were only a small sect within the Early Church, albeit a noisy one. The orthodox Christians of their day, such as Augustine and Epiphanios, recognized immediately that their teachings were totally unconnected to those of Jesus Christ. They somehow managed to be fanciful, perverse, and banal all at once.
Those who try to revive them embody the phrase, Beware the man of one book. They’re the ones St. Paul referred to as “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:6-7). Thankfully, after a short period of time, these creeds always lapse back into obscurity. Sometimes this is due to persecution. Far more often, however, it’s because Gnosticism is too stupid and gross to be taken seriously.
This is true of virtually all the heretical groups that have appeared in the Christian Church over its 2,000-year-long history. True: some ancient errors have survived. Yet the most deviant sects all passed (and pass!) quickly into obscurity. The ones that endure are those which bear the closest resemblance to Christian orthodoxy.
In other words: there is, indeed, a living consensus to the authentic teachings of Christ, and to the authentic practices established by His Apostles. Within a small margin of error, the huge majority of Christians have held virtually identical beliefs about Jesus Christ and His Church.
The heterodox bear their own witness to orthodoxy. The exceptions prove the rule. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Amen!
https://yankeeathonite.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-lost-gospels