Gnosticism

Trigger warning: Rape.

Here’s some common ground for mainstream theistic Christians and metaphysically naturalistic atheists: something neither of us believe in. Gnosticism is a variety of religion, possibly a form of early Christianity but arguably not, which existed from about the first Christian century until going into decline around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. It might have been the other way round, in which case mainstream Christians would’ve been the heretics and they’d be orthodox, but this is how it really turned out.

The word “Gnosticism” is derived from the Greek γνωσις, which both means and is cognate with the English word “knowledge” and the Sanskrit word ज्ञान, jñāna. The general idea is that Jesus provided special esoteric knowledge to a few people, such as his disciples, which can be discovered by analysing what he said. Because history went the way it did, Gnosticism comes across as odd to today’s Christians, and also has a flavour more akin to Eastern religions such as Buddhism than Judaism or the other Abrahamic religions. A possibly over-simplified version of Gnosticism goes as follows: There is an ultimate true God known as the Λογος, Logos, or Word, who rules over all and is ultimately good. This God is hermaphrodite and defined only negatively, for instance as the Unmoved. Several steps down from this God is the Δημιουργός, Demiurge or artisan, carpenter perhaps, who fashioned the physical Cosmos and has trapped souls in matter. This Universe as we know it is therefore effectively the Matrix. This is the origin of the idea that we might be living in a simulation, and the secret knowledge we gain enables us to escape. I often think this makes the film series ‘The Matrix’ and Elon Musk’s and others’ idea that we are in a simulation distinctly unoriginal. Some Gnostic Christians saw Christ as the manifestation of the Logos and contrasted the New Testament God with God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as being the Logos and the Demiurge respectively.

Now for a bit more detail.

This is a diagram of the πληρωμα (pleroma). This is literally “fullness” and is a concept used in both orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. It means the totality of divine power. There is, incidentally, a lot of overlap between the concepts of orthodox and Gnostic Christianity and the word is used many times in the New Testament. It contrasts with κένωμα, kenoma, emptiness, and there may be a third contrast with κοςμος, kosmos (more usually spelt with a C in English). I should point out, incidentally, that when I say “orthodox Christianity” I’m actually referring to the version of Christianity which is directly ancestral to the Roman Catholic, Protestant and of course Orthodox denominations of the Church, and not just the Orthodox churches, although at the time what was to become mainstream Christianity was also to become the Orthodox Church. Terminology just is confusing here. A general trend of sophistication can be traced in the New Testament between the earlier synoptic gospels and the later Fourth Gospel and Johannine writings, and this trend continued with Gnosticism becoming more esoteric. Therefore the Pleroma as shown above works like this. The point at the top is the Monad, which seems to be another word for the Logos but I’m not sure (I’ll come back to that). This emanates into νους & αληθεια (I’m having to shift between Greek and English keyboards here all the time, hence the ampersand in the middle of that – it’s quite tiresome!), which are Mind and Truth. The word for “truth” is negative in Greek, meaning something like “non-forgetfulness” or “the state of not being hidden”, hence the “a-“, as in “atypical”, “asymmetrical” and “atheism”, also found in the related Sanskrit. This reflects the tendency in Gnosticism to pursue the via negativa, i.e. describing things as what they are not because the divine passes all understanding and therefore cannot be described positively – we don’t have appropriate concepts for God. This could lead into something interesting, and it will in a bit. Every point in that diagram within or on the larger circle represents one of the emanations of the divine, and the circle itself is referred to as the Boundary, Cross (Stake as in σταυρος), i.e. the same word used for the instrument of Jesus’s execution. The pleroma is where the ‘αιωνης (I’m not sure of that plural) dwell. These Æones (singular “Æon”) are the enamations of the Monad. Emanations are things which are “thrown off” the Monad without it being diminished. I tend to think of them as separate beings but I’m not sure this is correct. A similar idea is found in Zoroastrianism with the 𐬀𐬨𐬆𐬱𐬀 𐬯𐬞𐬆𐬧𐬙𐬀, Amesha Spenta, seven divine and personified emanations of Ahura Mazda representing various virtuous attributes of God. Since these are personified, I assume they are also in Gnosticism, which has thirty of them.

The kenoma could be linked to kenosis, an important concept in orthodox Christian theology. Kenosis is the idea that in becoming human Jesus emptied himself out and “became nothing for us”, and is a useful concept, for example, in the idea that Jesus was gang-raped before the crucifixion by Roman soldiers. One of the most popular posts on this blog is ‘Was Jesus Raped?‘ which goes into this in more detail, but it should be noted that there are many people who describe themselves as Christian now who object to such things as this statue:

A photo of the Jesus the Homeless Statue by Timothy Schmalz outside
Date
22 April 2014, 14:15:07
Source
Own work
Author
Pjposullivan

This statue is sometimes objected to on the grounds that it attempts to debase Christ, and similarly there are attempts on Yahoo! Answers to insult Christians by bringing up the question of him being gang raped. Kenosis focusses on the idea of Jesus becoming the lowest of the low: a homeless man, born in a stable, who happened to be God. The Gnostic concept of the Kenoma is of the emptiness or void outside of the Boundary of the Monad, and is the world as we perceive it by our senses. Each Æon in the pleroma has a corresponding entity in the kenoma.

The reason all this stuff is speculated about is that it’s supposed to be secret knowledge which carries the key to the Universe, and it’s also an attempt to reconcile Christian philosophy with Neoplatonism. My first impulse is to throw all of this into some kind of conceptual dustbin as completely idle and pointless esotericism, but one thing that stops me is the fact that, and this opens me to potential ridicule, I actually believe Nostradamus made successful, unambiguous and accurate predictions, and he based his technique on Neoplatonism. Also, the esoteric has a draw to me: it can be seen in alchemy, the Qabbalah, choirs of angels and the likes of the chakra system in Yoga.

I am, of course, coming out of the dominant strand of Christianity, some of which was to evolve into evangelical Protestantism, and consequently I’ve inherited the dismissive attitude of the early Church from about the fifth Christian century onwards, which regards Gnosticism as heretical. This history of early Christianity may, however, help to explain a couple of notable features of today’s mainstream Christian faith. Christianity as I understand it has an oddly sparse and austere cosmology. Any other world faith seems to have accumulated complex models of the spiritual universe such as many deities, the various worlds of Buddhism, the emanations of Zoroastrianism, the complexity of the Talmud in Rabbinical Judaism and the names of God in Islam. Some denominations of the Christian faith share that kind of concretion, but not the likes of the Society of Friends or Evangelical Protestantism, the two aspects wherewith I have most to do. I also place ethical considerations right at the centre of my life, something which occurred to me when I first looked at the Qabbalah, because the idea there seemed to be that “doing the Right Thing”, which in that case probably meant following the Talmud perfectly, was simply the first stage of the Tree Of Life, whereas to me that makes the entire thing redundant because it constitutes a distraction from that duty and a waste of time and energy. This plainness and austerity, in the context of what became orthodox Christianity, seems like a continuation of the trend which began with the rejection of Gnosticism.

There is, though, an opposite trend which is equally apparent in Evangelical Protestantism, and the fact that these two seem to coëxist in it really puzzles me. If you look at, for example, Judaism, that has a list of thirteen precepts arrived at by Moses Maimonides which sums up its basis, although of course you then have the sophistication of Torah, Talmud and perhaps even the Zohar. Islam has its Five Pillars and Buddhism its Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. All of these amount to just one principle: do good deeds in the world and you will achieve a higher state of being. Evangelical Protestantism is markèdly unlike this. It has no “elevator pitch”. In order to do the right thing according to that, you have to repent and commit to Christ, the uniquely fully human and fully divine sinless person who died on the Cross for you in order to atone for the inherited sins of the human race due to the first people’s disobedience from God, and it isn’t good deeds which help here but just the one deed of letting Christ in. Maybe it’s just because I’m closer to it, but all that seems a lot more complicated than other religions. And somehow, this austerity and complexity comfortably occur together as features of Evangelical Protestantism. Which is weird. However, I think this complexity is probably inherited from Gnosticism, because a clear trend can be seen towards it in the chronological order of the New Testament texts.

Modern mainstream Christianity, including in fact heterodox sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, emerges from a tradition which defined itself as “Not Gnosticism”, although there are other heresies such as Arianism and Monophysitism, while also inheriting Gnostic features. One legacy is the via negativa, that is, describing the Divine by what it’s not. There is a view that metaphysically naturalistic, scientifically realist atheism is the result of a Christian world view because of its separation between the Divine and the created realms, the latter of which is taken to be amenable to logic and governed by physical laws, and ultimately leading to the redundancy of the concept of God. Some other forms of atheism are remarkably different. For instance, some Indian atheists simply saw karma as a sufficient explanation for everything an therefore rejected the concept of God. But to me the most appealing other option to theism, and probably the one closest to my own theism, is theological non-cognitivism, also known as “ignosticism”, which is the view that religious language, including talk of God, is not about semantic meaning, and therefore that “there is no God” is just as invalid as “God exists”. It’s similar to ethical non-cognitivism – the idea that a sentence like “this is the right thing to do” in fact means “I approve of this, do so as well”. It is also true that the via negativa edges into that, and if I were to reach another set of beliefs from where I currently am, I would probably just decide that atheism and theism are equally crass and ill-conceived. This idea can be traced back to Gnosticism, although it crops up in other belief systems, such as logical positivism. There is no point at which I would ever claim to be atheist, for that reason, unless I change my mind about the idea that there is always a strong emotive element in meaning. My narrative tends to be psychological even though I’m externalist, but ignosticism also works as a way of highlighting the possibility that our notion of God, among other religious ideas, may simply be incoherent.

I don’t consider Gnosticism to be a good thing. To my mind, it removes the distinctiveness of Christianity and makes it more like Buddhism and Hinduism in that it leads one to view matter as evil. This has negative consequences in the real world. For instance, Ayurvedic medicine is influenced by the idea that reincarnation is an undesirable consequence in that it sees in utero development as painful for the fetus and pregnancy as an unhealthy state, so it brings misogyny with it. Women are, for Ayurvedic medicine, undesirable vessels which trap us all in life as opposed to Nirvana. The same kind of thing happens with Gnosticism, since it views matter as evil and something to be escaped. Adopting such an attitude undercuts the urge to make a positive difference to the world, since life is effectively an illusion anyway. The modern Church has also accused transgender people of Gnosticism, which I won’t cover since this is the wrong blog for it: here is a pamphlet from the Christian Institute on the matter, so to speak.

There are opposing views regarding whether the New Testament itself contains Gnostic elements. It had a tendency to use words also used in the New Testament, and the Septuagint, but elaborated way beyond their usual meaning, which accords with its esotericism. The Fourth Gospel (“John”) of course mentions the Logos in a prominent position and there seems to be something odd going on with its prose style which I’ve never been able to put my finger on, possibly chiasmus, which might be used to extract some kind of hidden meaning. Analysing the texts of the gospels themselves, some claim that earlier and later versions can be distinguished in such as way that Jesus was viewed differently as time went by. Specifically, the Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical gospel which, however, appears to be Q, an early long-undiscovered apparent source for other canonical gospels, seems to focus on the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and doesn’t refer to the idea of the End Times. This could reflect on a change in attitude when the apparently promised imminent end of the world didn’t happen. To my mind, it seems that paradoxically the idea that the world was about to end is a later idea, although this may not be sustainable considering the apparently apocalyptic focus of much contemporary Judaism. It’s also possible that Paul was influenced by Gnosticism, because his focus was on the Gentiles, who would at the time have been more comfortable with Greek ideas, although the Jews were themselves quite Hellenised at this time. He may even have been Gnostic himself, referring to “knowledge” in such texts as 1 Corinthians 8:10 –

Εαω γαρ τις ιδη σε τον εχοντα γνωσιν εν ειδωλειω κατακειμενον ουχι η συνειδησις αυτου ασθενους οντος οικοδομηθησεται εις το τα ειδωλοθυτα εσθειν;

For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 

I don’t know about you, but to me this looks a bit contrived, since the “knowledge” might simply be the usual Pauline theology of salvation.

To conclude, if Gnosticism had become the dominant form of Christianity I don’t think it would’ve been a good thing. Even as it stands, Christianity may have been instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire because people simply didn’t care about the world any more, and with Gnosticism it would’ve been even more so. It’s popular in certain circles and has influenced Christianity as we know it, pun intended, but it isn’t a good thing. It’s still quite interesting though.

Was Jesus Raped?

Very obvious trigger warnings.

I’m going to start with trolls. I’m quite keen on frequenting Yahoo! Answers Religion & Spirituality section, and have been a level 7 user on there although it’s subject to the same entropy as I’ve just written about . There’s also the usual polarisation of opinion there, with the main categories being metaphysically naturalistic atheists and fundamentalist evangelical Protestants, who unwittingly agree on a historical-grammatical approach to Scripture, apparently because they’re ignorant of other options. There are also, unsurprisingly, many trolls, some of which are hard to comprehend, but a recent apparent attempt at trolling is to ask variations of the question at the top of this post: Was Jesus raped? I don’t fully understand why this is trolling, because the chances are that the historical Jesus was indeed sexually assaulted, quite possibly even gang-raped, and it actually has quite helpful considerations.

Before I go any further, I should point out that a lot of what I’m going to say is a paraphrase of the Otago theologian David Tombs’ research, although it’s also a personal response and I’ve added more.

First, to address the idea of an historical Jesus for non-believers: most scholars agree that Jesus, that is Yeshua ben Yosef of Nazareth, did exist. The popular New Atheist idea that he didn’t is poorly informed and an example of an extreme position adopted in ignorance. These scholars, incidentally, are not religious. Many of them are themselves agnostic or atheist and don’t have an axe to grind. I don’t want to go on too much about this because that’s not what this is about, but consensus opinion is that there was such a person, that he was baptised by John The Baptist, crucified under Pontius Pilate and lived at a time of unrest when the Jews were expecting the apocalypse and the appearance of the Messiah. However, what I’m going to say doesn’t entirely depend on the existence of a real Jesus.

Beyond this, things are more controversial, but suppose someone of that description had lived at that time and that the above claims are true of him. What would have happened to him at the end of his life? I also want to emphasise that in concentrating on the question of his sexual assault, I don’t wish to minimise any other suffering he or anyone else went through under the Romans or any other oppressive regime, but rather to concentrate on an aspect of it which people tend not to think about and seem to shy away from. And I’m not setting myself up as an expert either, although of course I’m Christian, and furthermore a bog-standard Christian which most staunch evangelicals would accept as such, even though my values are highly divergent from what might be expected given that.

Having got that out of the way, there are at least three main sources of evidence that Jesus was sexually assaulted, and I also think it’s fair to describe his assault as anal rape, possibly repeatedly. These are: historical evidence outside the Bible, the gospels themselves and circumstantial evidence from what’s known to happen in similar situations at other times and places.

Firstly, historical evidence suggests that crucifixion involved other elements than what we’re told in the gospels. Here’s a fairly standard depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus:

I can’t just post that and move on. It’s an upsetting image of a real event. Forget for a moment that that’s Jesus and remember that this is something which happened routinely in the Roman Empire. Although the picture is inaccurate in various ways, and the black background presumably refers to Matthew 27:45 – “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour,” – the fact was that people did hang and suffer like this, and died from a combination of heatstroke, dehydration, suffocation and suspension syndrome – look them up if you like but this is not a medical post. But there is one probable inaccuracy which is particularly important in this context. Would there really have been a loincloth? Would the Roman authorities, having flogged him, stripped him naked and forced him to carry his cross through the streets of Jerusalem, really have provided him with a cover to preserve his modesty? Why would they have done that? Would it not, in fact, have had the opposite effect from what they intended, of humiliating and destroying his dignity in death? I don’t think so. I think that loincloth is there for the viewer and because Velázquez couldn’t have got away with depicting the Son of God, as he was seen by the majority of the populace at the time, in a seventeenth century predominantly Roman Catholic country. And just as Matthew says the veil of the temple was torn in two at the moment of his death, we need to tear away this garment, because in doing so it emphasises the sheer nothingness to which Jesus was being reduced by the Romans. This is also a society in which there was a great deal more modesty than we’re used to in the West. The hijab in Islam for men, as far as I know, involves covering the waist from the navel to the knees as a minimum, and since religious Jews, Christians and Muslims are all people of the book, it seems very likely that something like that would’ve been enforced by the Pharisees. They certainly would not have considered it okay to expose the entire body, and the nakedness of crucifixion is a significant, and deliberately sexually humiliating, part of the punishment. It very probably violates Jewish religious codes. Although it’s a mistake to assume what was the general practice in Roman-occupied Palestine two thousand years ago to be similar to modern Orthodox Jewish practice, modesty of dress is clearly important to Hassidic men today. That insult, and perhaps blasphemy, was an element of the motivation behind the crucifixion of Jews. It says, “we don’t care about your culture or your God and we’re showing it by ridiculing it as we kill you”. It’s also significant that artistic depictions of the crucifixion always, as far as I know, commit this inaccuracy, because it’s hard for them to face the probable fact of his nakedness and vulnerability in this respect.

Josephus the first century Jewish historian who may or may not have referred to Jesus in his work – many see it as an insert by later writers and a forgery – also refers to the practice among Jewish radicals of driving stakes into the recta of victims and stuffing vetch down their urethras in order to torture them into revealing the location of food. Josephus was writing for a Roman audience and is unlikely to have portrayed the Jews sympathetically, but these kinds of torture are rife in the ancient world and can be expected to have happened in other contexts even if they didn’t in the one he mentioned. Plato also describes crucifixion as being preceded by castration, so it did happen. Also, the Romans used to arrange the bodies of their victims in “amusing” poses on the crosses, and if Jesus hadn’t been castrated by that point, it doesn’t stretch credulity at all to suppose that considering that his limbs had been nailed to the cross, so might his genitals.

This is all “mights” and “could’ves” of course, but to me it doesn’t stretch credulity at all to believe that once Jesus had been handed over to the soldiers that he would’ve been raped, possibly repeatedly, as well as all the rest of what happened, and regardless of anything else. You can completely leave aside the element of sexual humiliation as a weapon of power during the crucifixion itself and still believe the soldiers gang-raped him anally. Unlike the Jews, the Romans had no sodomy taboo.

This brings me to the gospels themselves. Clearly they don’t mention anything explicit about this, and people haven’t generally “gone there” since, but considering that the New Testament is generally quite circumspect about these things and only refers to them elliptically if at all, this is not surprising. Paul’s statement in Romans 1:27 refers to homosexual male activity in these terms: “And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.”. It may also be that the writers themselves couldn’t face talking about it, or that their sources couldn’t since the accounts are not contemporary. Incidentally, if you’re worried about inaccuracy and mythologising at this point, bear in mind that the myth you might think this is is still significant and useful to many.

The gospels do refer to Herod and the soldiers dressing Jesus in a “kingly”, “purple” or “red” robe after taking off his clothes and mocking him by pretending to worship him, and to him being flogged. All of this could plausibly have a sexual element to it.

Then there’s the evidence of what happens in other comparable situations. The purpose of crucifixions was «pour encourager les autres» as Voltaire once put it, that is, if the punishment is severe enough, it’s easier to subject a population. That subjection bears a close parallel to the meaning of rape, in the sense that it’s about power. It’s entirely credible that a regime like Rome would exercise its power over its conquered peoples by subjecting them sexually, something which happened at the time routinely in war, and still happens today in that context. Taking a couple of examples, the recent Congolese war was characterised by male rape, it was used as an instrument of war in Libya, Gaddafi was sexually assaulted with a metal pipe before being dragged off and killed, and there are numerous other examples. The sexual assault and other anal rape of men is routine in this situations in modern times and is also referred to throughout recorded history.

This gives Judas’s kiss a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

Okay, so whereas I feel pretty confident that this did happen, the question arises of why it’s important to emphasise it. One reason is that it stresses the fact that Jesus was socially speaking a pretty lowly person, subject to all the suffering that we experience in our lives in this imperfect world. Jesus is the person to me as a Christian who provides me with a good example, and was able to avoid wrongdoing and selfishness in every situation he was confronted with. There’s nothing in his experience which can’t in some way be meaningfully equated with anything which happens in someone else’s, regardless of sex or gender. He is also not a person apart from the rest of us. Whereas I have a lot of respect for Islam, one of the problems I find with it is that many Muslims, and the Qu’ran itself, deny that Jesus was crucified because they don’t believe that God would allow that to happen to a prophet – such a person would be under special protection perhaps. This is not the kind of king Jesus is. Jesus is absolutely one of us, and he’s able to stand with a rape survivor and genuinely say he’s been through that too if this happened. The whole point of the incarnation is that he’s walked a lifetime in our shoes, and that’s everyone.

Another reason is that it helps to work against the denial of sexual abuse of children and others which has taken place in various churches, because there is no shame for the survivors of these assaults if they are suffering as Christ suffered, and it stresses also that the perpetrators are doing “unto the least of my brethren” what was done to Christ. The current unease about revealing this stuff, while understandable, is in accordance with the way these sexual sins have been hidden in the past when they were committed against Jesus.

A further aspect of this is that it provides a model of solidarity for the “meek”. Those who are suffering in war and totalitarian states are going through what Jesus went through, in this and in other ways. This is the kind of king Jesus is. Jesus can be seen as a freedom fighter or guerilla, and this and other aspects of his life underline this.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable to assert that as well as all the other suffering he went through, Jesus was probably raped, but it helps, because it means Christ is with us in that and there’s nowhere he won’t go to walk beside us. It’s a difficult and unnerving prospect to look at, but if spirituality is merely about comfort, is it really worth having at all?