http://www.booktalk.org/post141179.html#p141179
DWill wrote:I haven't read The Gnostic Paul, Robert, though I want to.
Now I am up to Page 3 in my responses to comments in this thread. I note that Interbane has just said his comment was old, and I am sorry that it has taken me a month to reply, but better late than never.
The Gnostic Paul by Elaine Pagels is a highly provocative book, exploring how major early thinkers read Paul in a way that is extremely different from the dominant orthodox interpretation we now know and love.
My view is that the flagrant corruption of the Catholic Church means it is more likely that the heretical readings of Paul were accurate while the orthodox readings were a sort of Big Brother type of propagandistic distortion, although Pagels is extremely careful not to make such a heretical claim.
Even Pagels is severely intimidated by orthodox bullying, despite her powerful position as a Professor of Religion at Princeton University. It would hardly do for her to be picketed by Westboro Baptists, for example, for questioning the historical existence of Jesus Christ. So some level of caution about insulting the emotional commitments of believers may well be a strategic move on her part rather than evidence that she accepts the tradition.
DWill wrote:I find it easy to accept that an interplay of forces was involved in the development of Christianity, and that Gnosticism (maybe that should be the gnosticisms) was a major player. We say that orthodoxy won and in fact as the victor did its best to wipe out the literary traces of the heretics, but that was quite far on.
It is actually extremely difficult for us to reconstruct the dynamic between Gnosticism and orthodoxy, since the church was so assiduous in wiping out all trace of its origins. This assiduity (thorough zeal) shows that the church had something to hide, namely that the actual facts are entirely different from the fairy stories in the Bible.
I was thinking about a comparison that may help to understand the psychological motives at play. A radio program the other day about homosexuals in sporting teams explained that many gay people feel the need to conceal their sexuality in order to avoid persecution, and that in fact when they do come out they get persecuted by being bashed and dropped from the team. So we can hardly use the public information as a reliable guide to how many homosexuals there are in major sports.
It is very similar with Gnosticism, with its basic philosophical method of a focus on logic and evidence being highly unacceptable to popular sentiment that seeks signs and wonders. The cynical Gnostic despair at popular ignorance is reflected in John 4:48, where Jesus says "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe." This statement illustrates the early need to manufacture signs and wonders in order to generate belief, a process which unfortunately escaped from the control of the sorceror’s apprentices.
DWill wrote:It's likely that our imagining of two opposed camps in the first few centuries isn't quite the way it was.
I don’t think that the orthodox camp arose until much later, although there were isolated ‘true believer’ fools early in the second century who were later glommed onto by the church while the much more widespread allegorical gnostics were obliterated from history. The principle used by the church was that any text was examined for political utility, and was banned and burnt if assessed as disutilitous.
DWill wrote: Thus there is contribution from gnosticism even in the final, dominant religion that triumphed as an institution.
This contribution of Gnosticism is far bigger than is generally realised, especially with the cosmic blueprint of precession providing the entire framework for the Christ Myth. The church imagined that it could be like Lady MacBeth, with her ‘out out damned spot’ line, and remove the bloody evidence of its crimes. But this evidence was so deeply intertwined as the true vine of its origins that such efforts to hide the facts were impossible, and the Gnostic origins remained in place to be rediscovered once the social authority of the church could no longer prevent analysis.
DWill wrote:The Book of John is one example, a gnostic-flavored work that Pagels believed was canonized only because it said that salvation could come only through Christ. That was the type of restrictive statement that sat well with both the church leaders and the masses, but the rest of the book could lead one to different conclusions.
Thanks DWill for this insight that John can be read with different conclusions, which I endorse. The Gospel of John is a deeply Gnostic book, with a light veneer of orthodoxy carefully and astutely designed to make it acceptable for mass use in the ancient world.
Applying the ‘signs and wonders’ principle that the public faith had to be dumbed down in order to spread, the vision of the authors of John could only gain traction through a Harry Potter style rollicking yarn. John therefore placed the philosophy and ethics of the secret mystery origins within a magical assertion of a blood messiah among the Jews who acted for an interventionist God.
The reconstruction process now can look to both how the authors applied rational methods, and how these methods were concealed to preserve their insights and intuitions against a rampant mob.