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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Historical Jesus and Gnosticism in US News & World Report
Interesting article in the popular media, quoting Elaine Pagels, NT Wright, Ben Witherington, etc.
Why some old books are stirring up a new debate about the meaning of Jesus (the page links to an earlier article on James Tabor's Jesus Dynasty theory.)
The December 12 article is an essay on the culture wars and gnosticism. If you find the hard copy, there is a picture of St. Athanasius paired with a photo of NT Wright which makes them look like twins.
Quote:
Most threatening to the orthodox position, though, was the Gnostics' interpretation of Jesus and the Christian message: To the Gnostics, or at least to many of them (there were various schools, with names like Sethians, Marcionites, Valentinians, and Thomas Christians), Jesus was not the son of Yahweh sent to redeem fallen humanity through his death and Resurrection; he was an avatar or voice of the oversoul sent to teach humans to find the sacred spark within. This was a view of Jesus that made priests and even churches peripheral, if not irrelevant, to salvation. Salvation was not the redemption of embodied creatures or the world they inhabited (bringing the kingdom of God to this world) but freedom from the body and the physical world. And to attain this salvation, one needed only to turn within. "For Gnostics," writes Pagels, "exploring the psyche became explicitly what it is for many people today implicitly-a religious quest."
Throwing down the gauntlet. As Pagels presented them, the Gnostics came across as forerunners of modern spiritual seekers wary of institutional religion, literalism, and hidebound traditions. Free of sexism and paternalism and unburdened by an emphasis on guilt and sin, the Gnostics' highly esoteric and intellectual approach to the sacred was one that even enlightened skeptics could embrace. At the very least, Pagels suggested, the Gnostic tradition would have made Christianity a more appealingly rational, tolerant, and expansive creed had the orthodox not suppressed it and largely driven it out of existence.
Pagels today says she would revise many parts of her bestselling book, including its title. Along with several other scholars of early Christianity, including Michael Williams and Karen King, she now rejects the label Gnostic as an imprecise name for the many different movements to which orthodox heresy hunters applied it. "I've come to think of them simply as the 'other' Christian gospels," Pagels says. While she insists her book is often misread as arguing that the "good guys lost," she does not deny that she intended to challenge Christian traditionalists, Protestant and Roman Catholic, on many points of theological and historical interpretation. . . .
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If the Gnostic perspective is not really that new, and if its seminal ideas are already planted in the heart of modern western, and particularly American, culture, why are the defenders of orthodoxy so troubled by the arguments of modern Gnostic enthusiasts? Perhaps it is a matter of self-defense on the part of those who see delicate historical and theological truths on the verge of demolition. From the second to the 20th century, Johnson writes in the Roman Catholic journal Commonweal, the "tripod of creed, canon, and apostolic succession not only shaped Christian orthodoxy but provided the strategy for Christian self-definition. ... Today, I would argue, a 'new Gnosticism' not only threatens the shape of Christian faith, but does so by questioning the reliability and authenticity of this traditional frame of self-understanding."
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12-17-2006, 11:27 PM
Gnosis = Science?
