It’s scandalous to say, because so much pop theorizing about early Christianity is anchored to it, but it turns out, Gnosticism was never actually a thing. It was an invention of modern scholars; an interpretive category, it turns out, that refers to no actual thing that existed in antiquity. Or worse, when defined vaguely enough to actually encompass anything real, it refers to every sect of Christianity and thus distinguishes none of them. The word is therefore useless and ought to be abandoned. I find myself having to point this out a lot, so clearly this memo hasn’t made it to the public yet. So I am writing this article to get you up to speed.
I came to this conclusion on my own, from my extensive postdoc research project on the historicity of Jesus. Which is why (in case readers didn’t notice) the words “Gnostic” or “Gnosticism” never appear anywhere in my book On the Historicity of Jesus (except incidentally as the title of a couple of books I cite, but not on that subject). I never use Gnosticism as an interpretive category there, or as an explanation of anything. And yet, as soon as that was published, the Westar Institute (best known for The Jesus Seminar, and of which I am now a fellow) published a report declaring the same thing, and on the same basis. That a large group of prestigious Biblical scholars independently came to the same conclusion I did, and for pretty much the same reasons I had uncovered on my own, is fairly powerful evidence we are correct about this. The odds of that all happening by coincidence are pretty low.
The Westar Report on Gnosticism
You can read Westar’s Fall 2014 Christianity Seminar Report on Gnosticism yourself. There is also a whole issue on it in the Spring 2016 edition of Forum. This is a segment of their Christianity Seminar, which will eventually become a book on leading new perspectives on the origins and early development of Christianity (part of which I participated in). As the report puts it:
The Christianity Seminar took votes of historic proportions, collectively setting aside what had been assumed for the last five generations and opening up a new collaborative path forward. With at least twenty-five internationally known scholars in attendance, the Seminar voted with substantial majorities to rule “gnosticism,” the reigning boogey man of early Christian history, out of order.
Indeed, there was not much disagreement: the votes were all solid red (which means, almost every single scholar concurred, without any significant doubt in the matter); except for on two minor points that came up pink, the more significant one being whether the decision to eliminate the concept “removes a confusing category” from further discussion. The pink vote on that likely is because some scholars thought discussing the non-existence of Gnosticism could still be valuable to the seminar’s future work, or that it should be eliminated because it is merely false, and not because it was “confusing.” But that’s a nitpick. There was no significant disagreement on several other points voted on, including the central finding that “the category of Gnosticism needs to be dismantled” because it “no longer works” to describe any ancient religion or sect. Consequently, “the idea that such a thing as ‘Gnosticism’ even existed is simply off the table.” And all this is due to “cutting-edge scholars,” including Michael Williams, David Brakke, Denise Buell, and Karen King, “who, over the past fifteen years or more, have made a thorough case against the existence of Gnosticism.” Thorough enough, indeed, to persuade a representative majority of mainstream scholars. And they’re right.
They also voted “pink” the idea of reserving the word Gnostic for one specific sect associated with the Gospel of Judas, but confusingly, in that use the word does not mean what Gnostic has traditionally meant, so in my opinion that is just confusing. Even scholars who voted the possibility of reassigning the word that way, agreed the traditional definition and category has to be abandoned altogether. So it’s time to stop talking about Gnosticism. Purge it from your vocabulary. And abandon every idea linked to it. It was all a construct of modern scholars, one with zero utility in explaining ancient Christianity.
Their Reasoning (and Mine)
To exemplify the problem, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy still has an entry on Gnosticism that says, “Gnosticism (after gnôsis, the Greek word for ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight’) is the name given to a loosely organized religious and philosophical movement that flourished in the first and second centuries.” That’s a pretty typical statement. But the Westar Institute scholars have concluded, as I did, that no such “movement” existed. What was mischaracterized as some sort of sectarian pedigree is really just a random collection of “ideas” shared by numerous diverse philosophers and theologians and sects, in varying degrees. “Gnosticism” was no more a distinct “movement” than “dualism” or “henotheism.” In fact, less so; as those at least are real coherent things that developed and spread in antiquity; Gnosticism as a whole isn’t. Only individual pieces of it.
Hence when the IEP claims, for example, “certain fundamental elements serve to bind these groups together under the loose heading” of Gnosticism, there actually is no group that possesses all of the usually-attributed features, and nearly every group possesses one or more of them, or some modified version of them, and there was no particular relationship among any set of groups one could distinguish as “Gnostic” as if in opposition to some other set of groups. For instance, every sect of Christianity on which we have any information on the point believed in a separate Logos who created the universe at God’s behest; likewise, believed some kind of secret knowledge (“gnosis”) was essential to ensuring one’s salvation; likewise, had a dualist view of the cosmos in which the lower world was corrupted by meddling divine beings and the upper world’s God was awaiting a chance to destroy it and start over, and help us escape our corrupt bodies and locations by fleeing into celestial ones.
Hence the paradigmatic “Gnostic” sect is a fiction; no such thing existed. Nearly all religious sects shared one or another Gnostic idea, including what we anachronistically call “orthodox” sects. So in fact there was no such thing as Orthodoxists against the Gnostics. In fact there was no ancient discussion of any such “group” as the Gnostics, neither calling them that, nor describing them in any of the ways modern scholars imagine it, nor conceiving any “grouping” of sects in such a way. Every sect claimed it was “orthodoxy” and every other “heresy,” and what Christianity ended up looking like in the later fourth century corresponded to no sect prior to that century. And the sects usually categorized as “Gnostic” actually bear no consistent or coherent relationship to each other, and differ from each other as much as any of them differs from the sects that eventually merged to become the ascendant “orthodoxy” of the fourth century. So there were just “sects.” Not “Gnostic” and “non-Gnostic” sects. The term “Gnostic” thus leaves us with no meaningful distinction to make with it.
I came to this realization when trying to see, in my research for On the Historicity of Jesus, if Gnosticism would be a useful category for explaining the origins of Christianity and whether Gnostic sects could be shown to be closer to the original teachings of Christianity. What I found was no sect matching what historians had come to call “Gnosticism,” just diverse sects, each having some elements of it, and no sects with no elements of it, nor all of them. Moreover, I found that anything that was being distinguished as “Gnostic” either had zero evidence of existing in the first century, or if evidenced, was evidenced as a component of what later became orthodoxy; in other words, the Christians who supposedly were attacking Gnostic sects as heretical, were from “Gnostic” sects themselves, just with their own evolved and modified ideas; which describes every sect. Every sect we find in the late second century was an evolved, modified, and different version of the original sect; and there is no way to “group” them in any meaningful sense along Gnostic lines; nor any real way to call one “orthodox” and the others “heretical.” As I wrote in OHJ, “I believe all sects deviated from the original religion and innovated freely and in equal measure, and the victorious Churches of the early Middle Ages looked nothing at all like the original faith of Peter or even Paul” (p. 64).
Hence I found the term “Gnostic” to have no explanatory utility. And let me be clear: I’m not saying that I found “no Gnosticism” in the first century, but rather, that anything called “Gnosticism” after the first century is just an evolved or elaborated version of the originating sect, launched by Peter and modified by Paul, which also evolved into so-called “orthodoxy.” In other words, everything simply evolved from that—each sect modifying in its own way what Paul meant by gnosis, or how his cosmic dualism was to be explained, or how he imagined the task of creation was delegated or corrupted, or the specific names used for that corruptor or delegated creator, and every other peculiar thing—and there was no coherent “pattern” of evolution in this that could be called “Gnostic” as distinct from “not” Gnostic. Every teaching usually listed as “Gnostic” is actually found, in some form, in nearly every Christian sect, including those now deemed “orthodox” or “proto-orthodox.” There are just different sects, each as divergent from the original sect as from each other, and with no particular pattern of change to group them by.
The Docetism Analogy
To illustrate by analogy, I also think this same fate will eventually befall another made-up category, Docetism, the supposed existence of sects that claimed Jesus only visited earth in a fake, illusory body. I think this is bogus for much the same reasons. As I discuss in OHJ (pp. 317-20; and see my more recent discussion here), I found no evidence that that actually existed as a distinct movement. Though (unlike Gnosticism) ancient authors did use the label, they imagined it was a distinct “sect,” yet used the word to label anything they thought “denied the humanity of Christ,” no matter how; and all of the texts categorized by modern (or indeed even ancient) scholars as “Docetist” are so divergent from each other and modern definitions of Docetism as to render the category completely useless. It is largely a fiction modern scholars made up, and then imposed on diverse texts it does not actually correctly or demonstrably describe. Consequently I suspect we should do away with it as well.
There were sects that taught something like what scholars mean by “Docetism,” but no two of those teachings is the same in what they teach, and most diverge significantly from how the term is usually intended. For instance, the Gospel of Peter was originally called “Docetic,” and indeed Serapion’s epistolary condemnation of it in the second century (quoted by Eusebius in the fourth century) is our earliest surviving record of that label, yet that Gospel contains nothing Docetic in it—a point scholars keep trying to point out: the body of Jesus in it is real, is mortal, actually is crucified, and Jesus rises in it. The entity that “leaves” that body upon its death on the cross is self-evidently the Holy Spirit, since the line about “he was taken up” corresponds with the line in the Synoptics that “the spirit left him” or “he exhaled the spirit” (probably the same spirit that entered him at his baptism), which the Gospel of Peter simply interprets as the soul of Jesus, which leaves (as souls always do upon death), and then returns on the third day to reanimate the corpse it left behind, just as all other Christian sects taught.
The term “Docetae” thus meant something else to Serapion than modern scholars think, who for example mistake Ignatius speaking of Christian heretics (whom he does not call the Docetae) claiming Jesus only “seemed” or “was imagined” to live and die as speaking of the same thing Serapion was, or Clement of Alexandria a half-century later (who gives us our next mention of “Docetae” as a sect that, Clement imagined, “denied the true humanity of Christ,” a notion Clement never clearly explains). But there is actually no evidence these authors were referring to the same thing at all, much less to what modern scholars think Docetism means.
Likewise, scholars will claim the Apocalypse of Peter is Docetic, but in fact it is not. In that text, as I wrote before, “there is not one Jesus in heaven and another on earth, but the real Jesus is the same person the villains seize and crucify as occupies the fleshly body they drive nails into,” it simply imagines soul and body as separable, which every Christian believed (that text is also reporting a vision, not represented as a real event anyway). Nor is the Second Treatise of the Great Seth Docetic, as it portrays Simon of Cyrene being sneaked in to be crucified in place of Jesus, which is not Docetism either, nor at all what Ignatius, Clement, or Serapion were talking about.
Conclusion
The more you dig, the less you find Docetism to have been a distinctive thing at all, much less the thing modern scholars claim. So, too, Gnosticism. Which concept not even ancient authors had invented. As King wrote, “the variety of phenomena classified as ‘Gnostic'” today “simply will not support a single, monolithic definition, and in fact none of the primary materials fits the standard typological definition” (What Is Gnosticism? p. 226; italics hers). In other words, Gnosticism simply didn’t exist. The collection of ideas claimed to be Gnostic was a random hodgepodge of notions scattered across all Christian sects, most shared in some form by all of them, and the complete collection held by none of them.
Even the proto-typical Gnostic myth (about demiurges and what not) was fabricated by modern scholars by lifting ideas found in diverse sources from completely different sects. It did not exist in that form in any ancient sect. Yes, each idea did, somewhere (some sects introduced the notion of an incompetent Demiurge being delegated the task of creating the universe and screwing it up), but the entire collection of features, nowhere. And even those ideas have counterparts in every other sect so far as we know. The Demiurge story, for example, is just a reimagined evolution of the original Satan’s Fall story, where the incompetent or evil “sub-god” ruins creation after the fact, rather than from the start—a distinction of barely any relevance. Otherwise, the idea that this creation is corrupt and evil and we have to escape it is not only entirely orthodox, it’s canonical (2 Peter 3, 2 Peter 2, 1 Thess. 4, Jude, Romans 8, Galatians 4, 1 John 2, 1 John 5, Ephesians 6, Colossians 2, 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 4-5). It is thus not distinctive of any such thing as “Gnosticism.” Likewise, the role of secret knowledge (literally, gnosis) in ensuring salvation—a fact which many orthodox authors speak of approvingly as actually a component even of so-called orthodox Christianity; as we see from Paul and Hebrews, to Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen (see OHJ, Elements 11 & 13, Ch. 4).
So the bottom line is, “Gnosticism” and “Gnostic” sects and texts has been a phantom, a fabrication of modern scholarly “interpretation” that turns out to be wrong about almost every single thing. The individual beliefs that were cobbled together and “claimed” to be Gnostic existed; but all together in no sect we know, and in part in every sect we know enough about. There was thus no such distinctive category of Christianity, no movement. Ancient authors never mention it. And there is no ancient evidence of it. Time to drop that concept and move on.
Wow! Thanks for reducing the number of garbage categories that I thought were important. Jung had written forwards to early Tibetan translations comparing Vajrayana Buddhism to Gnostic sects. The early translations by Evans-Wentz – Tibetan Book of the Dead and others – included long forwards by Jung. Long ago – before I read your work on the historicity of Jesus – I seriously planned to read the Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The last few years seem to show that Jung’s ideas didn’t hold up. Now his comparisons don’t hold up either. Perhaps Jungian archetypes are helpful in comparing similar categories in mythology and literature. I suspect though they are totally made up categories of little use like Gnosticism and Docetism.
I read Elaine Pagels book, “The Gnostic Gospels,” and I felt I learned a great deal. Now I’m wondering if I was hoodwinked! She seemed to group the texts she described as having commonalities that allowed them to be labeled “gnostic.” So if I understand what you are saying, since there was no sect or movement in the first century that fulfills a complete set of these imagined “gnostic” characteristics, there is no value in such a classification today, regardless of the set of characteristics one chooses. I think I get that, but are you equally saying that the texts that ultimately became orthodox and canonical have no distinguishing characteristics that separate them from characteristics of the texts that others have labeled as “gnostic?”
On the Pagels book, see my other comment. That might clarify some things.
On the implications of the non-existence of Gnosticism, obviously it would be tautologically untrue to say that there are no differences between sects, much less between sects declared heresies and sects that gained imperial endorsement. That isn’t what we are saying. What we are saying is that none of those differences can be coherently grouped under the heading “Gnosticism.” No such grouping existed in antiquity either. They were just “heresies” (to the ascendant victorious sectarian conglomerate). Full stop.
That said, it is also true those differences have often been exaggerated or misinterpreted or misunderstood when forced through the distorting lens of the modern fiction of “Gnosticism.” To give you an example, see my comment elsewhere here on the Demiurgic theology: that differed from ascendant orthodoxy in many trivial ways, but functionally and structurally, not in any way that actually mattered. Both are different ways of marginalizing and demonizing the Jews through a revised cosmology. So the differences are more superficial, and not as significant as the Gnosticism construct tried to pretend.
Similarly, all sects spoke approvingly of secret teachings and gnosis as a component of achieving salvation. What those secret teachings were, what the gnosis was supposed to be of, may have differed, but often again ultimately trivially. That you needed secret knowledge to be saved is simply by every sect acknowledged, even by Ignatius, Origen, and Clement of Alexandria. So there is no “distinction” to be made here that substantively matters. And what distinctions remain to be made (the trivia of what weird doctrines different sects were pushing or using as this gnosis) are hugely diverse and can’t be categorized into any dichotomous narrative of “Orthodox vs. Gnostic.”
We also, most often, don’t even know what they are—because these were secrets, we rarely find them discussed, or only so by polemicists (we can rarely trust any Christian to always correctly or honestly describe the heretical teachings they are attacking)—so the “Gnosticism” construct was instead over-used to “invent” knowledge of those secret doctrines that actually we don’t have and should never have claimed. Historians really have a hard struggle with accepting they can’t know things, creating a strong tendency to invent knowledge like this. There are many examples beyond this one (like, the vast range of scholarly “histories” of the imaginary “Q” document).
I should also add, regarding gnosis in all Christian sects, even so-called Orthodoxy, I think I see some signs of second and third century Christians deviating from Paul’s notion that everyone needed gnosis of the mysteries to be saved (probably for him even a requirement before being baptized), and pushing this secret knowledge more into the purview of church authorities, rather than rank-and-file brethren (Paul already started this, speaking of deeper mysteries reserved for Christians of higher rank); gnosis thus seems to then become the means to spread the Gospel to keep the flock saved, e.g. secrets about demonology to defeat demonic opposition, or whatever it was Ignatius thought was important about his having secret gnosis about angelic orders (he never says, and we have no idea).
I own Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels but have not read it. Am I well advised to toss it, unread?
It’s been too long since I read that, so I don’t know. Insofar as it’s a book that should have been titled “The Other Gospels” it may still have use. It would only be defective insofar as she uses Gnosticism as a category to attribute things to those “other” Gospels that actually aren’t in them, or uses Gnosticism as a causal category to explain their formation or what sectarian interests they served. Anything like that is likely to be obsolete.
So I would just caution to read it critically and pay close attention to what in it is a simple fact (that a Gospel exists, said a specific thing, and so on) and what is an inference (something she is trying to infer or deduce to “fill out” those facts). A common failing across historical academia is the tendency to over-confuse those two things and present them as the same. History as a profession has gotten a great deal better at that since 1950 but it can still happen. And sometimes the lines get really blurred; for instance, if she uses “Gnosticism” as a tool to estimate the date a text was written: that sounds like a simple fact (when a Gospel was written), but would probably not be valid anymore; so you’d have to attend extra carefully to how important her statements about Gnosticism are to any of her conclusions (like, when a certain Gospel was composed, or what it’s sayings “meant”).
I’m reading Pagels’ “The Gnostic Paul” at the moment and what I’m getting from it so far is “Gnosticism” is just another artefact of inventing the historical Jesus: nothing she writes of goes much, if any way at all,
beyond legitimate exegesis of the Pauline texts.
She seems oblivious to erasing the distance between Paul and e.g. Valentinus and rendering “Orthodoxy” and “Gnosticism” a distinction without a great deal of difference. One is just the exoteric milk and the other the esoteric meat. It’s all rock n’ roll to me!
The “Orthodox” so-called go much further and more often than not fall into eisegesis: I can’t find the “canonical” gospels or a “historical” Jesus in Paul even if I squint. Neither can I find a great deal of what makes for “Orthodoxy” in those “canonical” gospels
The puzzled and affronted followers of Valentinus were legitimately hard done by in my opinion: their inferences from Paul I don’t have to squint to see and they genuinely didn’t believe anything staggeringly different than him. This is obvious when you have binned Jesus or didn’t have that conception of Christ in the first place.
Holding on to an invented Jesus, whether it is the invented Jesus of “Mark” or the invented Jesus of Ehrman, just leads to a garblage of epicycles a la Ptolemy and his epigones.
I’m glad for the Westar Institute; but how long will it take for the loons to realise roofs are impossible without a supporting structure, the one they have spent the last thirty or forty years demolishing and being oblivious to so doing?
I think your observations are fairly on point.
sounds a lot like how the British invented the Hindu religion
I’m not sure what you mean. Can you link to some authoritative discussions?
I agree with the article’s conclusion, but I would like that you don’t ignore at least a feature of the ‘Gnosticism’: the fact that some sects hated the Jewish God and claimed that Jesus was the Son of an unknown Father (not YHWH) and he was not the Jewish Messiah of YHWH. We have evidence of the existence of this sect even in Mark, since their Jesus was reduced (by midrash from Lev 16) to the role of ‘Jesus Bar-Abbas’ (another Jesus with the only difference who he is not ‘called Messiah’, that is all his true “crime”).
This feature (worship of Jesus + hostility against YHWH) may be called anti-demiurgism to distinguish it from the abstract category of gnosticism. If you recognize his early existence, then mythicism may have a good explanation about why Jesus was euhemerized by ‘Mark’. I know that your defense of minimal mythicism doesn’t require by you to clear what moved ‘Mark’ and his insiders to invent the ‘historical Jesus’, but often I see that a criticism addressed against mythicism is its presumed not-inability of explain WHY Jesus was euhemerized.
My point is that the anti-demiurgism was the real reason and impulse to euhemerize Jesus: by reducing Jesus to a pious Jew (not only to a mere creature, but to an adorer of YHWH), then the anti-demiurgists couldn’t say that Jesus was killed by YHWH (=one of the 7 “archons of this age”) in outer space. They couldn’t say more that Jesus was the Serpent of Genesis (seen as a positive figure). Their threat could be neutralized by fabricating the Gospel of Mark.
This would explain why Jesus is provided with a mother and brothers and sisters: while the anti-demiurgists rejected the carnal procreation (in the world of the demiurge YHWH), the invented carnal family of Jesus would prove that the procreation is a good thing. In the same time, the hostility of Jesus against her mother and brothers believing him “out of himself”, would eclipse the antidemiurgist hostility against carnal procreation, by replacing it with a more banal misunderstanding between a man and his relatives.
This would explain why all that midrash from OT to prove that Jesus was the Messiah of YHWH: not only the Jews had to be persuaded about that point, but also the anti-demiurgists.
This would explain why Jesus was placed under Pilate: the Messiah of YHWH was expected in recent times.
What do you think about all these points ?
Thanks in advance for any answer.
The sectarian move to denigrate the Jewish God is not “Gnostic,” is the point. It does not distinctively come along with any other specific baggage, but just as diverse a baggage as any other sect. This is what I already point out: yes, each particular thing credited as Gnostic existed somewhere. But the collection of all of them in any one sect, much less group of sects, existed nowhere.
Hence there is no point in calling this Gnosticism. Just call it what it is. You can find weird new developments and features in every sect, including the sects that merged into later orthodoxy. They all deviated from the original.
In this particular case, this is just a different way of dealing with the same problem: distancing Christianity from the Jews. Which became increasingly important after the Jewish War. The sects that later merged into “orthodoxy” chose a different method: blaming the Jews for killing and rejecting Christ and thus accusing Jews of being unfaithful to their own God, even blinded by their own God for their wickedness, and as such deserving of everything they get (as we see in John; which is an evolution of the more nuanced critique of the Jews in Mark, on which see my discussion of the Barabbas narrative in On the Historicity of Jesus, index).
Thus we got Christian antisemitism. Other sects accomplished this same goal in a different way, by simply redefining the cosmic order by having the Jews worshiping literally a false God (the Demiurge), which simply recreates the entire antisemitic apparatus under a different set of schematic trivia. (One more borrowed from Plato than Jewish literature.)
In other words, there is no meaningful structural difference between Marcionism (which is the earliest form of what you are talking about, which was not actually “Gnostic” by any modern definition) and what evolved into Nicene Christianity. They both reinvented new understandings of cosmic history to ground their antisemitic rejection and denigration of the Jews. The minor trivial details of how they did that hardly matter in practice. And “Gnosticism” as a concept is wholly unhelpful in understanding it.
No ancient writer used the word “Gnostic”? What about Ireaneus’ book “On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis”, which is basically the Constitution of the Apostolic Church?
No ancient writer used that word of a group or sect or collection of distinctive ideas. Even that book is not about Gnostics, hence illustrates exactly my point. Irenaeus is using the word as just the Greek word “Knowledge,” i.e. that title should be translated as it is written: “On the Detection and Overthrow of False Knowledge.” It’s about heretics in general; meaning everyone Irenaeus disagrees with. Not anything modern scholars mean by Gnosticism.
This is a central point in the works of King and so on: they extensively demonstrate that it was modern scholars who tried to “spin” that title to mean something else. Once we abandon that modern construct, we can finally translate a title like that correctly, and not attach a bunch of false baggage to it the author never meant.
So you think that Irenaeus considers all heretics, including the Ebionites and Marcionites, to be Gnostics? Because the word only seems to come up in relation to particular sects like the Valentinians and Sethians.
“The first of them, Valentinus, who adapted the principles of the heresy called “Gnostic” to the peculiar character of his own school, taught as follows…” -Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.11
“And so it happens that the doctrines which have grown up amongst the Valentinians have already extended their rank growth to the woods of the Gnostics.” -Tertullian, Against the Valentinians 39
Would you say the word “Celtic” is similar since it also denotes many various groups who believed different things? Would you likewise say there are no Celts?
As for Docetism, the Gospels of Luke and John have incidents in which Jesus walks directly through people, which is not something he seems able to do in Mark and Matthew. The Marcionites had a version of Luke in which Jesus descended from heaven and they were Docetic. The Valentinians had a version of John and Valentinus’ disciple Cassianus was said to be Docetic. Do you see a connection there?
Irenaeus does not say Valentinus was a “Gnostic.” He says Valentinus borrowed some ideas from the “heresy called gnostic,” by which he means the heretical practice of claiming supposedly “new” secret knowledge about God, which heresy included any sect Irenaeus believed was doing that, not the specific secret knowledge attributed to Valentinus. Much less to anything modern scholars mean by “Gnosticism.” It would be better to translate this as “those who claim to ‘know’ things,” complete with scare quotes.
Thus, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, are not talking about the modern construct of Gnosticism, but just the generic practice of claiming any secret knowledge whatever (against what they deemed true knowledge), which corresponded to no specific sect or concepts, modern or ancient.
Docetism the modern construct, meanwhile, is not “Jesus could do miraculous things with his body.” It’s the view that that wasn’t Jesus. It was an illusion pretending to be, or fooling people into thinking it was. So far as I know, no such belief ever really existed in antiquity. Every example pointed to is not only of a completely different belief than that, but a completely different belief from every other example. That’s why I don’t think Docetism, in the modern sense, existed. Likewise, “Gnosticism.”
P.S. Someone elsewhere asked a similar question about Plotinus’s essay Against the Gnostics in the Enneads. That’s exactly the kind of thing these scholars are talking about. That has nothing to do with Christianity. It isn’t about the modern notion of Gnosticism at all, or even about a group, movement, or sect of any kind. It is simply a tract against a specific (and he means pagan) doctrine of the gods—in fact it’s simply a criticism of middle Platonist theology that followed the Timaeus. It’s title should just be translated “Against Those Who Claim to Have Knowledge,” in reference to Plato’s Socratic principle, “Only he knows who knows that he knows nothing.” The word was never intended in the way modern scholars translate and interpret it. So by rendering it “Gnostics” we completely mistranslate and misunderstand what this text even is and what it’s about.
This is the kind of thing they mean when they say we need to stop doing this. The tract is simply “Against Those Who Claim to Know Things” not “Against the Gnostics.” The latter doesn’t exist as a thing.
It is funny that when a scholar points something out, it seems blindingly obvious. Yet I would have never taken the leap to think this way. Once stated it alters the whole narrative of the triumph of orthodoxy over heterodoxy, because it ceases to be seen as one defined group against other defined groups. Rather it becomes an accretion of diverse ideas into what grew into the orthodox fold. I’m not putting this very well but I can say it will influence how I see the development of Christianity from now on. I think the phrase is paradigm altering. Thanks Richard.
Gnosticism struck out, Docetism struck out…Judaizing struck out? Is it an inning?
I don’t know what you mean by “Judaizing.”
Do you think that the scholarly assumption that a proto-orthodox sect existed at the incipient stage of the religion made it natural to group the more weird cosmic ideas together as a separate movement (i.e. gnosticism)? If they assumed the religion started with sect that worshiped a recently remembered earthly Jesus believed to be resurrected, it may have seemed like the other stuff had to come from some outside polluting movement of more mystical ideas. I take your point that such an outside monolithic movement never existed, since all those weird ideas clearly come from the earliest evidence and evolved from the beginning of the Christianity. But it just reminds me of how Bart Ehrman made the assumption that a proto-orthodox sect believing the basic historicist line was present from the start, despite being contradicted by Paul’s high christology. Just trying to make sense of the impetus of the scholarly construct of “gnosticism”. I hope that makes sense.
That’s sort of what King and others point out (with extensive historiographical analysis of scholars inventing and using the Gnosticism construct).
Man, I’m glad you wrote this. This was what I started to think when reading Bart Ehrman’s book ‘Forged’. He seemed to think it was a legitimate concept rather than a modern invention, yet everything he said about it seemed applicable to every sect (e.g., that they believed in secret knowledge necessary for salvation).
Glad to know my gut was onto something. Thanks for this!
Note: I didn’t make an issue of it in my published work citing or quoting it before, but the usual derivation of “Docetism” from remarks by Ignatius seem to mistranslate the Greek.
For instance, in To the Smyrnaeans 2, the key line in Greek is οὐχ ὥσπερ ἄπιστοί τινες λέγουσιν τὸ δοκεῖν αὐτὸν πεπονθέναι αὐτοὶ τὸ δοκεῖν ὄντες, with minor variations in word order, and the usual translation of this is something like “not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that he [i.e. Jesus] only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be,” which is often expanded to “as they themselves only seem to be Christians,” but that addition is nowhere in the text itself, not even across multiple redactions and manuscripts.
But even without that, this cannot be a correct translation of the Greek. The word “only” is not in the text (on either side). The word “as” in “as they” is not in the text. And the infinitive dokein is in the present tense, not past, so it cannot mean “seemed” to suffer; it would sooner translate, “seems to suffer.” Present continuous action. But how can they be saying Jesus continually “seems” to suffer, when it’s supposed to be a past event?
If we were to ignore the modern construct of Docetism, and thus not try to force a fit with it here, and we just translated the sentence as it appears to be written, what we have is an articular infinitive (a neuter to dokein), the Greek gerund, which translates as “seeming” not “seems” or “seemed”; or even “imagining” (dokein has diverse meanings). It would take an object in the accusative, so to dokein auton could simply be “imagining him” to have suffered (peponthenai being the perfect infinitive of “to suffer”).
This is therefore not likely indirect discourse. Indeed the presence of the article to argues against that. So it’s not “as they say, that,” but simply “as they say, imagining him to have suffered,” with the following clause something like “they themselves imagining being,” the exact meaning of which is difficult to discern (which is why translators often try to conjecture a lost word like “Christians”).
Whether that’s a correct retranslation or not, it remains a fact that the standard translations of this sentence are not correct. We therefore can’t reliably extract anything of the modern construct of Docetism from this passage.
The concept of “Gnosticism” was always very appealing to me because it’s based on knowledge rather than faith. I was curious about the origins of the movement but now you’re saying that it never existed! Why do you think scholars invented this category? Were they simply mistaken?
Follow the link I provided. That’s a whole article on why Gnosticism is a modern fabrication and didn’t really exist in antiquity.
I suspected something like this for a long time, ever since the Earl Doherty days. Whenever I found writings on or about gnosticism, it would either be general explanations without going into specifics about who they were or where and when they got their ideas from, or it would be something like this: I remember watching discussions on message boards about Jesus origins where Doherty participated. People would say things like “wow, it sounds like Paul was a gnostic!” And Doherty would be like “errmm more like proto-gnostic”. When I researched other discussions about early Christianity, people would say things like “Origen has traces of the gnostic heresy in his theology.” I was getting frustrated at that point, wondering “why is it that when gnosticism comes up in discussions, something is either proto-gnostic or has traces of gnosticism? Where are the full blooded concrete gnostics?”
Of course Gnosticists would say that there were, but when you actually try to find a “true” Gnostic, you don’t succeed. They all end up being “partially Gnostic,” indeed even the most orthodox Christians. Which is why Westar came to the conclusion that there actually is no such thing. The word simply does not describe any sect. It was an arbitrary modern-made collection of “stuff” that is really just randomly scattered across all sects and authors of Christianity.