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Chapter One

Who Were the Gnostics?

Until fairly recently, if you were to ask about the origins of Christianity, you would hear much the same story no matter whom you asked. Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, came down from heaven. He taught the apostles the true faith and commissioned them to preach the Gospel to all nations. He also founded a church and appointed the apostles as its leaders. Sometime in the second century A.D., this organization started to call itself the Catholic Church, from the Greek katholikos, or "universal." All Christian churches today are, in one way or another, its offspring.

Human nature being what it is, however, things did not always proceed so smoothly. Groups of people sprang up who introduced their own distortions into Christ's doctrine. Some said that Christians still had to observe the Jewish Law. Others said that Christ wasn't really divine. Still others said he wasn't really human.

Throughout the centuries, the church, aided by the power of the Holy Spirit, managed to face down these heretics, as they came to be called (from the Greek hairesis, or "sect"). To this day, the Christian church has preserved Christ's teaching in its pure form, thanks to the countless Church Fathers and theologians who fended off the assaults of error.

As I say, this was the standard picture of Christian history until comparatively recently (although, of course, certain details had to be adjusted depending on which denomination was telling the story). And this is the picture in which many sincere Christians still believe. Unfortunately, as modern scholarship has discovered, it's not entirely accurate.

If you read the Gospels carefully, you will notice that Christ does not talk much about theology. He has a lot to say about ethics, about loving your neighbor, and about going to God with inner sincerity. He argues often and heatedly with scribes and Pharisees about sacrificing the spirit of the Law to the letter. But he does not argue with them about the nature of God, nor does he even say who or what he himself is. His disciples keep asking him, but he never gives them a clear answer. If you were to summarize Christ's teaching as found in the Gospels, you might turn to a verse from the prophet Micah: "What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Mic. 6:8). Christ says much the same thing in the episode of the Two Great Commandments (Matt. 22:35-40; Mark 12:28-31). There's not much theology in that.

This was the heart of Christ's teaching, and he no doubt had good reasons for stressing the things he stressed. But once Christ himself was no longer on the scene, his disciples began to teach his message in their own ways, and these ways soon began to diverge. Some stayed close to the Jewish religion; others moved away from it. You can see this in the New Testament, where Paul quarrels with the church leaders over whether Gentile converts need to follow the Mosaic Law. (The dispute is described both in Acts and in Paul's letter to the Galatians. Acts makes the whole affair sound considerably more peaceful and dignified than Paul does: Acts 15:1-31; Gal. 2:1-16.) There were other differences as well. Some emphasized a more external faith; others saw Christ's teaching in a more mystical light.

By the second century A.D., if you were to take a look at the Christian community in the Roman Empire, you would undoubtedly find a number of different, often conflicting, groups who understood the master's teaching in various ways. Some would see Jesus as a great spiritual master and nothing more. Some would resemble early versions of the Catholic or Orthodox churches today, with bishops and sacraments; others would probably look more like philosophical study groups or mystical schools. And although it would be far from true to say that these different bodies lived in perfect harmony, none of them had any special privileges, and so they all had to coexist. This picture would change radically only in the fourth century A.D., when the emperor Constantine first legalized Christianity and then began to turn it into the state religion of the Roman Empire. At this point the proto-Catholic Church -- which was previously only one strain of the Christian tradition -- consolidated its power by suppressing its Christian as well as its pagan rivals.

Christian history is, as a result, a sad and often heartbreaking story, where great Church Fathers (some of them later canonized as saints) heaped anathemas upon alleged heretics over points of doctrine that Christ and his disciples would in all likelihood neither have cared about nor even understood. At the same time the essential teaching of Christ -- to "love thy neighbor as thyself" -- was often sacrificed to this doctrinal squabbling, turning the church itself into a merciless persecutor.

The ancient Gnostics were one of those lost strains of Christianity. Who were the Gnostics, and what were they like? This isn't always easy to figure out, because much of the material we have about them comes from Church Fathers who were writing anti-Gnostic polemics. We are thus somewhat in the position of a future historian who would have to piece together a Democratic Party platform using only Republican campaign commercials as sources (or vice versa).

Fortunately, the situation has improved of late, thanks to the discovery of Gnostic texts at various archaeological sites in the Middle East over the last century. The most celebrated of these took place at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. Two peasants, digging for fertilizer, unearthed a cache of scriptures, many of them previously unknown, that cast an entirely new light on Gnostic teachings. This discovery is so important that it in itself is one of the main reasons for the resurgent interest in Gnosticism. The Nag Hammadi texts were written by different authors at different times and represent the views of a number of sects and teachers. But they still offer an extremely valuable window onto a tradition that had previously been known mainly through the words of its enemies.

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Excerpted from Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to the Da Vinci Code by Richard Smoley
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