Gnosticism, the religious rival that lost out to orthodox Christianity in ancient times, has become fashionable again thanks to Dan Brown’s huge-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code” and the efforts of professors such as Princeton’s Elaine Pagels.
Harvard University picked Pagels to deliver its prestige-laden William Noble Lectures in theology for 2001. But this year’s Noble lecturer, scholarly Church of England Bishop N.T. Wright, assailed Gnostic chic.
He said the central issue is: “Do we or don’t we believe in a good God who made the world?”
For Wright, that’s no esoteric scholarly issue. He told the Ivy Leaguers that Gnosticism – ancient or modern – fosters spiritual elitism and political escapism, and undercuts truth and social betterment.
“Da Vinci” was popular because it “tapped into a deep desire in our culture for secret knowledge,” Wright said, and similarly, Gnostics conveyed Jesus’ supposed secret teachings to a spiritual elite.
Like “Da Vinci,” Gnosticism claimed that “Christianity as we have known it was based on a gigantic mistake” and “the church has hushed up the real Jesus,” he said.
That false history, the bishop asserted, appeals to growing numbers of Westerners who think truth cannot be known, distrust authority, seek private spiritual experience and love conspiracy theories.
Analysts will doubtless debate Wright’s remarks about 21st-century Gnostic-style thinking. But his depiction of ancient Gnosticism is well-documented by the “Gospel of Judas,” a rediscovered Gnostic text released last spring by National Geographic amid intense promotion.
That text is analyzed in Wright’s latest book, “Judas and the Gospel of Jesus” (Baker Books) and in “The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot” (Oxford University Press) by Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina.
The books largely agree about the substance of “Judas” and Gnosticism. However, Wright dislikes the way skeptic Ehrman (such as Pagels and Brown) promotes writings that early Christians kept outside the New Testament on grounds that they weren’t authentic.
Despite the “Judas” hoopla, Ehrman and Wright say it expresses classic mid-second-century Gnostic ideas but reveals nothing reliable about Judas or Jesus, both of whom lived more than a century earlier.
“Judas” turns the New Testament inside out, presenting Judas not as the infamous betrayer but as a hero. It claims that Jesus asked Judas to hand him over to the authorities for crucifixion so he could escape this evil material world.
“Judas” assailed Judaism’s biblical God, who was considered stupid or evil because he created this corrupt material world. Like Jesus, Gnostics were supposed to realize they were trapped in their bodies and this world and seek escape into the divine realm.
At Harvard, Wright pursued the provocative theme that the otherworldly Gnostic outlook erodes the basis for work to improve society; if the world is evil, or at least confusing and discouraging, why not seek private escape, as both left-wing and right-wing spiritual movements often do?
But Jesus prayed that God’s kingdom would “come on earth as it is in heaven.” Wright observed that it was the early Christians, not the Gnostics, who challenged the Roman Empire and suffered persecution as a result.
Brown mistakenly said Gnostic writings presented a merely human Jesus, while Christians chose only the four New Testament Gospels to show Jesus as divine. Actually, it’s the opposite. Gnostics typically thought Jesus was divine but merely appeared to be human, while Jesus’ full humanity as well as divinity is central to New Testament teaching.
This year’s “Judas” rediscovery has provoked other vigorous reactions.
For instance, Catholic exegete Luke Timothy Johnson of Atlanta’s Emory University excoriated the Geographic’s book about the text because it said “Judas” was “as valid as the version told in the New Testament.” He said the book mingled “half-truth, distortion and flat-out error.”
And Jewish scholar Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., declared that the message of “Judas” is “not good for the Jews, and not good for the Christians, either.”
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