Drove to Ohio today. It was a nice enough drive interspersed with four thin fingers of thunderstorms – heavy, torrential rain on I65 and I71 that only lasted for a few miles, but reduced visibility to 20 yards or so.
Judy read from the Gnostic Gospels. Fascinating read. Gnosticism’s
Christian form grew to prominence in the 2nd century A.D. Ultimately
denounced as heretical by the early church, Gnosticism proposed a
revealed knowledge of God (gnosis
meaning knowledge
in
Greek), held as a secret tradition of the apostles.
This book talks about a recent (well, circa 1945 or so ago, but recent based on the scale of events) find at Nag Hamadi of a bunch of gospels (Thomas’, Mary Magdalene’s) which was declared heretical and virtually stamped out by the orthodox church by the start of the second century after Christ when the orthodox churches were combined into a “catholic” church and the gospels that did not meet the party line were excised and destroyed.
I learned a lot about the politics of the church in the early years (including how having witnessed the resurrection was a keystone in acquiring legitimacy in the church). The revelations about Mary Magdalene were very interesting as well.
Gnostics focused on the self rather than the community. They were utterly non-judgmental, to the point that they would not confer superior status to any one individual, as the Catholics did with their bishops, but rather they would share the duties of worship leader, hymn leader, deacon etc., and take turns alternating different people through the positions. Women participated in the worship service on an equal basis with men, rather more like modern Protestants than the seemingly misogynist Catholics of that era. The gnostics believed that those who received gnosis, or hidden knowledge, transcended the authority of the church.
It struck me that the forbidden Gnostic gospels were very similar to the teachings of Hinduism (Gnosticism celebrates God as both Mother and Father, shows a very human Jesus’s relationship to Mary Magdalene, suggests the Resurrection is better understood symbolically, and speaks to self-knowledge as the route to union with God, the deity being in all of us, the material world merely Vishnu’s maya, etc). Too bad that this version of Jesus’ teaching lost out politically, I find it more palatable than the conventional teachings.
It was a very fun drive.
manoj