Those fun, tolerant Gnostic Christians

I finally read an article from last fall about a second-century artifact found in Rome, which is an inscription probably connected with the Gnostic Christian heretic Valentinus. It’s an interesting article and shows some of the esoteric Gnostic Christian teachings.

While it’s informative, there’s a striking agenda in it as well. In the middle of the article, there’s a description of the Gnostic attitude toward martyrdom, which echoes an observation from Larry Hurtado that I posted last year:

But there were some important differences between Valentinians and other early Christians. “Valentinians in particular, and gnostics more generally, most of them wouldn’t, for example, get martyred,” McKechnie said. “They wouldn’t think it was wrong or unlawful to do the things that Christian martyrs refused to do, like take an oath in the name of Caesar or offer incense to a statue or that kind of thing.”

The reason for their lack of bias has to do with the Valentinians’ beliefs about all things physical. “They believed that not only matter and the physical world was evil, but also that matter and the physical world was unimportant,” McKechnie said. “Therefore, it was unimportant what you or what your body did in the physical world.”

“It’s mostly about the world of the mind.”

Valentinians were also likely influenced by earlier Greek philosophers such as Plato, Snyder has found, though he doesn’t think they would have interpreted the story of the resurrection of Jesus in a literal way.

“It’s certainly not the case that they would have considered that to be a physical resurrection,” he said. “Christians of this particular variety (who incorporated Plato’s philosophy) generally speaking saw the material body as something not so desirable, not so good.”

Wow, what a healthy attitude. What I do with my body is not important, just what’s in my mind. I wonder how they taught their kids not to hit their siblings. “But, Dad, I was loving Julius in my mind. It’s not important what I do with my fists.” And don’t we wish all people could be flexible enough to violate their consciences like those cool Gnostics?

The last two paragraphs of the article drive home the spin:

Snyder said that the mix of Christian and pagan traditions in the inscription is striking. He told LiveScience that he’s studied early Christian paintings on the Via Latina that mix biblical themes, such as the story of Samson or the raising of Lazarus, along with figures from classical mythology, like that of Hercules.

“Those kinds of things I find particularly interesting, because they seem to suggest a period of time in which a Christian identity is flexible,” Snyder said. “Is it just a simple either/or between pagan and Christian?” he asked. “Or is there really something rather like a spectrum? Or are you really sort of both in certain respects?”

There’s probably a way in which Christian identity is flexible in any age. Being in the world and not of it, the reality that being made more Christlike is a process, the difficulty of establishing the right relationship between Christ and culture, and the pressure to conform to the world mean that Christians in any age will have difficulty untangling themselves from the sinful aspects of their culture. So in one sense, this kind of thing is not that surprising. This was a time where Irenaeus and other Christian leaders were contending for the correct understanding of these issues, resulting in creedal statements and the movement toward a canon of Scripture.

Secondly, good grief! The martyrs might have interested to hear that this was a period of flexible Christian identity. In fact, that’s really what the persecutors wanted them to adopt, wasn’t it? To be more flexible on issues of incense-burning and honoring the Roman gods?

Resurrection and the Christian life in the ancient church

I stumbled on a Slate column by Larry Hurtado of the University of Edinburgh the other day. It’s a short but interesting piece. In his discussion of the origins of the belief in resurrection, he gives a late date (2nd century BC) for Daniel but also takes the discussion between Jesus and the Saducees seriously. I’ve often wondered what the Hebrews believed about the afterlife. Perhaps some readers have ideas about when God revealed the idea of an afterlife and resurrection. Was it from the very beginning or was it later? Perhaps readers have some ideas.

The last three paragraphs of Hurtado’s article stuck out:

In Christianity’s first few centuries, when believers often suffered severe persecution and even the threat of death, those who believed in Jesus’ bodily resurrection found it particularly meaningful for their own circumstances. Jesus had been put to death in grisly fashion, but God had overturned Jesus’ execution and, indeed, had given him a new and glorious body. So, they believed that they could face their own deaths as well as those of their loved ones in the firm hope that God would be faithful to them as well. They thought that they would share the same sort of immortal reaffirmation of their personal and bodily selves that Jesus had experienced. Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, has argued that those Christians who regarded the body as unimportant, perhaps including “Gnostics,” were less willing to face martyrdom for their faith and more willing to make gestures of acquiescence to the Romans—for example, by offering sacrifices to Roman gods—because they regarded actions done with their bodies as insignificant so long as in their hearts they held to their beliefs.

By contrast, Christians who believed in bodily resurrection seem to have regarded their own mortal coils as the crucial venues in which they were to live out their devotion to Christ. When these Christians were arraigned for their faith, they considered it genuine apostasy to give in to the gestures demanded by the Roman authorities. For them, inner devotion to Jesus had to be expressed in an outward faithfulness in their bodies—and they were ready to face martyrdom for their faith, encouraged by the prospect of bodily resurrection. Indeed, Christian martyrs are pictured as engaged in a battle with the Roman authorities (and the Devil, whom Christians saw as behind Roman malevolence toward them), with the martyrs’ bodies as battlegrounds in which the integrity of their person and their personal salvation could be lost or retained.

Historically, then, how Christians have understood Jesus’ “resurrection” says a lot about how they have understood themselves, whether they have a holistic view of the human person, whether they see bodily existence as trivial or crucial, and how they imagine full salvation to be manifested. Does salvation comprise a deliverance from the body into some sort of immediate and permanent postmortem bliss (which is actually much closer to popular Christian piety down the centuries), or does salvation require a new embodiment of some sort, a more robust reaffirmation of persons? This sort of question originally was integral to early Jewish and Christian belief in the resurrection. In all the varieties of early Christianity, and in all the various understandings of what his “resurrection” meant, Jesus was typically the model, the crucial paradigm for believers, what had happened to him seen as prototypical of what believers were to hope for themselves.