Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Those exclusive Gnostics?!

The Gnostics have been characterized as elitists and exclusivists - a characterization begun by the church fathers and kept in our common knowledge about what Gnostics are supposed to be. But were they?

This is a good question and since I've been dealing with all the children of Eve texts lately, I have had to re-evaluate this common knowledge. Yes, the texts say that the Sethians thought they were the carefully preserved race of Seth, that they even had a heavenly pre-existence. There were other races descended from Eve's other children, but the seed of Seth was elect.

Now this sounds elitist and exclusive at first glance. Until you ask the question, how do you become a Sethian? The answer is that you convert. In other words the Sethians, like the Valentinians, thought that your response to the religious message - i.e. you choose to become one of us - is what signaled that you were an elect. Certainly the Valentinians at least were concerned about proper sex so that an elect might be conceived, but one only knew if the child was elect if the child responded instantly in a positive way to the Valentinian message.

I haven't figured out how the Mandaean (modern Gnostics) notion that only children born to Mandaean fathers and mothers could be Mandaean, but I imagine that this was a later development and had to do with social issues. As the community moved and settled into new locations, intermarriage was probably a natural response to keep the faith "pure".

At any rate, the ancient Gnostic Christians look to be every bit as much like any other Christian tradition at the time. If you converted, you became part of the saved. If not, you were doomed. They were no more elitist or exclusive in terms of salvation than the standard Christians in that period (or many Christians today).

5 comments:

James F. McGrath said...

Great post! My own work on the Mandaeans of late would tend to confirm that the non-acceptance of converts is a late development, perhaps connected with the consequences of conversion from Islam. I've actually come across a few neglected references in Mandaean literature that I'll share in my conference paper in November; the well known Miriai tradition also seems to reflect a situation in which conversions happened.

Jeremy Puma said...

Definitely. I also agree with Williams' assertion that some Gnostic sects (or "biblical demiurgicals" to use his phraseology) were actually *less* elitist that other proto-orthodoxies. After all, the Gnostics were the ones who got in trouble with the church fathers for doing things like mingling with pagans and eating meat from sacrifices, behaviours that would have been perfectly normal to the Pagan cultures at the time but not so much in many proto-orthodox circles. It would seem that in many cases, the "Gnostic" sects were less exclusivist than the proto-orthodox....

April DeConick said...

James,

Great news. This was my gut-instinct so it will be good to have confirmation from the Mandaean literature! Looking forward to your paper in November.

Jeremy,

Yes. And I would add that the gnostics were the ones who were trying to accommodate the Christian myth to pagan knowledge and behavior.

Jim Deardorff said...

April,

What do you think were the main motivations for this accomodation? Pressure from peers to convert? Or a desire to make one's writing sufficiently acceptable to local Christians that they would not seek to destroy it?

José Solano said...

“At any rate, the ancient Gnostic Christians look to be every bit as much like any other Christian tradition at the time. If you converted, you became part of the saved. If not, you were doomed. They were no more elitist or exclusive in terms of salvation than the standard Christians in that period (or many Christians today).” DeConick.

Of course the import of this statement is that just like the orthodox Christians the varied Gnostic schools thought you were doomed of you did not convert to their particular view. You could therefore say they were “just as elitist and exclusive as the orthodox Christians.” Hmm. Decisions, decisions, decisions.