Is it possible to place proto-gnosticism safely in the first century?
A few thoughts that have led me to think this is safe:
1) Given the typical datings, proto-Luke is safely in the first-century.
2) Proto-Luke seems to be at least the basis of Marcion’s Evangelion (if they were not simply the same book), and Marcion was a gnostic. So conducive to a gnostic interpretation was the Evangelion that anti-Marcionite authors accused Marcion of deliberately falsifying the gospel to support his theology (a charge that I think is generally rejected today, in favor of the view that Marcion’s gospel was just the gospel that was current in his community).
3) As Bart recently noted in a blog post, Luke changes the apocalyptic imminent kingdom (where “imminent” means chronologically near) to an imminent kingdom in the sense of “already within you” (e.g., Lk 17:21), just like we see in the gospel of Thomas (3).
4) Luke seems to oppose marriage, and to think of those “worthy of the kingdom” as already in angelic form. See Lk 20:34-36 (consider also Lk. 23:29, Lk. 20:36, compare with Thomas 22), and a longer discussion ** you do not have permission to see this link **
In other words, it seems we already have in canonical Luke (and I expect in proto-Luke too) several key ideas that lead gnosticism: The kingdom is not a thing to come (even if it’s coming soon) is *already* present, most people just can’t see it; those who are children of God are already angelic (even though most people can’t see this and aren’t aware of it–hence the importance of gnosis). Marriage and procreation are for children of this age, not for the angelic children of God.
And it would make sense that this transition would happen about the time of the Gospels (that is, well before the end of the first-century) as the apocalyptic message definitely failed.
It makes perfect sense: “The kingdom of God is at hand” turns into a gnostic message of “the kingdom is in you”, because the grand prophecies of an imminent eschaton didn’t materialize as foretold. The first generation died off without the son of man coming in power in any visible way. So that message had to be reinterpreted in a gnostic way: The kingdom *is* at hand. The son of man *has* come, but only the sons of God can see that it has.
Did you mean imminent vs immanent?
Well, that was embarrassing. Yes, I conflated them (and I didn’t mean to attribute that language to BDE). The point stands without the fun play on words though (and BDE does think that Luke changes an imminent eschaton to an immanent one, again without the word play–see below).
can you please point me to this post of Bart’s?
He makes the argument ** you do not have permission to see this link **.
He preferred “among” to “within” when speaking to the Pharisees here. Very interesting if he’s changed his mind.
He continues to use “among” rather than “within,” but he still points to this as evidence of Luke de-apocalypticising the Gospel and making it about the present state of affairs rather than something to be realized in the future.
I apologize if I was too fast and loose in stringing the ideas together; I didn’t mean to give an inaccurate impression of what Bart is saying.
Gratefully noting the corrections, I’d still go back to the original question:
Assuming that Bart has good exegetical reason to take ‘entos’ as “among” rather than “within” does it really change the basic question? Luke has made the kingdom of God something already present during Jesus’ ministry; no longer something ushered in by the grand entrance of the son of man in power, but something quiet and hidden that only those with some special insight are cognizant of. And again, even if ‘entos’ means ‘among’ not ‘within,’ destroying any facile conflation of Luke with Thomas, it’s still the case that Luke says that those who are worthy are–even as he spoke–already like the angels, children of God, unable to die (Lk 20:35-36). So even if it’s not that the kingdom of God, per se, is within the individual believer, there is something invisible and superhuman already present in the individual believer.
And–even if BDE is right that Luke still expects the eschaton in his own life–it seems this development to something invisible and pseudo-divine (angelic) in the individual believer–is an attempt to save Jesus’s preaching an imminent kingdom after that kingdom didn’t arrive on schedule. If it seems like Jesus’ most emphatic predictions of the kingdom failed, that is only because you didn’t have the eyes to see the reality he was actually talking about.
It seems to me that that alone provides a satisfactory basis for placing Luke as a key moment in the development of what will become Gnosticism. Adding in the stuff about his aversion to marriage and reproduction, his approval of divorce, and his subsequent use by Macrion only reinforces the case.
I perhaps ought to make explicit another motivation for this line of inquiry:
I’m bothered by the insistence (and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this from Bart) that Gnosticism is a movement of the 2nd century, used as a rebuttal to the suggestion that some writing of the first century is Gnostic. And, in the same vein, it is treated as a totally discrete movement, as though it sprang full grown from the head of Zeus.
It may been that we see a mature and developed Gnosticism, a la Valentinus, only in the second century, but surely that developed continuously from something prior. To say otherwise not only stretches credulity–presumably anyone who cared enough to develop a complicated Christian world-view started from some already extant form of Christianity–it grants the heresiologists their talking point about Gnosticism as an utterly novel corruption lacking all continuity with anything prior.
I’m excited by the proposal I started with, as it seems to bridge the gap elegantly. (Proto-)luke is trying to make sense of an apocalyptic messiah whose prophecies have failed to come true in any visible way. They did come true–they were already true at the time–you just needed the gnosis to realize it. Sort of like Rex Mottram:
“Suppose the pope says that it’s going to rain tomorrow. Does that mean it will rain?”
“Oh yes Father.”
“But supposing it doesn’t rain, what then?”
“Well … Uh … I guess it would be, ah, spiritually raining. Only … We were too sinful to see it!”
I think Luke might be thinking of the state of the children of the resurrection as they will be in the resurrection perhaps after their death or after this age is over. How would you try to convince me otherwise? . . . where does he speak of individual believers as pseudo-divine?
I feel like you are setting a trap for me, but here goes: The verbs are present tense and nothing indicates it is some sort of timeless present. As much as he says they neither marry nor are given in marriage, so much when he says they cannot die, describes them as like angels, and calls them sons of God.
those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry (gamousin) nor are given in marriage (gamizontai). They can no longer die (dynantai . . . apothanein), for they are like angels (eisin); and they are (eisin) the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.
Note how Luke changes the text of Mark (“For *when* people rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are [at that time] like angels in heaven.”)
Do you perhaps have traumatic memories of some for of Inquisition?
No, nothing like that. I do have a fair amount of experience with debates of various levels of formality and in various formats, and when an interlocutor who knows the material far better than I do, and who is habitually careful and studied in his responses, asks the equivalent of “what would ever make you think that” after I said something that seems like a fairly simple observation, it makes me think he suspects *exactly* what makes me think it but would rather that I go on the record giving my reason than that he put words in my mouth before he explains exactly why that thought is childish and untenable.
Perhaps I’m partly just projecting my own dispositions: If I think I see what your argument is, and if it is clearly idiotic, I’d rather give you the chance to say unambiguously what your argument actually is than shoot you down, without first establishing precisely which argument you are making, for making an idiotic argument. “How would you try to convince me otherwise?” is just the sort of question I might ask someone right before I showed him he didn’t know what he hell he was talking about.
By the way, I don’t think I ever told you how much I like your screen name. A stroke of genius.
I don’t think you have, but thank you for saying so. I loved the irony that Christian scholars couldn’t but acknowledge his authority as a logician while burying his direct rebuttal of Christianity. It really struck me.
t’s also a difficult discussion because it’s become practically taboo to speak of gnosticism in a very general sense.
It is an interesting phenomenon.
I’d hazard part of the problem is that certain gnostic tendencies get subsumed into orthodoxy itself–consider that on most Christian accounts there is a whole invisible world of grace that only the believers are cognizant of; and insofar as we want to oppose orthodoxy to gnosticism we have to draw a tighter boundary around the label “gnostic”. But taking that later dichotomy at face value seems to obscure the intellectual history that led to the dichotomy in the first place. It seems to me we need to be able to acknowledge the common intellectual and theological roots that bridge both orthodoxy and gnosticism back to Jewish apocalypticism. It seems likely to me that the branches of orthodoxy and developed gnosticsm share a common trunk.
It’s on my mind this morning, so I figure I might as well put down a few of the connections I see between apochalypticism, orthodox Christianity, and gnosticism.
First, what I mean by “gnosticism.” The beating heart of gnosticism I take to be the contention that the world is not as it seems. The most important aspect of reality is invisible to us. There is a primordial cosmic struggle between good and evil, The world we live in is a byproduct of this struggle. There is a hidden knowledge–given to us by some sort of savior–that lets us see reality as it is and thus somehow escape and achieve salvation.
Already in apocalypticism you get a certain sort of dualism. They divided the world into children of light and children of darkness, or children of this age and children of the resurrection. They were monotheists, but by the first century they had developed the idea of Satan, the prince of this world, as an anti-God figure.
I would also note here that I find it likley that Jewish apocalypticism was influenced by Zoroastrianism: The entire period of second temple Judaism coincides with a period in which Zoroastrianism was actively practiced in the area around Palestine (and there were still Zoroastrians floating around in, e.g., Syria during the first century. Note also, that though Zoroastrianism has a similar dualism to Jewish apocalypticism: though they conceive of the world as a grand struggle of good and evil, they are arguably the first monotheistic religion, and they believed in a single transcendent, good, creator God.
In early Christianity we have all that. but we also get an emphasis on hidden knowledge. Faith plays a critical part in all the major early Christian writings. Moreover, I’m tempted to see something like the gnostics’ hidden gnosis in the messianic secret in Mark and in the persistent blindness of the disciples (Mk 8:31-33 is particularly suggestive). Presumably this plays really well with the actual human experience of the first disciples, since no one expected a crucified and disgraced messiah, and the disciples’ persistent failure to understand the actual role of the messiah is reflected in all the gospels. From the beginning, Christianity appeals to a hidden knowledge to turn the spectacular and obvious failure of Jesus into a confirmation of his status as messiah.
I think this illustrates the curiosity I earlier noted: The theme of faith (and blindness) is so familiar to us as a foundational aspect of Christianity (and gnosticism feels so foreign) it is difficult to recognize how fundamentally gnostic the idea is.
This earliest Christianity faced a sort of crisis when Jesus didn’t return to usher in his kingdom within the lifetime of the first disciples.
The most predictable response–typical of failed apochalyptic prophecies–is just to double down and reset the date. Never mind what those prophecies seemed to say, the Son of Man is coming any day to usher in a glorious kingdom.
Another response to make sense of this was to look to the destruction of Jerusalem–this seems to be going on in Mark. While this sort of preterist interpretation has some considerable virtues, it also has problems: Jesus din’t return in glory to do the stuff a Messiah is supposed to do. While some corrupt authorities were overturned (e.g., the Jewish authorities), the world didn’t become a utopia.
Another possible response is to interpret the kingdom in non-physical terms. The kingdom has already come, but you just can’t see it with your eyes. This seems to me to just be reverting to the gnostic tendencies already present in Christianity from the start. This is the same theological trick they first used to reconcile their conviction he was the messiah with the notorious fact of his ignominious death. The real world, the world that matters, is not visible and most of humanity is oblivious to the cosmic battle that is playing out, even if they have some inkling of it they don’t really understand it.
These responses aren’t mutually exclusive; they can coexist in one and the same strain of Christianity. Thus in orthodox Christianity you find all three in varying degrees. Jesus did predict the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus did bring the kingdom when he gave us grace and established his church. The kingdom will yet be visibly established when Jesus returns at the end of the world to admit those who serve him to heaven.
From that point of view, gnostic Christianity spouts from the same trunk as orthodoxy and is driven by much of the same logic: When their expectations are disappointed (either when their messiah is crucified before doing any of the things a messiah is supposed to do, or when the messiah doesn’t return to finish the job as expected), they both appeal to hidden knowledge, which we must accept by faith, about the invisible, true nature of reality and the cosmic struggle between good and evil. The principal difference is that gnosticism places much stronger emphasis on the last of these responses in the specific case of the Son of Man not showing up to establish the kingdom of God as expected: the kingdom is already present now, just invisibly. Take that idea as your point of departure, simmer on it for a few decades, and it seems that something like historical Gnosticism is a not entirely unexpected result.
One could object that gnosticism, as I have identified it, is too common to be a useful category. Even Plato’s allegory of the cave might be taken as gnostic: reality is not what it appears to be; we are saved from our bondage when someone comes to us out of the light and shows us that our world is only shadows and illusions. There is some truth to the observation, and I wouldn’t be shocked if that allegory turned out to have been used by some early Christians to support their system. But the principal difference I’d point to is that Plato doesn’t appeal to hidden knowledge as a way to fix his disappointment–but that is what we seem to see in Christianity. Also, taken in context, the one who leads people to the light in Plato’s analogy is meant to be the philosopher, not some otherworldly being; the knowledge he discloses is a knowledge that anyone might have discovered if only they had looked; it isn’t hidden in the sense that we can only attain it from an angelic messenger; it is only hidden insofar as we are dull-witted and more interested in the pleasant than in the intelligible.
To be responsive to the question posed by the Sadducees with their parable of the seven dead brothers, the answer must address what takes place in the resurrection. The behavior of currently celibate believers would not be relevant to the issue introduced by the Sadducees in the parable of the seven childless brothers.
But if the point is that those worthy of the resurrection simply do not marry (in this life, never mind in the next) it would be responsive to their question, no? There is no point asking whose wife she will be as the people involved aren’t going to be present at the resurrection, so the question is moot.
I do think ** you do not have permission to see this link ** lays out a fairly strong prima facie case (from this passage and others) that Luke does disapprove of marriage. I don’t want to die on the hill, but it does look like there is a pattern of Luke editing his sources in ways that show he disapproves of marriage.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert