Loading...In my previous post I started a mini-series on Gospels that we know about but that are still lost. One of the early Gnostic figures mentioned by the late-second century heresy-hunter Irenaeus was a man named Basilides. As with the Cainites, we do not have any writings from Basilides or any of his followers, and so all we know about these people and their writings is what authors like Irenaeus tell us. That is somewhat like asking Karl Rove for a fair assessment of Obamacare. You have to take the description with a pound of salt.
We don’t know if Basilides actually had a Gospel, but Irenaeus does tell us of an episode from the life of Jesus from one of the writings used by Basilides, so it’s completely plausible that this was found in a Gospel book available to him (alternatively, it could simply have been a tradition he passed along). It has to do with Jesus’ crucifixion. And it’s an amazing story.
To understand Basilides’ account of the crucifixion, it’s important to realize (or remember) that many Gnostics did not believe that Christ, as a divine being, could actually suffer. If he seemed to suffer (he was crucified, after all), then it was in fact all an appearance. Different Gnostics had different ways of explaining how it was an appearance: some said that Christ did not have a real flesh-and-blood body, so that when it appeared that his enemies inflicted pain and death on him, they were actually unable to do so; others said that the Christ was a divine being and that Jesus was a separate, human being, in whom the Christ came at his baptism and left at his crucifixion, leaving Jesus, the man, to suffer alone, while the Christ, the divine being, was beyond suffering. And Basilides had yet a different explanation.
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Dr Ehrman:
To follow up on the last paragraph for a moment: If you had the proverbial lamp, what would be the one lost document you would most like to have lying on your desk there in front of you?
Q!!
Hello Dr Ehrman
I have a question. Doesn’t the Simon of cyrene being crucified story actually predate the NT. We see in Mark that there is an ambiguity in the pro noun which confuses whether it was jesus or Simon who was crucified. This becomes more clear when Matthew and luke both “clear up” the confusion in their rendering of the same passage. Then we notice how John goes out of his way to say “jesus bore his own cross” in other words being the apologetic book that it is it seems to be responding to a group that may have pushed the Simon theory.
What are your thoughts on this Dr Ehrman ?
We don’t have any evidence of this tradition until the early second century, in the now lost Gospel of Basilides described (years later, around 185 CE) by Irenaeus.
I
think Irenaeus misunderstood the teaching of Basilides. His mistake would not be surprising since the sect of Basilides was secretive and boasted that “only one in a thousand, two in ten thousand” could know their doctrines (Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” 1, 24, 7). But it makes no sense to see the death of an innocent bystander as being redemptive. Surely Basilides and his crew knew that many an innocent person has been put to death from the beginning of time. Why would this innocent death be any different? No, the one crucified had to be the Son of God for there to be a redemptive dimension to the crucifixion.
So here is what I think happened:
Basilides likely did teach that Simon Kyrenaios was transformed and switched places with a certain man whom the Romans were crucifying for sedition. But I suspect that, according to Basilides, it was Simon — and not the initial crossbearer — who was the Son of God; and that just moments before making the switch, the Son had descended through the seven heavens precisely in order to enter the scene as Simon and get himself crucified by mistake.
The Son of God’s aim in surreptitiously descending and switching places with the failed messiah was to deceive the “rulers of this world” (1 Cor 2:8) into unjustly killing him, thereby winning from them man’s freedom. For, according to Basilides, “those angels who possess the last heaven, which is the one seen by us, set up everything in the world, and divided between them the nations upon it. Their chief is the one known as the God of the Jews. Because he wished to subject the other nations to his own men, that is, to the Jews, all the other nations opposed him and worked against him. For this reason the other nations were alienated from his nation” (“Against Heresies,” 1, 24, 4).
The reason, then, that the Son’s laughed at the spirit rulers of this world was because he had tricked them into overreaching their authority by crucifying him. It was they—and not the Roman soldiers— who were held responsible for the mistaken crucifixion. The Romans, in crucifying the seditionist, were just doing their job, “inflicting wrath on the evildoer” (Rom. 13:4). If in this instance the Son of God used his transformative powers to trick the Romans, they cannot really be blamed for not seeing through his trickery. Human power of detection cannot be expected to be a match for the transformative power of the Son of God. But it is otherwise with the spirit rulers of this world. Since they are spirits, they are in the same league as the Son of God. And their ignorant and prideful belief that “we alone are and there is none beside us” (“Ascension of Isaiah,” 10:13) was the reason why the Son of God was able to so easily pass unrecognized through their heavens and then switch places on their earth with the seditionist.
After his burial the Son descended to the underworld to harrow it, and then rose back to his Father in heaven. Thus, in the initial myth the Son of God did not live a life on earth, i.e., no birth, no teaching, no disciple-gathering, no miracle working. That was all added later when written gospels were composed. And that is what probably led Irenaeus astray. Writing well after the composition of the gospels, he naturally assumed that any purported switcheroo on the way to Golgotha would have meant that the teaching, miracle-working Son of God got off the hook/cross. Absit!
(Incidentally, I notice that Birger A. Pearson too is convinced, though on different grounds, that Irenaeus misunderstood the teaching of Basilides. He writes: “Here Irenaeus has undoubtedly misintepreted his source…” – “Ancient Gnosticism,” p. 140).
Interesting idea. My view is that it’s really impossible to reconstruct a belief when we know of it from the one and only surviving account which gets it wrong, if you see what I mean.
What do you make of the Qur’an’s docetic views on the ressurection? Mohammad must have gotten it from Christians sharing similar views as Basilides.
Great question. I’m afraid I don’t know — but the Qur’an got it from *somewhere*!
Do you believe it to actually be docetic??
The Muslims believe Jesus never was crucified.
They believe he was one of the prophets of God in a long line of them.
The Muslim view is very close to Christian view on his return except they do not believe he is the son of God.
His mission here is incomplete and he will return to fulfill it, is the general belief of Muslims and of Jesus
Jesus was a very real person with the same message for a particular group of people for a specified time.
You will find in the Quran, subjects not in the Bible as well as many that are in the Bible.
Yes, it is docetic in an unusual way.
I, too, find Jesus laughing puzzling. As you mentioned, the occurrence isn’t mentioned in the NT, yet many Christians insist that Jesus had a sense of humor. Yet they recoil at the the thought of Jesus possessing another human quality: romantic feelings. I’m wondering if this is simply because of the OT prohibition of Asherah poles? Yahweh was not to have a consort, therefore Jesus wouldn’t have one either?
My sense is that the earliest Christians did not identify Jesus with Yahweh. And I think the reason he has no romantic attachments is that he, historically, really was an ascetic — like, say, the Essenes in the Dead Sea Scroll community, with whom he had a lot in common, and, later, the apostle Paul. All of these people were apocalyptic Jews, and they all appear to have advocated for celibacy.
of course, the teachings of Islam take information from many sources and about Jesus it’s definitely the Arabic traditions of the Jesus’ infancy and and the crucifixion it would be most probably this source. It’s but harder to explain to them, they mostly don’t even know their own book, history, theology, life of prophet. Education and honesty is the way. +::::;)