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The Historiography of Gnosticism Chee Yao Rong View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarBank@NUS THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GNOSTICISM CHEE YAO RONG, BRENDON (B.Arts. (Hons.), NUS A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2010 Acknowledgements This thesis has been challenging for a variety of reasons but I am grateful to God for the experience and for being there for me through the entire process. There are hard lessons I had to learn at the end of my Honours thesis that I did not necessarily fully appreciate or understand then. Now, I see that it was by the grace of God that I experienced what I did during my Honours year and I hope the lessons learnt have translated into a Master’s thesis that the readers will benefit from and enjoy. To my dearest father and mother, thank you for allowing me to continue with my graduate studies and for being so understanding in those times when I have been zombie-like at home following a day of researching and writing. I love you both and am extremely grateful for the love, care and concern that you have showered me with all these years. To my brother and sister-in-law, thank you both for helping me de-stress by playing ‘Words with Friends’ with me on the iPhone. It goes without saying that I could not have written this thesis without my wonderful supervisor and mentor, Prof Lockhart. I am truly grateful for your tremendous wisdom in discerning when to push me harder and when to give me the room to breathe a little. I have learnt so much, not just academically, from you in the time you have supervised me and I count myself blessed that I got to work under you for both my Honours and Master’s theses. Cheryl, my dearest fiancée, it was only two years ago that I was thanking you as my girlfriend in my Honours thesis acknowledgements and I am infinitely blessed that I will be spending the rest of my life with you. Thank you for everything you i have done—big and small. There truly are insufficient words to express how grateful I am for you. There is so much more I could say but I suspect the acknowledgements page of a thesis might not be the most appropriate place so I will save those words for our wedding day and beyond. Thank you for being there and for just being who you are. To all my brothers and sisters at SJSM, thank you for the prayers, the encouragement and for journeying with me through this entire process. I have grown and learnt so much in the time that I have been with all of you and please forgive me for not naming you individually because there are simply too many to name. If you read this and are wondering if you really did bless me in one way or another, the answer is a resounding ‘YES’. My fellow graduate students, how could I have survived my Master’s without the silly antics, laughter, fun, and stressing over deadlines that we all shared? Thank you for being the wild, wacky bunch whom I will remember and for the many meals and conversations that I am privileged to have been a part of. I also want to say a big ‘THANK YOU’ to Kelly for all that you did for the department and us while you were there. We all miss you dearly at the History department and we will all meet up for a nice Peranakan meal soon! To the staff at Trinity Theological College, thank you for generously granting me access to the resources at your library. I especially would like to thank Michael for the tremendous help you have rendered from my Honours year through to the end of my Master’s. May God bless all of you and the important work that you do. My heartfelt thanks also goes out to the staff at TCC Anchorpoint. Thank you for allowing me to hog a table there so that I could do my research and write my ii thesis. Thank you all for the conversations that helped to break the monotony of reading and writing and for being friends. I will certainly come back again and this time, I promise not to stay so long! To my fluffy bunny, Pebbles, I know you cannot read this but I am grateful for the times after a stressful day when I could just plop you next to me on the sofa and ‘watch’ TV with you. You are possibly the most affectionate bunny I have met and I hope we will have you around for many more years to come! If there is anybody else I have forgotten to thank, please forgive me. My disclaimer is that writing this thesis possibly killed my brain cells at an unnaturally quick rate and in devastatingly large numbers. When (and if) my brain functions normally again, I will definitely drop you a text message or an email. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Summary v Introduction 1 The Historiography of Gnosticism Chapter One 17 The Gnosticism-Christianity Debate Chapter Two 38 The Intellectual and Cultural Context for Public and Media Receptivity toward Gnosticism Chapter Three 58 Reconstructionism and Deconstructionism in the Gnosticism-Christianity Debate Conclusion 85 Historicising the Gnosticism-Christianity Debate Bibliography 105 iv Summary Media coverage of Gnostic texts such as the Judas Gospel and the popularity of The Da Vinci Code—a novel that draws on Gnostic themes—are symptomatic of a broader trend where scholars, the media and the public have become increasingly interested in alternative ‘Christianities’. One of the main features of the increased interest in Gnosticism is the argument by revisionist scholars of Gnosticism that the Nag Hammadi discoveries comprise Gnostic texts that should challenge the orthodox Church’s portrayal of the history of Christianity. In this thesis, I explore the historiographical issues inherent in the Gnosticism-Christianity debate. At the heart of the Gnosticism-Christianity debate is a battle of historical narratives, with the Church holding to a single, exclusive narrative that is incommensurable with the alternative versions of the history of Christianity found in the Gnostic texts. On the one hand, revisionist scholars of Gnosticism maintain that Gnostic texts contain legitimate ‘truths’ that the Church unfairly excluded during the canonisation process, leading to an incomplete and inaccurate portrayal of the history of Christianity. On the other hand, evangelical scholars hold that the distinction the Church made between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ is legitimate and thus, the Church was right to exclude the Gnostic texts in their efforts to preserve a ‘true’ narrative that accurately reflected the history and doctrine of orthodox Christianity. In the course of the thesis, it will be shown that historiographical concerns such as the ‘truthfulness’ of the text, whether one ‘truth’ can be inherently superior to another, and the validity of a master narrative for the history of Christianity figure prominently in the Gnosticism-Christianity debate. In addition, the positions of v revisionist scholars of Gnosticism and evangelical scholars of Christianity in the debate are influenced by whether they identify more closely with deconstructionist or reconstructionist principles. As revisionist scholars display an inclination towards the views of deconstructionists, they believe that it would be unwise to exclude the multiple ‘truths’ that Gnostic texts have to offer the history of Christianity. In contrast, the views of evangelical scholars cohere with reconstructionist ideas and these scholars believe it is both possible and desirable to arrive at an exclusive and objective ‘truth’. Within the context of the Gnosticism-Christianity debate, evangelical scholars thus believe the Church’s portrayal of the history of Christianity to be a valid master narrative that is incompatible with competing versions of it. vi Introduction: The Historiography of Gnosticism Historically, discourses of normative Christian identity formation have defined Gnosticism in at least three different ways: all varieties of Christianity that have an insufficient or overly critical appropriation of Judaism; an external contamination of pure Christianity—where Gnosticism is either an independent religion or a secondary deviation from the orthodox Christian gospel; or any of a variety of traditions said to be closely related to the afore-mentioned ‘contaminated’ Christianity, regardless of whether they contain explicitly Christian elements, such as in Hermeticism, Mandeism and Manichaeism.1 A substantial body of the original material on Gnosticism stems from the work of its opponents—Christian apologists and religious philosophers, some who held Episcopal office and whom Catholic theology later elevated to the status of ‘Church Fathers’.2 For example, Irenaeus’—regarded as the first Church Father— main work Exposure and Refutation of the Falsely So Called Gnosis can be considered a sizeable ‘store-house of Gnosticism’.3 While Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Tertullian had works that ‘included a good deal of vituperation in their attacks against heretics’, later Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria 1 Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 4. 2 Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature & History of Gnosticism (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), p. 9. 3 G.R.S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), p. 147. 1 and Origen made a more concerted effort to understand their Gnostic opponents.4 Nonetheless, all the Church Fathers considered Gnosticism heretical and, despite the Church Fathers never using the term ‘Gnosticism’, their detractions have supplied most of the information on ancient Gnosticism in addition to criteria for defining and evaluating it.5 As scholarship on Gnosticism developed over time, the view of the Church Fathers would not prove to be immutable.
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