chapter three

‘THIS BODY OF DEATH’: COSMIC MALEVOLENCE AND ENSLAVEMENT TO SIN IN PAULINE EXEGESIS

A Jew from Asia Minor, deeply influenced by his Graeco-Roman environ- ment, a zealous apostolos to fledgling , Paul remains a source of fascination to scholars today for the complexity—and paradoxically, the simplicity—of his thought. The period of Paul’s career falls outside the chronological boundaries of this study. Yet his correspondence with cer- tain first-century Christian communities offers an opportunity to observe how one dynamic visionary conceived and articulated his own understand- ing of the vast imaginative world which extended from the fertile grounds of first-century philosophical speculation. Paul’s seven undisputed letters and six disputed letters were to have such a profound impact upon later Christians that it would be impossible to examine Christian articulations of cosmic structure and the nature of fate unless we first understand the degree to which many Christians based their various convictions upon innovative exegeses of Paul. This chapter offers an examination of Pauline passages on the nature, structure and inhabitants of the cosmos. My specific concern is the degree to which Paul envisions the cosmos as a malevolent, enslaving entity: what, for Paul, is the relation of the Christian to the inhabitants and influences of the cosmos? What part, if any, does astrological fatalism play in his articulations of the heavens? I begin my analysis with the undisputed , then turn to the Pauline trajectory which the deutero-Pauline Ephesians and Colossians follow as their authors continue in the tradition of their spiritual leader. It is my assertion—and here I diverge from the majority of scholars on the subject—that cosmic pessimism within second to fourth-century Chris- tianity (particularly, though by no means exclusively, ‘Gnostic’ Christianity) finds its root not just in prevailing Graeco-Roman conceptions of a malevo- lent cosmos, but also in later exegeses of the Pauline corpus.1 Any Christian

1 Perhaps oddly, much scholarship remains blind to Pauline notions of the demonic, 54 chapter three concerned to articulate and develop the idea of an enslaving cosmos needed to look no farther than Paul. Gnostic authors, in particular, had such a profound respect and fascination for the Pauline corpus that Paul’s sta- tus as an apostle within orthodox circles teetered perilously close to the abyss for a century or so. As Tertullian observed, Paul was the ‘apostolos haereticorum.’ It comes as no particular surprise, then, that the unknown author of the Hypostasis of the Archons begins his account of the creation of humankind with a gesture of acknowledgement to Paul, or more accurately, the unknown author he believed was Paul, the ‘great apostle’: On account of the hypostasis of the authorities, inspired by the Spirit of the Father of Truth, the great apostle, referring to the “authorities of the darkness” [Col 1:13] told us that “our contest is not against flesh and [blood]; rather, the authorities of the cosmos and the spirits of wickedness” [Eph 6:12]. I have sent (you) this because you inquire about the reality [of the] authorities. (Hyp.Arch. 86, 20–28) The Hypostasis of the Archons paints a vivid picture of hostile, enslaving cos- mic beings bent on the destruction of humankind. The basic premise of this treatise—that humans must contend against evil spiritual entities— the author draws from his interpretation of Ephesians and Colossians. To determine one source for the Christian devaluation of the cosmos, then, I will discuss in this chapter the extent to which Pauline rhetoric of enslave- ment informed ‘Gnostic’ soteriological systems through specific exegetical patterns and hermeneutical concerns. enslaving cosmos as it searches for the genesis of Christian cosmic malevolence. The older generation of scholars of (Anz, Bousset, Jonas, Rudolf, to name only a few) have overlooked Paul’s influence in gnostic cosmology. Hans Jonas, for instance, in his classic study und spätantiker Geist, FRLANT 51, 63 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934) vol. 1, 183ff., suggests cosmic pessimism first arises in and spreads to Gnosticism. For a similar aetiology, see also Jörg Büchli, Der Poimandres: Ein paganisiertes Evangelium (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1987), 132. A few modern scholars, however, have been more open to Paul’s influence on heterodox Christian thinkers. Simone Pétrement, in her study A Sepa- rate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 71, stresses the twin influence of the Pauline corpus and the of John as integral to the origins of Gnosticism: “the idea of tyrants reigning in the heavens … would necessarily have to have been prepared by the Pauline and Johannine vision of the world as dominated by the forces of error.” In the United States, Elaine Pagels has examined the Pauline impact on cer- tain Gnostic writings in, inter alia, her book The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1975) and her article, “Exposition and Exegesis of Genesis Creation Accounts in Selected Texts from Nag Hammadi,” in Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson Jr., eds., Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (Peabody, MA: Hendrick- son, 1986), 45–56. In this study, because of space and time restraints, I have chosen not to examine the impact of the in early Christian cosmologies, though I concur with Pétrement and Pagels that it was as influential as the Pauline corpus.