Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels

Author:Elaine Pagels [Pagels, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400079087
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-21T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CANON OF TRUTH AND THE TRIUMPH OF JOHN

People engaged in spiritual exploration often are especially attracted to the Gospel of John; for, although written with great simplicity—and, apparently, to advocate faith—this gospel shines with paradox, mystery, and hints of deeper meaning. Thus T. S. Eliot, moved by its opening lines, wrote these in response:

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the center of the silent Word.1

Some four centuries before Eliot, another poet, the son of converted Jews, an intense young Spanish monk who would become a saint and mystic, chose John’s name as his own, calling himself John of the Cross. Now, largely because of the Nag Hammadi discoveries, we can see that, nearly two thousand years ago, many of John’s earliest readers also responded to this gospel in surprising and imaginative ways.

How did those Christians whom Irenaeus calls “evil interpreters” read John and the other Scriptures—and why did he oppose what they found there? Irenaeus warns that these people “have cast truth aside”;2 they introduce lies that entice and delude naÏve believers, but to many people their obvious fictions actually seem true. Irenaeus says that the Christian poet and teacher Valentinus, his disciple Ptolemy, and others like them have invented all kinds of myths about what happened “in the beginning,” and even before the beginning of the world, and how the unknown Source of all being, which these Christians sometimes call the primal Father and other times call Silence—since there are no words to describe this Source—first poured forth streams of divine energies, both masculine and feminine, whose dynamic interaction brought forth the universe. Some followers of Ptolemy go on to say that divine Wisdom came forth “in the beginning” and participated with God to bring forth the universe, as described in Genesis 1 through 3.

Irenaeus may not have known that such questions were widely discussed in certain Jewish circles among teachers and their disciples, who apparently influenced the questions that teachers like Valentinus and Ptolemy asked, as well as their interpretation of passages from Israel’s Scriptures—especially Genesis, the Psalms, and the oracles of Isaiah and Proverbs.

We know little of Valentinus himself, since only a few fragments of his writing survive,3 but he, too, wrote a poem reflecting on the mystery of how the visible universe emerges from the invisible Source, as Genesis 1:2 says, after “the spirit moved above the depth”:

All things I see suspended through spirit;

All things borne along through spirit;

Flesh depending on soul,

Soul bound to air,

Air depending on ether,

From the depth, fruit brought forth,

From the mother’s womb, a child.4

At the same time, Valentinus and his disciples were among the first, perhaps a hundred years before the New Testament canon was established, to place these newer “apostolic” writings along with Genesis and the prophets, and to revere the authority of Jesus’ sayings as equal to or even above that of Israel’s Scriptures.5 Ptolemy even wrote in a letter to Flora, an aristocratic Roman woman who studied with him, that Jesus’ sayings offer “the only unerring way to comprehend reality.

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