SINCE preparing Chapter XI., on The Ideal Christ, and quoting freely from Mr. Gerald Massey regarding the Gnostics, some doubts have been suggested as to the soundness of his views. We have therefore carefully reviewed this matter, and can find no reason to abate one tittle from the conclusions presented by this painstaking and able writer.
The word gnosis, meaning knowledge, does not apply exclusively to a party or sect The Gnostics were not distinguished from Christians at first by sectarian lines. The Epistles of Paul, both genuine and spurious, recognize the gnosis, and there were Gnostic sects, as well as individual Gnostics, both before and after the Christian era. The gnosis consisted in knowing, and mainly in not accepting as historical and literal what was really only allegorical. The chief Gnostic sects held as secret their essential doctrines, and at the same time they had an exoteric statement which they gave to the common people. Even Paul, who seems to have been a first-class Gnostic, preached one gospel publicly to the Gentiles, and another which he gave “privately to them that were of reputation” (Gal. 2: 2). His teachings were highly Cabalistic, and he seems to have delighted in “mysteries.” He had no conference with any of the other apostles as to what he should teach, but went to Arabia, where he doubtless met the Essenean brotherhood, and probably learned from them instead of the Judean teachers. The Essenes were famous for the cultivation of sacred literature, and had their personified Christ, as we have reason to believe. Mr. C. Staniland Wake thinks, with good reason, that the Essenes were Mithrasts, and that they worshipped the sun, and Mithras, the Persian savior, was a personification of the sun. The Essenes, according to Josephus, treated the sun with great veneration, and offered certain prayers early in the morning, as if they made supplication for its rising. The Essenes and Mithrasts were Gnostics in that they held to a personified savior, and not a literal man of flesh and blood. The symbolism of the universe afforded models for the secrets of their religion, and their rites were introduced into every part of the Roman empire—of course including Palestine—and for nearly four centuries the Mithraic religion wellnigh overshadowed Christianity. Much that was written of Jesus indicates the characteristics of the secret initiations. It may appear strange to the superficially informed when we affirm, as heretofore, that many of those matters which Paul set forth with such seeming literalness were in fact mystic and arcane, the transcript of older doctrines, and were made up throughout of astrological symbolism.
The systems of many ancient peoples centuries before Christianity contain doctrines and dramatic stories closely analogous to the gospel story of Jesus. The Neo-Platonists held that these occult rites were merely a form of representing philosophic thought as if in scenes of daily life. While Paul refers to certain matters as apparently historical, he never overlooks their symbolic import. The interpolators of his writings misrepresented his real views, as is evinced by internal evidence in the writings themselves.
The fourth Gospel, falsely credited to John, was written for the evident purpose of opposing the Gnostic doctrine of Jesus not made flesh by presenting the Neo-Platonic dogma of “the Word made flesh.” In many places throughout the New Testament there is an implication that there were those who denied that Jesus came in the flesh: “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 1: 3). In 2 John, 7th verse, it is said: “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.” How does this comport with the assumption that the existence of the human Jesus was never doubted in the apostolic age? The ignorant and disingenuous ecclesiastics who wrote on Gnosticism in early ages always observed one rule, and that was to represent it as a mere offshoot and corruption of Christianity, invented because of disappointed ambition by apostates from the religion established by the apostles. The Rev. Mr. King, in his Gnostics, and their Remains, affirms that such representations “are entirely false.” The truth is, that Gnosticism did not purport to be a Christian system, except by a kind of syncretism to reconcile different faiths. The Neo-Platonists attempted this, and Gnostics did the same on an analogous plan. The historical existence of Jesus was little else than a concession made to the unreasoning multitude, while the esoteric doctrine was so much older as to make such an existence of no possible account except as a piece of folk-lore to hang illustrations of doctrines upon. This is the central idea of every branch of Gnosticism. The forms set forth by different expositors are secondary and incidental, liable to mislead those who attempt to place them in the front and draw deductions from them; and hence Saturninus taught that all that was considered physical in Jesus was only a phantasy, and that what was from God was spiritual only, and not at all corporeal. As for the writings of Tatian, they are “lost”—that is, destroyed—and we are under no obligations to accept what his enemies have said of them. The period was one in which calumny, slander, and forgery were the rule, as well as the main dependence for refuting an adversary. We know nothing of Cerinthus except through Epiphanius, whose reputation for truth and veracity is so bad that he would make falsehood appear like truth by his manner of telling it. Our evidence respecting Cerinthus comes chiefly from Epiphanius, who once professed to be a Gnostic (Macosian), and afterward turned Catholic, and, Judas-like, betrayed some scores of his former associates, including seventy women, to the persecuting civil authorities.
The Ophites were certainly mystics, and read everything concerning Jesus as a sacred allegory. Many think that Christos was with them Chrëstos, the good, the incarnation and associate of Sophia, “the wisdom from on high.” The “wisdom religion” was extensively symbolized. Pythagoras named his esoteric doctrine the gnosis or “knowledge,” and Plato used a similar expression to indicate the “interior knowledge.” Marcion was evidently Persian and used Mithraic symbolism. The ceremonials of Mithraism (red-cap Christians) and astral rites were adopted by the Catholic Church, besides many other rites of paganism. The Jewish Cabala and the Gnostics had much in common. The Sethites were of Jewish origin, and they held that Seth was the son of Sophia, who had filled him with the divine gnosis, and that his descendants were a spiritual race.
The Mandaites were Gnostics, as their name indicates, and they found in the system the older type of doctrine which obtained in Mesopotamia and in the old and elaborate Babylonian religion. This is seen from the fact that the names of the old pantheon were adopted.
The variety of legends regarding Jesus show that he was not an historical character. Deriving the bulk of their theosophy from beyond the Euphrates, and even much from beyond the Indus, the early ecclesiastics changed names, but retained their original ideas. Nearly all Christian festivals are the equivalents of pagan observances, as is well known. Prof. F. W. Newman denounces the assertions of Tischendorf and Canon Westcott, concerning the Gnostics as “unworthy of scholars, and only calculated to mislead readers, who most generally are ignorant of the actual facts in in the case.” “The uncritical and inaccurate character of the Fathers rendered them peculiarly liable to be misled by forgone conclusions.”
Oriental Christianity and Parseeism furnish a striking example of religious syncretism. In the Gnostic basis itself it is not difficult to recognize the general features of the religion of ancient Babylon, and thus we are brought nearer to a solution of the problem as to the real origin of Gnosticism in general.
Dr. John Tulloch, principal of St. Andrew's University and the writer of the article on the Gnostics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (ninth edition), truly says: “The sources of Gnosticism are to be found in diverse forms of religion and speculative culture antecedent to Christianity, especially in the theology of the Alexandrian Jews as represented in the writings of Philo, and again in the influences flowing from the old Persian or Zarathustrian religion and the Buddhistic faiths of the East.” He also says it is “the fact that the spirit of Gnosticism and the language which it afterward developed were in the air of the apostolic age, and that the last thing to seek in the early Fathers is either accuracy of chronology or a clear sequence of thought.”
In Appletons’ New American Cyclopedia, under the title “Gnostics,” it is said: “The Gnostics numbered two classes—the select few who were admitted to the divine secrets, and the large class of common believers who were not able to rise above the physical condition.” The point is that the Gnostics had a secret doctrine which their adversaries did not know. The recognition of Jesus as an actual person was only apparent, and hence different people differed in that respect. The doctrine came from the far East, and teachers only sought to harmonize it with the new worship, as they also did with Mithraism. The real Gnostics were the spiritual men of the times, and mere externalists could not understand them. It would be amusing if it were not so serious to see men often affecting great learning, themselves not professing orthodoxy, yet vehement for what can only be called Roman ecclesiasticism. “The letter killeth,” and “the wise shall understand.”