Category: Gnosticism

One of my tasks this summer was to complete a paper begun many years ago (I first presented it at the SBL Annual Meeting in 2003!). As I often do, I committed myself to finish the paper by agreeing to contribute it to a special volume of the journal Religious Studies and Theology in honor of my doktorvater Michel Desjardins, who recently retired. The origins of the paper go back to Michel’s 1995 Gnosticism class at Wilfrid Laurier University. He casually asked the class about analogues to the gnostic cosmogonies that would help readers understand and appreciate them. Eager to impress, I came up with the Pinocchio analogy and presented it to the class at our next meeting. I have used the parallels in my own Gnosticism classes ever since. Gnostic parallels to films are somewhat de rigueur these days, with lots of examples appearing in the past few decades (e.g., The Matrix, The Truman Show), but back in 2003 this one was somewhat novel and I have found that it works really well in my classes—it’s the one thing the students remember! What follows is a shortened version of the submitted paper (notes and citations have been removed also for ease of reading).

Disney famously said, “We just make the pictures, and let the professors tell us what they mean.” He was adamant about keeping religion out of his films. True to Disney’s word, except for occasional christening and wedding ceremonies, there are few explicit religious elements …

Bruce Chilton, a prominent Historical Jesus scholar, has contributed a piece on Elaine Pagels' groundbreaking book The Gnostic Gospels for the New York Sun (HERE). Thanks to Jim Davila at Paleojudaica for pointing this out.

For our penultimate class in Gnosticism we took a bit of a break and watched Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2008). For those in-the-know, Blade Runner is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick had an avid interest in Gnosticism and, though the film takes some liberties with his book, it is still suffused with Gnostic imagery and themes. Blade Runner was originally released in 1982 . Unfortunately, the film flopped but it became a cult classic and led to several further incarnations, including a Director’s Cut in 1992 and now the “Final Cut.” For more information on the film’s history, check out its WIKIPEDIA page.

After the film, we had a short discussion of the Gnostic themes and imagery we were able to observe. Several excellent ideas arose, including the identification of Replicant Roy Batty as a saviour figure (the nail in the palm and the ascending dove were tip-offs), Tyrell as Demiurge, the post-apocalyptic city as the dark earthly realm of matter, Rachael as the archetypal Gnostic seeking salvation, etc. Another observation made was that there are no children in the film. This led me to think further of my own take on it; so I thought I’d post that here to stimulate some discussion outside of the classroom. Note, however, that I have not consulted any commentaries on the film, so my comments risk being unintentionally similar to others and/or pitifully naïve.

As mentioned, the post-apocalyptic city represents …

Despite my interest in Gnosticism and all things apocryphal, I must confess that I find reading one Gnostic cosmogogical myth after another rather tedious. I have speculated before that perhaps other young religious systems went through a similar process of crafting such myths before an official one (or two) became standard. For Christian and non-Christian Gnosticism we get to see mythmaking in process—in all its joys and pains.

So, I struggled a little this week to find something in our discussion of Valentinianism that would excite me, and therefore excite the class. We ambled through the lecture material—an overview of sources, a tour of Ptolemy’s myth, a catalogue of sacraments, and a peak here-and-there into some of the texts (including the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, and the extant fragments of Valentinus’ works). Then we were left with an hour to do…something.

I decided to try our hand at Valentinian exegesis. I selected three pericopae from the gospels to examine: the Parable of the Sower, the Parable of the Unjust Judge, and the Woman with a Hemorrhage. The selection was somewhat random; I figured that we’d get more out of the endeavour if they were not obvious (the Johannine Prologue, for example, invites Gnostic exegesis and would be too easy). So the class was broken into groups and asked to do an allegorical reading of the pericopae—put more specifically, they were to read Valentinian cosmology and anthropology into (or is that out of?) the texts.

The …

In 2007 I used the Apocryphicity blog as a host for some musings on the weekly classes of my course on the New Testament Apocrypha. I am now teaching the counterpart to that course: Gnosticism. Though a little late into the semester now, there’s no reason to let that prevent me from posting some thoughts on the course to date. We’ll begin with a discussion of the course syllabus (available HERE).

1. Course Texts. This is the third incarnation of the Gnosticism course. The first two versions were constructed around Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis. I found Rudolph’s book useful but occasionally had to teach against it as some of his assertions about the origins of Gnosticism and of Mandaeism are now out-of-date. So I thought I’d try out Birger Pearson’s new book, Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. So far I am not very happy with it. While I like how he divides his discussion into the various groups (Sethianism, Valentinianism, etc.), much of what Pearson does is summarize the material. He also makes numerous assertions about the origins of the texts without offering support (leaving the reader somewhat bewildered at how he arrives at the dates he provides). I will play out the year with the book but I do not think I will use it again. This is the first year also for Meyer et al’s new Nag Hammadi Library volume. In previous years I used Bentley Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures, which, alas is currently out-of-print. But …

Phil Harland of York University (and administrator of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean blog) passed along this link to a Prada perfume ad which includes a recitation of the Gnostic writing “Thunder Perfect Mind”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nmFg7hZRv4.