The gospel of John was popular in Gnostic circles. This is a significant
fact. Raymond Brown contends that certain forms of early Gnosticism could have
arisen from a one-sided interpretation of John’s theology. ln his view,
the Johannine letters were an attempt to correct gnosticising tendencies within
the framework of genuine ‘Johannine’ tradition.(1) Whatever may be
the truth about this, a Gnostic look at John may shed light on a Johannine
trait we might otherwise overlook.
Who were these Gnostics? Until recently our understanding of their concerns was severely limited. Our knowledge of Gnostic beliefs and practices derived almost exclusively from third- and fourth-century writers whose stated purpose was to defeat and discredit them. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen, Eusebius and Tertullian were hardly less biased than presentday evangelical cult-bashers for whom everything Oriental is suspect if not satanic. The picture we had was a caricature, not a fair representation.
From the contents of actual Gnostic texts, many of which have only been translated and published in the last two decades, it has become possible to reconstruct Gnosticism more accurately. In its widest form it represented a climate of thought that pervaded many diverse religious movements. The Mandaeans in Persia were obviously an esoteric sect. The ministers and disciples whose writings have been preserved in the Egyptian Corpus Hermeticum were initiates of a mystical cult. Some Gnostic groups were hardly touched by Christianity; others spawned as bizarre cross-breeds that incorporated Jewish and Christian no less than Hellenist and Oriental elements. The scene must have been as confusing as that created by the numerous ‘new religious movements’ of today which combine esoteric teaching, Hindu beliefs, biblical traditions and ‘new age’ expectations in amazing novel constructions.
What has become clear is that not all ‘Gnostics’ were necessarily ‘heretics’. ‘Gnosticising’ groups were to be found also among orthodox Christians. Towards the end of the second century some of these may have split off as recognisable, dissenting organisations. The Valentinians and Basilidans were such nonconformist new communities. But before this happened and probably as a parallel phenomenon even in later years, there were Gnostic Christians and Gnostic Christian communities that existed alongside and within the mainstream tradition. These Gnostic Christians were convinced they were as orthodox as anyone else. In fact, we can be reasonably sure that they considered their own interpretation the more correct version of Christ’s own teaching. It is these Gnostic Christians we will focus on in this chapter, referring to them simply as ‘Gnostics’.
Elaine Pagels has tried to characterise their attitude in a sympathetic and readable account.(2) Though Christian, they deserve the epithet ‘Gnostic’ because like their pagan counterparts, they considered ‘awareness’ and ‘religious experience’ (gnosis) the most important element in their faith. This awareness, they believed, had come to us in Christ. True inner enlightenment was to them much more important than the observance of external laws and conformity to Church structures. Some recognised a ‘female element’ in God and resented the domination of the male clergy who were entrenching themselves even then. Stressing interior realities as more important than external ones, they shocked fellow Christians by asserting that ritual worship to idols exacted under pressure did not imply sin. They minimised the bodily resurrection of Christ, asserting that Christ rises over each one of us when we become spiritually aware of him.
It is this emphasis on the priority of what is interior that emerges as their most dominant tenet. It is manifested in an extreme form in The Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic document that only became fully accessible to us after the discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945. This gospel contained 114 Sayings of Christ. (2) It presented Christianity entirely as a spiritual search. Christ saves us by helping us discover that we can become ‘persons of light’. No value is attached to Christ’s deeds: his birth, vocation, miracles, passion or even the resurrection. Indeed, Christ himself can be dispensed with once the disciple has drunk of the source (logion 13). "Who will drink from my mouth shall become as I am" (logion 108). There is no need of a eucharist, baptism or any other sacrament. No external actions are required of the disciple; except that he ‘lay off his clothes’, which means: that he renounces his body. It is only with great difficulty that the spirit, ‘such great riches’, can live in the flesh, ‘this poverty'’ (logion 29). Any form of sex, ‘hanging on the body’, disfigures a spiritual person. Women have to become men in this respect. Jesus says of Mary Magdalene: “I will make her a man so that she too will become a living spirit, ”(logion 114).
The gospe/ of Thomas reflects an extreme position no doubt; but it gives us a taste of how much it was interior values, 'the living spirit, ’ that mattered to Gnostics.
More orthodox, and closer to John’s gospel, is Heracleon’s commentary on it. It is the oldest commentary on John we know of and perhaps, not surprisingly, it was Gnostic.(4) Basing himself on the gospel, Heracleon distinguishes three kinds of Christian: material Christians, psychic Christians (psyche is ‘soul’) and pneumatic Christians (from pneuma, 'spirit'). The material Christians hardly deserve to be called Christian. They busy themselves with miracles, healings and other body matters. The psychic Christians have faith but attach great importance to externals. They take the gospels literally and ascribe salvific power to the things Christ did. They believe the sacraments convey grace by their external performance. They think they should observe external practices and obey external laws. The pneumatic Christians do not reject such external realities; but while participating in them they know that it is ‘spirit’ (pneuma) that counts. They put store by interior faith, not by acceptance of a formulated creed; by personal enlightenment rather than ritual; by inner sanctity more than by observance.
What Heracleon and other Gnostics of the early second century show is an inner-Church tension that has remained within Christianity until this day. They were convinced that they found support for their own ‘spiritual’ understanding of the gospel in John. If, as Raymond Brown and others contend, the Gnostic communities were themselves Johannine in origin, their interpretation deserves special attention. What do John’s ‘spirit’-passages look like from a ‘Gnostic’ point of view?
In the encounter with the Samaritan woman, John deliberately raises the question of external ritual. Is Jerusalem the model with its temple, its sacrificial practices, its sacred priesthood, its calendar of feasts and holy traditions? Or should Mount Gerizim be preferred with its precincts, customs and observances (4: 19)? The reply is sweeping in its generality. No sacred place, whatever its rituals or traditions, is important. “God is spirit. The Father wants to be worshipped in spirit and in truth” (4:24). This, John says, can be done in any place.
’There is a downright rejection here of Jewish ritualism and pagan practice; but is there not also a rebuttal of narrow Christian observance? John asserts that the Father can be known through an interior experience; that he wants to be worshipped spiritually because by nature he is spirit. In no way does he deny the mediation of Christ's humanity (14:6; “I am the way”) as later Gnostics would (see 1 Jn 4:2), but he firmly that this mediating work of Christ leads to an internal, spiritual worship.
The eucharist was the central act in each Christian community. John recognises it as irreplaceable. When he describes the last supper, however, he studiously omits to mention the well-known words of consecration of the bread and wine. Rather, he emphasizes Jesus’ words of enlightenment in five lengthy chapters (13-17). John confesses the reality of communion with Jesus ‘when we eat his flesh and drink his blood’ (6:56). But here, too, he hastens to add that it is the spiritual fruit, not the rite itself that matters: “My words are spirit and life” (6:63). We might paraphrase this as: “I am not talking about a crude, physical practice, such as one can find in temple worship. My eucharist produces interior life in you. It makes you live within, through the spirit I will impart.”
The same concern speaks from John’s treatment of baptism. In his days it had no doubt already become an established practice. It was the Christian equivalent of Jewish circumcision and of the initiation rite of Hellenistic mystery religions. Again, John acknowledges that baptism should take place. It is its spiritual nature, however, that he stresses. To enter the kingdom one should be born anew; not by entering one’s mother’s womb a second time, but by being born from water and the spirit (3:5-7). It is the interior element, the spiritual experience, that makes baptism the gateway to Jesus’ kingdom.
John is surprisingly ‘Gnostic’ when he states that the essence of the Christian experience is an awareness of ‘waters of life flowing continually from one’s heart’ (7:38). John identifies this experience with the infusion of the spirit: “He said this about the spirit which those who believed were to receive from him” (7:39). In this passage, as in some others, John uses phraseology that is curiously parallel to that found in the Gnostic Odes of Solomon. (5)
Like later Gnostics, John refrains from spelling out Christian behavior in anything resembling a code. He has nothing akin to Matthew’s sermon on the mount. To decide matters of right and wrong John does not appeal to Church authority as Paul repeatedly did. He believes these questions should be decided by consulting one’s inner conscience. “The Paraclete will teach you all things. He will remind you of all the things I told you” (14:26). We find this even more explicitly in the Johannine letters. “There is no need for anyone to teach you” (1 Jn 2:27).
In the previous chapters we saw that ‘spirit’ in John is always associated with an experience that affects us internally. Through ‘spirit’ God overwhelms us and makes us feel and act in a new way. In the context of John’s ‘gnosticising’ interest we can now add new relevance to this observation. Our experience of ‘spirit’ is not an extra, a bonus. Rather, it is at the heart of our Christian faith. Like later Gnostics, John values the interior transformation more than the external means that bring it about. Christ came to bring ‘spirit’; or ‘the spirit’. We should worship ‘in spirit.’ Baptism, the eucharist and other Christian practices avail nothing if they do not make us live ‘in the spirit.’ The cluster of associations centering round the spirit indicate a deep interior happening that constitutes the core of discipleship.
1. R.E. Brown, The Epistles of John, Chapman, London 1983, esp. pp. 69-85.
2. E. Pagels, The Gnostic Cospels Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1980.
3. Translation and Commentary in R.M. Grant and D.N. Freedman, The Secret Sayings of Jesus, Doubleday, New York 1960.
4. See E. Pagels The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis, Nashville 1973; esp. p. 114-122.
5. J.H CharIesworth and R.A. CuIpepper, “The Odes of Solomon and the Gospel of John,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 35 (1973) 298-322.