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By Root 2316 0

judgment be subsequently raised (as the Didache, Papias, and Ignatius)? This discussion evidently reflected not merely the continuous desire for more specificity in religious doctrine but also the community’s lively interest in the coming end-time as well as the signs that should precede it. In the process of depicting the issues in more detail, an unmistakable trend toward a physical and bodily resurrection can be detected in the “orthodox” tradition. As would be expected, the Gospel writers were favored over Paul as sources for discussion in this regard. In the sectarian Christian position, there is just as strongly a trend away from bodily resurrection, with a characteristic emphasis on the Pauline corpus.4 The nature of the resurrection is the bell-wether for the presence or absence of heresy. The use of passages from Paul or the Gospels is the wind that propels the boat.

Docetism and Gnosticism

APOSTOLIC CHRISTIANITY shows a distinct tendency towards an explicit description of bodily resurrection, which favors the Gospels’ surety over Paul’s ambiguity, the Gospels’ vivid statements over Paul’s dynamic, internal process of transformation. But most scholars of doctrine begin their histories with an intellectual challenge: the struggle against docetic Christology. Docetism, from the Greek word dokeo-“to appear to be” in the sense of “to seem to be,” with the connotation of “(mistakenly) seeming to be human”—promulgated the notion that Jesus, being divine, only “seemed” to suffer and die. In reality, Christ’s divine nature was never compromised. This is an obvious way out of a deep ambiguity about Jesus’ nature. Docetism is a quick and dirty way to preserve Jesus’ divinity at the moments when he “seems” most tragically human and lacking in divinity. This intellectual move was also characteristic of the “Gnostic” writers. The Gnostics and others suggested that Jesus only seemed to die, although the body was putrid and infected, so Jesus subsequently only seemed to be resurrected. His resurrection was merely the revelation of his true divinity.

As in the Gospel of Thomas, to the Gnostics, what was necessary was for the believer to come to the saving knowledge (gnōsis) that Jesus was divine and could return in his purified spirit (pneuma) to the abode of the divine above this corrupted and unsavable world. We have already discussed the physicality of the resurrection as not only characteristic of Jewish apocalyptic thinking, independent of any contact with Greek notions of the afterlife, and especially inimical to Platonism. Docetism and Gnosticism thus represent a first and most obvious way to connect the narration of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection with the Platonic thought-world of Greece. Mature, anti-Jewish Gnosticism also takes up a great many of the mythological themes of Genesis in the Bible.

“Orthodoxy” is “correct doctrine” but since it is the predominant position in the Church, it always means “the right doctrine” from the perspective of the winners. Though “orthodoxy” is always used by the church to indicate the truth, I mean by it only the position that predominated. The definition of “Gnosticism” has never been easy; at the current moment it is even harder to define than orthodoxy. “Gnostic” refers to someone who thinks that “knowledge” (gnōsis) rather than “faith” (pistis) is the way to salvation and indicates a second-through fourth-century heresy within Christianity, though we also know of pagan Gnostics. In the modern scholarly world, the word “Gnosticism” has evolved into a technical term in comparative religion, identifying a characteristic of any religion-like mysticism, ritual, or ethics-which leads to ambiguities when studying the ancient world.

Interest in Gnosticism has quickened considerably since the discovery in 1947 of the Nag Hammadi collection of thirteen mostly Coptic codices, evidently from a monastic library dating back to the first centuries of the Christian era in Egypt. It contains the Gospel of Thomas which has both “Gnostic” and “orthodox” characteristics. Some of the “Gnostic