Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [328]
This is to be contrasted with another form of Gnosticism-Valentianism, named after the churchman Valentinus. These Gnostic documents, also found within the Nag Hammadi Corpus, emanate from a relatively more moderate wing which existed within the church, asserting that its members were “elected” above ordinary Christians because they understood a higher, more elite revelation. Their Christian worship consisted of normal Christian practices augmented with secret rites. “Gnostic” became an umbrella term used by the “orthodox” to brand whole groups of Christians as heretics, even those who would not themselves have used the term “Gnostic,” much less “heretic,” to describe themselves. The Gospel of Thomas is a good example of this “name-calling” phenomenon because it has been branded as “Gnostic” but could just as arguably be seen as an unusual part of “orthodox” tradition. What is clear is that the Fathers opposed the Christianity we see in the Gospel of Thomas.
A group of scholars meeting at Messina in 1967 decided to call only full-blown, anti-cosmic dualism by the term “Gnosticism.”5 The religious phenomenon that existed previously in the first few centuries could either be called proto-gnosticism or pre-Gnosticism. Scholars disagreed about whether particular documents, like the Gospel of John, was pre-Gnostic or proto-Gnostic. Whatever clarity was gained in this discussion was vitiated by the lack of scholarly agreement about the differences between proto-Gnosticism and pre-Gnosticism. Was what preceded second century Gnosticism just an antecedent or already essentially Gnostic? To make matters worse, either of the antecedents to Gnosticism could be described by the term “Gnostic,” making a muddle out of practically every article on the subject.
Hence, scholars have abandoned the attempt to define the term by common agreement. With this retreat from exactitude came the suspicion that the terminology does not always correspond to an actual phenomenon in the ancient world. Are scholars seeing Gnostics where none existed? We know that there were actually some people who called themselves Gnostics but the Church Fathers added wholesale to the characterization and the list. Instead, “Gnosticism” is now viewed more or less as a term of opprobrium in use among the Christian Fathers, as much as a phenomenon in and of itself. That is to say, we think they are Gnostics only because the Church Fathers call them Gnostics. It is probably just as well not to reify the term as a coherent and self-conscious movement; otherwise, we shall wind up taking sides in an ancient, almost forgotten debate instead of relating it.
The “Gnostic” interpretation of salvation can be characterized. It is the belief that there is a specific, divinely-revealed, saving knowledge (gnōsis), which, when received and understood, sets the Gnostic above and in an elect position with regard to the rest of humanity. The “Gnostics” tended to depreciate life in this world as irredeemably corrupt. Matter itself was seen as feminine and not redeemable, in a manner quite similar to Plato and Philo. In Gnosticism the gendered coding of matter becomes part of a mythological pattern. Yet, some Gnostics may have regarded women as eligible for church positions. When the Church Fathers say that women achieved roles of leadership in Gnosticism they meant this report as a vilification of the movement, so one wonders how much they were exaggerating. The Gospel of Thomas allows for equality between women and men through women’s transformation into men, viewed as the common gender. Yet the group that left us the Nag Hammadi corpus seems to be composed mostly of male monks living with little if any church structure,