Maternus Cynegius, Theodosius's governor in Alexandria from AD 384 – 388 was renowned for his relentless harrassment and persecution of heretics and pagans.73 In that great cosmopolitan city, one of the first strongholds of Gnosticism, a local syncretistic and universalising cult dedicated to the composite deity Serapis (a fusion of two ancient Egyptian gods, Osiris and Apis) had long enjoyed the patronage of people from many different social and religious backgrounds. Scholars believe that Christian Gnostics may have participated in the mysteries of Osiris in his Serapis incarnation ‘while professing to place upon what they saw there a Christian interpretation.’74 It is also notable that several of the Alexandrian Gnostic sects made direct use of figures of Serapis – generally depicted as robed and bearded in the Greek rather than Egyptian style – as a symbol of the God of Goodness .75 Such flexibility and open-mindedness in the search for spiritual truths had been characteristic of Alexandria since its foundation some seven centuries previously. But precisely because of this venerable tradition of tolerance and fusion many of its citizens were shocked, and then outraged, when Cynegius began to put the military forces he commanded as governor – supposedly for the protection of all sections of the community – at the disposal of the Catholic campaign to abolish other religions .76
In 391, three years after Cynegius's death, state-sponsored persecution was still on the increase. In parallel Theophilus, the Catholic archbishop of Alexandria, had been rousing the Christian masses against Gnostics and pagans. Riots were engineered and many members of the oppressed sects fled to the shelter of the Serapeum. This was the great temple dedicated to Serapis that had been built by Ptolemy I Soter (323 – 284 BC), the former general of Alexander the Great who established the dynasty that ruled Egypt until the time of Cleopatra (51 – 30 BC). The refugees felt sure that they would be safe there, on ground for so long deemed sacred. But they were wrong. Again at the instigation of Theophilus a huge Christian mob, including large numbers of monks, besieged and then attacked the Serapeum.77 The temple's irreplaceable library of ancient books and scrolls, arranged in the cloisters around the central building,78 was ransacked and burnt. Then with imperial troops openly supporting the Christian assault, the defenders were massacred and the temple itself was raised to the ground .79
Reviewing the affair some time later the emperor held the victims responsible for their own destruction and did not punish the attackers.80 Nor was the loss of the temple library to be lamented. Theodosius's well-known view was that all books contradicting the Christian message should be burnt ‘lest they cause God anger and scandalise the pious.’81
The first Inquisition and the ancient enemy
In the early fifth century, though their numbers had drastically declined after the persecutions of Theophilus, church and state still kept the pressure on the remaining Gnostics in Egypt. We know, for example, that Cyril, who succeeded Theophilus as archbishop of Alexandria, enforced the persecution of a group that believed the material world to be the creation of the demiurge82 – a classic Gnostic view – and that refused to accept Cyril as their illuminator (a classic Gnostic concept).83 His emissary Abbot Shenoute seized their ‘books full of abomination’ and ‘of every kind of magic’ and warned: I shall make you acknowledge Archbishop Cyril, or else the sword will wipe out most of you, and moreover those of you who are spared will go into exile.84
Cyril was a man to take seriously. In AD 415 he provoked the gruesome murder of an extraordinary woman of Alexandria, Hypatia, a pagan philosopher said to have been of ‘the school of Plato and Plotinus.’85 She was famous and much loved in the city for her ‘attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time.’86 Some reports suggest that it was out of jealousy at her obvious popularity that the archbishop had her killed. Whatever the reason she was dragged from her house on Cyril's orders by a Christian mob, carried into a church and hacked limb from limb with broken tiles (ostrakois, literally ‘oyster shells’, but the word was also used for brick tiles on the roofs of houses).87 Finally, reports one pro-Christian commentator of the time: … they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire. And all the people surrounded Archbishop Cyril and named him ‘the new Theophilus’, for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.88
With such an atmosphere of Christian fanaticism prevalent throughout the Roman world it is not surprising that the numerous Christian Gnostic sects of the second and third centuries had soon all but disappeared. In AD 447 Pope Leo the Great still felt it necessary to condemn Gnostic writings as a ‘hotbed of manifold perversity’ which ‘should not only be forbidden, but entirely destroyed and burnt with fire.’89 But by the end of the fifth century it seemed that organised Gnosticism was a thing of the past.
Some of those prepared to risk their lives for their Gnostic beliefs certainly joined the ragged group of charismatic preachers known as the Messalians. Established at Edessa in the mid-fourth century, they were still going strong in the sixth century. We saw in the last chapter how they might have formed part of the chain of transmission that would ultimately bring Gnostic texts and teachings to the Bogomils and thence to the Cathars of medieval Europe.
But it was Manicheism, also a Gnostic religion with strong Christian elements, that would have provided the most obvious haven for survivors of the disbanded sects.90 Perhaps because of this, and because Manicheism was an evangelistic faith that still posed a real threat to the Church, it became the primary target of persecution during the fifth century. So violent and thorough was this persecution that by the end of the sixth century, though it was to survive for another thousand years in the Far East, Manicheism was a dead force in the Roman world.91
The final measures were the work of Justinian (AD 527 – 565) who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople. Mass burnings of Manicheans soon followed when he equated heresy with treason and subjected both offences automatically to the death penalty.92 The Manicheans had begun to act like a secret society, disguising their identity and pretending to be good Christians.93 Justinian's response was not only to burn them at the stake but to burn any of their acquaintances, Manichean or not, who had failed to denounce them.94 Significantly, in our view, he also created an official investigative agency, the Quaestiones, which was specifically tasked to root out and destroy the Manichean heresy.95
Seven centuries later did Pope Innocent III have Justinian's initiative in mind when he created a very similar instrument of terror and oppression called the Inquisition?96 It was to become greatly feared and would ultimately take on a global role as Catholicism advanced into the New World and Asia. It's easy to forget that when Innocent established it in 1233 he did so with the specific purpose of rooting out and destroying the Cathar heresy – which we know he believed to be a resurgence of the more ancient heresy of Manicheism.
So by unleashing the Inquisition in the 13th century, it is almost as though Innocent was trying to pick up where his predecessor had left off in the 6th century. This would have been perfectly in character because together with many other European churchmen of the period he appears to have had a genuine sense of continuity about what the Bogomils and Cathars represented and how they were to be handled. The heretics, too, felt themselves to be part of a continuum and dealt with the Church like an old enemy who they already knew very well.
What was odd was that so few of the participants on either side seemed surprised, after such a long silence, that a fully-fledged Gnostic ‘anti-Church’ was now straddling Europe like a colossus, confronting both Rome and Constantinople, and threatening to turn the tables of the world.
CHAPTER SIX
THE RIVALS
A monstrous breed … You must eliminate such filth.
Pope Innocent III (1198 – 1216), speaking of the Cathars 1
The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, one of the Nag Hammadi texts, speaks of the Gnostics’ experience of persecution at the hands of people who believed themselves
to be Christians. The setting could be anytime in the first four centuries AD before the texts were concealed. The Treatise then goes on to make a further allegation – one that the Cathars and Bogomils were to repeat a thousand years later. This is that the established Church is an impostor – an ‘imitation’ of the true Church that it has displaced.2
So we're now better able to understand the references in the Treatise, cited in the previous chapter, to ‘empty people’ who ‘think that they are advancing the name of Christ’ when they persecute others. The writer is either speaking of the Catholic Church itself, or of the militant, literalist faction always in favour of persecuting its opponents, that would ultimately dominate the Church during the reign of Emperor Constantine – and that would impose its agenda on the future. Set against it, and persecuted by it, are the Gnostic adepts, ‘Sons of Light’, founders of the true Church, described as ‘an ineffable union of undefiled truth’.3 The impostor Church has ‘made an imitation’ of their ‘perfect assembly’ and ‘having proclaimed a doctrine of a dead man’4 (the crucified Jesus Christ), it has tricked its followers into lifetimes of: … fear and slavery, worldly cares, and abandoned worship … For they did not know the Knowledge of the Greatness, that is from above, and from a fountain of truth, and that it is not from slavery and jealousy, fear and love of worldly matter.5
It should be obvious to the reader by now that this simple statement of Gnostic dualism, which lay at Nag Hammadi for 1600 years after being buried there in the late fourth century, could equally well have been written by a Cathar or Bogomil perfectus of the 12th or 13th centuries. There is the same horror of worldly matter and the same sense that it entraps and enslaves the soul. There is the same belief that while ignorance can extend the soul's imprisonment, knowledge can set it free. And there is the same concept of what this knowledge is – i.e. that it concerns the existence of a spiritual realm of greatness ‘above’ which is the domain of the God of Good, the source of truth, and the long-lost home of the soul.
The reader will recall that according to Cathar and Bogomil doctrine, Christ was not a physical human being ‘in the flesh’ but an immensely convincing apparition.6 The Second Treatise of the Great Seth clearly has the same thing in mind when it puts these words into Christ's mouth after the Crucifixion: I did not succumb to them as they had planned … I was not afflicted at all. Those who were there punished me, and I did not die in reality but in appearance …7
Many other religious ideas that we have come to associate with the Cathars and Bogomils also appear a millennium earlier in the Second Treatise of the Great Seth – for example that the god of this world is evil and ignorant and can be identified with the God of the Old Testament, and that his minions, the Catholic bishops are ‘mere counterfeits and laughingstocks.’8 The passages we've quoted here are just fragments of the Treatise – itself only a small part of the overall collection of 52 Gnostic texts preserved in the Nag Hammadi library. Virtually any of them could serve, without alteration, as a manifesto of Cathar and Bogomil beliefs. It therefore seems to us inconceivable, as many scholars continue to argue, that there is no link between the religion of the early Christian Gnostics and the later religion of the Cathars and the Bogomils.
There is in our view more than a link. Despite some superficial differences – and their significant separation in time – these two religions have so much in common at the level of their vital concepts, cosmology, doctrine and beliefs that they're almost impossible to tell apart. When we consider that essential elements of ritual, symbolism, initiation, structure and organisation were also the same, and that both the Gnostics and the medieval dualists were persecuted with the same spirit of savage repression by the same opponent and for the same reasons, it is increasingly difficult to resist the conclusion that they must, indeed, have been one and the same thing.
Seizing control of the tradition
Because the Catholic Church won the power-struggle against the Gnostics it gained victor's privileges over the way history would be told. It's not surprising, therefore, while all other beliefs and doctrines are regarded as aberrations, that Catholic beliefs and doctrines tend to be treated as orthodox (literally ‘straight-teaching’) and also as ‘authentic’, ‘of true apostolic descent’, etc, in most historical accounts.9 However, a dispassionate look at what is now known about the broad and eclectic character of Christian beliefs in the first three centuries does not support the Catholic claim to primacy. There is no doubt that the evidence shows us the nucleus of the faction that became the Catholic Church forming around dogmatic militants like Irenaeus and Tertullian. But after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, and the gradual revelation of their contents that has followed, it has been impossible to ignore the presence, and equal weight, of the Gnostic Churches in the same period. Since Catholics and Gnostics alike claimed that the teachings in their possession were the earliest and the most ‘authentic’, why has the Catholic version for so long been accepted as gospel (literally!), and left unchallenged, while the Gnostic version was hunted down and persecuted out of existence? Isn't it equally possible, as the Nag Hammadi texts themselves invite us to believe, that the tradition of the Gnostics was all along the ‘authentic’ one?
Scholars have known for many years, for example, that the Valentinian Gnostics of the second century AD accepted not only the four Gospels of the New Testament that have come down to us today (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), ‘but many additional documents professing to contain traditions of the secret teachings of Jesus.’10 Writing in 1967 Henry Chadwick, the great historian of Christianity was happy to accept that such ‘secret teachings’ did in fact once exist and suggested that they would have been similar to ‘the Gospel of Thomas [one of the Nag Hammadi texts] recently recovered from the sands of Egypt.’11 But he was not interested in questions concerning the authenticity of these Gnostic traditions. He simply took it for granted that whatever ‘secret teachings’ the Gnostics possessed must self-evidently have been false. Chadwick even seemed happy to gloss over the pseudoscientific claptrap of the heresy-hater Irenaeus who, he observed approvingly: … ingeniously vindicated the fourfold gospel on numerological principles. Four, he urged, was a sacred number corresponding to the four winds, or the four faces of the cherubim in Ezekiel …12
Chadwick accepts that even as late as the last two decades of the second century AD a substantial oral tradition was still in circulation, purporting to transmit the true words of Christ. This tradition, he notes, was ‘regarded as an authority which had not yet been wholly merged with the written gospels.’13 In other words the canonical New Testament was still incomplete by the end of the second century,14 and the eventual course of Christian doctrine was not yet set in stone.
Chadwick suggests that circa AD 185 – 190, with many different ideas (both written and oral) in circulation, Irenaeus, together with others from the proto-Catholic group, saw the advantage ‘which a written document possessed and which oral transmission did not.’15 Although the Gnostic leader Marcion had prepared his own canon some time before – much to the consternation of the Catholics – few of the other proliferating Gnostic sects of the period accepted it and the possibility that they would ever be able to agree amongst themselves for sufficiently long to put a representative Gnostic canon together seemed remote.
Amongst the proto-Catholic group there was no such hesitation. Knowing that those who controlled the written document would effectively have ‘the control of authentic tradition’,16 they launched their own initiative to compile and create a canonical New Testament. Since this group was dominated by men like Irenaeus who regarded their own views as infallible and were intolerant of the views of others, they were naturally inclined to label whichever texts or traditions supported their views as belonging to the authentic apostolic line and to cast into the outer darkness as inauthentic any that contradicted them.
What justified this, notes Chadwick, was that ‘the teaching given by the contemporary bishop of, say, Rome or A
ntioch’ was held by the Catholics to be ‘in all respects identical with that of the apostles.’17 As Irenaeus himself put it in the second century with reference to the so-called Rule of Faith (a short summary of the main points of Catholic belief that he and other heresy hunters favoured): This rule is what the bishops teach now and therefore comes down from the apostles.18
Thus, irrespective of its actual origins and authenticity, any teaching given by the Catholic bishops was automatically deemed authentic and to have come down from the apostles. Vice versa, any teaching of which they did not approve was automatically deemed inauthentic and not descended through the proper apostolic line – in other words, heretical.
In an era when oral traditions were still dominant, and the bestowal of canonical status upon texts was in the hands of a militant faction, such circular arguments could only have one outcome. There is little doubt that the proto-Catholics deliberately manipulated the gradual formation of the New Testament so that it could serve them in their early battles against the Gnostics and reinforce their own claims to authenticity and exclusivity as the sole mediators of Christ's message.
No eyewitnesses we can trust
Can we be sure of anything that the New Testament has to tell us?
No matter how dense the smokescreen surrounding the vexed issues of authenticity, few would dispute that somewhere in the century between 50 BC and AD 50, mysterious and powerful events occurred in Palestine that set in motion the Christian phenomenon. But it is not at all certain what sparked the phenomenon off. Was Christ really the Son of God, born as a flesh-and-blood human being and murdered on the cross – thus somehow redeeming our sins? That's the Catholic position. Was he a projection or emanation from the divine – an ‘appearance’ only, not really flesh-and-blood ? That's the Gnostic and Cathar position. Or could he simply have been an urban legend blown out of all proportion, or perhaps even an artificially constructed myth designed to serve the purposes of a particular religious cult?