Gnostica

The world of misleading headlines gets a little larger today with the lede to this story on MSN:

Earliest reference describes Christ as ‘magician’

The bowl itself is pretty interesting– dating to between 200 BCE and 100 CE, it carries an inscription currently being read as DIA CHRHSTOU OGOISTAIS (ΔIA XPHCTOY OΓOICTAIC). The story continues:

If the word “Christ” (CHRHSTOU) refers to the Biblical Jesus Christ, as is speculated, then the discovery may provide evidence that Christianity and paganism at times intertwined in the ancient world.

The full engraving on the bowl reads, “DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS,” which has been interpreted by the excavation team to mean either, “by Christ the magician” or, “the magician by Christ.”

There are a few HUGE problems with this automatic assumption (an assumption which serves to titillate but is actually extraordinarily misleading). The most egregious leap in logic is, of course, the very idea that the word “CHRSTOU” refers to the historical Jesus. In fact, the word had been used variously in quite a few different ways at the time, most notably as a fairly common personal name.

Professor April Deconick points out that the word has also been used as a common title of Athoth, one of the Archons in classical Sethian Gnosticism.

For various possible interpretations and a plethora of interesting possibilities, visit this Textual Interpretation forum. Here’s my fave (probably not correct, but awesome, esp. to readers of Foucault’s Pendulum):

O might stand for O(INOU)
“gost./goist.” - this is an abbreviation for “grammata hosa…”, i.e. “ca. X grams”.
Thus, ELAIOU KALOU GOIST IS
would mean
“ca. 16 grams of good oil”.

Regardless, it seems an exceptional leap based purely on sensationalism that the cup would have anything whatsoever to do with the historical Jesus. Still, pretty interesting find overall.

(to the tune of “Hooray for Hollywood”)

Hooray for Heretics,
Those crazy, lackadaisy Heretics!
Where any infidel
Or young apostate
can invoke hate
By referencing Arius,
And any well-read priest
Can be a well-dead priest
If he’s listed by old Eusebius!

Hooray for Heretics!
When you’re malefic
if you’re even good!
Where anyone at all from Satorninus
to Valentinus
is equally misunderstood
No matter what you say
Welcome to auto-da-fe’
Hooray for Heretics!

Hooray for Heretics!
Those tricky, contradict-y Heretics
They come from Damascus and St. Martins
with their false doctrines
To see their names up in lights
All armed with tractates
From aeropagates
With their mad ideas
and Mystery rites
Hooray for Heretics!

You may be well-known in your neighborhood.
Still, if you think that you have the gnosis,
And not a psychosis,
You’ll make good friends with mystics!
With some luck and some moxie,
You’ll have an orthodoxy
Hooray for Heretics!

Leaving aside for a moment discussions as to whether the Gospel of Thomas was used by historical Gnostics, have a look at the two most common translations of the end part of the first Saying in the Gospel (emphasis mine):

Patterson and Meyer: “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”

Lambdin: “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.”

The phrase used in Coptic translates literally to “take taste of,” and is used multiple times in the GoT. Its appearance in the very first Saying, and its repetition in the text, clue us in that not “tasting death” is pretty much the prevalent theme in the Gospel.

The Patterson/Meyer interpretation is troubling, and here’s why: to a modern reader, it’s very easy to interpret this Saying as literally meaning “Whoever finds out what these sayings mean won’t die.” Surely this may mesh with the resurrectionist point of view, and may indeed have been what the original authors intended, but I don’t think this is the case. I think the phrase “will not taste death” carries a far different implication, one more practical and useful to the day-to-day existence of anyone currently residing in the World of Forms.

Let’s really take a look at the idea of “tasting death.” Just because one doesn’t taste something doesn’t mean it isn’t experienced. We’ve all eaten sweet cake, in which one of the ingredients is baking soda, which is terribly salty by itself. When, however, it’s properly baked into a confection, we no longer taste the saltiness– we’re so overwhelmed by the wonderful treat that the salty ingredient can’t be perceived.

In this World, the experience of death cannot be avoided. Even those of us in affluent nations in which health care can keep us alive for decades, our friends and family members and loved ones will die, and eventually our bodies will give out. This idea terrifies most people, when it’s mentioned at all, especially in Western cultures, where death is usually relegated with sex and politics to the “do not discuss” list. Nonetheless, as of this writing, it still can’t be escaped. It’s something we’ll all have to face in some capacity or another, all have to deal with at the very least at the end of our own lives. For most of us, it’s a bitter ingredient, too much baking soda in the cake, that taints our experience and causes anxiety and sadness. Or, we swim in death, choosing violence or war as a way of life, maybe to try to get used to the flavor, with varying results.

However, whomever uncovers the meanings of the Sayings in the Gospel of Thomas– whoever achieves gnosis– will still very well “experience death.” We live in the World of Death, the place in which everything eventually dies. However, the person who experiences gnosis will not taste death. He or she will not be dominated by death, and will come to understand death as a necessary ingredient in the confection of life.

As someone once said, “Life is a terminal disease.” Indeed, we die a little death every second of every day, and in the end– an illusion, as there is no difference between past, present and future, but that’s a topic for a different discussion– in the end, what’s one more moment of finality that precedes the resurrection?

“For many who are familiar with the language of the Gospels, it could be an eye-opening revelation to read the sayings of Jesus without the usual contextualization of his words. A reader might discover wisdom instead of moralizing, beauty and poetry rather than opinion, and unfathomable mystery instead of plain persuasion. Q offers us a glimpse of the Gospel’s soul and not merely its message”

Thus begins the story of The Lost Gospel Q (The Original Sayings of Jesus) by Marcus Borg, Mark Powelson, Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore, a text that I will rely upon heavily for this discussion. But what exactly is this “Q Gospel”?Q is an older and simpler Gospel than the Gospels that are found in the New Testament (NT)…and more.

This “Q Gospel” is known to us only indirectly, as no copy of the “original” Q Gospel has ever been recovered. But the Q story is “still with us, nevertheless” preserved within the canonical (NT) Gospels themselves. Q was not only believed to be the the First Christian Gospel, but the earliest written form of the Jesus tradition.

The claim that there was a lost Q Gospel is not a recent innovation. The scholarly case for the existence of Q was first made more than 150 years ago. By the early 1900s, Q had been widely accepted by scholars involved in the study of Christian origins. The basis for the “Q Hypothesis” as it came to be known, is the large amount of material (over 200 verses) found in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. Most scholars do not think that the author of Matthew or the author of Luke knew of the existence of the other’s Gospel. If this assumption is correct, the non-Marcan material that they share in common cannot be the result of one borrowing from the other, but must come from an earlier written source to which both authors had access. That common source was the Lost Gospel Q.

Since no actual copy of Q has ever been found, it is therefore possible to deny that it existed, and some scholars do not accept the Q Hypothesis. But more than 90% of contemporary Gospel scholars do. It seems to them a necessary hypothesis. Accepting the highly probable hypothesis that Q once existed, what was it like? Q was a “sayings Gospel”. It consisted primarily of the recollection of “things that Jesus said” that had been intentionally preserved by the collective memory of early Christianity, and eventually gathered together and “written down” so as to never be forgotten. Unlike the NT Gospels (but very much like the Gospel of Thomas), Q is not a narrative Gospel. There are no birth stories, no death and resurrection stories. There are almost no miracle stories. The one exception, the healing of the centurion’s servant, has as its climax, a saying of Jesus. Thus even the “exception” fits the basic pattern of Q as a sayings Gospel.

(To Be Continued)

There was a damn good discussion tonight on the PTG forum about very real yet ephemeral occurrence that we’ve all experienced as we tread the path.  I thought it was suitable for memorialization here.

.

Heather wrote about a dark side to gnosis:

Does Gnosis have a dark side? Can one feel completely at home in Gnosticism and then suddenly become uprooted more than ever before? Does this mean that it was all a lie? Does this mean I really just don’t get it? Is it about a continuous cycle of trusting one’s self, interpretations, and intuition only to discover I know nothing?

If so, I guess it leads to true understanding but there is some comfort in one’s delusions.
-Heather

We have all experienced the dissolution of a brilliant shining moment of illumination. You catch hold of an underlying truth in a very irrational, intuitive way that is deeply subjective and personal, and then once you return to commerce in the world of forms that moment seems to have been a phantasm, a fever dream that is trumped by the cold concrete world that we have come to accept as reality.

But (sic.) maybe also, don’t mistake ‘being troubled’ for ‘darkness’.