Early Christianity Question - In the early church there were the gnostics, and what other sects?

[Taverner]

I knew there were the Jewish Christians (Peter) and the Gnostics (Paul) and the Manichean Christians (not sure how early they were though...)

Were there any others?

[CJCRANE]

1. Nestorians I think

:shrug:

[dmallind]

2. How early? Arianists came pretty soon to add another slaughtered minority sect. nt

[Angry Dragon]

3. Perhaps it is just me but I do not think of Paul as Gnostic

[Taverner]

4. Elaine Pagels makes a very good case that he was

Again, he's not around today so we'll never know.

And one of the funny things about Gnostics is that they will never say 'I am a gnostic.'

Here's a wiki article that summarizes her research. The book, 'The Gnostic Paul' is a good read if you get ahold of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gnostic_Paul

[Igel]

10. That's Pagels.

She was the big promoter of Gnostic texts back in the '70s and '80s, and there's this tendency to try to see what you're expert in everywhere you can.

Paul uses some language in common with Gnostics--so does John, for that matter--but Paul would have "interfaced" with them more.

When you talk to an audience, you tend to use what they give you, a kind of jiu-jitsu. You take the terms that they're used to and you use them in similar but different ways. It means that a lot of your speech seems similar. If you want to see Gnosticism in his speech, it's possible; if you do so, you have to conclude that other things he says are interpolations or added, that other things he says that don't use Gnostic terminology and sound like they contradict Gnostic must have some other meaning. And, as you say, he's not around to defend himself.

It's easy to confuse rhetoric with content. Take, for example, the altar to the unknown god. Most cities had one. I've seen photos of some set up in marketplaces in various places from Rome to Asia Minor. He said that was *his* god. Now, he was preaching, converting. Was he equating his god to theirs, and saying they were actually in (covert) solidarity? Or was he saying that they worshipped an unknown god, which he's going to say was Jesus and both known (to him) and very much knowable (to them)? If the former, he's Gnostic. If the latter, he was using a nice rhetorical hook to engage them and string them into his preaching.

Lots of critics have a very simple metric to determine interpolations and additions: If they have a coherent story about a text but need bits gone, then the bits to be disposed of are interpolations and additions. Done and dusted.

The result is that there can be a historical Paul who wrote and intended. Then there can be meta-Pauls, as his work is re-interpreted, re-imagined, and re-purposed, in which his work is rewritten upon being read, and re-intended by the reader. When you've already concluded that later Xianity *must* be something different from primitive Xianity, because your definition of "true Xianity" includes a wide range of belief systems and views and the texts can't be used to cleanly separate between them, it becomes not only possible to think of one or more meta-Pauls as the historical Paul, or at least equal to the historical Paul. It's flattering, if nothing else, that he actually agreed with you, and attractive that he can be used to fight against the kind of orthodoxy that you so loath.

Of course, that's just saying that we all like our own confirmation bias.

[struggle4progress]

16. I think Pagel's book does not argue that Paul was gnostic, but rather discusses

how gnostics read the Pauline letters and gnostic attempts to use the Pauline letters to support their own ideas

[Xithras]

5. Dozens, if you consider the hybrids "sects"

You named a few of the major ones, but you also had the Marcions (who rejected the OT outright and believed that Christianity should be based only on Christs teachings of forgiveness and love), the Arians (who believed that Jesus was a tool created by God to suit a purpose, and who didn't exist as the eternal son of God any longer because he was destroyed when his purpose was finished), the Ebionites (who believed that Jesus wasn't the "Son of God" at all, but was the mortal child of Mary and Joseph who had simply been "adopted" by God to fulfill his purpose because he was pure of heart), and a couple of others.

On top of that, there were dozens of "minor" sects that emerged as Christianity moved into new areas and the locals fused the new Christian belief systems with their own traditional pre-Christian beliefs.

[Trajan]

6. There were many sects ...

I could not direct you to the perfect source to answer that question, but I find these sites helpful:


Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Try chapters 15 and 16 and through to ch 21 ... Also sprinkled throughout ....

http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/index.htm


Also check into the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which is a huge repository of Christian literature through the ages .... This is where the Gibbon history text resides as well

http://www.ccel.org


Finally, wikipedia "History of Christianity"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christianity

[FiveGoodMen]

7. Followers of the shoe, followers of the gord...

[Taverner]

9. LOL

[On the Road]

8. I Have Never Been Clear on How the Gnostics Fit in

to early church history, and it doesn't sound like most New Testament scholars are very clear, either.

You might be interested in http://firstnewtestament.netfirms.com/first_nt_early_cx_christ.htm">The First New Testament which has a unique perspective on the first century and a half of Christianity. (The site appears to have been taken down in the last month, but is archived on The Wayback Machine.)

Although it's not written from a scholarly viewpoint, its proposals make a surprising amount of sense and are unique as far as I know. (This is from the perspective of a non-scholar who lurks on historical Jesus boards for academics.) It also contains a discussion of pagan Gnosticism throughout the ancient world which gave an amazing amount of context.

The author or authors argue that Paul was a gnostic, and so was most of what we think of as early Christianity. They argue that the orthodox position developed in the mid-to-late 2nd C as a reaction to Marcion's gnosticism and to his Bible, which was primarily Paul's epistles. They date the final versions of the New Testament books extremely late because, for example, the nativity accounts are seen as an attempt to flesh out Jesus' earthly existence.

I have some reservations in their understanding of the original Jewish followers. There may be some gnostic-like elements in what's left of that tradition (eg, The Ascents of James). Everything I know about James, Jude, the author of Revelation, etc is that they were fundamentally opposed to some of gnostic's basic principles. But OOH gnosticism was in the air and seems to have influence everyone.

[Igel]

11. The lack of clarity is an understatement.

Imagine this: You have a bunch of Jews who add Jesus to Judaism.

Meanwhile, the surrounding Roman empire is a mix of stuff. There's traditional belief mixed in with locally-derived mystery cults and philosophies, plus religions brought in from travellers and the eastern fringes of the empire (and southern fringes). "Authority", outside of the synagogues and some organized cults is limited to schools, which usually means a teacher, his acolytes, and whoever his acolytes propagandize to. Teachers often lost control over members of their schools, and once the founder-teacher was dead, the reins seldom passed on smoothly to an heir.

Now, Judaism frayed around the edges. But Xianity, esp. when it was preached to people in the mix of beliefs and philosophies, also frayed. Moreover, Xianity didn't have a single "founder teacher", except perhaps Paul, and he moved a lot and then was incarcerated. Letters attributed to him make clear that he disagreed with some of what was being taught in various churches and, in fact, that there was precious little he could do about it.

He died before the first copies Xian mss whose text has survived to the present were produced. This is early.

In this, you don't get clear "movements." You get a continuum with some fracture lines. You get writings by a guy, writings attributed to the same guy in antiquity, and writings that because they seem to have something in common with the guy are assumed now to be from his "school." We impose structure and order, and often define the schools and lump fragments of mss together the way that the early church fathers lumped them--even though we know that they lumped them for reasons of decrying, persecuting, and preaching against the "heresy."

It also doesn't help that many of the Gnostics instead of duking it out with each other would have tried to find overlap, influencing each other's texts or subverting each other's followers.

It doesn't help that we tend to give greater weight to the Gnostic mss. They don't have interpolations; their inconsistencies are to be overlooked; their claims are considered not to be equal with that of the texts copied over and over but somehow more "authentic" because they don't bear the imprint of "orthodoxy" and "patriarchy." It's a problem in lots of fields in which the data is soft and impressionable.

Which makes understanding how the original Xianity that would have been taught by Jewish followers of Jesus was influenced to because various flavors of Gnostic Xianity and Xian Gnosticism.

Most literature concerning Gnosticism bears the same kind of imprint as most modern Xian theology does: You start with the text and naive readings and find that there's little interesting to say. Either you come up with stuff known 1800 years ago or you come up with trivialities (but I repeat myself). So you have to move beyond relative naive readings--the phrase "naive reading" is itself symbolic of the problem, as people moved to "wise" or "sophisticated" readings. Once you get past the simple text things open up. Instead of 1-2 options you get 200, but you still don't have much new data. What you do is mostly eisegesis. If exegesis is the "reading out" of what is presumed to be in the text, "eisegesis" is the "reading in" of material not obviously in the text.

[On the Road]

15. This is Why Original Religious Texts (Outside the Bible)

are difficult for me to read, including the Koran and most Jewish apocryphal books:

Most literature concerning Gnosticism bears the same kind of imprint as most modern Xian theology does: You start with the text and naive readings and find that there's little interesting to say. Either you come up with stuff known 1800 years ago or you come up with trivialities (but I repeat myself).

For me, what's interesting is not the naive reading, but how it fits in historically. And especially in Gnosticism, whether the text is supposed to be allegorical or not. That is critical. When I was young, I used to imagine that religion and philosophy 20 centuries ago would have been literal and naive, whereas allegorical readings were a more modern development. Now I think it's the opposite.

As far as Paul being a gnostic, I had never thought so, but have begun to wonder.

Some of his phraseology and ideas and distinctively gnostic. For example, an expression such as "the god of this world" raises the question of whether Paul saw the God of the Torah as a demiurge. His eschatology seems a tad unorthodox when he says that "Christ must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet.” And he had the same mix of public asceticism and theoretical antinomianism that Marcion himself did.

Paul may have not even have been Jewish at all, but an Idumean relative of Herod that had grown up in a Mithraic environment, which would give him a different perspective and less of an adherence to the Law.

There's a lot more to the story than just saying there were different schools of thought. Showing how they developed from each other is key IMO. And even though academics are not usually people of faith, it's still difficult to break from the idea that orthodox Christianity was close to the original version of the faith.

[white_wolf]

12. Paul was not a Gnostic.

Pauline Christianity is the dominate form today, but it was not Gnosticism. Gnosticism is much more mystical than Pauline Christianity.

[Taverner]

13. Check out Pagel's book

The funny thing is that if Paul was Gnostic, Christians have been interpreting his letters incorrectly for years

[white_wolf]

14. I'll check it out.

IF he was a Gnostic then the entire basis of modern Christianity crumbles, especially the Catholic Church.

[struggle4progress]

17. Ehrman's Lost Christianities seems to be a good introduction to your topic

You can, for example, learn something there about Carpocratians, Docetists, Ebionites, Marcionites ...