How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (40 page)

The best known docetist of the second Christian century was a famous preacher and philosopher, who was eventually branded as an arch-heretic, named Marcion. It is much to be regretted that we do not have any writings from Marcion’s hand, as he was tremendously influential on Christianity in his day, establishing churches throughout the Christian world that embraced his distinctive teachings. Unfortunately, we know of these teachings only from what his orthodox enemies said about them in their refutations. These refutations are, in any event, extensive. The heresiologist Tertullian, whom I will discuss at greater length below, wrote a five-volume work against Marcion that we still have today. This serves as our chief source of information about this great heretic.
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Unlike the antichrists mentioned in 1 John, Marcion did not take his theological cues from the Gospel of John but from the writings of the Apostle Paul, whom he considered to be the great apostle who alone understood the real meaning of Jesus. Paul in particular stressed that there was a difference between the Jewish law and the gospel of Christ. For Paul, following the dictates of the law could not make a person right with God; only faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus could do that. Marcion took this differentiation between law and gospel to an extreme by saying that in fact they were completely at odds with one another. The law was one thing, the gospel another. And that was for a very clear and, to Marcion, obvious reason: the law was given by the God of the Jews, but salvation was given by the God of Jesus. These were, in fact, two different gods.

Even today, some people—often Christian people—think of the God of the Old Testament as a God of wrath and the God of the New Testament as a God of mercy. Marcion honed this view to a razor-sharp edge. The God of the Old Testament created this world, called Israel to be his people, and then gave them his law. The problem was that no one could possibly keep the law. The God of the law was not evil, but he was mercilessly just. And the just punishment for breaking his law was condemnation to death. That was the punishment everyone deserved, and it is the punishment everyone received. The God of Jesus, on the other hand, was a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness. This God sent Jesus into the world in order to save those who had been condemned by the God of the Jews.

But if Christ belonged to the spiritual loving God rather than to the just Creator God, that must mean he did not belong in any sense to the creation itself. Christ could not, therefore, have actually been born and could not actually have any attachment to this material world, which was the world created by and judged by the God of the Jews. And so Jesus came into the world not as a real human being with a real birth. He descended from heaven in the appearance of a full-grown adult, as a kind of phantom who only appeared to have human flesh. But it was all an appearance, designed, evidently, to fool the Creator God. Jesus’s “apparent” death was accepted as the payment of the sins of others, and through seeming to die, the phantom Jesus from the spiritual God managed to bring salvation to those who believed in him. But he didn’t really suffer and he didn’t really die. How could he? He didn’t have a real body. It was all an appearance.

In response, the opponents of Marcion among the orthodox insisted that the God who created the world was the same God who had redeemed the world; the God who gave the law was the God who sent Christ in fulfillment of the law; and Christ was an actual, full, flesh-and-blood human who did not
seem
to suffer and die but who
really did
suffer and die, shedding real blood and feeling real pain, so that he could bring real salvation to real people who desperately needed it. The orthodox view that triumphed over Marcion and other docetic Christians like him insisted that even though Christ was divine, he was also actually, really human.

S
O FAR WE HAVE
explored two Christological extremes—on one hand were adoptionists, who claimed that Christ was human but not, by nature, divine; on the other were docetists, who claimed that Christ was divine but not, by nature, human. The orthodox position, as we will see, claimed that both sides of this dispute were right in what they affirmed and wrong in what they denied: Christ was divine by nature—actually God—and he was human by nature—actually man. But how could he be both? One solution to this problem was deemed completely wrong-headed and heretical: that Jesus Christ was in fact two entities, a human Jesus who temporarily came to be inhabited by a divine being, who departed from him before his death. Some such view was held by a variety of Christian groups that modern scholars have called
Gnostic.

There have been long, hard, and heated debates among scholars in recent years concerning the nature of the religious phenomenon known as Gnosticism.
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If nothing else, these debates have shown that we can no longer speak simply of Gnostic religions as if there were a monolithic set of beliefs shared by a wide range of religious groups, all of whom can fairly be labeled Gnostic. Some scholars think that the term
Gnosticism
has been so broadly defined that it is no longer of any use at all. Others have more plausibly suggested that we need to define Gnosticism very narrowly and refer only to a certain group as Gnostic and to call other, roughly similar groups by other names. Since this is not a book about Gnosticism per se, I do not need to go into great detail about these scholarly disagreements, important as they are. Instead I will simply indicate what I mean by Gnosticism and briefly discuss the kind of Christological view found among surviving Gnostic texts.

The term
Gnosticism
comes from the Greek word for knowledge,
gnosis.
As we have seen, Christian Gnostics maintained that salvation came not through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but through proper “knowledge” of the secrets Christ revealed to his followers. For many centuries we knew about Gnostics only from the writings directed against them by such Christian heresiologists as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian. We now know that even if we take the reports of these heresy-hunters gingerly and treat them with a rigorously critical eye, they still can mislead us as to the real character of Gnostic views. We know this because actual writings by Gnostics themselves have turned up. Now we can read what the Gnostics have to say about their own views.

The most significant find of such writings in modern times was a collection of books uncovered by Egyptian farmhands digging for fertilizer near the town of Nag Hammadi.
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This collection is called the Nag Hammadi Library. It contains thirteen books that are ancient anthologies of texts, most of them Gnostic writings produced by Gnostics and for Gnostic readers. Altogether the books contain fifty-two treatises—forty-six if you eliminate duplicates. They are written in the ancient Egyptian language known as Coptic; originally the books were apparently all authored in Greek, so the surviving copies are later translations. The books in which these treatises were found were manufactured in the fourth Christian century; the treatises themselves were composed much earlier, probably in the second Christian century. Studies of these books abound in scholarship. For our purposes, I briefly summarize the basic view set forth in these texts to help us make sense of the Christology that Gnostic Christians commonly shared.

Gnostic Christians did not think that this world was the creation of the one true God, making their views roughly similar to those of Marcion. But unlike Marcion, Gnostics subscribed to extensive mythological explanations for how the world came into being. Its origin was traced far into eternity with the generation of numerous divine beings who made up the divine realm. At some point—when the divine realm was all that existed—a cosmic catastrophe occurred that led to the formation of divine beings who were imperfect and not fully formed. One or more of these lower, imperfect, and (often seen as) ignorant divinities created this material world that we inhabit.

Gnostic texts do not explain the logic lying behind this view of the origin of the world, but it is not hard to detect. Does anyone really want to assign responsibility for this world, filled with so much pain and suffering, to the one true God? This is a world with hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, epidemics, birth defects, famine, war, and on and on. Surely a good and powerful God is not responsible for this cesspool of misery and despair. The world is a cosmic disaster, and the goal of religion is to escape this disastrous world.

According to Gnostics, the world is a place of imprisonment for sparks of the divine that originated in the divine realm but have come to be entrapped here. These sparks want and need to escape their material entrapment. They can do so by learning the secrets of who they really are, where they came from, how they got here, and how they can return.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with Christianity. According to the Christian Gnostics, this view of the world was taught by Christ himself. Christ is the one who came into the world to teach heavenly secrets that can liberate the divine sparks entrapped in matter.

Apparently, some Gnostics held to a docetic understanding, that Christ—who could not belong to this evil material world—came to the earth as a phantom, much as Marcion had said. Marcion himself should not be thought of as a Gnostic; he held that there were only two gods, not many; he did not think of this world as a cosmic disaster, but as the creation of the Old Testament God; and he did not think divine sparks resided in human bodies that could be set free by understanding the true “gnosis.” Moreover, his docetic view does not appear to have been the
typical
view of Gnostics. Rather than thinking that Christ was completely divine but not human, most Gnostics appear to have thought that Jesus Christ was two entities: a human Jesus who was temporarily inhabited by a divine being. For them, there was a “separation” between Jesus and the Christ. We might call this a
separationist
Christology.

Because the man Jesus was so righteous, a divine being from the heavenly realm came into him at his baptism. This is why the Spirit descended upon Jesus and—as Mark’s Gospel says—came “into” him at that point (the literal meaning of Mark 1:10). And this is why he could begin doing his miracles then—not earlier—and delivering his spectacular teachings. But the divine cannot, of course, suffer and die. So, before Jesus died on the cross, the divine element left him. This is attested, some Gnostics claimed, by Jesus’s final words: “My God, my God, why have you left me behind?” (the literal meaning of Mark 15:34). Jesus was abandoned by his divine element on the cross.

One of the Nag Hammadi texts that espouses this kind of Gnostic separationist Christology most poignantly is the book we considered in Chapter 5 called the
Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
, which is allegedly narrated by none other than Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter. In the final portion of the text, Peter is said to be speaking with Jesus, the Savior, when suddenly he sees a kind of double of Christ who is seized by his enemies and crucified. Peter is understandably confused and asks Christ: “What am I seeing O Lord? Is it you yourself whom they take?”
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His confusion increases because then he sees yet another Christ figure above the cross and asks in his dismay: “who is this one above the cross, who is glad and laughing? And is it another person whose feet and hands they are hammering?” (
Apocalypse of Peter
81).

Christ replies that the person above the cross is “the living Jesus” and that the person being nailed to the cross “is his physical part.” And so, there is a radical disjuncture between the physical, human Jesus and the Jesus who is “living.” The physical being is said to be “the home of demons, and the clay vessel in which they dwell, belonging to Elohim” (that is, God). The physical Jesus belongs to this material world and the inferior God who created it. But not the living Jesus: “But he who stands near him is the living Savior, the primal part in him whom they seized. And he has been released. He stands joyfully looking at those who persecuted him.” In other words, the divine element—the living Christ—has been set free from its material shell. And why does the living Jesus find the scene so amusing? “Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception, and he knows that they are born blind. Indeed therefore, the suffering one must remain, since the body is the substitute. But that which was released was my incorporeal body” (
Apocalypse of Peter
83).

Here then is a separationist Christology. The “real” Christ, the “living Jesus,” is the divine element that only temporarily inhabited the body. It was this lower, inferior part, the “home of demons,” that was crucified. It is not the dying Jesus who brings salvation; salvation comes through the living Jesus who cannot be affected by suffering and who can never die. Those who don’t understand, who think that it is the death of Jesus that matters, are the object of Christ’s ridicule. Obviously, this would include church leaders who insisted that the real suffering and death of Jesus was the one thing that brought salvation. For this Gnostic author, these church leaders were not only misguided; they were a joke.

But the Gnostics did not have the last laugh. For a variety of complex social, cultural, and historical reasons, the Gnostic form of Christianity did not succeed in winning the majority of converts to its perspective. Orthodox church writers such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian ended up winning the day. These orthodox authors attacked the Gnostics for their divisive views based on a divisive set of theological beliefs: Gnostics, the orthodox charged, separated the true God from creation; they separated human bodies from their souls; and they separated Jesus from Christ. But in fact the one God had made the world, which is a place of suffering not because it was created evil, but because it has fallen as a result of sin. This was not God’s fault. This one God had made humans body and soul, and they would be saved body and soul. The true God had sent his Son into the world, not in the mere appearance of human flesh and not as a temporary inhabitant of a human body. God was one and his Son was one, body and soul, flesh and spirit, human and divine.