The charge against the Gnostics fits in one breath. They believed a lesser god made the world, so they decided matter was bad, so they hated the body. You can still hear the verdict whenever someone calls an idea “gnostic” because it treats flesh as an inconvenience to be managed or escaped.

I’ve spent a lot of this blog reading these texts sympathetically, so it seems only fair to put the charge to them directly. The short answer is sometimes yes. The longer answer is that the texts fought about the body among themselves, and a few of them defended it more stubbornly than their critics did.

The Case for the Prosecution

Start with the strongest evidence, because there’s plenty of it. In the Secret Book of John, the rulers of this world build Adam’s body out of earth, water, fire, and “their own phony spirit.” The text then names what they’ve made:

This figure is the cave for remodeling the body that these criminals put on the human, the fetter of forgetfulness.

A cave, a fetter, a remodeling job done by criminals. Later in the same book, the divine Forethought descends into “the prison of the body” to wake the sleeper inside.

Marvin Meyer’s notes point out that the body as prison or tomb was already an old Platonic and Orphic idea, so the Gnostics didn’t invent it. But they gave it a villain. I walked through the whole myth in Understanding the Apocryphon of John.

The Book of Thomas, a dialogue between Jesus and his twin, goes further. “Woe to you who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish,” the Savior says, and the woes keep coming, most of them aimed at sexual desire. John Turner’s introduction in Meyer’s edition calls its outlook an asceticism that condemns everything having to do with flesh and sex.

Turner also notes that the text never mentions the creation myth at all. You don’t need a demiurge to despise your body. Plenty of people manage it without one.

Then there are the reports from outside. Irenaeus, writing around 180, says the followers of a teacher named Saturninus declared that “marriage and generation are from Satan,” and that many of them refused to eat meat. Irenaeus was hostile and his reports need salt. Still, Hippolytus repeats the claim a generation later, and it squares with the Book of Thomas well enough that I don’t think he made it up.

So the prosecution has a case. Some Gnostics did hate the body, and they wrote it down.

Thomas Can’t Quite Make Up Its Mind

The Gospel of Thomas, the most read of all these texts, looks at first like more evidence for the charge. Saying 87 reads, “How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.” Saying 112 sharpens it: “Woe to the flesh that depends on the soul. Woe to the soul that depends on the flesh.”

But look at the verb. Neither saying condemns flesh for existing. Both condemn dependence, a body leaning on another body, a soul hanging its whole weight on the flesh. That’s a diagnosis of attachment, and the Buddhists would recognize it.

Elsewhere Thomas sounds almost amazed by embodiment. In saying 29, Jesus marvels that spirit should have ended up in flesh at all, calling it “great wealth” come to dwell “in this poverty.” Poverty is not a compliment, but wonder isn’t contempt either, as I argued in Thomas 29: Great Wealth in Poverty.

Saying 89 refuses the split altogether. “Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don’t you understand that the one who made the inside is also the one who made the outside?”

That last line is hard to square with the idea that the body belongs to a different, lesser maker. Thomas seems to hold both thoughts at once, and I think it’s more honest for doing so.

Philip Argues Against Both Sides

The Gospel of Philip is where the charge really runs into trouble. Philip is a Valentinian collection of teachings about the sacraments, and it takes up the resurrection of the flesh directly. It starts by mocking people who want to rise in their own bodies because they’re afraid of rising naked. Then it turns around:

And I also disagree with others who say that the flesh will not arise. Both views are wrong.

Philip’s own answer is that “it is necessary to arise in this sort of flesh, since everything exists in it.” The flesh in question is a transformed one, identified with the flesh and blood of Jesus, which Philip reads as word and Holy Spirit. That’s not the body you brush your teeth with. It’s not nothing, either, and Philip goes out of its way to rebuke the people who said the flesh simply drops away.

Philip also says “the mystery of marriage is great,” because without it the world would not exist, and it speaks of the power of pure intercourse even though its image in this world is defiled. Its whole spiritual life runs through physical things. You get water in baptism, oil in the anointing, bread and a cup at the eucharist, and the bridal chamber at the top. A group that hated matter would make strange choices for its holiest rites.

The Flesh You Take With You

The Treatise on Resurrection, a Valentinian letter to a student named Rheginus, makes the gentlest case of all. “Although once you did not exist in flesh, you took on flesh when you entered this world,” the teacher writes. “Why is it, then, that you will not take your flesh with you when you ascend into the eternal realm?”

He does rank things. What animates the flesh is better than the flesh, he says, and what you leave behind is the body’s slow decline into old age. But the question itself assumes the flesh belongs to you and goes where you go. I spent a whole post on this letter in You Already Have the Resurrection, and it still surprises me how little contempt there is in it.

Sorting the Strands

Here’s how I’d put it if a friend asked. The tradition had at least three attitudes to the body, and they don’t line up neatly with “Gnostic” and “orthodox.”

  • The ascetic strand treats the body as the enemy. The Book of Thomas and the Saturninians belong here, and so, for what it’s worth, do a lot of later desert monks the church made into saints.
  • The mythic strand treats the body as a prison built by jailers. The Secret Book of John is the clearest case, though even there the body is where the divine spark lives and where Adam first wakes up.
  • The sacramental strand treats the body as raw material for transformation. Philip and the Letter to Rheginus speak for it, and it’s the strand modern summaries leave out.

None of the three celebrates the body the way a psalm about being “fearfully and wonderfully made” does. That’s a fair concession, and the critics are right to press it. The texts consistently rank spirit above flesh. But ranking something second is different from hating it, and only one strand comes close to hatred.

Living Well in the Garment

If you’re drawn to this tradition and worried it’ll make you treat your body like a rented car, the texts themselves give you some ways to check.

  • Use Thomas 112 as a test. When you’re frustrated with your body, ask whether the problem is that it exists or that you’re leaning your whole weight on it. The first is contempt. The second is something you can work on.
  • Pick one physical act this week and treat it the way Philip treats water and oil. Your morning shower or the first bite of dinner both count. Do it slowly, as if it were a rite, because for Philip it would have been.
  • If you fast or abstain from something, check the motive. The Saturninians gave things up because they thought creation was Satan’s. Giving something up so you can pay attention is a different practice, even when it looks the same from outside.
  • Next time the mirror gets a harsh word from you, try saying 29 instead. Wealth in poverty is still wealth, and the saying marvels at the arrangement.

Philip has one more line that I keep coming back to, because it flips the usual picture of what a Gnostic thinks of flesh. “In this world those who wear clothes are superior to the clothes. In heaven’s kingdom the clothes are superior to those who wear them.”

So the garment outlasts the wearer, and in the kingdom it outranks the one wearing it. It’s an odd thing for a body-hater to write.

The Secret Book of John, the Book of Thomas, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Treatise on Resurrection are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), with introductions by John D. Turner and Madeleine Scopello. Irenaeus is quoted from Against Heresies 1.24.2 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation. Hippolytus’s parallel report is in Refutation of All Heresies, book 7. Psalm 139:14 is quoted from the NIV.