Valentinianism

“They call us unspiritual, common, and ecclesiastic.” That’s a bishop talking, around the year 180. Irenaeus of Lyon is complaining about Valentinian Christians who still sat in his congregation and took communion with everyone else. They just treated him as a man who couldn’t follow the conversation. If you’ve spent any time with Gnostic texts, you’ve probably met the charge that grows out of complaints like his. Gnosticism, it goes, split humanity into the saved few and the hopeless many, and the few decided they were the few. I want to give that charge its full weight, because some of it lands. Then I want to show you a few texts that pull hard the other way. ...

Picture the church in Rome around the year 140. There’s no cathedral and no Vatican, just a scatter of house congregations that speak Greek, argue constantly, and look to a handful of gifted teachers. One of the most gifted is a man from Egypt named Valentinus, and by one ancient account he expects to be made bishop. He wasn’t. Someone else got the job, and within a generation Valentinus had become a favorite target of the heresy hunters. Bentley Layton, whose translation of the fragments I’ll lean on throughout, says that if things had gone the other way, “the whole future of Roman Christianity might have been unimaginably altered.” ...

Ask most people what the Gnostics thought of the Hebrew Bible and you’ll get a one-line answer. They hated it. The God of Moses was the villain, the jealous craftsman who trapped us in matter, and the whole Old Testament was his propaganda. There are Gnostic texts that come close to saying exactly that, and this site has walked through some of them. Then there is a letter from a teacher named Ptolemy to a woman named Flora, and it does something nobody expects. It takes the Law of Moses apart piece by piece, with a scalpel rather than a hammer, and it ends up treating most of the Law with respect. If you’ve only met the cartoon version of Gnosticism, this is the text that complicates it. Here’s how the argument works, where it still falls short, and what a modern reader can borrow from it. ...

Near the end of the New Testament, two men get named and condemned for a single idea. Hymenaeus and Philetus, the writer of 2 Timothy warns, “say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some.” We never hear their side. Their teaching spreads “like gangrene,” the letter says, and then it drops them. In 1945 a jar came out of the Egyptian sand holding, among much else, a short letter from a teacher to a student named Rheginus, and its thesis is the sentence the church had warned against. Not that the resurrection will come. That it has. The Treatise on Resurrection is a sustained second-century argument for that position, it runs under two thousand words, and it turns out to be one of the warmest things in the whole library. Let’s walk through it and ask what living from it might look like. ...