Resurrection and the Sanctification of Matter
By Robin Phillips|Published Date: March 26, 2012
“Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.” So Paul went out from their midst.” Acts 17:32-33
In 2003, Dan Brown’s publishing phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code, hit the world with a splash. The book popularized the ideas of Gnosticism, in addition to quite a few of Brown’s own ideas packaged in a pseudo-historical gloss.
I never read the book, but my wife and I did watch the film so I could write a review of it. Around the same time that we watched the film, I read in the papers that the National Geographic Society was announcing the publication of a new Gnostic document, the so called, Gospel of Judas.
Suddenly it was no longer merely historians and academics who were interested in Gnosticism. Everyone from the dentist to my neighbour seemed to be talking about issues of Christian origins and the historical Jesus.
Were the four gospels written to suppress the truth of the real Jesus, who may never have even claimed to be divine? Might the historical Jesus have actually been an esoteric Gnostic sage whose true career was subsequently covered up by the church? Were the ancient Gnostics the true followers of Christ? These were the types of questions that I kept hearing people ask, prompting me to take an interest in this ancient heresy.
But there was another reason that Gnosticism captured my interest. Around this same time, an evangelical Christian writer and former mentor began publishing some magazine articles in which he suggested that maybe the church had got it wrong about Jesus and the four gospels. He speculated that maybe it was only because the church of the 4th century had colluded with political power that books like Matthew, Mark, Look and John came to take precedence over non-canonical works like The Gospel of Thomas.
A fifth gospel?
In the previous article of this series, ‘Salvation as Escape from the Body’, I explained that The Gospel of Thomas was among the discoveries made at Nag Hammadi in the mid ‘40s. Since its publication, scholars and lay persons alike have excitedly suggested that this fifth gospel offers a legitimate portrait of the historical Jesus quite distinct to the Christ of the canonical tradition.
They are right that the portrait of Jesus in Thomas is distinct from the Jesus of the Bible, but wrong that this helps us to understand the historical Jesus. There are actually good text critical grounds for dating Thomas sometime in the second century, which strongly suggests that the work is dependent upon the canonical tradition. (See the article at CARM,
"Does the Gospel of Thomas belong in the New Testament?")
But while Thomas is useless as a piece of evidence about the historical Jesus, it is extremely valuable in shedding light on some of the key themes of Gnosticism both in the 2nd century and, unfortunately, in our day.
Denigration of matter
The Gospel of Thomas adopts a view of the material world that is deeply Platonic. But what do I mean by that?
We get a glimpse into the Platonic worldview in Acts 17 when we read about the reaction to the sermon Saint Paul preached at the Areopagus. The apostle expounded many truths at which an audience of Athenian philosophers might be expected to have taken offense at: God’s sovereignty, the need for universal repentance, the folly of idolatry and God’s coming judgement. Significantly, however, Luke records that it was the doctrine of the resurrection that incited particular mockery from Paul’s philosopher audience. (Acts 17:32)
This is not surprising. The bodily resurrection of Jesus challenged the deeply dualistic philosophy that many of the ancient Greeks held in common with Gnosticism. Echoing Plato’s statement “Soma sema” (“a body, a tomb”), many of the Greeks looked upon the material body as a prison house. Perhaps the clearest expression of this comes from Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates explains:
“We are convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things in isolation with the soul in isolation.... If no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body, then either it is totally impossible to acquire knowledge, or it is only possible after death, because it is only then that the soul will be isolated and independent of the body. It seems that so long as we are alive, we shall keep as close as possible to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body...”
It should come as no surprise to find an assortment of second- and third-century writers, especially those associated with either the Greek or the Gnostic tradition, trying to fit the doctrine of resurrection into categories consistent with the metaphysics of a Platonic philosophy. We see this in the Gnostic idea that the goal of salvation is not the resurrection of the physical body but disembodiment in an eternal realm of pure spirit. Continued/more:
Resurrection and the Sanctification of Matter.
