INTRODUCTION^11
in terms of modern philosophical existentialism. The gnostic drama high-
lights the self-experience of a person as Geworfenheit, "thrownness," aban-
donment of self in the world. As the Secret Book of John and other texts
describe it, one is thrown into this world, into a body, into the darkness. Yet,
Jonas states, "There is no overlooking one cardinal difference between the
gnostic and the existentialist dualism: Gnostic man is thrown into an antago-
nistic, anti-divine and therefore anti-human nature, modern man into an in-
different one. Only the latter case represents the absolute vacuum, the really
bottomless pit."^6 Ancient gnostics and modern existentialists may both be ni-
hilistic, but we modern folks, in our post-Christian world, face the more pro-
found abyss: the uncaring abyss. For gnostics, there is light in the darkness and
hope in the abyss.
More recently scholars have questioned these ways of describing and
defining gnosis and gnosticism. Here we shall consider three significant at-
tempts to shed new light on the gnostic debate, those by Elaine Pagels, Bentley
Layton, and Michael Williams.
- In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels admits that Jonas's book The Gnos-
tic Religion remains "the classic introduction," but in her own book Pagels de-
picts gnostics in a different way.^7 She reads the gnostic gospels and draws
conclusions about social and political concerns that motivated the gnostics.
Thus, for Pagels, the gnostics formulated teachings on the spiritual resurrec-
tion of Christ that subverted the emerging orthodox church's hierarchy of
priests and bishops, whose authority was—and still is—linked to the messen-
gers or apostles who were witnesses of the bodily resurrection of Christ. The
gnostic teaching on spiritual resurrection and spiritual authority, Pagels ob-
serves, "claimed to offer to every initiate direct access to God of which the
priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant."^8 Again, Pagels notes that
the gnostics formulated teachings on the multiple manifestations of god, the
mother and the father, that subverted the emerging orthodox church's com-
mitment—which still can be found—to the authority of one bishop, and a
male bishop at that. In these and other ways, as Adolf von Harnack once said
and Pagels also recalls, the gnostics may have been the "first Christian theolo-
gians," whose ideas and actions stimulated theological thinking in the Christ-
ian church. In Pagels's view, the gnostics lived as freethinking advocates of a - Ibid., p. 338.
- Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, p. xxxi.
- Ibid., p. 27.