308 LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM
concepts of the gnostics appear: aeons, pleroma, demiurge, and the father of
truth. Yet even here he refrains, probably because of the intended audience,
from going into the esoteric mythopoetic structure of the Valentinian cosmos,
with its tales of Sophia and other principle eternal beings (aeons) in the full-
ness (pleroma).
Herakleon focuses both on the nature of the savior and on those who have
accepted and denied him. Jesus is accepted as the anointed (Christ, messiah) by
some Jews, whom we now call Christians, and not by other Jews. He informs us
that the Jews of the New Testament (by this he is excluding Jesus' followers and
Jesus himself) are even seen as not descended from the patriarch Abraham but
as descendants of the devil, and he cites John 8:44, "You are from your father
the devil." "They are neither children of Abraham nor children of god, because
they do not love Jesus." They are from the demiurge, the biblical creator god.
At this point he moves into the crucial area of Christian and Christian-
gnostic thought and confusion—who is this Jesus? The orthodox views of the
church father Justin (or Justin Martyr, as he is conventionally known) that
"Jesus Christ alone really was born as the son of god"l and of Irenaeus that
"god was made man"^2 contrast with the gnostic view that Christ was not a
human. In her Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis, Elaine Pagels compares
Christian belief and gnostic heterdoxy:
Heracleon claims, for example, that those who insist that Jesus, a
man who lived "in the flesh," is "Christ" fail to distinguish be-
tween literal and symbolic truth. Those who write accounts of
the revelation as alleged biographies of "Jesus of Nazareth"—or
even of Jesus as messiah—focus on mere historical "externals"
and miss the inner truth they signify.^3Herakleon saw the view of an earthly Jesus as an error of the flesh in which un-
denied historical data pass for spiritual truth when such events have been re-
ally just earthly reflections of a divine reality whose appearance of corporality
was pure illusion. The word was not made real flesh in the instance of Jesus
Christ. The word was made image, a simulacrum of the flesh.
- Justin, First Apology 21.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.2.1.
- Pagels, Johannine Gospels in Gnostic Exegesis, 13.