(^768) EPILOGUE
followers of Alexandrian Valentinos as well as the heresiarch and magician
Simon Magus, among many others. The church fathers "simply traced back
the rise of Gnosis to the devil."^3 The gnostics returned the favor by making the
god of the Old and New Testaments the demiurge—or more bluntly, the devil.
Not all the church fathers' polemics against the gnostics were uninformed,
however. The Alexandrian fathers Clement (d. 215?) and Origen (i85?-254?)
were well informed and, to counter the readings of the Valentinian school of
biblical scripture, developed their own hermeneutics, which were based on an
allegorical reading of scripture. Tertullian was called "the Christian gnostic,"
since he was said to have found the true gnosis while the gnostics propounded
false gnosis. Clement's student Origen, the most prolific theologian before
Augustine, edited the Hexapla Bible and developed a threefold reading of
scripture: literally, ethically, and allegorically. Imitating the gnostics in looking
for esoteric meanings in scripture, he developed an exegesis of the Bible that
would find approval in the church. Origen was also linked to gnosticism by his
elevation of knowledge over mere faith.
But what most enraged early Christians about the gnostics was not only
their unsympathetic portrait of the traditional creator god and the rivalry for
dominion in this emerging religion—there were many serious heretical rival
sects posing threats to primitive Christianity—but their rejection of the es-
sential creed that in Jesus there existed two natures: the human and the divine.
For the orthodox, Christ was at once man and god, and after suffering on the
cross he was resurrected and ascended as the son of god to heaven.
The gnostics denied Christ's two natures of human and divine, and la-
beled his human semblance merely that—a semblance, not a reality. For
them Jesus was a celestial body incapable of human misery. They shared the
second-century docetic belief that during his life on earth, Christ was a di-
vine phantom, who only seemed to inhabit a human body and to die on the
cross.^4 Since Jesus Christ did not die a human death or a divine death, his
resurrection and ascension to heaven never took place. Likewise, his lifetime
ministries, miracles, and suffering were mere appearances. In the Nag Ham-
madi library's First Apocalypse of James, the exalted Christ straightens out a
commiserating James after his crucifixion: "I am the one who was in me.
Never have I experienced any kind of suffering."^5 As for those who thought
- Rudolph, Gnosis, 275.
4. Second-century docetism (from Greek dokein, "to seem") affirmed Christ's divinity and
scoffed at the idea that made Jesus both man and god.
5. The First Apocalypse of James, Codex V, 3,15-20 (Nag Hammadi Library, 3d ed., p. 268).