EPILOGUE 771
man. Baruch ("blessed" in Hebrew) is the tree of life and the chief angel.
Naas, the serpent, is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the chief
maternal angel. Eden is many: garden, earth, Israel, a symbol of Eve, and the
earth mother. In later speculations the unknown god in his various guises has
a male and female element and is called the mother-father of us all, or god
with a female principle or emanation. The female emanation is usually
Sophia, who is wisdom. Because of a disturbance and inadequacy in god, she
is separated from him, falls from the pleroma, and creates the world. In refer-
ring back to Christian gnosticism's Jewish origin and early ties between gnos-
ticism and early and late Kabbalah, Grant observes that Justin's variation of
Judaism "is like the mystical Judaism we find in the [medieval Spanish]
Zohar, where Yahweh is called the father and Elohim the mother."^10
DESPAIR AND TURN TO LIGHT
The calamitous Roman occupation of Israel surely influenced the Jewish turn
to gnosticism. After the failure of the Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem (66-70
CE), the misery of the Jews increased with the destruction of the Second Tem-
ple (70 CE). The utter failure of god to intervene on their behalf dashed their
apocalyptic hopes for external help and opened a way to gnosticism. Grant
describes the mess of destruction and despair: "For all practical purposes, the
Gnostics must have been ex-Jews, renegades from their religion, for they had
abandoned the deity of the Creator."^11 While the destruction of the Temple
and the city of Jerusalem devastated and exiled the Jews, the later Christian
Jews who composed the gospels turned that historic horror into a punishment
for those Jews who failed to recognize their messiah and a reward and hope for
those who did. In reality both Jews and Christian Jews were slaughtered and
driven out of the razed city. This diaspora led to the spread of both gnosticism
and Christianity. With Christian Judaism now in the gentile world, the new
sect's laws of the Sabbath, circumcision, and diet were quickly altered, making
large-scale conversion to Christianity a popular possibility. At the same time
the original persecution and calamity, having been experienced equally by Jew
and Christian Jew, led many to a gnostic solution, which is seen in the sudden
eruption of gnosticism in all the new Christian terrains.
Rather then pinning hope on clergy and traditional places of worship,
these heterodox Jews as well as Christian Jews chose to look for a light inside.- Ibid., 23.
- Ibid., 26.