EPILOGUE 7 8lthose of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.^19 Their favored text to com-
ment on was the Gospel of John (see Herakleon), which they treated as their
gospel. In the first lines of the Gospel, John establishes the notion of the essen-
tial interior light and tells the role of John the baptizer:
He was not the light.
but came to testify about the light.
The light was the true light
which illuminates every person
who comes into the world. (John 1:8-9)John the baptizer was not the light, meaning that Jesus was the light and
John merely the lamp carrying the light. So John's role is defined as prophetic
but secondary to that of Jesus, who is the divine. All this suggests intense ri-
valry between early followers of a messiah, some favoring John, who electri-
fied Judaism with his arrival as a human messiah in ways seemingly foretold
in Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14, 9:2-7, 42:1-4), others, the majority, favoring Jesus as a
divine messiah. There is considerable evidence that by the second century the
number of those favoring John—apart from the gnostics who favored him—
was increasing alarmingly. The Mandaean gnostics aggressively chose John
the baptizer over Jesus and made Jesus into the so-called Nbu Christ, who is a
sorcerer, who fouls baptism and people with menstrual discharge but claims
to be the true god.
The high clergy in Rome, Antioch, and Constantinople was alarmed. Not
only were the gnostics converting newcomers by appropriating the gospels as
their own, but they were also converting Christians to their heresy and spread-
ing from land to land as an unquenchable fire. These gnostics seemed to turn
every sacred notion on its head, from Eve, who could be seen as virtuous for
choosing knowledge, to the creator god, who was denigrated as proud, legalis-
tic, and ignorant and assigned the lowest demonic place in the cosmic hierar-
chy. In those ostensibly Christian schools of the gnostics, especially pernicious
were the intellectual and mystical notions of Alexandrian Valentinos (Valenti-
nus), Basilides, and the Sethians, which, from at least 135 to 450, were promi-
nent. To the initially decentralized networks of the early Christians, these were
formidable heretics. These Alexandrians, along with Mani and his followers,
- See Rudolph, Gnosticism, 25.