Early Christianity

This view has found its way into a recent best-selling novel.

In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, an eccentric English histo-

rian presents the writings from Nag Hammadi as a true history

of Christian origins that was suppressed by the early church but

which was preserved through the centuries by a secret society. He

shows the chief protagonists of the novel (a Harvard professor

and a French policewoman) a leather-bound volume of ‘Gnostic

Gospels’ and explains that they contain truths about the divine

feminine that the church would rather forget. For what it is worth,

The Da Vinci Codereflects how perceptions of the Nag Hammadi

library and the Dead Sea Scrolls have become confused in some

recesses of the popular imagination: at one point the eccentric

English historian even refers to the Nag Hammadi codices as

‘scrolls’.

Perhaps it will seem gratuitous of me to mention interpre-

tations of the Nag Hammadi texts contained in a novel – the

stuff of tabloid history, it might be said. However, The Da Vinci

Codehas sold extremely well and has been responsible for raising

public awareness of the Nag Hammadi library. Other books have

been published explaining (and sometimes denouncing) its

contents.^1 It might be objected that The Da Vinci Codeis only

fiction, that its conspiracy theories hardly merit serious atten-

tion, and that anyone who doestake them seriously is simply

misguided. Even so, some aspects of the response to the novel,

particularly the angry denunciations of it, remind us that there

are modern Christians who are uncomfortable with the sorts of

information that are included in the Nag Hammadi texts, and that

the history of early Christianity is a subject in which people

continue to vest powerful emotions.

Nag Hammadi and the Gnostics

I have mentioned already that the Nag Hammadi library provoked

much excitement because it preserved more or less complete

versions of texts that had been mentioned in the polemical trea-

tises composed by early Christian writers against the heresy that

modern scholars have called Gnosticism. For example, Irenaeus

ORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY

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