5 Doctrine and power: orthodoxy and organization
in early Christianity
1 Interestingly, one of the books is by Bart D. Ehrman, chair of the
Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, and a respected scholar of the place of texts in the debate
between orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity (Ehrman 2004).
Some other responses have been unusually intemperate (and are
directed not so much against the novel’s use of the Nag Hammadi texts,
as against its perceived broader anti-Catholic agenda). Among them is
The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code
(Chicago: Ignatius Press, 2004) by Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel,
which contains a polemical foreword by the Cardinal Archbishop of
Chicago.
2 For the later influence of ‘Gnosticism’, see Richard Smith, ‘Afterword:
The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism’, in Robinson 1988: 532–49.
3 Some of the texts clearly have an origin outside of Gnosticism. Codex
VI, for example, contains a Coptic translation of a couple of pages
from Plato’s Republic; indeed scholars generally agree that noneof the
texts in this codex can be defined as Gnostic in any way. Meanwhile,
Codex XII contains a fragmentary Coptic version of a work called the
Sentences of Sextus, a text that had originally been composed in Greek
and was known also in translations into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and
Georgian. The Sentencesconsist of a series of moral maxims (e.g.
number 165c: ‘Untrue words are the evidence of evil persons’). Even
if they contained statements about moral and spiritual rigour that might
have appealed to Gnostics, their circulation in other contexts suggests
that they enjoyed a broader popularity among communities of early
Christians.
4 Plotinus’ treatise is preserved scattered about his surviving Enneads
(2.9, 3.8, 5.5, 5.8). It is perhaps worth mentioning that Plotinus came
from Lycopolis in Egypt, not far from the site of Nag Hammadi.
5 See R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity 400–1000,
second edition, London: Macmillan, 1995, ch. 3. The ‘location’ of
Arianism within the fourth century is explicit in the dates given in the
title of Hanson 1988.
6 See the story ‘The Lost Gospels’ in Timemagazine, vol. 162, no. 25
(22 December 2003), pp. 54ff.NOTES
248