EPILOGUE 769
they could cause him pain, we see Jesus laughing at his would-be tormentors:
"I laughed at their ignorance."^6 In sum, most of the gnostic sects rejected the
usual symbolic interpretation of "the word became flesh" (John 1:14) in
which the word of god resided in Jesus, who was at once the holy word and a
human being. These rejectionist ideas were an anathema to the church, and
the gnostics and docetists were examined at length and denounced for their
terrible heresies by Irenaeus of Lyon, the bishop Ignatius of Antioch, and
Hippolytus and Clement of Alexandria.^7 Later the gnostics were condemned
by Augustine, who knew gnosticism from the inside, since he had been a fer-
vent Manichaean in his youth.
The church fathers were concerned. Here we have the earthly Jewish mes-
siah of Isaiah, who in the gospels becomes salvific Jesus, turned by the gnostics
into a divinity who resembles an angel but is neither man nor god. And above
Jesus is the gnostic god of light at odds with his rival, the ignorant god of the
Bible. The creator god of the Bible has earned his title of darkness by creating
man and woman as a prison containing the divine particles of light that fell
from the pleroma, the fullness (the highest principle in the gnostic theogony).
While the biblical god made light, that external light is a temporal illusion.
True light is in the human spirit. The gnostic earned the title of illumination
by seeking the inner light. And to know and become these particles of light
though gnosis is to disappear into eternity. Clearly, the gnostics were heretics.
They could become light or god—or whatever one calls the divine principle—
in their own person, and without need of the angry church that saw them as
evil and would eventually annihilate them.
THE JEWISH MOMENT AT THE
BEGINNING OF GNOSTICISMOne of the intriguing hypotheses about why and how gnosticism developed
remains the earlier-noted Jewish one as described by Scholem and Grant.
Grant suggests that the earliest gnostics operated in the first century before- The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Codex VII, 2, 56 (NagHammadi Library, 3d ed.,
P-365). - The question of whether Jesus had two natures (human and divine) or one (divine) divided
orthodox Christians and divergent sects for more than a thousand years. For example, in the
sixth century the Byzantine emperor Justinian wavered, giving some leeway to the Mono-
physites, who taught that Jesus Christ was only divine. There were many sects who insisted on
the docetic or monophysistic creed that Christ had only a divine nature, from the early Mon-
tanists, gnostics, and docetists to the tenth- and eleventh-century Bogomils in Constantinople
and Bosnia, and their later Cathar adherents in northern Italy and southwestern France.