(^778) EPILOGUE
god, clearly replacing the Hebrew Bible deity and, in practice and in popular
understanding, god himself. While in the gospels Jesus will sit to the right of
god's throne, in popular thought and iconography god and salvation are more
understood through Jesus. The tripartite nature of god explains away this pop-
ular misunderstanding, but the perception persists that Jesus is not only god
but also, for all practical purposes, the immediate god to address in prayer.
If the Christian god must share his realm of significance with Jesus and to
a much lesser extent with the holy spirit, then the gnostics carry sectarian ri-
valry with an ancestral father religion in the Hebrew Bible radically further.
The gnostics deconstruct both Judaism and Christianity and reconstitute
them both to conform to their own creation myths. In both Christian and gnos-
tic reconstruction of precursors, however, these ritual killings of the found-
ing father contain astonishing inconsistencies. The Christians demonize the
Jews but exempt all the early Christians, who were also Jews, by ignoring or
dissembling their religious identity as Jews. While the gnostics demonize the
original god of the Jews, they pay less attention to the Jews themselves, who
are seldom mentioned—though they are not well treated when they are
mentioned. Classical gnosticism sees the creator god of the Bible not only as
the god of the Jews but principally as the demiurgical tyrant of misguided
Christians, who have appropriated and interpreted the Hebrew Bible as their
own Christian Bible. And insofar as Christians worship that biblical god, they
also obey the demon of darkness. But the misguided Christians have a way
out. They can become true Christians if, as Christian gnostics, they renounce
the god of the Bible and turn to the invisible father of all.
JESUS AMONG THE GNOSTICS
How does Jesus fit into this revisionism? Among the Christian gnostics, Jesus
is the mediating figure. He is often the envoy (or angel) of the invisible true fa-
ther. This position makes him higher than a human, less than the godhead. He
is normally monophysitic, which is to say that he is only spirit and his body on
earth is illusion. He has no human body but only appears to have died on the
cross. In his highest position as envoy, he appears as an eternal being (an aeon)
sent to earth to instruct humans in the ways of light and redemption.
While the Christian gnostics, including the later Cathars, claim that their
Jesus is the true Jesus, he is so different from the Jesus of orthodox Rome and
Byzantium as to make his gnostic articulation impossible for Christians to ac-
cept. On at least two major issues there could be no compromise. Christianity
elliott
(Elliott)
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