EPILOGUE 793
While early Christianity was replete with conflicting creeds and many
gospels circulating and competing for authority and a place in the canon, in-
cluding the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, the
Gospel of Truth, and the Book of Thomas, the church fathers were seeking to
squelch secret teachings and dissent from an emerging canon. And despite a
later sentimental view that early Christians had a unanimity of belief and
charitable tolerance of outsiders, the times were intensely dangerous for dis-
senting Christians and especially for gnostic Christians. In comparing the dis-
sidence of John the baptizer with that of gnostic revolutionaries in those
divisive times, James M. Robinson, the editor of The NagHammadi Library in
English, observes that as the ingredients of Christianity coalesced and became
a set doctrine, the followers of the radical Christian Jews soon became power-
ful, comfortable, and conventional and took on the "basic stance... of the my-
opic heresy-hunters."^26 As for the gnostics, they in turn appeared to abandon
traditional god and church for a personal mythopoeia to accompany, in image
and word, their turn inward. Robinson writes,
[Their] outlook on life increasingly darkened; the very origin of
the world was attributed to a terrible fault, and evil was given
status as the ultimate ruler of the world, not just a usurpation of
authority. Hence the only hope seemed to reside in escape. Be-
cause humans, or at least some humans, are at heart not the
product of such an absurd system, but by their very nature be-
long to the ultimate. Their plight is that they have been duped
and lured into the trap of trying to be content in the impossible
world, alienated from their true home. And for some, concen-
trated inwardness undistracted by external factors came to be
the only way to attain repose, the overview, the merger into the
all which is the destiny of one's spark of the divine.^27These rebels, trying to make sense of the trap of an impossible world and
move from alienation to a divine spark, were, as were so many, influenced by
platonic thought. They were affected by both Plato and platonism, in the writ-
ings of Philo, and Greek revelation-wisdom texts from Egypt, in the Corpus
Hermeticum. Other sources were Jewish mysticism as elaborated by Scholem
- Robinson, ed., NagHammadi Library in English, 3.
- Ibid., 4.