Lost and Hostile Gospels

IV. The Gospel Of The Egyptians

The Gospel known by this name is mentioned by several of the early Fathers.373 It existed in the second half of the second century; and as it was then in use and regarded as canonical by certain Christian sects, it must have been older. We shall not be far out if we place its composition at the beginning of the second century.

To form an idea of its tendency, we must have recourse to two different sources, the second Epistle of Clemens Romanus, the author of which seems to have made use of no other Gospel than that of the Egyptians, and Clement of Alexandria, who quotes three passages from it, and refutes the theories certain heretics of his time derived from them.

The second Epistle of St. Clement of Rome is a Judaizing work, as Schneckenburg has proved incontestably.374 It is sufficient to remark that the Chiliast belief which transpires in more than one place, the analogy of ideas and of expressions which it bears to the Clementine Homilies, and finally the selection of Clement of Rome, a personage as dear to the Ebionites as the apostles James and Peter, to place the composition under his venerated name, are as many indications of the Judaeo-Christian character and origin of this apocryphal work.

The Gospel cited by the author of this Epistle, except in two or three phrases which are not found in any of our Canonical Gospels, recalls that of St. Matthew. Nevertheless, it is certain that the quotations are from the Gospel of the Egyptians, for one of the passages cited in this Epistle is also quoted by Clement of Alexandria, who tells us whence it comes – from the Egyptian Gospel. We may conclude from this that the Gospel of the Egyptians presented great analogy to our first Canonical Gospel, without being identical with it, and consequently that it was related closely to the Gospel of the Hebrews.

If the second Epistle of Clement of Rome determines for us the family to which this Gospel belonged, the passages we shall extract from the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria will determine its order. There are three of these passages, and very curious ones they are.

The first is cited by both Clement of Rome and Clement of Alexandria, by one more fully than by the other.

“The Lord, having been asked by Salome when his kingdom would come, replied, When you shall have trampled under foot the garment of shame, when two shall be one, when that which is without shall be like that which is within, and when the male with the female shall be neither male nor female.”375

The explanation of this singular passage by Clement of Rome is, “Two shall be one when we are truthful with each other, and when in two bodies there will be but one soul, without dissimulation and without disguise. That which is without is the body; that which is within is the soul. Just as your body appears externally, so should your soul manifest itself by good works.” The explanation of the last member of the phrase is wanting, as the Epistle has not come down to us entire.

But this is certainly not the real meaning of the passage. Its true signification is to be found in the bloodless, passionless exaltation at which the ascetic aimed who held all matter to be evil, the body to be a clog to the soul, marriage to be abominable, meats to be abstained from. It points to that condition as one of perfection in which the soul shall forget her union with the body, and, sexless and ethereal, shall be supreme.

It was in this sense that the heretics took it. Julius Cassianus, “chief of the sect of the Docetae,”376 invoked this text against the union of the sexes. This interpretation manifestly embarrassed St. Clement of Alexandria, and he endeavours to escape from the difficulty by weakening the authority of the text.

He does this by pointing out that the saying of our Lord is found only in the Gospel of the Egyptians, and not in those four generally received. But as Julius Cassianus appealed at the same time to a saying of St. Paul, the authenticity of which was not to be contested, the Alexandrine doctor did not consider that he could avoid discussing the question; and he gives, on his side, an interpretation of the saying of Jesus in the Apocryphal Gospel, and of that of St. Paul, associated with it by Julius Cassianus. The words of St. Paul quoted by the heretic were those in Galatians (iii. 28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, male or female.” Cassianus paid no regard to the general sense of the passage, which is, that the privileges of the gospel are common to all of every degree and nation and sex, but fastening on the words “neither male nor female,” contended that this was a prohibition of marriage. St. Clement pays every whit as little regard to the plain sense of the passage, and gives the whole an absurd mystic signification, as far removed from the thought of the apostle as the explanation of Julius Cassianus. “By male,” says he, “understand anger, folly. By female understand lust; and when these are carried out, the result is penitence and shame.”

It has been thought that the words “when two shall be one” recall the philosophic doctrine of the Pythagoreans on the subject of numbers and the dualism which was upheld by many of the Gnostics. St. Mark, according to Irenaeus, taught that everything had sprung out of the monad and dyad.377 But it is not so. The teaching was not philosophic, but practical. It may be thus paraphrased: “The kingdom of heaven shall have come when the soul shall have so broken with the passions and feelings of the body, that it will no longer be sensible of shame. The body will be lost in the soul, so that the two shall become one; the body which is without shall be like the soul within, and the male with the female shall be insensible to passion.”

It was a doctrine which infected whole bodies of men later: the independence of the soul from the body led to wild asceticism and frantic sensuality running hand in hand. Holding this doctrine, the Fraticelli in the thirteenth century flung themselves into the most fiery temptations, placed themselves in the most perilous positions; if they fell, it mattered not, the soul was not stained by the deeds of the body; if they remained unmoved, the body was indeed mastered, “the two had become one.”

The garment of shame is to be trampled under foot. Julius Cassianus explains this singular expression. It is the apron of skins wherewith our first parents were clothed, when they blushed at their nakedness. They blushed because they were in sin; when men and women shall cease to blush at their nudity, then they have attained to the spiritual condition of unfallen man.

We see in embryo the Adamites of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists of the Reformation.

But the garment of skin has a deeper signification. Philo taught378 that it symbolized the human body that clothed the nakedness of the Spirit. Gnosticism caught at the idea. Unfallen man was pure spirit. Man had fallen, and his fall consisted in being clothed in flesh. This garment of skin must be trodden under foot, that the soul may arise above it, be emancipated from its bonds.

The second passage is quite in harmony with the first: “Salome having asked how long men should die, the Lord answered and said, As long as you women continue to bear children.379 Then she said, I have done well, I have never borne a child. The Lord answered, Eat of every herb, but not of that containing in itself bitterness.”380

Cassian appealed to this text also in proof that marriage was forbidden. But Clement of Alexandria refused to understand it in this sense. He is perhaps right when he argues that the first answer of our Lord means, that as long as there are men born, so long men will die. But the meaning of the next answer entirely escapes him. When our Lord says, “Eat of every herb save that in which is bitterness,” he means, says Clement, that marriage and continence are left to our choice, and that there is no command one way or the other; man may eat of every tree, the tree of celibacy, or the tree of marriage, only he must abstain from the tree of evil.

But this is not what was meant. Under a figurative expression, the writer of this passage conveyed a warning against marriage. Death is the fruit of birth, birth is the fruit of marriage. Abstain from eating of the tree of marriage, and death will be destroyed.

That this is the meaning of this remarkable saying is proved conclusively by another extract from the Gospel of the Egyptians, also made by Clement of Alexandria; it is put in the mouth of our Lord. “I am come to destroy the works of the woman; of the woman, that is, of concupiscence, whose works are generation and death.”381 This quotation bears on the face of it marks of having been touched and explained by a later hand. “Of the woman, – that is, concupiscence, whose works are generation and death,” are a gloss added by an Encratite, which was adopted into the text received among the Egyptian Docetae. The words, “I am come to destroy the works of the woman,” i. e. Eve, may have been spoken by our Lord. By Eve came sin and death into the world, and these works Christ did indeed come to destroy.

But the gloss, as is obvious, alters the meaning of the saying. The woman is no longer Eve, but womankind in general; and by womankind, that is, by concupiscence, generation and death exist.

Clement of Alexandria was incapable of seizing the plain meaning of these words. He says, “The Lord has not deceived us, for he has indeed destroyed the works of concupiscence, viz. love of money, of strife, glory, of women … now the birth of these vices is the death of the soul, for we die indeed by our sins.”

We must look to Philo for the key. The woman, Eve, means, as he says, the sense; Adam, the intellectual spirit. The union of soul and body is the degradation of the soul, the fertile parent of corruption and death.382 Out of Philo's doctrine grew a Manichaeanism in the Christian community before Manes was born.

The work of Jesus was taught to be the emancipation of the soul, the rational spirit, Νοῦς, from the restraints of the body, its restoration to its primitive condition. Death would cease when the marriage was dissolved that held the spirit fettered in the prison-house of flesh.

Philonian philosophy remained vigorous at Alexandria in the circle of enlightened Jews. It struck deep root, and blossomed in the Christian Church.

A Gospel, which we do not know – it may have been that of Mark – was brought into Egypt. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, an Epistle clearly addressed to the Alexandrine Jews, prepared their minds to fuse Philonism with Christianity. We see its influence in the Gospel of St. John. That evangelist adopted Philo's doctrine of the Logos; the author of the Gospel of the Egyptians, that of the bondage of the spirit in matter.

The conceptions contained in the three passages which Clement of Alexandria has preserved are closely united. They all are referable to a certain theosophy, the exposition of which is to be found in the writings of Philo, and which may be in vain sought elsewhere at that period. Not only are there to be found here the theosophic system of the celebrated Alexandrine Jew, but also, what is a still clearer index of the source whence the Egyptian Gospel drew its mystic asceticism, we find the quaint expressions and forms of speech which belonged to Philo, and to none but him. No one but Philo had thought to find in the first chapters of Genesis the history of the fall of the soul into the world of sense, and to make of Eve, of the woman, the symbol of the human body, and starting from this to explain how the soul could return to its primitive condition, purely spiritual, by shaking off the sensible to which in its present state it is attached. When we shall have trampled under foot our tunics of skins wherewith we have been covered since the fall, this garment, given to us because we were ashamed of our nakedness, – when the body shall have become like the soul, – when the union of the soul with the body, i. e. of the male and the female, shall exist no more, – when the woman, that is the body, shall be no more productive, shall no more produce generation and death, – when its works are destroyed, then we shall not die any more; we shall be as we were before our fall, pure spirits; and this will be the kingdom of the Lord. And to prepare for this transformation, what is to be done? Eat of every herb, nourish ourselves on the fruit of every tree of paradise, – that is, cultivate the soul, and not occupy it with anything but that which will make it live; but abstain from the herb of bitterness, – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, – reject all that can weave closer the links binding the soul to the body, retain it in its prison, its grave.383

It is easy to see how Philonian ideas continued to exert their influence in Egypt, when absorbed into Christianity. It was these ideas which peopled the deserts of Nitria and Scete with myriads of monks wrestling with their bodies, those prison-houses of their souls, struggling to die to the world of matter, that their ethereal souls might shake themselves free. Their spirits were like moths in a web, bound by silken threads; the spirit would be choked by these fetters, unless it could snap them and sail away.

Part III. The Lost Pauline Gospels