Lost and Hostile Gospels

II. The Gospel Of Truth

Valentine, by birth an Egyptian, probably of Jewish descent, it may be presumed received his education at Alexandria. From this city he travelled to Rome (circ. A.D. 140); in both places he preached the Catholic faith, and then retired to Cyprus.467 A miserable bigotry which refused to see in a heretic any motives but those which are evil, declared that in disgust at not obtaining a bishopric which he coveted, and to which a confessor was preferred, Valentine lapsed into heresy. We need no such explanation of the cause of his secession from orthodoxy. He was a man of an active mind and ardent zeal. Christian doctrine was then a system of facts; theology was as yet unborn. What philosophic truths lay at the foundation of Christian belief was unsuspected. Valentine could not thus rest. He strove to break through the hard facts to the principles on which they reposed. He was a pioneer in Christian theology.

And for his venturous essay he was well qualified. His studies at Alexandria had brought him in contact with Philonism and with Platonism. He obtained at Cyprus an acquaintance with the doctrines of Basilides. His mind caught fire, his ideas expanded. The Gnostic seemed to him to open gleams of light through the facts of the faith he had hitherto professed with dull, unintelligent submission; and he placed himself under the inspiration and instruction of Basilides.

But he did not follow him blindly. The speculations of the Gnostic kindled a train of ideas which were peculiarly Valentine's own.

The age was not one to listen patiently to his theorizing. Men were called on to bear testimony by their lives to facts. They could endure the rack, the scourge, the thumbscrew, the iron rake, for facts, not for ideas. That Jesus had lived and died and mounted to heaven, was enough for their simple minds. They cared nothing, they made no effort to understand, what were the causes of evil, what its relation to matter.

Consequently Valentine met with cold indifference, then with hot abhorrence. He was excommunicated. Separation embittered him. His respect for orthodoxy was gone; its hold upon him was lost; and he allowed himself to drift in the wide sea of theosophic speculation wherever his ideas carried him.

Valentine taught that in the Godhead, exerting creative power were manifest two motions – a positive, the evolving, creative, life-giving element; and the negative, which determined, shaped and localized the creative force. From the positive force came life, from the negative the direction life takes in its manifestation.

The world is the revelation of the divine ideas, gradually unfolding themselves, and Christ and redemption are the perfection and end of creation. Through creation the idea goes forth from God; through Christ the idea perfected returns to the bosom of God. Redemption is the recoil wave of creation, the echo of the fiat returning to the Creator's ear.

The manifestation of the ideas of God is in unity; but in opposition to unity exists anarchy; in antagonism with creation emerges the principle of destruction. The representative of destruction, disunion, chaos, is Satan. The work of creation is infinite differentiation in perfect harmony. But in the midst of this emerges discord, an element of opposition which seeks to ruin the concord in the manifestation of the divine ideas. Therefore redemption is necessary, and Christ is the medium of redemption, which consists in the restoration to harmony and unity of that which by the fraud of Satan is thrown into disorder and antagonism.

But how comes it that in creation there should be a disturbing element? That element must issue in some manner from the Creator; it must arise from some defect in Him. Therefore, Valentinian concluded, the God who created the world and gave source to the being of Satan cannot have been the supreme, all-good, perfect God.

But if redemption be the perfecting of man, it must be the work of the only perfect God, who thereby counteracts the evil that has sprung up through the imperfection of the Demiurge.

Therefore Jesus Christ is an emanation from the Supreme God, destroying the ill effects produced in the world by the faulty nature of the Creator, undoing the discord and restoring all to harmony.

Jesus was formed by the Demiurge of a wondrously constituted ethereal body, visible to the outward sense. This Jesus entered the world through man, as a sunbeam enters a chamber through the window. The Demiurge created Jesus to redeem the people from the disorganizing, destructive effects of Satan, to be their Messiah.

But the Supreme God had alone power perfectly to accomplish this work; therefore at the baptism of Christ, the Saviour (Soter) descended on him, consecrating him to be the perfect Redeemer of mankind, conveying to him a mission and power which the Demiurge could not have given.

In all this we see the influence of Marcion's ideas.

We need not follow out this fundamental principle of his theosophy into all its fantastic formularies. If Valentine was the precursor of Hegel in the enunciation of the universal antinomy, he was like Hegel also in involving his system in a cloud of incomprehensible terminology, in producing bewilderment where he sought simplicity.

Valentine accepted the Old Testament, but only in the same light as he regarded the great works of the heathen writers to be deserving of regard.468 Both contained good, noble examples, pure teaching; but in both also was the element of discord, contradictory teaching, and bad example. Ptolemy, the Valentinian who least sacrificed the moral to the theosophic element, scarcely dealt with the Old Testament differently from St. Paul. He did not indeed regard the Old Testament as the work of the Supreme God; the Mosaic legislation seemed to him to be the work of an inferior being, because, as he said, it contained too many imperfections to be the revelation of the Highest God, and too many excellences to be attributed to an evil spirit. But, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, he saw in the Mosaic ceremonies only symbols of spiritual truth, and, like him, he thought that the symbol was no longer necessary when the idea it revealed was manifested in all its clearness. Therefore, when the ideas these symbols veiled had reached and illumined men's minds, the necessity for them – husks to the idea, letters giving meaning to the thought – was at an end.

Like St. Paul, therefore, he treated the Old Testament as a preparation for the New one, but as nothing more. We ascertain Ptolemy's views from a letter of his to Flora, a Catholic lady whom he desired to convert to Valentinianism.469

In this letter he laboured to show that the God of this world (the Demiurge) was not the Supreme God, and that the Old Testament Scriptures were the revelation of the Demiurge, and not of the highest God. To prove the first point, Ptolemy appealed to apostolic tradition – no doubt to Pauline teaching – which had come down to him, and to the words of the Saviour, by which, he admits, all doctrine must be settled. In this letter he quotes largely from St. Paul's Epistles, and from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John.

Like Marcion, Ptolemy insisted that the Demiurge, the God of this world, was also the God who revealed himself in the Old Testament, and that to this God belonged justice, wrath and punishment; whereas to the Supreme Deity was attributed free forgiveness, absolute goodness. The Saviour abolished the Law, therefore he abolished all the system of punishment for sin, that the reign of free grace might prevail.

According to Ptolemy, therefore, retributive justice exercised by the State was irreconcilable with the nature of the Supreme God, and the State, accordingly, was under the dominion of the Demiurge.

To the revelation of the old Law belonged ordinances of ceremonial and of seasons. These also are done away by Christ, who leads from the bondage of ceremonial to spiritual religion.

Another Valentinian of note was Heracleon, who wrote a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Origen; and perhaps, also, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Of the latter, only a single fragment, the exposition of Luke xii. 8, has been preserved by Clement of Alexandria.470

Heracleon was a man of deep spiritual piety, and with a clear understanding. He held Scripture in profound reverence, and derived his Valentinian doctrines from it. So true is the saying:

“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,

Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”

His interpretation of the narrative of the interview of the Saviour with the woman of Samaria will illustrate his method of dealing with the sacred text.

Heracleon saw in the woman of Samaria a type of all spiritual natures attracted by that which is heavenly, godlike; and the history represents the dealings of the Supreme God through Christ with these spiritual natures (πνευματικοί).

For him, therefore, the words of the woman have a double meaning: that which lies on the surface of the sacred record, with the intent and purpose which the woman herself gave to them; and that which lay beneath the letter, and which was mystically signified. “The water which our Saviour gives,” says he, “is his spirit and power. His gifts and grace are what can never be taken away, never exhausted, can never fail to those who have received them. They who have received what has been richly bestowed on them from above, communicate again of the overflowing fulness which they enjoy to the life of others.”

But the woman asks, “Give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw” – hither – that is, to Jacob's well, the Mosaic Law from which hitherto she had drunk, and which could not quench her thirst, satisfy her aspirations. “She left her water-pot behind her” when she went to announce to others that she had found the well of eternal life. That is, she left the vessel, the capacity for receiving the Law, for she had now a spiritual vessel which could hold the spiritual water the Saviour gave.

It will be seen that Valentinianism, like Marcionism, was an exaggerated Paulinism, infected with Gnosticism, clearly antinomian. Though the Valentinians are not accused of licentiousness, their ethical system was plainly immoral, for it completely emancipated the Christian from every restraint, and the true Christian was he who lived by faith only. He had passed by union with Christ from the dominion of the God of this World, a dominion in which were punishments for wrong-doing, into the realm of Grace, of sublime indifference to right and wrong, to a region in which no acts were sinful, no punishments were dealt out.

If Valentinianism did not degenerate into the frantic licentiousness of the earlier Pauline heretics, it was because the doctrine of Valentine was an intellectual, theosophical system, quite above the comprehension of vulgar minds, and therefore only embraced by exalted mystics and cold philosophers.

The Valentinians were not accused of mutilating the Scriptures, but of evaporating their significance. “Marcion,” says Tertullian, “knife in hand, has cut the Scriptures to pieces, to give support to his system; Valentine has the appearance of sparing them, and of trying rather to accommodate his errors to them, than of accommodating them to his errors. Nevertheless, he has curtailed, interpolated more than did Marcion, by taking from the words their force and natural value, to give them forced significations.”471

The Pauline filiation of the sect can hardly be mistaken. The relation of Valentine's ideas to those of Marcion, and those of Marcion to the doctrines of St. Paul, are fundamental. But, moreover, they claimed a filiation more obvious than that of ideas – they asserted that they derived their doctrines from Theodas, disciple of the Apostle of the Gentiles.472 The great importance they attributed to the Epistles of St. Paul is another evidence of their belonging to the anti-judaizing family of heretics, if another proof be needed.

The Valentinians possessed a number of apocryphal works. “Their number is infinite,” says Irenaeus.473 But this probably applies not to the first Valentinians, but to the Valentinian sects, among whom apocryphal works did abound. Certain it is, that in all the extracts made from the writings of Valentine, Ptolemy and Heracleon, by Origen, Epiphanius, Tertullian, &c., though they abound in quotations from St. Paul's Epistles and from the Canonical Gospels, there are none from any other source.

Nevertheless, Irenaeus attributes to them possession of a “Gospel of Truth” (Evangelium Veritatis). “This Scripture,” says he, “does not in any point agree with our four Canonical Gospels.”474 To this also, perhaps, Tertullian refers, when he says that the Valentinians possessed “their own Gospel in addition to ours.”475

Epiphanius, however, makes no mention of this Gospel; he knew the writings of the Valentinians well, and has inserted extracts in his work on heresies.

III. The Gospel Of Eve

The immoral tendency of Valentinianism broke out in coarse, flagrant licentiousness as soon as the doctrines of the sect had soaked down out of the stratum of educated men to the ranks of the undisciplined and vulgar.

Valentinianism assumed two forms, broke into two sects, – the Marcosians and the Ophites.

Mark, who lived in the latter half of the second century, came probably from Palestine, as we may gather from his frequent use of forms from the Aramaean liturgy. But he did not bring with him any of the Judaizing spirit, none of the grave reverence for the moral law, and decency of the Nazarene, Ebionite and kindred sects sprung from the ruined Church of the Hebrews.

He was followed by trains of women whom he corrupted, and converted into prophetesses. His custom was, in an assembly to extend a chalice to a woman saying to her, “The grace of God, which excels all, and which the mind cannot conceive or explain, fill all your inner man, and increase his knowledge in you, dropping the grain of mustard-seed into good ground.”476 A scene like a Methodist revival followed. The woman was urged to speak in prophecy; she hesitated, declared her inability; warm, passionate appeals followed closely one on another, couched in equivocal language, exciting the religious and natural passions simultaneously. The end was a convulsive fit of incoherent utterings, and the curtain fell on the rapturous embraces of the prophet and his spiritual bride.

Mark possessed a Gospel, and “an infinite number of apocryphal Scriptures,” says Irenaeus. The Gospel contained a falsified life of Christ. One of the stories from it he quotes. When Jesus was a boy, he was learning letters. The master said, “Say Alpha.” Jesus repeated after him, “Alpha.” Then the master said, “Say Beta.” But Jesus answered, “Nay, I will not say Beta till you have explained to me the meaning of Alpha.”477 The Marcosians made much of the hidden mysteries of the letters of the alphabet, showing that Mark had brought with him from Palestine something akin to the Cabbalism of the Jewish rabbis.

This story is found in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas. It runs somewhat differently in the different versions of that Gospel, and is repeated twice in each with slight variations.

In the Syriac:

“Zacchaeus the teacher said to Joseph, I will teach the boy Jesus whatever is proper for him to learn. And he made him go to school. And he, going in, was silent. But Zacchaeus the scribe began to tell him (the letters) from Alaph, and was repeating to him many times the whole alphabet. And he says to him that he should answer and say after him; but he was silent. Then the scribe became angry, and struck him with his hand upon his head. And Jesus said, A smith's anvil, being beaten, can (not) learn, and it has no feeling; but I am able to say those things, recited by you, with knowledge and understanding (unbeaten).”478

In the Greek:

“Zacchaeus said to Joseph … Give thy son to me, that he may learn letters, and with his letters I will teach him some knowledge, and chiefly this, to salute all the elders, and to venerate them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age. And he told him all the letters from Alpha to Omega. Then, looking at the teacher Zacchaeus, he said to him, Thou that knowest not Alpha naturally, how canst thou teach Beta to others? Thou hypocrite! if thou knowest, teach Alpha first, and then we shall believe thee concerning Beta.”479

Or, according to another Greek version, after Jesus has been delivered over by Joseph to Zacchaeus, the preceptor

“ – wrote the alphabet in Hebrew, and said to him, Alpha. And the child said, Alpha. And the teacher said again, Alpha. And the child said the same. Then again a third time the teacher said, Alpha. Then Jesus, looking at the instructor, said, Thou knowest not Alpha; how wilt thou teach another the letter Beta? And the child, beginning at Alpha, said of himself the twenty-two letters. Then he said again, Hearken, teacher, to the arrangement of the first letter, and know how many accessories and lines it hath, and marks which are common, transverse and connected. And when Zacchaeus heard such accounts of one letter, he was amazed, and could not answer him.”480