Lost and Hostile Gospels

IV. The Gospel Of Perfection

The Gospel of Perfection was another work regarded as sacred by the Ophites. St. Epiphanius says: “Some of them (i. e. of the Gnostics) there are who vaunt the possession of a certain fictitious, far-fetched poem which they call the Gospel of Perfection, whereas it is not a Gospel, but the perfection of misery. For the bitterness of death is consummated in that production of the devil. Others without shame boast their Gospel of Eve.”

St. Epiphanius calls this Gospel of Perfection a poem, ποιήμα. But M. Nicolas justly observes that the word ποιήμα is used here, not to describe the work as a poetical composition, but as a fiction. In a passage of Irenaeus,485 of which only the Latin has been preserved, the Gospel of Judas is called “confictio,” and it is probable that the Greek word rendered by “confictio” was ποιήμα.486

Baur thinks that the Gospel of Perfection was the same as the Gospel of Eve.487 But this can hardly be. The words of St. Epiphanius plainly distinguish them: “Some vaunt the Gospel of Perfection … others boast … the Gospel of Eve;” and elsewhere he speaks of their books in the plural.488

V. The Gospel Of St. Philip

This Gospel belonged to the same category as those of Perfection and of Eve, and belonged, if not to the Ophites, to an analogous sect, perhaps that of the Prodicians. St. Philip passed, in the early ages of Christianity, as having been, like St. Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles,489 and perhaps as having agreed with his views on the Law and evangelical liberty. But tradition had confounded together Philip the apostle and Philip the deacon of Caesarea, who, after having been a member of the Hellenist Church at Jerusalem, and having been driven thence after the martyrdom of Stephen, was the first to carry the Gospel beyond the family of Israel, and to convert the heathen to Christ.490 His zeal and success caused him to be called an Evangelist.491 In the second century it was supposed that an Evangelist meant one who had written a Gospel. And as no Gospel bearing his name existed, one was composed for him and attributed to him or to the apostle – they were not distinguished.

St. Epiphanius has preserved one passage from it:

“The Lord has revealed to me the words to be spoken by the soul when it ascends into heaven, and how it has to answer each of the celestial powers. The soul must say, I have known myself, and I have gathered myself from all parts. I have not borne children to Archon (the prince of this world); but I have plucked up his roots, and I have gathered his dispersed members. I have learned who thou art; for I am, saith the soul, of the number of the celestial ones. But if it is proved that the soul has borne a son, she must return downwards, till she has recovered her children, and has absorbed them into herself.”492

It is not altogether easy to catch the meaning of this singular passage, but it apparently has this signification. The soul trammelled with the chains of matter, created by the Archon, the Creator of the world, has to emancipate itself from all material concerns. Each thought, interest, passion, excited by anything in the world, is a child borne by the soul to Archon, to which the soul has contributed animation, the world, form. The great work of life is the disengagement of the soul from all concern in the affairs of the world, in the requirements of the body. When the soul has reached the most exalted perfection, it is cold, passionless, indifferent; then it comes before the Supreme God, passing through the spheres guarded by attendant aeons or angels, and to each it protests its disengagement. But should any thought or care for mundane matters be found lurking in the recesses of the soul, it has to descend again, and remain in exile till it has re-absorbed all the life it gave, the interest it felt, in such concerns, and then again make its essay to reach God.

The conception of Virtues guarding the concentric spheres surrounding the Most High is found among the Jews. When Moses went into the presence of God to receive the tables of stone, he met first the angel Kemuel, chief of the angels of destruction, who would have slain him, but Moses pronounced the incommunicable Name, and passed through. Then he came to the sphere governed by the angel Hadarniel, and by virtue of the Name passed through. Next he came to the sphere over which presided the angel Sandalfon, and penetrated by means of the same Name. Next he traversed the river of flame, called Riggon, and stood before the throne.493

St. Paul held the popular Rabbinic notion of the spheres surrounding the throne of God, for he speaks of having been caught up into the third heaven.494 In the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah there are seven heavens that the prophet traverses.

The Rabbinic ideas on the spheres were taken probably from the Chaldees, and from the same source, perhaps, sprang the conception of the soul making her ascension through the angel-guarded spheres, which we find in the fragment of the Gospel of St. Philip.

Unfortunately, we have not sufficient of the early literature of the Chaldees and Assyrians to be able to say for certain that it was so. But a very curious sacred poem has been preserved on the terra-cotta tablets of the library of Assurbani-Pal, which exhibits a similar belief as prevalent anciently in Assyria.

This poem represents the descent of Istar into the Immutable Land, the nether world, divided into seven circles. The heavenly world of the Chaldees was also divided into seven circles, each ruled by a planet. The poem therefore exhibits a descent instead of an ascent. But there is little reason to doubt that the passage in each case would have been analogous. We have no ancient Assyrian account of an ascent; we must therefore content ourselves with what we have.

Istar descends into the lower region, and as she traverses each circle is despoiled of one of her coverings worn in the region above, till she stands naked before Belith, the Queen of the Land of Death.

i. “At the first gate, as I made her enter, I despoiled her; I took the crown from off her head.

“ ‘Hold, gatekeeper! Thou hast taken the crown from off my head.’

“ ‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

ii. “At the second gate I made her enter; I despoiled her, and took from off her the earrings from her ears.

“ ‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the earrings from my ears.’

“ ‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

iii. “At the third gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the precious jewels on her neck.

“ ‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the jewels of my neck.’

“ ‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

iv. “At the fourth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the brooch of jewels upon her breast.

“ ‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the brooch of jewels upon my breast.’

“ ‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

V. “At the fifth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the belt of jewels about her waist.

“ ‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the belt of jewels about my waist.’

“ ‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

vi. “At the sixth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her armlets and bracelets.

“ ‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my armlets and bracelets.’

“ ‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

vii. “At the seventh gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her skirt.

“ ‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my skirt.’

“ ‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this degree of circles.’ ”495

We have something very similar in the judgment of souls in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. From Chaldaea or from Egypt the Gnostics who used the Gospel of St. Philip drew their doctrine of the soul traversing several circles, and arrested by an angel at the gate of each.

The soul, a divine element, is in the earth combined with the body, a work of the Archon. But her aspirations are for that which is above; she strives to “extirpate his roots.” All her “scattered members,” her thoughts, wishes, impulses, are gathered into one up-tapering flame. Then only does she “know (God) for what He is,” for she has learned the nature of God by introspection.

Such, if I mistake not, is the meaning of the passage quoted by St. Epiphanius. The sect which used such a Gospel must have been mystical and ascetic, given to contemplation, and avoiding the indulgence of their animal appetites. It was that, probably, of Prodicus, strung on the same Pauline thread as the heresies of Marcion, Nicolas, Valentine, Marcus, the Ophites, Carpocratians and Cainites.

Prodicus, on the strength of St. Paul's saying that all Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, maintained the sovereignty of every man placed under the Gospel. But a king is above law, is not bound by law. Therefore the Christian is under no bondage of Law, moral or ceremonial. He is lord of the Sabbath, above all ordinances. Prodicus made the whole worship of God to consist in the inner contemplation of the essence of God.

External worship was not required of the Christian; that had been imposed by the Demiurge on the Jews and all under his bondage, till the time of the fulness of the Gospel had come.496 The Prodicians did not constitute an important, widely-extended sect, and were confounded by many of the early Fathers with other Pauline-Gnostic sects.

VI. The Gospel Of Judas

The Pauline Protestantism of the first two centuries of the Church had not exhausted itself in Valentinianism. The fanatics who held free justification and emancipation from the Law were ready to run to greater lengths than Marcion, Valentine, or even Marcus, was prepared to go.

Men of ability and enthusiasm rose and preached, and galvanized the latent Paulinian Gnosticism into temporary life and popularity, and then disappeared; the great wave of natural common-sense against which they battled returned and overwhelmed their disciples, till another heresiarch arose, made another effort to establish permanently a religion without morality, again to fail before the loudly-expressed disgust of mankind, and the stolid conviction inherent in human nature that pure morals and pure religion are and must be indissolubly united.

Carpocrates was one of these revivalists. Everything except faith, all good works, all exterior observances, all respect for human laws, were indifferent, worse than indifferent, to the Christian: these exhibited, where found, an entanglement of the soul in the web woven for it by the God of this world, of the Jews, of the Law. The body was of the earth, the soul of heaven. Here, again, Carpocrates followed and distorted the teaching of St. Paul; the body was under the Law, the soul was free. Whatsoever was done in the body did not affect the soul. “It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”497

“All depends upon faith and love,” said Carpocrates; “externals are altogether matters of indifference. He who ascribes moral worth to these makes himself their slave, subjects himself to those spirits of the world from whom all religious and political ordinances have proceeded; he cannot, after death, pass out of the sphere of the metempsychosis. But he who can abandon himself to every lust without being affected by any, who can thus bid defiance to the laws of those earthly spirits, will after death rise to the unity of that Original One, with whom he has, by uniting himself, freed himself, even in this present life, from all fetters.”498

Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates, a youth of remarkable ability, who died young, exhausted by the excesses to which his solifidianism exposed him, wrote a work on Justification by Faith, in which he said:

“All nature manifests a striving after unity and fellowship; the laws of man contradicting these laws of nature, and yet unable to subdue the appetites implanted in human nature by the Creator himself – these first introduced sin.”499

With Epiphanes, St. Epiphanius couples Isidore, and quotes from his writings directions how the Faithful are to obtain disengagement from passion, so as to attain union with God. Dean Milman, in his “History of Christianity,” charitably hopes that the licentiousness attributed to these sects was deduced by the Fathers from their writings, and was not actually practised by them. But the extracts from the books of Isidore, Epiphanes and Carpocrates, are sufficient to show that their doctrines were subversive of morality, and that, when taught as religious truths to men with human passions, they could not fail to produce immoral results. An extract from Isidore, preserved by Epiphanius, giving instructions to his followers how to conduct themselves, was designed to be put in practice. It is impossible even to quote it, so revolting is its indecency. In substance it is this: No man can approach the Supreme God except when perfectly disengaged from earthly passion. This disengagement cannot be attained without first satisfying passion; therefore the exhaustion of desire consequent on the gratification of passion is the proper preparation for prayer.500

To the same licentious class of Antinomians belonged the sect of the Antitactes. They also held the distinction between the Supreme God and the Demiurge, the God of the Jews,501 of the Law, of the World. The body, the work of the God of creation, is evil; it “serves the law of sin;” nay, it is the very source of sin, and imprisons, degrades, the soul entangled in it. Thus the soul serves the law of God, the body the law of sin, i. e. of the Demiurge. But the Demiurge has imposed on men his law, the Ten Commandments. If the soul consents to that law, submits to be in bondage under it, the soul passes from the liberty of its ethereal sonship, under the dominion of a God at enmity with the Supreme Being. Therefore the true Christian must show his adherence to the Omnipotent by breaking the laws of the Decalogue, – the more the better.502

Was religious fanaticism capable of descending lower? Apparently it was so. The Cainites exhibit Pauline antinomianism in its last, most extravagant, most grotesque expression. Their doctrine was the extreme development of an idea in itself originally containing an element of truth.

Paul had proclaimed the emancipation of the Christian from the Law. Perhaps he did not at first sufficiently distinguish between the moral and the ceremonial law; he did not, at all events, lay down a broad, luminous principle, by which his disciples might distinguish between moral obligation to the Decalogue and bondage to the ceremonial Law. If both laws were imposed by the same God, to upset one was to upset the other. And Paul himself broke a hole in the dyke when he opposed the observance of the Sabbath, and instituted instead the Lord's-day.

Through that gap rushed the waves, and swept the whole Decalogue away.

Some, to rescue jeoparded morality, maintained that the Law contained a mixture of things good and bad; that the ceremonial law was bad, the moral law was good. Some, more happily, asserted that the whole of the Law was good, but that part of it was temporary, provisional, intended only to be temporary and provisional, a figure of that which was to be; and the rest of the Law was permanent, of perpetual obligation.

The ordinances of the Mosaic sanctuary were typical. When the fulfilment of the types came, the shadows were done away. This was the teaching of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, called forth by the disorders which had followed indiscriminating denunciation of the Law by the Pauline party.

But a large body of men could not, or would not, admit this distinction. St. Paul had proclaimed the emancipation of the Christian from the Law. They, having been Gentiles, had never been under the ceremonial Law of Moses. How then could they be set at liberty from it? The only freedom they could understand was freedom from the natural law written on the fleshy tables of their hearts by the same finger that had inscribed the Decalogue on the stones in Sinai. The God of the Jews was, indeed, the God of the world. The Old Testament was the revelation of his will. Christ had emancipated man from the Law. The Law was at enmity to Christ; therefore the Christian was at enmity to the Law. The Law was the voice of the God of the Jews; therefore the Christian was at enmity to the God of the Jews. Jesus was the revelation of the All-good God, the Old Testament the revelation of the evil God.

Looking at the Old Testament from this point of view, the extreme wing of the Pauline host, the Cainites, naturally came to regard the Patriarchs as being under the protection, the Prophets as being under the inspiration, of the God of the Jews, and therefore to hold them in abhorrence, as enemies of Christ and the Supreme Deity. Those, on the other hand, who were spoken of in the Old Testament as resisting God, punished by God, were true prophets, martyrs of the Supreme Deity, forerunners of the Gospel. Cain became the type of virtue; Abel, on the contrary, of error and perversity. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were pioneers of Gospel freedom; Corah, Dathan and Abiram, martyrs protesting against Mosaism.

In this singular rehabilitation, Judas Iscariot was relieved from the anathema weighing upon him. This man, who had sold his Master, was no longer regarded as a traitor, but as one who, inspired by the Spirit of Wisdom, had been an instrument in the work of redemption. The other apostles, narrowed by their prejudices, had opposed the idea of the death of Christ, saying, “Be it far from thee, Lord; this shall not be unto thee.”503 But Judas, having a clearer vision of the truth, and the necessity for the redemption of the world by the death of Christ, took the heroic resolution to make that precious sacrifice inevitable. Rising above his duties as disciple, in his devotion to the cause of humanity, he judged it necessary to prevent the hesitations of Christ, who at the last moment seemed to waver; to render inevitable the prosecution of his great work. Judas therefore went to the chiefs of the synagogue, and covenanted with them to deliver up his Master to their will, knowing that by his death the salvation of the world could alone be accomplished.504

Judas therefore became the chief apostle to the Cainites. They composed a Gospel under his name, τό Εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ Ἰουδα.505 Irenæus also mentions it;506 it must therefore date from the second century. Theodoret mentions it likewise. But none of the ancient Fathers quote it. Not a single fragment of this curious work has been preserved.

“It is certainly to be regretted,” says M. Nicolas, “that this monument of human folly has completely disappeared. It should have been carefully preserved as a monument, full of instruction, of the errors into which man is capable of falling, when he abandons himself blindly to theological dogmatism.”507

In addition to the Gospel of Judas, the Cainites possessed an apocryphal book relating to that apostle whom they venerated scarcely second to Judas, viz. St. Paul. It was entitled the “Ascension of Paul,” Ἀναβατικὸν Παύλου,508 and related to his translation into the third heaven, and the revelation of unutterable things he there received.509

An “Apocalypse of Paul” has been preserved, but it almost certainly is a different book from the Anabaticon. It contains nothing favouring the heretical views of the Cainites, and was read in some of the churches of Palestine. This Apocalypse in Greek has been published by Dr. Tischendorf in his Apocalypses Apocryphae (Lips. 1866), and the translation of a later Syriac version in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. VIII. 1864.510