The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters by Elaine Pagels

The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters Reviews

• 
  BlackOxford

  The Secret Sharer
  
  Paul of Tarsus, that Moses of the Christian religion, is a persistent intellectual pain for many, including me. He is contradictory, opaque, and elusive. It’s incredible that a world religion is based on his frequently incoherent ramblings about a man he’d never met. But Pagels book goes a long way to dispersing the Pauline conceptual mist and suggesting why he was so successful.
  
  One of the earliest crises in Christianity, the Gnostic Controversies, occurred about a century after Paul wrote his very influential letters to the congregations he founded throughout the Roman Empire. A group of Christian heretics (so subsequently determined) began using a somewhat older and distinctly un-Jewish theological approach called Gnosticism to interpret the traditions and writings about Jesus. For Christianity, a religion grounded in ideas, Gnosticism, an established cult of ideas, presented an obvious threat.
  
  Gnosticism had several strands but all of these converged on a view of the physical world as a creation of an evil Demiurge. Within this world, the spirits of human beings had become trapped. The mission, as it were, of Gnosticism was to provide the secret knowledge, the inside dope, which would allow these spirits to escape their material emprisonment. Since this view was radically opposed to the idea put forth in the book of Genesis that God found the world ‘good,’ a number of the so-called Fathers of the Church spent a great deal of time attacking Gnosticism as an un-scriptural and erroneous interpretation.
  
  Most of what is known about the Gnostics is available only from these Church Fathers since their attack was successful and most of the original Gnostic writing was destroyed. However the mid-twentieth century discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, largely Gnostic, provoked a re-consideration of the history and real substance of the entire second century dispute.
  
  The issue around which Pagels centres her analysis is fascinating. In their attack on the Gnostics the Church Fathers relied heavily on the letters of Paul to argue against their opponents. Strangely, however, the Gnostics also used Paul extensively to support their case. Before Nag Hammadi it appeared that the Gnostics were merely being tendentious and the orthodox interpretation of the Fathers obvious.
  
  But by examining each of the Pauline letters in terms of a more complete knowledge of the Gnostic position, Pagels makes a compelling case that Paul had been heavily influenced by Gnostic thought. In fact many of the apparent contradictions and confusions contained in these documents are the result of Paul addressing two audiences simultaneously: the psychics, or Christ-followers uninitiated into the sacred Gnostic mysteries; and the pneumatics, those relatively few elect who were spiritually prepared to understand the esoteric truths about what salvation really meant.
  
  Pagels detailed scholarship in tracing the elements of this Pauline ‘double-speak’ is impressive and impressively explanatory. For me it goes a considerable way toward suggesting definitions for what Paul actually meant in his use of terms like ‘faith’ and ‘salvation.’ The fact that these suggestions are very different from what has been passed down through orthodox theology is, to say the least, interesting.
  
  Postscript: For more on the Pauline idea of faith and other links, see
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• 
  Steve Cooper

  This Gnostic interpretation of the Pauline letters provides, among many other things, a framework to reconcile the Old and New Testaments. It has been argued that it is heresy and an exercise in wish fulfillment - selectively choosing whom Paul intended as the audience on a case-by-case basis, and completely ignoring Acts and the Pastoral Letters in order to support the Gnostic position. But this comprehensive exegesis (Valentinian, for the most part) finally succeeds in making a compelling case for Paul's 'Gnosticness' (Gnosticity?). What are the implications?
  
  The religious controversy that Paul's letters provoked in the 2nd century as persecution and in-fighting fatefully directed the evolution of the Christian community, resembled the current political debate between libertarians and nanny-staters. But the Gnostic's claim of immunity from Abrahamic law and superiority to his ecclesiastical brethren was never going to go down well with ecclesiastics. And of course, the institutional logic of religious and political players has never supported the self-abnegation a libertarian agenda obliges.
  
  So quite a bit of effort was expended by early church fathers like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen (you can practically hear boos and hisses whenever they're mentioned in a Pagels book even though she maintains a strict scholarly objectivity), to de-gnostify these Pauline letters. Their efforts were rewarded with success, and their orthodox view of Paul continued to predominate in Christian circles when this book came out, and I suspect it still does.
  
  But, like Philip K Dick, I find the Gnostic interpretation fascinating. It brings an inviting depth to what I've always considered to be a flat, impenetrable thicket of words And it appeals to a deep vein of intuition in 1) its identification of the Old Testament God as the demiurge - lord of the material world only, 2) its position that some people need religious laws and others don't, and 3) its incorporation of the female principle in a more intrinsic cosmological role.
  
  So 5 stars to you, Elaine Pagels, for distilling libraries of forgotten writing into this book, and for shedding light on a controversy whose outcome fundamentally shaped Western culture.
  
• 
  Rama Rao

  Was Paul a gnostic believer?
  
  The New Testament describes apostle Paul preached Christian communities all his life as the leader of the ministry of Jesus Christ in the first century. But what is known about Paul comes from Sunday school stories that were meant to keep kids reverent and obedient. Volumes have been written after the discovery of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered in Nag Hammadi in 1945. These texts shed light on early Christianity and give glimpses of Paul, and project him as the apostle of the heretics. What does divinity school scholarship tell us about the enigmatic thirteenth apostle who looms larger than life in the New Testament?
  
  Gnostic beliefs clashed strongly with accepted Christian doctrine in the first two centuries. By the end of the second century, Gnostics broke away from the church. Their core belief was dualistic in nature which proposes that that there are two realities, the physical and spiritual realms. They believed that the material world (matter) is evil and therefore one must achieve spiritual realm to find everlasting peace. This concept is remarkably like the Sankhya Philosophy of Hinduism founded by the sage Kapila in 800 B.C.E.
  
  In this book, the author examines and interprets the texts of the Pauline Epistles; 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Hebrews in the historical and cultural context. She considers each of these non-pastoral epistles, and questions about their authorship. She examines how the Pauline epistles were read by second century Valentinian Gnostics and argues that Paul was in fact gnostic.
  
  Valentinus, a leading gnostic and follower of Paul in the second century preached that only spiritual people received the gnosis (knowledge) and they would find the Divine Pleroma, while non-gnostic Christians with material nature will perish. Maricon, another major gnostic leader from Sinope (present-day Turkey) in 150 C.E., preached Gnosticism followed a version of New Testament that included a redacted gospel of Luke and ten edited epistles of Paul.
  
  One of the difficulties in understanding Paul with the earliest Christianity has been explaining his lack of relationship to the early “sayings” tradition (the transmission and quoting of the sayings of Jesus also called “Oral” tradition). Paul quotes few sayings of Jesus in his epistles. But he became a Christian in Syria and spent the first fifteen years of his ministry there. It is in this area, the “sayings” tradition was the strongest in the first century C.E., Was this because his heretic beliefs conflicted with the parables and canonical gospels?
  
  Princeton University Professor Elaine Pagels offers a thorough analysis of the early Christian beliefs and the gnostic traditions that influenced apostles like Paul, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene
  
• 
  Bohdan Pechenyak

  A fascinating journey through the epistles of Paul interpreted from the perspective of Valentinian Gnosticism. Ultimately, interpreting Paul either as hyperorthodox or hypergnostic would be reductionist and anachronistic, for he wrote before such debates emerged in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Early Christianity was multivalent, multipolar, exceptionally rich in meaning and symbolism, but was gradually stripped bare and ossified into the orthodoxy and dogma by the “church fathers”.
• 
  Mandimby Ranaivoarisoa

  Allegory on Steroids. This book is another testimony to Pagels' romance with Gnosticism.
• 
  Michael Greer

  Paul's Letters constitute a contested territory for scholars. Was Paul conveying an "esoteric" doctrine or was he appealing to anyone? Or both? You don't have to be anyone 'special' is receive the good news of Christ.
  
  But how one works the message of Christ is determined by the subject who hears and receives the "good news." Since the majority of people are "hylic" they imagine heaven and salvation in material terms. This is tragic because the hylic overestimates the importance of spatio-temporal reality. For the hylic the "good news" becomes a prosperity gospel. Follow the rules and you'll find the path to riches.
  
  Another type of receiver hears the good news as a psychic. Here I am not referring to someone who reads Tarot cards or palms. What I mean is that this receiver of the message understands it in psychic terms alone. Thus the good news translates as "peace of mind in time of turbulence." This receiver can't imagine anything more real that the state of condition of his or her own soul.
  
  Finally we arrive at the pneumatic receiver. This receiver is capable of receiving messages from the Holy Spirit. From the perspective of the hylic and the psychic receiver the messages mean nothing-so much babble-because they are unable to live in the spirit of God. But for those of you who are pneumatic the message is clear: heaven is available as the Father's gracious gift to us.
• 
  Erik Graff

  I started reading Pagels in college in preparation for a thesis on theories regarding the origins of "gnosticism." Later, in seminary, I was able to take a course she was teaching in preparation for her book, Adam & Eve & the Serpent. She was kind enough at that time to allow me the liberty of composing a dictionary entitled, cleverly, "On the Procession of the Hieresiarchs of Gnosis" even tho the course was ostensibly about Genesis.
  
  The other contact I had with Pagels was my roommate at the time, a student at Barnard College where she taught. That connection was good enough to get me invited along to her apartment for a party or two.
  
  Beyond that, I've read several of her books and will pick up anything written over her name. There has only been one disappointment, viz. The Gnostic Paul.
  
  Basically, it's a lazy book. Once you know the loaded words in what we moderns class as gnostic circles--words like pneuma (spirit), archon (lord), hylikoi (dirt-people), psyche (soul), or the cosmologies they favored--fallen materia versus celestial spheres & the like, then you can take pretty much any contemporaneous religious text and look to it for its hidden meanings. With Paul this is almost legitimate. They did do so. Indeed, the first known Christian scripture, now lost, but possibly a proto-Luke, was substantially Pauline, treating the god of the Hebrew Scriptures as a fallen, rather unpleasant, spirit and earthly life as something mean and nasty. As an exercise for the author, it was probably useful. As an exercise in reading, it is pretty boring.
  
  Incidentally, there never was a Gnostic Religion. The ontological status of Gnosticism is about as weak as that for schizophrenia, gnosticism standing to modern scholarly nosology as schizophrenia stands to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals.