A Break in the Sound of Crickets
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 7/5/2007 4:50 PM 
Categories: Gnosticism, Valentinus, Coptic, Church Fathers, Archaeology, Jospehus, Contemporary Religion, Manichaeism
Categories: Gnosticism, Valentinus, Coptic, Church Fathers, Archaeology, Jospehus, Contemporary Religion, Manichaeism
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Bro. Jeremy Puma has been kind enough to mention this site on his blog Summer Harvest. A sample:The second problem with the Anarchonic Fallacy is that it depends upon ideas about Gnosticism that were spread by early opponents of the movement, polemicists such as Irenaeus of Lyons. This is far from surprising- until the 1970's, 9/10ths of the information we had about Gnosticism came from its enemies. Apart from some fragmented texts and the almost unread Pistis Sophia, if you wanted to study Gnosticism before 1974 and you weren't a student of Coptic language, you read the Church Fathers. The Church Fathers were opposed to Gnosticism- a perfectly reasonable stance for the Church Fathers to take- and therefore played more than a bit loose with their rhetoric and arguments. Now, however, that we have the Nag Hammadi texts, we're coming to understand that the Gnosticism practiced by our Alexandrian and Syrian and Chaldaen and Roman forebears was far more complex and nuanced than that portrayed by Irenaeus et al.
If modern Gnostics are news to you, Birger Pearson's recent book has an epilogue that covers the movement's various branches. Pearson's book also correlates heresiological literature (like Irenaeus) with other information about Gnosticism. (Most heresiological literature does not correspond to what we know from Gnostic primary sources, in these cases Pearson attempts to sift reliable information for polemic. It is never easy to do single-source historical work, see my prior post on the difficulties of using Josephus.)
(With Gnosticism there is little archaeology to test textual evidence against. Like the rest of Christianity ancient Gnostics did not have free standing buildings devoted to worship: we guess they met in other places and (again, as with the rest of Christianity from that era) little to no ceremonial artifacts have survived. (The only exceptions are later and from one branch of Gnosticism, Manichaeism.))
The name of Bro. Puma's blog comes from the following poem by Valentinus:
Summer Harvest
I see in spirit that all are hungI know in spirit that all are borne
Flesh hanging from soul
Soul clinging to air
Air hanging from upper atmosphere
Crops rushing forth from the deep
A babe rushing forth from the womb.
(Translation by Bentley Layton from his book Gnostic Scriptures.)
-Kushana P.S. (From the perspective of religious diversity, I am fortunate enough to live in a city with a Neo-Gnostic church, Rev. Stephan A. Hoeller's Ecclesia Gnostica. I say "neo" because (as with Neo-Paganism) there isn't a strong, continuous through-line from Antiquity to the present in written historical sources: a lot of religions (and religious movements) start as such revivals or revitalizations.)
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