Carrier on "gnosticism"

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
User avatar
Joseph D. L.
Posts: 1405
Joined: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:10 am

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by Joseph D. L. »

And the key point is that Irenaeus was wrong to do that
Irenaeus wasn't "wrong" to call them Gnostics, just like he wasn't "wrong" to call them heretics.

If want to get even deeper into it, Adam and Eve would be the first gnostics because they ate from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:

καὶ ἔλαβεν Κύριος ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον ὃν ἔπλασεν καὶ ἔθετο αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ, ἐργάζεσθαι αὐτὸν καὶ φυλάσσειν. καὶ ἐνετείλατο Κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῷ Ἀδὰμ λέγων Ἀπὸ παντὸς ξύλου τοῦ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ βρώσει φάγῃ· ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ ξύλου τοῦ γινώσκειν καλὸν καὶ πονηρόν, οὐ φάγεσθε ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ· ᾗ δ᾽ ἂν ἡμέρᾳ φάγησθε ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε.

And Jehovah God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

And what happens in the very next chapter? Eve is persuaded by the serpent to eat from the tree, who then persuades Adam to eat from it, thus gaining knowledge and knowing they were naked:

καὶ διηνοίχθησαν οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ τῶν δύο, καὶ ἔγνωσαν ὅτι γυμνοὶ ἦσαν· καὶ ἔρραψαν φύλλα συκῆς καὶ ἐποίησαν ἑαυτοῖς περιζώματα.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And it is precisely this scene in particular that seems to have inspired a whole sabaoth of "gnostic" sects, like the Sethians and the Cainites and Adamites and the Valentinians.

So it isn't like Irenaeus was just reaching for a term and making it up. To say Irenaeus was "wrong" is to presume some anti-historic bias onto these men writing in their own time.

Napoleon wasn't "short" for his day, but it isn't "wrong" to call him short today. Historically inaccurate. But not "wrong".

I lost my train of thought.
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by MrMacSon »

davidmartin wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:19 am What Carrier is saying is, ignore Gnostics and their writings and anything said about them

Surely that's obvious from his own words?
He doesn't just want to remove the category 'Gnostic', he wants to remove these sects relevance by presenting them as later offshoots, presumably with them out the way he is free to spout his own theories. This is what the church fathers did as well and like them presumably he ignores anything else that's inconvenient from the historical record as well.
No and kind of ['kind of' as in, he want to maintain Peter & Paul primacy, from the early to mid 1st century]. He says -

Hence the paradigmatic “Gnostic” sect is a fiction; no such thing existed. Nearly all religious sects shared one or another Gnostic idea, including what we anachronistically call “orthodox” sects. So in fact there was no such thing as Orthodoxists against the Gnostics. In fact there was no ancient discussion of any such “group” as the Gnostics, neither calling them that, nor describing them in any of the ways modern scholars imagine it, nor conceiving any “grouping” of sects in such a way. Every sect claimed it was “orthodoxy” and every other “heresy,” and what Christianity ended up looking like in the later fourth century corresponded to no sect prior to that century. And the sects usually categorized as “Gnostic” actually bear no consistent or coherent relationship to each other, and differ from each other as much as any of them differs from the sects that eventually merged to become the ascendant “orthodoxy” of the fourth century. So there were just “sects.” Not “Gnostic” and “non-Gnostic” sects. The term “Gnostic” thus leaves us with no meaningful distinction to make with it.

I came to this realization when trying to see, in my research for On the Historicity of Jesus, if Gnosticism would be a useful category for explaining the origins of Christianity and whether Gnostic sects could be shown to be closer to the original teachings of Christianity. What I found was no sect matching what historians had come to call “Gnosticism,” just diverse sects, each having some elements of it, and no sects with no elements of it, nor all of them. Moreover, I found that anything that was being distinguished as “Gnostic” either had zero evidence of existing in the first century, or if evidenced, was evidenced as a component of what later became orthodoxy; in other words, the Christians who supposedly were attacking Gnostic sects as heretical, were from “Gnostic” sects themselves, just with their own evolved and modified ideas; which describes every sect. Every sect we find in the late second century was an evolved, modified, and different version of the original sect; and there is no way to “group” them in any meaningful sense along Gnostic lines; nor any real way to call one “orthodox” and the others “heretical.” As I wrote in OHJ, “I believe all sects deviated from the original religion and innovated freely and in equal measure, and the victorious Churches of the early Middle Ages looked nothing at all like the original faith of Peter or even Paul” (p. 64).

User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by MrMacSon »

Joseph D. L. wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:24 am
And the key point is that Irenaeus was wrong to do that
Irenaeus wasn't "wrong" to call them Gnostics, just like he wasn't "wrong" to call them heretics.
You missed the immediate qualification -
Britannica wrote:Irenaeus’s use of gnostikoi is said to be somewhat confusing, however, since he sometimes seems to apply it to all of the groups he condemns rather than to only one or two sects
= the fallacy of composition: attributing qualities or characteristics of parts of a whole to the whole itself, or attributing qualities or characteristics of some parts of a whole to all parts.

Which is what most people have been doing since, until " 'cutting-edge scholars,' including Michael Williams, David Brakke, Denise Buell, and Karen King, “who, over the past fifteen years or more, have made a thorough case against the existence of Gnosticism”."
Last edited by MrMacSon on Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Joseph D. L.
Posts: 1405
Joined: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:10 am

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by Joseph D. L. »

MrMacSon wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:09 am
Joseph D. L. wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 2:15 am If you want to get even more technical, Catholicism would be γνωστικός and Catholics would be γνωστικός. I agree that Gnosticism is a term that gets too much exposure and is misunderstood, but for opposite reasons. Every religion is gnostic and it's redundant to to use the word to single out heretical Christian sects and therefore we should stop using it, for that reason, not because "it was made up by modern scholars", but because it was made up by an ancient Christian PR lobbyist.
Carrier and you agree -

Nearly all religious sects shared one or another 'Gnostic' idea, including what we anachronistically call “orthodox” sects. ... Every sect claimed it was “orthodoxy” and every other “heresy,” and what Christianity ended up looking like in the later fourth century corresponded to no sect prior to that century.

The problem here is you can say this about any time in the era of Christianity. The Christianity of today is not the Christianity of the 20th century, the 19th century, the 18th, etc.

And there is a clear distinction between what is commonly called "orthodox" and what is called "gnostic/heretical". Carrier is being deliberately facetious, as is his entire agenda ("Jesus Christ From Out Space".) A historian is someone who is supposed to help others understand certain factors or conditions that went into a event, time, place, era, epoch, and so on. Carrier just wants to take the piss out of Christianity.

So is orthodoxy and gnosticism the same? Yes, but not for the reasons Carrier is claiming.
I disagree where he claims

anything called “Gnosticism” after the first century is just an evolved or elaborated version of the originating sect launched by Peter and modified by Paul

and where he claims

each sect modif[ied] in its own way what Paul meant by gnosis, or how his cosmic dualism was to be explained, or how he imagined the task of creation was delegated or corrupted, or the specific names used for that 'corruptor' or delegated creator, and every other peculiar thing

I think that might apply to some small pseudo-Christian sects that we'll never ever hear about, but it probably doesn't apply to the ones that are known, such as the Sethians, the Valentianians, etc.
The problem here is that "Gnosticism" was a second century term when applied to Christian sects. He's still under the impression that Paul and Peter were first century figures. This makes everything he says null and void as far as I care.

I don't know if Jewish Gnostics called themselves as such, but the same still applies to them. Jews are gnostic, Platonists are gnostic, Osirians were gnostic, Mithraists were gnostic, Orphics were gnostic, Hindus are gnostics, etc. etc. Everyone is a gnostic. So the term is meaningless insofar as religion goes.
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by MrMacSon »

Joseph D. L. wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:39 am And there is a clear distinction between what is commonly called "orthodox" and what is called "gnostic/heretical".
I disagree. On the point there was no clear orthodoxy, and probably never was [and still isn't], I think Carrier is right.

Joseph D. L. wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:39 am The problem here is that "Gnosticism" was a second century term when applied to Christian sects.
No fucking way. Sects we know as 'gnostic' would not have been Christian.

Irenaeus's use of gnostikoi is unlikely to mean Gnosticism as a category.

Joseph D. L. wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:39 am He's still under the impression that Paul and Peter were first century figures. This makes everything he says null and void as far as I care.
I doubt Peter and Paul were first century figures too, but that doesn't make everything he's said null and void eg. he's likely right there was a milieu of competing sects though every century until the early Middle Ages.

Joseph D. L. wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:39 am I don't know if Jewish Gnostics called themselves as such, but the same still applies to them. Jews are gnostic, Platonists are gnostic, Osirians were gnostic, Mithraists were gnostic, Orphics were gnostic, Hindus are gnostics, etc. etc. Everyone is a gnostic. So the term is meaningless insofar as religion goes.
You're being disingenuous and spurious. Having Claiming special gnosis does not mean being gnostic ([everyone did it].

The whole fucking point [of Carrier and the gnostic scholars he names] is that describing a sect or religion as gnostic or being part of a supposed Gnosticism is as fucking stupid as you're being.
User avatar
Joseph D. L.
Posts: 1405
Joined: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:10 am

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by Joseph D. L. »

MrMacSon wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:39 am
You missed the immediate qualification -
Britannica wrote:Irenaeus’s use of gnostikoi is said to be somewhat confusing, however, since he sometimes seems to apply it to all of the groups he condemns rather than to only one or two sects
= the fallacy of composition: attributing qualities or characteristics of parts of a whole to the whole itself, or attributing qualities or characteristics of some parts of a whole to all parts.
What did I miss? You called what Irenaeus did "wrong" and that is not an accurate description.

And as far as we can know, all of the groups Irenaeus attacks did call themselves gnostics. Even if they didn't, to say Irenaeus is wrong implies that we know something he doesn't. We don't know what they called themselves. "Marcionites" is just a convenient name to call those who followed Marcion, "Simonians" for Simon Magus, and so forth. They may have called themselves something else altogether.

I'm a Marxist-Leninist and I call myself such, not only because I believe in their theories, but because it is to denote that I come after these men. Marx himself wasn't a "Marxist", and Lenin wasn't a "Marxist-Leninist". These terms came about after their respective times.

It's the same with "gnosticism". To call them "gnostics", or what they believed "gnosticism", is not at all incorrect. Maybe historically shortsighted considering that it presumes boarder between orthodoxy and gnosticism, but I don't really care about getting hung up on word games and semantics. You know what I mean, I know what you mean, when we here "gnosticism". Let's just leave it at that and move onto something more productive.
Which is what most people have been doing since, until " 'cutting-edge scholars,' including Michael Williams, David Brakke, Denise Buell, and Karen King, “who, over the past fifteen years or more, have made a thorough case against the existence of Gnosticism”."
Meh.
User avatar
Joseph D. L.
Posts: 1405
Joined: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:10 am

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by Joseph D. L. »

You're being disingenuous and spurious. Having Claiming special gnosis does not mean being gnostic ([everyone did it].

The whole fucking point [of Carrier and the gnostic scholars he names] is that describing a sect or religion as gnostic or being part of a supposed Gnosticism is as fucking stupid as you're being.
First off my guy, you need to cool your jets. I haven't said anything to insult you or to belittle your intelligence in anyway.

Second of all, yes, these groups would be called "gnostic" given the kind of knowledge--divine/heavenly--they are claiming to possess. That's precisely my point. There isn't a difference between "orthodoxy" and what they call "gnosticism" on a fundamental level, and the same is true for orthodox Judaism and "Jewish gnosticism a la Philo of Alexandria, the Merkabah or the Zohar, and the same holds true for Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. All these religions are gnostic in a general sense. To deny that is... well, just being foolish and obtuse. Gnosticism doesn't have to have Jesus fucking Christ as it's main guy to be gnostic. Xoroaster viewed gnosticism as a parasitic term that applies to everything and so it should be rejected as a qualifier, because it doesn't qualify anything especially.

There. Now we can be friends again.
User avatar
Joseph D. L.
Posts: 1405
Joined: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:10 am

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by Joseph D. L. »

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic ... gnosticism
An esoteric system of theology and philosophy. It presents one of the most obscure and complicated problems in the general history of religion. It forced itself into prominence in the first centuries of the common era, and the Church Fathers were constrained to undertake its refutation. Writers on the history and dogmas of the Church have therefore always devoted much attention to the subject, endeavoring to fathom and define its nature and importance. It has proved even more attractive to the general historians of religion, and has resulted during the last quarter of a century in a voluminous literature, enumerated by Herzog-Hauck ("Real-Encyc." vi. 728). Its prominent characteristic being syncretism, the scholars, according to their various points of view, have sought its origin, some in Hellenism (Orphism), some in Babylonia, others elsewhere. This question, however, can not be discussed here, as this article deals with purely Jewish gnosticism.
User avatar
mlinssen
Posts: 3431
Joined: Tue Aug 06, 2019 11:01 am
Location: The Netherlands
Contact:

Re: Carrier on "gnosticism"

Post by mlinssen »

Dear Joseph, from a conceptual point of view, off-topic perhaps, a wholeheartedly YES!!! to all this.
The essence of Gnostic thought is duality, and acquiring Knowledge (of the wrong kind) is what gave Adam and Eve shame, and so on.
It's what Thomas advertises against in logion 37, with a fat pun: make yourselves naked of your shame (and you'll see the child of he who lives, and not be afraid)

And as such, all religion is duality, all religion is Gnostic: dual, aimed at dividing, it distantiates itself from spirituality, Oneness (thought there are spiritual flows that don't embrace it, perhaps)

Yet the label itself was used in the first centuries to imprint on heretics, to give them one single brand mark: it was a "them vs us" move, and the word could have been heretics as well (pun), or simply "idiots", "liars", or anything else that applies to an enormously large group of people that don't share your singular, myopic vision

We can debate about what Gnosticism was or is it was meant to be, but we should omit all labels and simply try to define who and what we are taking about
Joseph D. L. wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:24 am
And the key point is that Irenaeus was wrong to do that
Irenaeus wasn't "wrong" to call them Gnostics, just like he wasn't "wrong" to call them heretics.

If want to get even deeper into it, Adam and Eve would be the first gnostics because they ate from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:

καὶ ἔλαβεν Κύριος ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον ὃν ἔπλασεν καὶ ἔθετο αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ, ἐργάζεσθαι αὐτὸν καὶ φυλάσσειν. καὶ ἐνετείλατο Κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῷ Ἀδὰμ λέγων Ἀπὸ παντὸς ξύλου τοῦ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ βρώσει φάγῃ· ἀπὸ δὲ τοῦ ξύλου τοῦ γινώσκειν καλὸν καὶ πονηρόν, οὐ φάγεσθε ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ· ᾗ δ᾽ ἂν ἡμέρᾳ φάγησθε ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε.

And Jehovah God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

And what happens in the very next chapter? Eve is persuaded by the serpent to eat from the tree, who then persuades Adam to eat from it, thus gaining knowledge and knowing they were naked:

καὶ διηνοίχθησαν οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ τῶν δύο, καὶ ἔγνωσαν ὅτι γυμνοὶ ἦσαν· καὶ ἔρραψαν φύλλα συκῆς καὶ ἐποίησαν ἑαυτοῖς περιζώματα.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And it is precisely this scene in particular that seems to have inspired a whole sabaoth of "gnostic" sects, like the Sethians and the Cainites and Adamites and the Valentinians.

So it isn't like Irenaeus was just reaching for a term and making it up. To say Irenaeus was "wrong" is to presume some anti-historic bias onto these men writing in their own time.

Napoleon wasn't "short" for his day, but it isn't "wrong" to call him short today. Historically inaccurate. But not "wrong".

I lost my train of thought.
Post Reply