Given to Matthew Hayes - 05/04/2023

Pretty good. She doesn't actually define Gnosticism, but rather delves into the history of the way it has been defined. Frequently, it's been defined in a way that serves prevailing opinions on religion, Christianity, Orientalism, and the practice of history. It seems that there never really was any single movement or religion that could go by the name "gnostic", just a collection of heresies that have very little in common.
She does indicate two main branches of gnostic thought, based largely on similarities of Nag Hammadi texts to what we are told various heretics believed - Sethian and Valentinian gnosticism. Seth here refers to the son of Adam, and the school of thought focuses on the joy of learning from all that wisdom has to offer, regardless of where it is to be found (note: crazy sex orgies don't seem to belong to this category). Valentinian refers to the teachings of Valentinus, who taught that there was a secret teaching revealed by Christ to those who seek and are initiated into the mysteries.
Mostly though the focus is on past scholars of Gnosticism, what they believed, how it influenced others, and how they may have gone wrong.
The last part of the book concerns historical methodology, particularly the methods she used in researching, evaluating, and writing this book. She acknowledges her debt to Foucault and Bourdieu, and how she differs from their methods.
4 stars on completion, mostly because I like the thoroughness and transparency of her method. ( )

This is sort of wonderful. King follows the ancient polemical and modern scholarly views of Gnosticism down through the ages. Her main point is that the late 19th-early 20th century scholars for the most part accepted and reinforced the views of the early church polemicists (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.). She gives detailed example after detailed example. We look at the work of Harnack, Reitzenstein, Bousset, Bultmann, Bauer, Jonas and others. She then undertakes a review of shifting scholarly positions after the astonishing discovery in 1945 of a trove of ancient mostly Gnostic manuscripts near the Upper Egypt village of Nag Hammadi. These manuscripts, written in Coptic, were hidden in a jar under the sand and estimated to be 1,600 years old. They threw much light on the formation of the early church and raised many questions. Does King belabor her point a bit? Yes, she is nothing if not thorough, but it's such a fascinating overview, requiring only minimal googling for the general reader, that one is borne along. Her writing is clear and free of jargon save for the first chapter or so where she pays the requisite obeisance to scholarly argot. Though she isn't the writer her peer Elaine Pagels is, King nevertheless does a rock solid job which is to be commended. Her approach is chronological for the most part. She wants to follow the sequence of ideas and compare and contrast them as she goes along. Just the sort of treatment of the subject matter I was looking for. Thorough and admirable. ( )

In 2003 both Karen King and Christoph Markschies published significant, yet very different works on the subject of Gnosticism. King’s "What is Gnosticism?" strives to serve as a corrective, suggesting a paradigm shift in how we are to understand what has come to be known as “Gnosticism.” Markschies, on the other hand, offers a self-admitted brief treatment of the concept. One author seeks to eliminate the term all together in order to find continuity in difference, while the latter seeks to codify and preserve the term by demonstrating the development and commonality of a movement.

** What Is Gnosticism? **

Karen King has the honor of being the first woman to ever serve as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University—the first, and therefore oldest endowed chair (1791) at Harvard. After earning her undergraduate degree in Religious Studies, she studied in Germany for a season with members of the Coptic-Gnostic study group at Humboldt University in Berlin. From there she attended Brown University where she earned her Ph.D. in History of Religions, specializing in Ancient Christianity. The recipient of many awards and accolades for her work as a feminist, historian, and academic, Karen King is best known at the moment for her discovery of the so-called “Jesus Wife” parchment.

** A Definitional Challenge **

In the introduction to her book, King wastes no time to draw a line in the sand regarding her view of the abuse of the term Gnosticism through the ages. She states the term “is an unhelpful artificial and rhetorical construction” (3). Indeed, all terms of religious identity are constructs fraught with power plays, implications, and agendas. In a not-so-subtle jab at Michael Williams, King refuses to put the Gnosticism in quotation marks, despite her disdain of the artificial nature of the term as she sees such a move yet another construct serving an argumentative and rhetorical purpose. She later calls Williams’ attempt to dispose of the term “Gnosticism” in favor of the more descriptive “biblical demiurgical” a failure as that is merely substituting one term for another while keeping the connotative weight intact (168). One would expect a work with the title What Is Gnosticism to make an attempt at a definition, but that would prove to be antithetical to King’s work. Gnosticism is “a problematic term that must be reevaluated,” not defined (4). The issue with definitions, King goes on to say, is they “tend to produce static and reified entities and hide the rhetorical and ideological interests of their fabricators” (15).

In the introduction, King outlines how Gnosticism has been historically understood: (1) varieties of early Christianity with little to no appropriation of Judaism, (2) an exterior contamination of the Gospel, and (3) any number of traditions related to this contaminated Christianity (4). It is this uniformity of understanding that King hopes to dismantle as incoherent in light of the historical record. The incredible breadth and ubiquity of so-called Gnosticism coupled with difficulties in dating and determining the actual identity of the Gnostics makes any definitional work an exercise in futility. The task is likened to an attempt to cram several different shapes into the same hole of a children’s game by carving the pieces until they fit—“But you can never really het the different-shaped blocks to all fit into the same hole without some violence to the evidence” (8-9).

Two primary methodologies have been levied in an attempt to define Gnosticism. The first is the genealogical approach as exemplified by Harnack. By identifying the historical point of origin of Gnosticism, we would be able to determine essential meaning and character of the phenomenon. The second is the typological approach with Jonas as exemplar. This approach seeks out the essential common characteristics that typify a movement in the context of its historical expression. Ultimately, according to King, they both fail in light of the diversity of expressions of the Gnostic myth (13).

The greatest difficulty when it comes to defining Gnosticism is the conceptual baggage of heresy and orthodoxy. It is “the fundamental and pervasive perception that Gnosticism is a heresy” that weighs most heavily on the definitional task. Gnosticism is framed as a part of “the ongoing project of defining and maintaining a normative Christianity” (18). King seeks to rectify what she sees as a false dichotomy being presented by Christian polemicists. The language of heresy and orthodoxy has infected “twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism … [that] has distorted our analysis of the ancient texts” (19).

** Heresy as Power Play **

King begins with the early apologists of the church, tipping her hand when she speaks of their work in writing “polemical treatises against other Christians” (20). By studying the modern academic treatment of the strategies of the polemicists, “we can learn more about Gnosticism as a category … than by examining the content of [their] descriptions of heresy” (21). In this chapter King describes the evolution of ancient Christianity as a polyvalent entity that moved from social and theological diversity into “a more uniform Christianity” in the fourth and fifth centuries under the guidance of Christian emperors (22). Orthodoxy was not a condition inherent in the ancient church; it was a title that this socio-political entity won for itself. Prior to this ecclesial victory, there was no hierarchy, creed, or canon. It was up to the apologists to “develop a few distinctive and powerful rhetorical strategies to argue that they, and they alone, understood the revelation of Christ and interpreted the Scripture correctly” (23).

Chief among these strategies was the appropriation of the connotatively neutral term αἱρέσεις to be used as a weapon of division between those whom they determined to be false believers versus true believers. This distinction was key in Christian “identity formation.” With the power to brand individuals and groups as heretics, the polemicists were able to “articulate the meaning of self while simultaneously silencing and excluding others within the group” (24). The genesis of orthodoxy and heresy as terms used in identity formation served as a power play to move the undesirables from their place within the community to a place without. As King put it, “the orthodox are the winners; the heretics, the losers” (24).

These apologists sought to exclude those based on differences of belief and praxis. Using Irenaeus of Lyons as an example, King notes his focus on differences related to cosmology, soteriology, and morality. After a brief sketch of a hypothetical Irenaeun polemic, King demonstrates how the accepted polemic operates on a distortion of their opponents perspectives. After her final example that speaks of gnostic claims to authority that would undermine the position of the church that only men could serve as bishops or priests, King ends with a somewhat telling aside: “Therein, perhaps, lay the real rub” (27).

A key strategy for Irenaeus was to construct “a genealogy of heresies from a single origin” (31). Through “strategic manipulation,” he painted those categorized as heretics not as fellow Christians, but disciples of the Devil. The source of these heresies can be found in Simon the Samaritan—inspired by the Devil, he is the source and archetype of all subsequent heretics. This artificial genealogical construct “provided a powerful metaphor that allowed Irenaeus to lump all his opponents together under one rubric, heresy, despite the enormous variety of their beliefs and practices” (32). This concept of heresy was essential to Christian identity formation.

Heresy, however, was not the only category created to differentiate what would come to be known as orthodoxy from outsiders. Christianity also stood apart from the broad categories of Judaism (40) and Paganism (48). Against Judaism, the question came down to the proper interpretation of Scripture. King levels the charge of hypocrisy against Christians—ancient and contemporary—for condemning others for using the hermeneutic of “appropriation, negation, and erasure,” when it is precisely the same hermeneutic they use (46-7). In response to Paganism, Christians used a three-fold strategy “to set the boundaries between Christians and pagans: outright rejection, hierarchical subordination, and transformation” (49). The “vociferously antisyncretistic” stance of the Christian in the face of other gods was clear in their outright rejection of any such claim of deity. Yet King sees hypocrisy once again the syncretistic pattern of embracing some truths of pagan philosophy (hierarchical subordination) or outright sublimation of a practice into orthodoxy (transformation) (50-52).

Contemporary scholarship struggles under the weight of the historical baggage carried by the term heresy. In a key statement for her argument King posits, “we have been mistakenly preoccupied with determining [heresy’s] origin and tracing its genealogical relation to orthodox Christianity because we have unwittingly reified a rhetorical category into a historical entity” (52, emphasis mine). With that historical error in mind, King’s stated purpose in this book “is to show how twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism has simultaneously reinscribed, elaborated, and deviated from…” the discourse on themes related to “the language, themes and strategies of orthodoxy and heresy” (54). A “fresh angle” is needed, and Karen King is ready to provide it.

** From Heresy to Historiography **

The next three chapters are historiographical in nature as King traces thought in the field from the twentieth century to the present day. She begins with Adolf von Harnack who “described Gnosticism as ‘the acute Hellenization of Christianity’” (55). That said, for Harnack the New Testament could never be read properly without a full awareness of the “general spiritual atmosphere created by Hellenism” (56). The essence of Christianity must therefore transcend the documents and its historical context. For Harnack, this essence is captured by a life that is characterized as living in the presence of God. This is the “husk” of the Christian experience, set free from the confines of historical context and dogma. It is through this methodology that Harnack could argue “that the essence of Christianity is neither Greek nor Jewish” nor is it “historically bound” (58). In understanding how Harnack related Christianity to Gnosticism, King recounts the eleven items that Harnack would call the regula fidei of Gnosticism. She subsequently explores how Harnack understood “Gnostic Christianity’s” understanding of the Old Testament, Gospel, and Greek philosophical ideas. Ultimately, King explains, “for Harnack … the Gnostics ‘were, in short, the first theologians of the first century.’ Given Harnack’s opinion that theological dogma arose only with the degeneration of true religious enthusiasm, this achievement was not to their credit” (64).

Although Harnack followed the tradition of the church in casting Gnosticism to serve as a singular term, he did not cast Gnosticism solely in a disapproving light. He drew a connection between Gnosticism and Catholicism that differed “not in kind but only in degree” (66). King closes her discussion on Harnack with the caveat that he lifted Gnosticism out of the ancient context and viewed it through the lens of the new values of enlightenment and romanticist movements in an attempt to preserve Christian identity formation tuned to his own normative Christianity in protestant liberalism.

King now casts her gaze disapprovingly on the History of Religions School. Where Harnack focused on the Hellenistic, or Greek world, these scholars focused on the Orient to aid their understanding. Rather than seeing Gnosticism as a heresy that had been expelled out from Christianity, they came to the surprising “conclusion that Gnosticism was an independent religion whose origin lay … in pre-Christian, Oriental myth and cultic piety” (71). Their methodology was a form of “motif history” which traced the genealogy not of the movement as a whole, but of specific motifs within the movement. For example, the concept of “Son of Man” was traced to Iranian folk religions, which influenced Paul, and possibly the Gospel of John. This practice lifted the study out of the realm of theology and into the disciplines of science, philology, and into the structure of the university. Consequently, the emphasis on “orthodoxy and heresy” was diminished, but still, King argues, seen through the obsession with origins and anti-syncretism (73).

The exploration of these scholars was detrimental to the study of Gnosticism on many fronts. Their methodology was fundamentally flawed in that motif history is now regarded as making arbitrary determinations without consideration of the shifting sands of “their historical, intellectual, and sociological contexts” (79-80). Most damaging, from King’s perspective, was the invention and propagation of the “Gnostic redeemer myth” which she pejoratively calls “that staple of two-page summaries of Gnosticism” (109).

** A New Light for Gnosticism **

In 1934 things turn a corner with the appearance of two key works on Gnosticism. Bauer’s Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum and Hans Jonas’s Gnosis und spätantiker Geist challenged contemporary thought on Gnosticism and have had a lasting impact not just on Gnostic studies, but on Biblical studies as well. Bauer set the foundation for King’s work with his hypothesis “certain manifestations of Christian belief that the authors of the church renounced as ‘heresies’ originally had not been such at all, but, at least here and there, were the only form of the new religion—that is, for those regions they were simply ‘Christianity’” (110-11). It was this reconstruction that urged scholars to jettison “the dominant master narrative of Christian origins” in favor of a view of multiple Christianities in a quest for dominance.

Bauer’s work offered an alternative model of Christian historiography. Although the history of religions school had already determined that Gnosticism preceded Christianity, Bauer more capably turned Tertullian’s thesis on its head: orthodoxy did not chronologically precede heresy—rather Gnosticism should be seen as Christianity. It was Bauer who set the stage for a professor at a well-known evangelical seminary to recently refer to a “Gnostic Christianity,” or as King phrased it, “the varieties of early Christianity” (114). Although her treatment of Bauer was brief, his contribution to King’s thesis cannot be overstated. She closes her discussion on Bauer by saying: "Bauer … suggested that these terms [orthodoxy and heresy] would be inadequate because the multiformity of Christianity cannot be comprehended by only two categories. What he did not say, but what seems implicit in his work, is that the relationship between Gnosticism and Christianity would never yield a single solution—not just because that relationship varied from time to time and place to place, but because our very understanding of Gnosticism and Christianity requires rethinking" (115).

The bulk of King’s focus in this chapter is on the work and contribution of Hans Jonas. His new approach to typology divorced from chronological/genealogical approaches was paradigm shifting. He could now interpret a phenomenon in its social and political context, not charting its linear evolution through time. This new approach led Jonas to seven characteristics that would “encapsulate the essence of Gnosticism: gnosis, dynamic character (pathomorphic crisis), mythological character, dualism, impiety, artificiality, and unique historical locus” (120). Interestingly, of gnosis, Jonas said that it was “the prominent characteristic of the second phase of Hellenistic culture in general,” and not something that should apply solely to Gnosticism per se (120).

Finally, King considers the work of Carsten Colpe to whom she attributes the merciful demise of the dreaded Gnostic redeemer myth. Colpe brought several of the “crucial philological mistakes” in the creation of the myth to light (141). He also demonstrated how the ancient texts had been misconstrued and misinterpreted by the history of religions school—of which he was a part.

In sum, these three scholars continue to have a significant impact on Gnostic studies. Bauer established that the claim that orthodoxy came first can no longer be used to determine theological orthodoxy—normativity must be grounded on some other basis. Jonas relegated motif tory to the rubbish bin and reframed typological and genealogical approaches to exist not synchronically, but tangentially. This modified approach created new and viable ways to determine the origins and nature of Gnosticism. The Mandaeism scholars have ruled out the surety of a pre-Christian Gnosticism. Colpe put the Gnostic redeemer myth out of its misery by demonstrating the flaw in its creation as “an artificial and composite synthesis that misconstrues the meaning of the actual texts it purports to describe” (148).

** The Matter of Gnosis—New Reading Material **

In the next two chapters King reflects on the scholarly aftermath of an unlikely find in an expedition for fertilizer. Surely these new manuscripts will give the Gnostics a voice of their own! Sadly, as King evidences, that has not been the case. The increase in evidence found at Nag Hammadi has only added new layers of complexity and served to bring the existing problems even more to the fore. The real problem is not the texts, King posits, but in the “continued entanglement of heresiological discourses in the scholarly study of Gnosticism” (150). In the Nag Hammadi works, King has found fuel for her fire to finish off these unhelpful terms. The bounds of orthodoxy and heresy must be expanded to deal with the reality that “early Christian literature does not divide neatly into orthodox and heretical camps” (152). Some of these overlaps, contradictions, and discrepancies have led scholars to interesting positions. Christoph Markschies for example now questions whether it is appropriate to relegate Valentinus to Gnosticism. Based on the definition of Gnosticism determined by the Messina Congress, “Valentinus cannot be considered a Gnostic. The same cannot, however, be said for followers of Valentinus such as Ptolemy” (156).

From study of these texts, four subcategories of Gnosticism have been established within the discipline: Valentinianism, Sethianism, Hermeticism, and Thomistic Christianity (162). Although the categories may be clear, King has questions as to whether it is best to see them as subcategories of Gnosticism, Christianity, or something else all together. Scholars are again driven to the question of origins in light of these new textual discoveries. Did Gnosticism emerge from Christianity, Greek philosophy, Oriental religion, or Judaism? Although many voices are now seeking to find the locus of origin within Christianity, “the hot new contender for the locus of origin is Judaism” (175). This move to a home in Judaism has given voice to various creation myths, which have resulted in a reductio of Gnosticism “to the production of an evil Demiurge even though many of the Nag Hammadi texts have no biblical Demiurge” (187-88). In reviewing these debates, King comes to the conclusion that a single point of origin is inconceivable due to the widespread nature of the concept. For King, “the entire question of origin is a non-issue whose seeming urgency arises only because of its rhetorical function in the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy” (190). It is time to set these things aside and move on.

King does move on to illustrate the “problem with typology by examining three of the supposedly ‘essential characteristics’ of Gnosticism: dualism, ascetic or libertine ethics, and Docetism” (191). Dualism proves to be a caricature that is typically misread to an “extreme anticosmic dualism” that when typified does violence to the text (201). The false dichotomy of placing Gnostic ethics into categories of asceticism or libertinism is “cliché” and inhibits a critical analysis of the subject matter (208). The conversations about the nature of Christ and Docetism too has become cliché, preventing the more significant anthropological discussion from taking place. Again, King urges the abandonment of cliché so that critical analysis can begin (213).

** The Death of Gnosticism and the Rise of Foucaultian Methodologies **

It is inevitable that the term “Gnosticism” will eventually pass out of usage, at least in the sense that it is currently used. Despite her earlier vehemence against the term, King clarifies that it may not be necessary to “eliminate the term per se, but to recognize and correct the ways in which reinscribing the discourses of orthodoxy and heresy distort our reading and reconstruction of ancient religion” (218). The task is now to work through a new framework in the study of the Christianities of the past. This new framework will still use “the basic methods of historiography … but [deployed] toward different ends and emphases … disentangled from a focus on origins, purity, and essence” (219-20).

The bottom line is that the “variety of phenomena classified as ‘Gnostic’ simply will not support a single, monolithic definition, and in fact none of the primary materials fit the standard typological definition” (226). A new method is required—one focused not on origin, but on practice (228), intertextuality of the texts themselves as well as the shifting intertexts of time and socio-political contexts (232-33), and a freedom from the restrictive bonds of orthodoxy and heresy. This approach will result in multiple “true and authentic” narratives that will establish multiple normative standards that allow for a migration from objectivity to ethics (246).

In her closing thoughts on methodology, King embarks on a fascinating discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of habitus and doxa. In light of Bourdieu’s model, King admits to “doing what [she is] critiquing: writing the origins and history of Gnosticism in order to ‘subvert the game’” (243). Indeed, "What Is Gnosticism?" has proven to be yet another power play in the history of interpretation regarding orthodoxy and heresy. ( )

Karen L. King is a religious historian that in this book reexamines the concept of Gnosticism. She attempts to sort out conflicting interpretations of those controversial beliefs in early Christian history. Drawing on the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in Egypt in 1945, King maintains that the understanding of Gnosticism has been distorted by hostile commentaries of early Orthodox Church partisans. Though she has nothing to support this hypothesis of a so-called power struggle. Her point that there probably is no entity called "Gnosticism" is deserving of discussion and research. ( )