A Gnostic’s Fables

One of the media’s favorite “authorities” on the newly published “Gospel of Judas” (and many other topics in religious history) is Elaine Pagels, a Princeton religion professor best known for her book The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Professor Pagels presents a picture of early Christianity with Good Guys Persons and Bad. The Bad are the predecessors of the modern Church: patriarchalist authoritarians motivated by lust for political power. The Good are the tolerant, egalitarian, proto-feminist Gnostics – surprisingly like contemporary liberal Protestants in their outlook – whom the authoritarians, most notably St. Irenaeus, persecuted to extinction.

The credulity with which secular journalists accept such a distorted picture of history is annoying, though hardly surprising. It is therefore pleasant to see the Princeton Gnostic exposed as a fabulator. Fr. Paul Mankowski, a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, focuses his eye on a single passage in Professor Pagels’ magnum opus:

What Irenaeus found most galling of all was that, instead of repenting or even openly defying the bishop, they responded to his protests with diabolically clever theological arguments:

They call [us] “unspiritual,” “common,” and “ecclesiastic.” ... Because we do not accept their monstrous allegations, they say that we go on living in the hebdomad [the lower regions], as if we could not lift our minds to the things on high, nor understand the things that are above. [The Gnostic Gospels, p. 43; all italics, brackets and ellipses in original]

He then demonstrates that the “quotation” from Irenaeus is, to put it bluntly, a fraud, constructed by snipping and realigning two passages that appear many pages apart in the original:

1. “They give speeches to the crowd about those from the Church, whom they call ‘common’ and ‘ecclesiastic’, through which they entrap the simple and entice them, counterfeiting our teaching, that they might listen to them more often.” [Adversus Haereses 3:15]

2. “For that which the followers of Valentinus [a Gnostic teacher] impute to us – claiming that we remain in the lower Hebdomad, as if we could not lift our minds on high or perceive the things that are above, since we reject their own extravagant discourses – this very thing the followers of Basilides [another Gnostic] impute to them.” [AH 2:16]

Even without Fr. Mankowski’s exposition, it is obvious that the portmanteau “quotation” has an entirely different meaning from the original texts. What Professor Pagels proffers as an example of Irenaeus’ sensitivity to criticism of bishops is a compound of (i) his description of the Valentinians’ sneers at all church-going Christians, not just bishops, and (ii) his ironical observation that the rival Gnostic schools accuse each other of the same faults that they find in Christianity. In other words, the writer, lacking an authentic text to back up her thesis, invented one. (Not that her invention is all that successful. Does her version make it sound like the Gnostics’ arguments are “diabolically clever” or, for that matter, “theological”?)

This fictionalizing of Irenaeus is a small matter in itself, but important as a symptom of a thoroughly unscholarly frame of mind. One doesn’t need to read much more to evaluate the author’s merits, just as one needn’t eat a whole egg before declaring it rotten. As Fr. Mankowski says,

The Gnostic Gospels, like those portions of Pagels’s later work with which I am familiar, is chock-full of tendentious readings and instances where counter-evidence is suppressed. The example of “creativity” here discussed may fairly be called a representative specimen of her methodology, and was singled out not because it’s the worst example of its kind but because it’s among the most unambiguous. No one who consults the source texts could give Pagels a pass, and that means she forfeits the claim to reliability as a scholar.

But he closes on a suitably charitable note:

I am not calling for academic sanctions but, more simply, for clarification. Pagels should be billed accurately – not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist. Her oeuvre is that of fiction – in fact, historical romance. Had New York Times reporters sought Barbara Cartland’s views on discoveries in Merovingian religion or paleography, most of us would find it odd, but we'd expect them to make it plain that it was romance, not history, in which she had the right to an opinion.

Indeed, as romance the Pagels view of the early Church has a certain appeal, so long as one doesn’t confuse it with real life.

Update (5/1/06): Dave Kopel also mentions Fr. Mankowski’s article. What’s interesting here is the venom of many of the commenters – directed not against Professor Pagels’ fabricated quotation but against Christianity in general. One goes so far as to accuse early Christians of “genocide” (killed a lot of lions and Romans, did they?). It’s all funny in a way, though also a depressing insight into how little modern secularists know about the Church and how readily they condemn it on the basis of their ignorance.

Comments

[moncler norway]

I just sent this post to a bunch of my friends as I agree with most of what you’re saying here and the way you’ve presented it is awesome.