What was the Gnostic view of Jesus? We might more appropriately discuss Gnostic “views.” The term “Gnosticism,” as I’ve written previously, can be applied to a diverse (and often contradictory) body of teachings and texts. Nonetheless, we can (cautiously) draw some general conclusions about so-called Gnostic Christianity. Christian orthodoxy sees Jesus as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity—the unbegotten Son of the Eternal Father. Many Gnostic texts frame the Abrahamic God as incompetent or malicious, certainly not divine. Jesus, in these works, came not to unite us to this being, but to liberate us from him.
If Gnostics view Jesus favorably, he surely can’t be the offspring of Yaldabaoth—the wicked archon (Greek for “ruler”) that Gnostic texts identify with the God of Genesis. According to these documents, Jesus isn’t his son, but his enemy.
An Alien Sonship
In my article on The Gnostic View of Adam and Eve, I drew from texts like The Apocryphon of John, On the Origin of the World, and The Hypostasis of the Archons. While the latter doesn’t mention Jesus by name, the first two offer pictures wholly foreign to Nicene Christology.
The Apocryphon of John
A study of the Christology of The Apocryphon of John is far too great a task for a blog article, but even a brief glance will reveal some curious assertions about the nature of Jesus. We read that Christ is also called “Autogenes,” the son of an invisible and holy spirit:
of whom it is not right to think of him as a god, or something similar. For he is more than a god, since there is nothing above him, for no one lords it over him.
These phrases smack of piety, and we might assume that this spirit is the God of traditional Christianity. The spirit, after all, “placed the divine Autogenes [i.e. Christ] of truth over everything. And he subjected to him every authority.”
But the text is clear that Christ is a created being:
And the holy Spirit completed the divine Autogenes, his son, together with Barbelo, that he may attend the mighty and invisible, virginal Spirit as the divine Autogenes, the Christ whom he had honored with a mighty voice.
The act of “completing” establishes a hierarchy incompatible with the Nicene Creed, which affirms Christ as “consubstantial with the Father” and “born of the Father before all ages.” Moreover, it appears that Barbelo is ontologically prior to Christ, as Barbelo is the “first power” that proceeded from the spirit and worked with him to “complete” Christ.
On The Origin of The World
On the Origin of the World mentions Christ by name twice. He is identified as a creation of Sabaoth, the son of Yaldabaoth, who repented of his father’s wicked deeds. Sabaoth did not take his place among the archons like Yaldabaoth, the corrupt and ignorant rulers of the material world. Instead, Sabaoth sided with the beings who inhabit an “eternal realm (aeon) of truth [that] has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it.”
Sabaoth is rewarded for his righteousness by Pistis, a being from the aeonic realm. She “dispatched seven archangels to Sabaoth from her light. They snatched him up to the seventh heaven.”
It is Sabaoth who “created a congregation of angels, thousands and myriads, numberless, which resembled the congregation in the eighth heaven; and a firstborn called Israel—which is, ‘the man that sees God’; and another being, called Jesus Christ, who resembles the savior above in the eighth heaven, and who sits at his right upon a revered throne.”
As is typical of Gnostic texts, the language of On the Origin of the World is dense and esoteric. But we can see that Christ is hardly coequal with the Abrahamic God here. Rather, he is a likeness of a being who exists “in the eighth heaven,” presumably his superior.
Basilides
In the texts above, the identity of the Son of God is radically reframed. Anyone holding to views like these must understand Christ’s activity and purpose on Earth in a manner quite divergent from Christian tradition.
St. Irenaeus, in his work Against Heresies, offers a treatment of the teaching of Basilides, a Gnostic of the second century. A word of qualification is in order: Irenaeus is writing polemically, and Basilides’s texts are lost. So Basilides cannot speak for himself.
According to Against Heresies, Basilides taught that the world was created by “angels who occupy the lowest heaven, that, namely which is visible to us.” The “chief” of these angels is “he who is thought to be the God of the Jews.” This head angel, then, bears considerable resemblance to the Yaldabaoth of other Gnostic texts. Irenaeus writes:
But the father without birth and without name, perceiving that they would be destroyed, sent his own first-begotten Nous (he it is who is called Christ) to bestow deliverance on them that believe in him, from the power of those who made the world. He appeared, then, on earth as a man, to the nations of these powers, and wrought miracles. Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them.
The Jesus of Basilides, “an incorporeal power,” “transfigured himself as he pleased.” He was, thankfully, spared the awful suffering of the Passion—such a spectacle would be beneath the dignity of “the Nous (mind) of the unborn father.”
The Passion was unnecessary. After all, Christians believe that Christ offered himself to reconcile us to “he who is thought to be the God of the Jews.” For Basilides, such a creed isn’t merely wrong, but spiritually catastrophic:
Those, then, who know these things have been freed from the principalities who formed the world; so that it is not incumbent on us to confess him who was crucified, but him who came in the form of a man, and was thought to be crucified, and was called Jesus, and was sent by the father, that by this dispensation he might destroy the works of the makers of the world. If any one, therefore, he declares, confesses the crucified, that man is still a slave, and under the power of those who formed our bodies; but he who denies him has been freed from these beings, and is acquainted with the dispensation of the unborn father.
The Scandal of the Incarnation
It is the scandal of the Incarnation: the unsettling event of a God made flesh who thinks with the mind of a man, works and acts with the hands of a man, loves with a human heart, a God who struggles, eats and sleeps like one of us. The Son of God overturns every human framework: it is not the disciples who washed the feet of the Lord, but it is the Lord who washed the feet of the disciples (cf. Jn 13:1-20). This is a reason for scandal and incredulity, not only in that period, but in all ages, even today.
Pope Francis I
The Apocryphon of John and On the Origin of the World seem to absolve man of guilt for his fallen state. After all, it is not his sin that corrupted the world. The archons fashioned this material realm, subject to death and decay. Our first parents didn’t sin at all—it was good to eat the fruit! It led them to gnosis, and taught them that the God of the Bible was really Yaldabaoth.
Basilides, unlike the writers of these two texts, does come closer to identifying Jesus as God. He is the “first-begotten Nous” of “the father without birth and without name.” But we are again free of guilt, since according to Basilides, Christ didn’t suffer and die. In fact, whoever claims that he did is a slave.
According to such teachings, it is ignorance, not sin, that keeps us in darkness.
In these Gnostic ideas, I read an attempt to avoid the scandal of the Incarnation. The thought that God not only took human form, but suffered and died for us, is a proposition that seems ludicrous on its face. If one takes enough time to contemplate it, the idea of the Incarnation might become excruciating. It might compel us to act, even to repent.