T(r)oy's Marbles

Author: What we’re talking about here are two different groups of people that wanted to call themselves Christians.

Reader: Right.

Author: But—

Reader: One group says “Jesus is God” and the other group says “Jesus is not God.”

Author: Right.

Reader: But then why would someone who says “Jesus is not God” want to call themselves a Christian still?

Author: Because Jesus did big things.

Reader: What do you mean?

Author: Well, think about it. Both sides say that Jesus was someone special. Even some Gnostics thought Jesus was very special. Because of that, they wanted to “follow” him. Most of the writings (if not all) by the various so called “Christian” Gnostics even include the fact that Jesus performed miracles and had knowledge of the spiritual world that no mere human possessed. In fact, the irony is, all of them believed that Jesus was, in some sense, divine.

Reader: But, wait a second, Dan Brown bases his novel on the notion that Jesus was not Divine, that he was not God, that he was merely a man. And, at the same time, he says he gets this idea from the Christian Gnostics. How can you say that the Christian Gnostics all believed that Jesus was Divine?

Author: I can see that you’re using the word “divine” as if it has a capital D. I did not say they thought Jesus was Divine, with a capital D. I said they thought Jesus was “divine” with a lower case d.

Reader: But how can that be? Either he is God or he isn’t.

Author: Yes, right. But, let me ask you: Are angels divine?

Reader: Sort of.

Author: What do you mean ‘sort of’?

Reader: Well, they come from heaven; they are purely spiritual beings, so in that sense they are divine.

Author: So, angels are divine?

Reader: Yes.

Author: But, angels are not God.

Reader: Right. So, ‘divine’ is a term that can be used for more things than God.

Author: Right.

Reader: And, in this instance, what you’re saying is the Gnostic Christians believed Jesus was divine but not God.

Author: Right.

Reader: What did they think he was then? An angel?

Author: Sort of. They really thought of him more as a “messenger” sent from the spiritual world to show us the way to—

Reader: “Messenger”. Isn’t that what the word “angel” literally means? Like a ‘messenger’ from heaven or from God?

Author: Yes, that’s right.

Reader: Okay, then let me get this straight, just to make sure: they believe he was sent from heaven, right?

Author: No. Not heaven, the heavenly spheres.

Reader: What’s the difference?

Author: Well, the Gnostics taught that the world beyond the world that we can see and taste and touch is composed of multiple levels. You could call these levels ‘spheres’. In many cases, the Gnostics called them ‘aeons’. Some people find it more helpful to refer to them as ‘emanations’.

Reader: Emanations?

Author: All this comes from Plato.

Reader: I’m confused.

Author: It doesn’t have to be confusing. It’s quite simple, really. Imagine that you live in a cave. You’ve lived in this cave all your life and have never left the cave. The cave is all you’ve ever known. Because of this, you are unaware that there is a world outside the world of your cave. Then, one day, you see something on the back wall of your cave that you never noticed before. Actually, it was there all along, but you only just now marked it. It’s a strange sort of thing, really. It’s there, but not there. I mean, you can see it--it’s black, in fact--but you can’t pick it up and take it with you. It’s a shadow.

Because this shadow is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, you’re intrigued. You decide you want to know more about it. For starters, you’d like to know where it comes from. So, the next time it appears, you look at it some more, hoping for a clue. But the day ends and you are none the wiser. You have no idea that the shadow is there because the sun is catching the form of a tree and casting an image on the back wall of your cave. You think that the shadow somehow comes from the wall, or out of the wall, or is actually part of the wall, so whenever you see it, you look at the wall. Of course, you’ll never find out where the shadow comes from by looking at the wall. The real object of your inquiry lies somewhere outside the mouth of the cave, in the real world. So—

Reader: To find out where it comes from, you’ve got to look outside the cave.

Author: Right.

Reader: This is Plato?

Author: Yes, it’s an allegory he told.

Reader: Okay, but what does this have to do with Gnosticism?

Author: Well, the Gnostics were deeply influenced by Plato and so it helps explain the concept of the “spheres”, “aeons” and “emanations.”

Reader: How so?

Author: Well, what caused the shadow?

Reader: The tree.

Author: And?

Reader: The sun.

Author: And, what would you need to do to find out more about the actual tree?

Reader: You’d need to go outside the cave and look at it.

Author: And, is there anything more you could do?

Reader: Examine it, climb it, touch it. Maybe eat some of its fruit.

Author: Yes, good. But there’s another part to the shadow too.

Reader: Right, the sun.

Author: And, how could you find out about the sun?

Reader: By studying it.

Author: And, if you could go to it without getting burnt up, what else?

Reader: Explore it. Examine it.

Author: Right. And to do that you’d have to—

Reader: Have a spaceship.

Author: Right. You’d have to travel through the stratosphere, the ionosphere, the mesosphere, past our moon, Venus, Mercury, etc.

Reader: I see, through the “spheres”.

Author: Right, up and out. Directly to the source of the shadow.

Reader: And that’s what Plato says?

Author: Sort of, at least this is the Gnostic way of interpreting and applying Plato. See, the various branches of Gnosticism all had one thing in common: they taught that the world we see and touch is not the real world. They would say the world we live in is like living in the cave and the things we see and touch are like shadows cast on the wall of the cave. They bear the likeness of the forms outside the cave, but they are not the things of themselves. To see the things themselves, you need to leave the cave, to look at the reality that’s “out there” and “up there”.

Reader: The world of the spirit.

Author: Right. And that world has structure to it, and, in some ways, “levels” to it, until finally you reach a certain point whereby you reach the source of it all.

Reader: Like the sun.

Author: Yes. So, we could say that the tree in question is a part of larger and smaller concepts or “forms”. Let’s say, for example, that the tree in question is an orange tree. We would note that the orange tree is part of a larger category called “fruit trees” and that category is part of a still larger category called “trees” and that all trees are part of a larger category called “plants” and “plants” are part of “living things” and “living things" are part of “things that are” (as opposed to “things that are not”). So, at the very least, we could see that the orange tree is part of the source which we could label “Being” (vs. non-being). You can see, if you look at it this way, that the highest form is Ultimate Truth or Ultimate Being and everything comes from that.

Reader: Okay, but how does Jesus fit into this now?

Author: Well, we said earlier that the Gnostics believed Jesus was sent from the heavenly spheres or one of the aeons. If we take the concept of Ultimate Truth or Being and “reverse” the order we just stated, we could say that everything that is comes from this Ultimate Being. Were we to do that, we would then label the things that come from Ultimate Being as ‘emanations’.

The ‘emanations’ participate in the nature of Ultimate Being, but only in the way that parts of the whole participate in the full wholeness of The Whole. They possess some of the whole (like sparks from a fire), but they do not possess all of the whole (like the fire itself). Of course, we are looking for the warmth of real knowledge, and we know we are missing something, so we yearn for the Big Fire, while mere sparks leave us shivering. See, sparks may point the way to the Fire, but they are not the Fire itself. The Fire is what we really want. We’re looking for salvation, really.

Reader: So, the Gnostics say that Jesus is like a spark sent from the Big Fire, but not the Fire itself?

Author: Yes. He participates in the qualities of Fire, and in that sense is divine, but he is not the one we are looking for. Jesus saves us in the sense that he reminds us of the Big Fire, but he is only a sign pointing the way, in the final analysis.

Reader: Okay, I think I got it now.

Author: It also may help to know that Jesus isn’t the only one the Gnostics latched onto. The Gnostics were constantly on the lookout for “messengers” bearing the “sparks” of the Divine Fire in other remarkable individuals too. And if they found them they would lay claim to them too. Actually, the Gnostics disagreed with each other regularly because of this. One group would say: “This is the person who has brought the correct knowledge of the Divine.” But then, if someone else came along, bringing a different sort of message or communicating a different configuration of Reality, other Gnostics would say, “Actually, this is the one.” So, Gnosticism developed gradually into an incredibly eclectic and diverse group.

Reader: Makes sense. But let’s bring this back to Jesus now.

Author: Which one? The Gnostic one or the traditional Christian one?

Reader: The Gnostic one.

Author: Okay. What do you want to know?

Reader: Well…I guess I’m wrestling with something.

Author: What is it?

Reader: Dan Brown bases his view of Jesus on the Gnostics, right?

Author: Right.

Reader: And the Gnostics taught that Jesus was divine. Small d, but divine nonetheless.

Author: Right.

Reader: So, when Dan Brown says that the Gnostics taught that Jesus was just a man, he was wrong about the Gnostics, wasn’t he?

Author: No, he was right. It’s just confusing because Mr. Brown wasn’t very exact with his terms.

Reader: How so?

Author: Let’s refer to the “emanations” from Ultimate Being as “creations of” Ultimate Being.

Reader: Okay, makes sense.

Author: We can refer to the emanations this way because we lose none of the meaning that the emanations are like Ultimate Being in the sense that a work of art is like the artist that made it. In this case, the work of art tells us something about the artist, but it is not the artist herself. The work of art is, more strictly speaking, a creation of the artist.

Reader: Okay…

Author: So, let’s pretend that we’ve granted the Gnostics their assertion that Jesus merely emanates from Ultimate Being but is not Ultimate Being herself. In this case, we could say that Jesus is, in a sense, merely the creation of Ultimate Being. And, it’s in this sense that Dan Brown agrees with the Gnostics in saying that Jesus was a mere “man.” He’s just using ambiguous terminology. In the sense that the Gnostics say Jesus was not God and only a creation of God, he is correctly representing them.

This, by the way, is the heresy for which Arius was condemned at the Council of Nicea in 325 (to which Brown refers in his book). Arius said that when the authors of the canonical Gospels referred to Jesus as the “begotten” of God that that meant Jesus was created by the Father and was not eternally co-existent with the Father. Therefore, according to Arius, the Son (that is, Jesus) was subordinate to (that is, not co-equal with) God the Father.

Of course, Brown is correct when he notes that the Council of Nicea voted to condemn Arius’ view (and he unnecessarily makes a big deal about this: “You mean they voted on it?!” one of the characters says). But, what Brown does not cite is the fact that, though Arius’ view has some Gnostic elements in it, Arius himself was not a Gnostic Christian. Brown just uses the issue discussed at the Council of Nicea as “proof” for the points he wants to make about the Gnostic Christian alternative. In fact, the two have very little to do with each other.

Reader: I think I understand now why Dan got so nervous when I was asking him about the little slip he made when he referred to Jesus as being “sent”.

Author: Why?

Reader: Well think about it: his book is based on a couple of popular ideas. First, that there may be an alternate way of viewing Jesus’ life. This is attractive to many because, well, there have to be other ways of viewing it, right? I mean, who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong? And, really, when you think about it, what if the “traditional” Christians are right? I mean, what if Jesus really is God? What then? But also, I’ve noticed that it has become fairly popular to think of Jesus as merely a great man. On those two counts, Dan Brown presents an alternative that many would find palatable.

But, actually, he misrepresents the Gnostic version of Jesus. And maybe that’s what made him a little nervous, because he realized that I was digging around into stuff that he didn’t want me to know about—like Jesus being “sent from” the spheres and such. That idea would appear to contradict his assertion that Jesus is “just a man”.

Author: Yes, you’re onto something there, I think. He doesn’t really tell the full story of the “alternate account” he’s choosing to advance, does he? And, I’m afraid, we’ve only just begun exploring what the Gnostics really taught about Jesus.

Reader: What do you mean? You mean, there’s more?

Author: Oh, yes, my friend. There’s LOTS more. But Dan Brown doesn’t tell us.

Reader: “Lots more”, you say?

Author: Um, “gobs”.

Reader: Such as?

Author: Well, for that, we’ll have to suspend our dialogue. Come back here tomorrow to find out.

To go on to the next part of "The Alternate Account" click here.