Has anyone seen the Dutch-produced documentary series, "Myths of Mankind"? One episode was entitled "The Son of God". It deals with the belief that Jesus Christ was “the only begotten son of God” as being a cornerstone of Christianity. Jesus himself is said to have made no such claim. It was the Nicene Creed of 325 that affirmed the divinity of Jesus and forbade all other views. Modern-day historians, however, are increasingly challenging the traditional understanding of who and what he was. A growing body of research suggests that significant elements of the story of Jesus may in fact be derived from Egyptian, Greek and other pagan mythologies. And many scholars now reject the notion that Gospels offer accurate accounts of historical events. Written decades after the death of Jesus, they are instead the earliest expression of those beliefs that would eventually harden into Christian orthodoxy.
The next episode, which I watched last night, is entitled "A Christianity Before Christianity". It discusses how the first followers of Jesus adhered to a creed very different from the Christian faith we know today. The discovery of the Gnostic gospels in 1945 is changing our whole understanding of early Christianity. Rooted in ancient mystery religions, the Gnostic movement maintained that divinity lies in each of us, and we can find our way to God through self-knowledge. Gnostics saw the life and death of Jesus in metaphorical terms. According to some scholars, however, the Gnostic form of Christianity was pushed aside by a literalist movement that saw Jesus as the only begotten son of God, and emphasized the vast gulf between man and the divine. By the third century Orthodox Christianity had allied itself with the Roman state, establishing a religious monopoly, and the Gnostic Christians were basically persecuted out of existence.
According to scholars presented in this documentary, the first Christians saw Jesus as an enlightened enlightener, not the son of God. That doctrine only developed several generations later. Gnostics believed that each of us can discover god within us through a journey of self-knowledge. "Know Thyself" was the motto carved in stone on the entrance of the school founded by Greek Philosopher Plato. Older civilizations such as the Chinese, Indian, Greek, Roman, Judaic and Hebraic traditions viewed self-knowledge and understanding as the true mark of wisdom.
Gnostics believed that we are not our body, but that our true essence is immortal, it was never born and will never die. Therefore, if we can discover our true essence, who we really are, then we can discover the divine. They believed that all humans are images of the one spirit and that the one consciousness of God expresses itself in all conscious beings. Apparently,(I haven't read it) the Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying "look under any stone and you shall find me." It's easy to see how the pantheistic undertones of a statement like that surely would have caused great concern for those Christian leaders who were attempting to build and control a new church. Gnosticism was/is dangerous to orthodox Christianity because it gives the power of salvation to individuals. It is only natural, in the creation of a religion like Christianity, for the founders to say that salvation is only possible through the church, that is to say, through the doctrines of God's representatives on earth.
Gnostics were free-thinkers, libertines and anarchists. They were always questioning, doubting, debating, and searching because there is no shortcut to gnosis and no instant nirvana. The apostle Paul was a Gnostic in the sense that he talked about Jesus as a mystery, a metaphor, a voice within. Paul lived before the Gospels were written and at that time there was no split among the early Christians between gnosticism and literalism - the idea that Jesus was the literal son of God. Literalism was developed by the Gospel writers and others, and the effect of literalism was to make the messenger more important than the message. I wonder then, if literalism was one of the mechanisms that church leaders used to control followers?
One of the most interesting discussions in the documentary was on the concept of sin and hell. One of the biggest struggles the followers of Jesus had to contend with was why he had to die the way he did. In the orthodox communities the only way they could make religious sense of it was to speak of it as an atonement sacrifice. But it could only be important as an atonement sacrifice if everyone needed atonement for sin.
Christians developed the idea that everyone must have sinned dreadfully beyond the capacity of making any atonement of any kind. Therefore, that God's own messiah died as an atonement sacrifce for the sins of the world became a very compelling way of understanding his crucifixion. This doctrine of universal sin became a new element in the relationship between humans and the divine.
The central element of the Christian message, its lever, is the degree to which it instills guilt. That God is there watching, knowing not only what we do but what we think. Christianity is quite exceptional in the degree to which the all seeing God observes and punishes (at least that's the claim) believers for faults of thought, for sins of the mind. Sin and guilt gave rise to a creed in which fear of God, the admonishment of priests and hell became necessary.
These were ideas the Gnostics did not share. Though they believed in the ancient concept that a person is a fallen god who remembers heaven, this doesn't necessarily mean they believed we are sinless or divine. Rather, they believed that we can find our way to god when we find our way to ourselves, and for what wrongs we do there are means of redress.
However, for orthodox Christians to make sin so essential that Jesus had to die to redeem us, their arguments focused on an ancient myth, Adam and Eve and the first sin, which made humans mortal. Christians dwell on the sinfulness of Eve, the "wicked woman", much more than Jews do. Before orthodox Christianity, sin hadn't been such an issue. Jewish rabbis, pagans, and agnostic teachers basically agreed that we have in us the capacity to follow or disobey God. We have the good impulse and the evil impulse. That was understood to be a human condition. For many, the idea that all humans are condemned by God to an inferior existence rather than live in paradise, for what was arguably a minor disobedience, is a completely capricious and disproportionate punishment (kind of like punishments Berg and his leaders meted out).
Anyway, I thought it was a fascinating documentary and gave me lots to think about and research.