29. Michael Williams, Rethinking GnosticismSpotify Link
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What is "Gnosticism"? A discussion of Michael Williams' Rethinking Gnosticism along with scholarship by Karen King, Christoph Markschies, and David Brakke.
Michael Williams, Rethinking "Gnosticism" An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Thanks to Carnegie Band for use of their song "Come Home."
An interesting discussion.
ReplyDeleteI take your main points, that there is no single "gnostic" kind of teaching but it is variable. Equally Karen King's notion of what might be termed "tropes" of gnosticism seems to fall down.
However, what you didn't seem to cover (or maybe I wasn't paying attention) was the gnostic attitude to what might be termed "salvation", as in Paul "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures". The notion of salvation through the death of Christ, and its linkage to the Hebrew Bible is not something I've come across in any text placed in the category of gnostic, but rather it seems to be that salvation is linked to knowledge (which is almost neoplatonic). Even in Thomas, the wisdom imparted is not that given by Paul - which we do know is very early.
Now I'm not saying that Paul is right or that the Gnostic texts are right - I'm not taking a faith position here. All I am saying is that the gnostic idea of salvation in all the texts deemed to be gnostic (as Irenaeus for example) finds salvation in a way linked to knowledge and not "that Christ died for us...."
The path to knowledge as salvation varies between different gnostic writers, but it is always knowledge as salvation and not the death of Christ bringing salvation.