Beyond “Gnosticism”: Michael Williams on Reading Nag Hammadi Anew

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

I’m really thrilled to welcome our guest scholar today. If you’re familiar with anything having to do with Nag Hammadi writings or ancient writers who talked about gnosis, then you would probably know Dr. Michael A. Williams. He is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion and Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was a faculty member since 1976. His PhD is from Harvard University. And his two highly important and influential books are The Immovable Race: a Gnostic Designation and the Theme of Stability in Late Antiquity, and Rethinking Gnosticism: an Argument for Dismantling a Problematic Category. And he’s the author and coeditor of several other books and articles. Let’s just say he’s been deeply immersed in the subject for a long time.

Mike, I’m so happy to welcome you to the Bible and Beyond Podcast.

Michael Williams

Well, thanks for the invitation, Shirley.

Shirley

So you are clearly one of the pioneers in the early studies of Nag Hammadi and other extracanonical writings who moved a lot of the conversation from clichés about so-called “gnosticism” to more of a discussion of what’s really in the text. So I’m really glad to get a chance to talk to you about this because I think it’s important to get some context for where scholarship is today, a little of where we come from and where we’re going. So, could I start by asking you how and when you first got interested in studying the Nag Hammadi writings in particular? Let’s just start there.

Mike

Yes, well, Shirley, it was during my master’s degree, which was at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. And I was there to get an MA in a program called Hellenistic Religions, I think, but my focus was mostly on early Christianity. My key mentor there was the late Roy Bowen Ward. And at the time he—I mean, this is 1968-69, and it was a time in which Nag Hammadi materials were being published, being edited. There had been some of these texts, Nag Hammadi-related things, that had been available earlier. But this was a period where it was really ramping up, and Roy—his specialty was not Nag Hammadi or even what was widely called Gnosticism at the time—but he was interested in the topic, and I think he gave a lecture on this at some point. In any case, I got pulled into it. I was fascinated by it and ended up doing my master’s thesis on types of these lower creators, often called demiurges. And I mean, I was…this was early days. I hadn’t even studied Coptic yet. And so I was stumbling my way into this, but I was fascinated by it. I did some work and did a paper on the Gospel of Philip, for example, but obviously I was reading translations of this in English at the time, like the commentary by R. McL. Wilson and so forth. Anyway, that’s how I kind of got into it. And once I was hooked, I applied to doctoral programs where I thought I might pursue this more extensively, and I ended up going to Harvard.

Shirley

Wow. You really got into the beginning of a very important thing as far as I’m concerned. So you’ve also explained that the term “Gnosticism” as a category was really kind of constructed more in our time. Could you tell us when or how that happened? What do you mean by that?

Mike

Well, one way to do this is to start much earlier. Actually, I wrote an article published about a decade ago in a volume edited by April DeConick on Religion: Secret Religion. And I was asked to do an article with the title “Gnosticism Emergent.” And I began with ancient times with the figure Irenaeus, a Christian writer of the late 100s CE. And to summarize—there are a lot of details in this—but to summarize I tracked the use of this term by Irenaeus. And Irenaeus was apparently not the first to compose blacklists of what he referred to as “misguided sects,” or “sectarian groups.” But it was powerfully influential, and his treatment was one of the more extensive in that period and was influencing writers for centuries thereafter, where blacklists tended to be constructed, oftentimes simply reflecting Irenaeus’s list of the usual suspects. But the lists—if you go all the way down into the medieval period—the lists tend to…they’re not all the same.

And in fact, even the term “gnostic” is not always used. Individual names of some of the sectarian groups that Irenaeus attacked—Basilides, Valentinus and so forth—these names come up… Simon Magus, the Simonians, and so forth. But sometimes it will be a list that contains only one sectarian group that is called Gnostics. But then these other names are listed as Gnostics, as one item in a long list of the people that Irenaeus talked about. Sometimes writers that composed these lists don’t even bother to use the term Gnostic. They simply refer to some of these other groups by the names of the supposed, alleged leaders. So, the point of this is that even the term “Gnostic” has been used in very different ways for centuries. And that really starts with Irenaeus, because Irenaeus himself actually used the term “Gnosticoi” in more than one way—sometimes for a cluster of things, sometimes for a single group. So to put it simply, I think the confusion begins with him.

Shirley

Yeah, it’s interesting.

Mike

And then there was a long period where it’s not clear that people had access to any text of Irenaeus. That changes in the 16th century when you begin to see…well, this Christian humanist Erasmus does an edition of Irenaeus. And this becomes influential thereafter. So, but then the term “Gnostic” is used in that period of the Reformation basically as a blunt instrument to attack whatever group one understands to be heretical. So Martin Luther is called a Gnostic, and Catholics are called Gnostics. I mean, it’s a period in which—particularly if you go even earlier, the term “Manichaean” was applied basically to your enemies—you accuse them of belonging to that kind of group.

The first term…the first period in which we see the term “Gnosticism” is in the 17th century. Bentley Layton of Yale wrote a classic article several years ago arguing that the person who coined the term was a Cambridge Platonist, Henry More in 1669. Actually, that sparked my curiosity when I was doing this article. So, I did a lot of reading of some of More’s work. He actually had used the term earlier than that article in 1669. In 1664 he had used the term. And as I looked at it, there was another contemporary of his who used the term. And it was used in ways that left me with the impression that it was actually of some currency in their day. So I’m not sure that More was the person who actually coined the term. But that’s a period in which we first began to see it used.

And then it’s a question of the shaping of how this is talked about. And it’s a long story. In the 18th century, you have a person who’s often cited: the scholar Gottfried Arnold. His approach is important to mention because, as far as I know, it’s one of the first instances where someone says scholars haven’t been—you know, polemicists—haven’t been really fair to the Gnostics. He was critical of them himself in some ways, but he argued that they hadn’t really gotten a balanced treatment, and so there wasn’t… They shouldn’t be understood in an entirely negative way. And then if you go through this period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some other features began to appear. And again, I’m having to summarize it fairly quickly, but some important things from my point of view, and this is in a period of romanticism. You begin to see an emphasis upon a certain feeling that Gnostics had. Being Gnostic involves a certain kind of feeling. For example, alienation, a sense of being alienated from the world, from living in the world. The term “pessimism”…you began to see that they have a pessimistic view of the cosmos. And it’s also a period in which you began to see the use of typologies in defining what Gnosticism is…Adolf Von Harnack…

And the person, the scholar who’s really done an extraordinary work in summarizing and exploring this story, is Karen King of Harvard, in her book What is Gnosticism?. And she’s done an outstanding job of exploring the story that I’m kind of summarizing very quickly here. But Harnack came up with a list of features that define it. He was also famous for saying that Gnosticism involved an acute Hellenization–Hellenization meaning the influence of Greek culture–on Christianity, the acute Hellenization of Christianity. And since then other people have developed various typologies.

But I’ll end this too-long summary with the mention of one scholar whose work for the longest time was of extraordinary influence, and that is the late Hans Jonas, an absolutely brilliant philosopher. Jonas, in the early 19th century, wrote what became a classic work in German, and he never quite finished that book completely in terms of the…because it was going to be a multi-volume study. But the gist of what he was trying to argue in the English-speaking world—and I’ll leave it at that—was distilled in his book The Gnostic Religion. And so now you began to have in his—and by the way, in fairness to Jonas—he was pushing back against; he was trying to come up with some kind of coherent way of talking about this material. I mean, there had been discussions of Gnosticism as the result of the influence of Eastern philosophies and Eastern religions. And, you know, this piece comes from that part of Eastern philosophy, and this piece from somewhere else, and so forth. And Jonas was trying to get the soul of Gnosticism, we might say. You know, what’s really going on? I think he didn’t quite do it right, in my opinion. And I say that along with the praise of his intellect and the intentions of his effort because he began to talk about this as—you know, the translation of his German work–he’s talking about the Geist, the spirit of late antiquity. Gnosticism somehow picked up on the spirit of late antiquity.

And what did that spirit mean? It’s a spirit, basically an escape from the world. I guess this is a bit unfair to him in terms of trying to distill it, but not all that, because he talked about features in Gnostic literature shared supposedly by Gnostic writers, like anxiety, homesickness. These are some of the captions of some of the titles–captions–in some of the chapters of his work: “Awaking from Sleep”, “Light versus Darkness”, “Alienation”. Again, the feeling of the rejection of the cosmos.

No real ethic except for Gnostics, who were either radical ascetics or licentious libertines. And that’s what I’ve called a kind of a two-pronged characterization of their ethic. It’s quite astounding how influential that was. And I think today you probably still could find it repeated somewhere. Less so on what I would call some of the more serious specialization people who are working with this material. I’ll stop there. There are other important scholars, but I’ll stop there.

Shirley

Right. Well, I appreciate your giving us kind of a history of this, because I know that it has had a long, complex history of just what people have been thinking about this. That’s why I think your book on rethinking it was so central to this whole discussion just because I think you turned a big corner at that point. Obviously you do, too, because that’s why you wrote the book. But so I guess I wanted to ask, you’ve said that this kind of construction of category really gets in our way of understanding it. Am I right? I’d like to know, how do you see that?

Mike

Well, there have been several of these types of typological categories where people—and by “brilliant scholars,” I mean, I don’t want to take from them—but from my point of view, it becomes a kind of chain weighing down the whole effort. Because you come up with a list of things and then the problem is everything…you have to find all of those things if you have a list of supposed features. But then there was the discovery of the Nag Hammadi text and the publication of these and the ongoing research on this, and you suddenly discover that those things are not always there. And I talked about that two-pronged ethic, that would be one example.

I’ll cut to what for me has become a kind of most important thing to say about these texts. There is the assumption underlying a lot of the very fine research on individual texts that there is a people who–again to use some of the terms used by Jonas–are really just rejecting life in the world. I’ve sometimes said that you get the impression that the only people who could be reading these texts are people who are clinically depressed. I don’t accept that being possible.

I’ll take one example. There’s a text known as the Apocryphon of John or the Secret Book of John. And we have four different manuscripts of this text, so it’s well known. It must have been a fairly popular text. And it’s often pointed to as a kind of classic example. What I’m struck by looking at the Secret Book of John and a number, you know, well… almost all of the other myths of origin—there are a lot of these origin myths in the Nag Hammadi collection and in related sources—is how little, if you’re actually reading them closely, they even talk about the material world when you think about it. You don’t find them complaining.

You know, the world is awful because it has vicious lions and poisonous snakes and all of these sorts of other things. Instead, they focus on moral evil. If you’re looking at what’s really going on in the text, it’s an attempt to explain how, on the one hand, what we experience in this life has a touch of the divine, but it’s also within the context of evil. It’s the classic issue of “why are there bad things?” But more significantly, why are there bad people? And I think that’s really the focus in so many of these texts, rather than ‘I just can’t live in this world anymore.’ We don’t find people who are writing these texts jumping off cliffs, as far as we have any testimony for.

I’ll sum it up like this, and we can talk about it further if you want. If you look at a text like the Secret Book of John, for example, and you’re reading it closely, yes, you have lesser gods who actually do the work of creating the material world and creating material humans. But what they’re doing—what they don’t realize—is that a lot of what they’re doing has been inspired by the divine realm. And in fact, there are some of these texts that explicitly say this. There’s a text in Nag Hammadi, for example, known as the—I’ll use the Greek term—Trimorphic Protennoia. Let’s not get into that. But in this, this is one example of a text in which it explicitly says these creators don’t realize that they’re not really the ones who are guiding their own work. It’s a way of saying, somehow or another, what we experience in this world is in fact a product of the real divine world. But we explain how badness gets in. Moral badness, I think, is their real focus by simply saying that the dirty work was done by lesser managers—you know, the middle management.

You have figures, I mean Plato… I mean, the influence of Platonism is very present throughout so many of these texts. And Plato, in writings like his work The Timaeus, talked about lesser beings being responsible for some of the work down here. And the Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria, for instance, takes over some of this and then has God, but then some of the lesser work is being done by and can be blamed on middle management.

And yet there’s something to be done. Because, you know, reading these texts, I know that there is goodness. I mean that even the term “goodness” comes up a lot as a term in the divine realm. I can get up and maybe I can go fishing next week. I’ve sometimes used an example of the history in what’s often called modern evangelical churches, but it goes back even probably earlier than the use of that term. You have…if you look at some of the music, there’s a…I can’t think of the title of it, I can’t think of the guy who wrote it…but ‘this world is not my home, I’m just a passing through’…this kind of thing you find in songs. But these people who go to churches, at least in my younger days–I don’t know whether they sing that song anymore in modern evangelical churches or not, maybe they don’t. But when those songs were current, I grew up hearing a lot of them. You know, people would say, okay, there’s that sermon, and now let’s go to the restaurant down the street and have a wonderful Sunday dinner. In other words, they’re enjoying life. But they’re saying it, and so I don’t know if I’m making sense with this. Please follow up if I’m…

Shirley

Well, you know what I think? Yeah, I really agree that I think that the Secret Revelation of John, which is the book that I have focused on, is very optimistic and a healing book. I think it’s very uplifting, and it addresses the seriousness of the world that we’re living in, but it gives reason for hope, and I think it deals with theosophy—just like where does evil come from and how do you deal with it—in an incredibly profound way.

And this is one of the things I love about your work, Mike: that you address these topics that people tend to skirt around or just want a quick answer to. But I love the way you take these things bit by bit and address them and say, well, let’s take a closer look. And that’s what I’m really appreciating. We are going to take a little break here and a little commercial break and come right back.

Shirley

All right. So I want to ask you, as you have watched the maturing of the academic study of these ancient writings, what would you say is the most encouraging thing to you anyway about where things are going?

Mike

Well, there’s a lot to be encouraged by. I mean the close reading, the technical work, continues. And I have to confess that since I retired a few years ago for reasons of personal responsibilities and family responsibilities, I’ve essentially not had time to keep up. I’ve been needed elsewhere in the family, and so I haven’t followed every strain of things. But my impression is anecdotal. Occasionally somebody will send me an article, or I will run across one, and my impression is that there’s a lot more careful work that’s being done—important work on individual texts and their place within the culture of the day.

Rather than just saying, “Okay, I’m going to the Gospel of Philip,” and “Okay, this is a Gnostic text that tells me the basic things I need to know, and I can find all of the instances in my typology somehow in this text.” Instead of that, this is a Christian text, and it’s different from a lot of other Christian texts, but it also shares certain things. And so you have studies. I have a specific example of that kind of approach to the Gospel of Philip from one of my own former students. But you see it in other places as well. There’s important work being done about place in the culture of these individual texts, rather than just trying to study them as examples of Gnosticism. That said, not everybody’s given up the term.

Shirley

Right. Well, and that’s what I kind of want to ask next: for people who are still holding on to canonical versus extracanonical, do you have some way of describing what that difference would be, or is that putting you too much into a category to even answer that question?

Mike

Well, extracanonical actually includes a lot of other things besides what I call demiurgical texts. I want to make sure I get the point of your question, so there…

Shirley

Let me just try to say it in another way—for people who are Bible-only readers and don’t know the world outside the Bible, is there some way that you would describe what’s outside the Bible in comparison with what’s inside the Bible?

Mike

Well, I guess the broadest and most abstract way of putting it would be outside the canon, there were developments, and there were lots of different developments. What we see in texts like the Nag Hammadi texts, for instance, is one example, but you have other examples where there’s theological development that’s using some of the canonical texts but taking them in certain other directions. I mean, you write…you look at writers like Augustine, one of the more famous examples; he’s using the canon, but he’s also taking questions further, exploring various issues. So I hope that this is making sense. I don’t think that there’s just a single answer, except broadly talking about a history of interpretation. And some interpretation some people might not like.

I’m not a devotee of Gnostic texts. I mean, I find them interesting, and occasionally here and there are some moving things in them. But that doesn’t mean that that’s what I follow.

So let me approach it in brief with one other characterization. I am struck…another way of talking about what I’ve been saying is that there are limitations to what myths can tell us about the people using them. You have the New Testament—just to take that part of the Christian canon—or you could take the whole Christian Bible, which can be referred to as a story. The term “mythos” in Greek just really means “a story.” That’s how historians of religion use the term rather than just something that’s false. They talk about the way people tell the story. So you have this same mythos being used and heard and experienced in different ways.

I mean, in the modern world, how many different kinds of Christianity read the same Bible? I mean, all the way from the most conservative evangelical churches who, you know, talk about women not having the right to vote or, you know, they shouldn’t have the right to vote, all the way from that to the most welcoming and affirming kinds of Christian groups that exist today, all reading the same texts.

I think of the Nag Hammadi texts, for example, in the same way. How many different kinds of people read those texts? That’s my point. The same myth, and you can actually see it because we have multiple versions of these origin myths in Nag Hammadi. They’re not all the same. They’re different. But even if you just take one of them, how many different kinds of people read the Secret Book of John? Probably there were some who saw heroism in those who could reject sexuality and be ascetic heroes. But that’s probably not most of the people who use attacks like that.

Shirley

Well, and certainly we know that people in France read it and people in England read it. So that’s the difference there, too.

Mike

Right, right. So, your original question was, “What’s the difference between canonical and noncanonical texts?” Well, it kind of depends on which text you’re looking at. Again, I go back to focusing on the individual.

Shirley

Well, and what I love about your answer here is that I think you’re demonstrating to us why you can’t categorize. I think that you’re illustrating the very point that you’ve been making all along here. So, you know, fortunately—in my opinion—a lot of people have heard you and moved in the direction of your suggestions. Where would you say the biggest pushback still remains at this point?

Mike

Well, you still find people, obviously, who want to use the term “Gnostic.” Those who were—I refer to the work of Bentley Layton… Layton and people who were some of his students tend to restrict the term to one single group of texts—a group of texts often referred to as Sethian. But frankly, if that had been the only way that the term “Gnostic” had ever been used in scholarship, I wouldn’t have had a book to write called “Gnosticism.” Yeah, so there’s some pushback on the use of the term. I don’t know. I guess it still is the case that the term “Gnostic” is being used in too many ways as far as I’m concerned. And you know it’s being stretched beyond the bounds of elasticity, in my opinion. Because it again leaves us with, you know, the question of what you really mean by the term, or what it is and how helpful it is to apply it to that many different kinds of things?

Shirley

Right. I love it. You are really getting at the heart of the question of categorization of religion itself. I mean, you’re making us think that religion just cannot be pigeonholed. You just can’t do it. There are too many people who think different thoughts, who read the same text and have different thoughts. So, I think I’m getting your point. I think there’s one last question I want to ask you. How do you kind of envision the future of these texts? Do you foresee any real meaning that they’ll have for future readers, or do you feel like the academic study of them will sort of finish studying and then go on?

Mike

I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, as somebody said, so I’m not sure. My instinct is that these texts are interesting enough that they have a long history ahead of probably some very fine and fascinating research. There’ll be things that will be seen that I never saw. I’m sure somebody… I’m sure that that always goes on. I think they’re gonna be around for a while. I think probably increasingly—at least I would hope increasingly—there will be the appreciation of the need for some humility about the texts and some caution.

But I don’t know; I think if I had to predict based upon what’s been going on, there’s going to be some very fine work that’s going to be produced and is being produced. And how long will that go on? You ask if people will just get bored with it? Well, that has happened with texts from time to time. They have their heyday, and then there’s a loss of interest, and you know, for a variety of reasons, I guess. But let the fun begin. Let the fun continue, I should say.

Shirley

That’s great. I happen to think that it’s fortuitous that they arrived at this age. I feel like we’re kind of in an age where we can read them differently from feeling like we have a vested interest in one or the others in antiquity the way they did. And now we can read them more for what they meant but also how they could be meaningful for us today without having to fight over who they belong to quite as much.

Mike

Yeah, there are people who have found a lot of meaning for them personally in the modern world in this or that text out of the Nag Hammadi, and that’s probably going to continue. There’ll be people who find that and then others who don’t, I guess.

Shirley

Right. Well, Mike Williams, I just want to thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. I think you have contributed so much to the very things that we’re talking about most of all here on the Bible and Beyond podcast. And I just can’t thank you enough for being with us today. Thank you.

Mike

Well, thank you, Shirley. It’s been great to be with you.