The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

Where Did Gnostic Ideas Come From?

An Interview with Dr. April DeConick

Dr. April DeConick

April DeConick theorizes about how gnostic ideas that emerged as a concept in antiquity keep reproducing themselves within different environments. This is one of the things that propelled religion toward its therapeutic aspect and individual relations to God. It came about during the desperate time of harsh Roman occupation, when people felt let down by their gods. Looking for some divine justice, they imagined a new kind of relationship to God, as children of God.

Dr. April DeConick holds the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professorship in New Testament and Early Christianity at Rice University, Department of Religion. She founded and chaired the Mysticism, Esotericism and Gnosticism group and chaired the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism group in the Society of Biblical Literature. She is most noted for her writing on the Gospel of Judas when she challenged sensationalism generated by the National Geographic Society that wrongly claimed that Judas is a gnostic hero in this text and that his heroics would rewrite our understanding of early Christianity. Her most recent book, The Gnostic New Age, won an award from the Figure Foundation for the best book published by a university press in philosophy and religion.

April is the co-founder and executive editor of the academic journal, Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies. The article discussed in this podcast is from this journal and is titled “The Gnostic Imagination and Its Imaginaries.” Gnosis 8 (2023) 133-166.

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Interview Transcript

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Lightly edited for clarity.

Shirley Paulson: I have been wanting to talk to Dr. April DeConick for some time, and I’m so glad she’s with us today on the Bible and Beyond podcast. She talks about gnosticism in a way that’s kind of different from the usual scholarly discussion, but she gets at the heart of its meaning in a way that I really appreciate.

Let me introduce Professor DeConick.

April DeConick holds the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professorship in New Testament and Early Christianity at Rice University, Department of Religion. She’s written and taught about topics revolving around the silenced voices of religious people who were left behind or discarded when Christianity emerged in the first four centuries.

She’s the co-founder and executive editor of an academic journal, Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies. In fact, it was in the November 20, 2023, edition of that journal that I found one of her articles that I thought would be really helpful to us.

I’m so grateful to get into the meaning of these silenced voices.

I want to say upfront that I’m not wild about using the term gnosticism because I think it’s so misleading and so heavy laden with negative baggage. But I do think this topic is so important and the lack of a proper term for it often gets in the way of even being able to discuss it. So, swallowing that discomfort, I really want to dig into this with you. Your scholarly theories are both technical and insightful, I think, and I’d like to see if we can find a way to get to your insightful ideas without requiring an academic background just to hear you. So, let’s try.

Here we go. I like the way you point out that the understanding of gnostics requires human imagination, and that seems like varied approach to the religious belief or practice. Can you start us off by telling us how imagination is so important for understanding just the concept of “gnostic’? Let’s go there first.

April DeConick: Okay, sure. So I know that you said that you’re not wild about the term gnostic or gnosticism, but the truth of the matter is, it’s a word for a concept that’s been around since antiquity, and we can rename it, but it’s still a concept that we need to discuss. The ancient people used the word ‘gnostic.’ I like just to stick with that word and then kind of unpack what is meaning is.

And the article that you’re talking about is called “The Gnostic Imagination, and Its Imaginaries,” and it’s where I’d really try to theorize better how the gnostic emerges as a concept in antiquity, but then keeps reemerging and reproducing itself, if you will, within different environments. What’s that process look like?

I rely a lot on cognitive studies and the whole concept of the human imagination being a creative, is our way to create and innovate and come up with new ideas to talk about our world. Our imagination will use all that’s available to it culturally. Everything that I know culturally my imagination uses. Then I kind of put all that together in a new way, and I come up with a new concept. That’s what I argue is going on in antiquity with the ‘gnostic.’ That it’s really a new concept that emerges and gets applied to a religious identity.

SP: Okay. That’s fair enough. I get you and I can go along with that kind of a word so long as we’re getting a new meaning for it. So I appreciate you saying it that way.

AP: Okay. Let’s just say “No worries!”

SP: Right, no worries. That’s another great way to talk about them, and I think that helps us to understand what they mean without the heavy baggage. But I’m going with you on this. Now, interestingly, you talk about how they’re looking for something new. Is there some way you would think that they were objecting to something that made them look for something new? Or was there something that was broken that needed to be fixed, or how do you look at that?

AP: Yeah, yeah, that’s a really good question, Shirley. It’s really the heart of what I’m talking about. In the ancient world, religion will function very differently from how it does today. And I think actually, gnostic, the emergence of the gnostic, is one of the things that kind of propelled religion toward its sort of therapeutic aspects and the focus on the individual, that the modern religion has taken on. But in antiquity, basically religion was your civic duty. Gods were the patrons of your city, your local area, or your ethnic group, and you were obligated to worship them. In antiquity this included praise, it included feeding the gods, their dinner or their breakfast or a fun celebratory meal or something like that, it included bathing the statues, so taking care of the statues and so forth. And that was all built on something I call a cognitive script or a kind of cultural story of slavery. Slaves took care of their masters because they were required to do so. That’s the kind of relationship that the ancient people thought of when they thought of their gods. They were kind of slaves or servants to the gods, and they had to be obedient and do whatever the master wanted them to do.

There were some different modulations on that script. Sometimes they would talk about, I call it the vassal script, where they would see the god as a king. They were the king’s vassals or servants that owed him allegiance. Or a client to a patron, where the God was the patron and would do things for you, but you did things for him too. So it was that sort of relationship.

Now, divine justice was linked into those scripts. If you as the servant to the god did what the god required you to do, then the god would protect you and take care of you. If you didn’t do what you were required to do, then the god could send a famine to your city, or foreign invaders would come and overrun you, or disease would appear, that sort of thing. So, it was really, really important for you to stay in line and do your thing.

But what happened in the Roman world is that the Romans were really harsh colonizers. When they moved into areas like Egypt or Syria or Israel or any of these areas, they colonized the area and indentured a lot of the people into the army and social mobility was quite difficult. And I think that what my argument is, is that certain people, I’m thinking particularly priests, thought, “Hey, wait a minute, we’ve been serving our gods. We’ve been doing all the right things, and yet we’ve been colonized by these Romans, and we’re now living this really terrible life.” Like, “Where’s divine justice?”

They started to think about a different way to tell the religious story, and they built that story on what I call the kinship script, which is the idea that if we’re not servants to the gods maybe we’re children of the gods. And I don’t mean adoptive children, but I mean biologically or genetically gods. And that was the script that these knowers started to talk about. They started to argue that the traditional gods, all of them, Yahweh included, were this kind of lesser class of gods that were below a supreme deity that they were akin to. That’s where I think the origins of gnostic thought, begins. Within that environment.

SP: Wow. This is a revolutionary new way of even envisioning a relationship with the deities at all!

AP: Yeah, wow. Because it ended up elevating the human above the traditional gods. You can see it in modern thought, the sort of elevation of the human. And yeah, this was really revolutionary. That’s why my book, The Gnostic New Age, was subtitled How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today. I really meant that. It wasn’t meant to be entertaining title. It’s a serious title.

SP: So, part of the other broken world that they were living in was the way, as you’re talking about, they were being oppressed by the Romans and colonized by them, but also, they were even tearing families apart. Did that have anything to do with the way they were conceiving this new relationship with, as you say, being a child of god? I mean, what did the family idea do then?

AP: Yeah, so they took that exact story: being with their family and then the army would come in and rip the family apart and the guy would go off into the service, and maybe they’d never see each other again. They used that as the storyline for how we as humans kind of got stuck in this world underneath these subservient gods, those are the Romans. We got stuck here — we were basically conscripted. So, we fell, we were torn away from the supreme deity. We were torn away from it, and we were embedded and imprisoned within this situation of indenture or whatever you want to call it. And so, in their mind, humans couldn’t get out of that on their own. There’s nothing they could do. Humans are stuck. And so that’s when they developed this idea that a divine entity has to come down. And in the Christian stories, of course, that’s Jesus who comes down in order to rectify that situation — release us from this indenture so that we can get home when we die.

SP: When you die, not before…

AP: They developed rituals that they used in order to program, to show the person the way home. So when the soul at death separated from the body, it wouldn’t get caught back within the system.

SP: Okay. So then how does a family of God actually function? Are the children independent gods or what is the relationship then?

AP: Yeah, no, we are, and this is one of the things that got Plotinus upset with the Gnostics. He knew in the third century this idea that they were better than the gods and they were better than Plato, and they knew better than anybody else.

SP: So that would make people feel kind of like they were carrying arrogant attitudes, like they were above everybody. I can see why people get mad at them for that.

AP: Yep. And they’re criticized for that. Now, I mean, it’s debatable whether or not they truly were arrogant or if the person who was doing the criticizing even realized what they were saying (which is kind of what I think was the case). I mean, they were like, “Wait a minute. You’re saying that you’re above Plato. You’re saying that you’re above the traditional gods, huh?” That’s hubris. And in antiquity, hubris was a very, very bad thing. You didn’t want to have hubris because then the gods could come and do all kinds of terrible things to you as punishment.

SP: Oh, my goodness. So there’s more than just disagreement over things. There was a lot of god in the middle of your argument. How did this work out practically? If you are thinking of yourself, as you say, imagining yourself in another way, is this just you dream about this when you’re daydreaming or how do you live the difference?

AP: Now, this gets to the heart of it, doesn’t it, Shirley? Okay. So these guys weren’t just intellectually thinking about this stuff. They were practicing. They were practicing a sense. So they did particular bodily practices that altered their state of consciousness. That’s the only way that I can kind of talk about it with you. They put themselves in different states of consciousness in which they claim that they would experience God. They would meet and greet him. That was what they meant by the term ‘gnostic.’ They knew God, that they didn’t just know about him intellectually, but they’d met this God, they’d ascended to his home. They knew where they were from, and that they were going to go back there at death. So, they were practicing those ascents.

SP: Okay. So, you’re talking about knowing then. This is very different from knowing material facts, but rather it’s more like, as you’re saying, it’s kind of an alternate consciousness, or we might even call it metaphysics. Would you call it metaphysical or spiritual? Or what would you call this?

AP: So, when I think of gnosis, I think of “Shirley, I know you.” That’s gnosis. I have a relationship with you. I know you. I’ve met you. Rather than I know about you from reading about you or anything like that. It’s like that. They thought that that knowledge was spiritual, divine knowledge, that this happened to them, that it actually happened to them, as spiritual beings meeting another spiritual being.

SP: Okay. Alright, so then this didn’t go down easy with everybody. The Church Father Irenaeus, in the late second century, for example, identified it as a heresy, even though I think heresy is also another heavily laden word.

AP: Yeah, heresy just means sectarian. It just means that it’s a religious sect that somebody chooses to join or a club or something like that. But Irenaeus gives it a negative spin.

SP: So, talk about that. What do you mean?

AP: So what Irenaeus is doing, he’s part of a movement of Christians that are consolidating into what I call the Great Church. They call it the Great Church, but I call it the Great Church as well, which is basically Catholicism before Catholicism. I don’t really want to call it ‘proto-catholicism’. It’s not really proto. It’s just out of these traditions the Catholics make themselves. In the middle of the second century, and by the time of Irenaeus, they have really started to consolidate a lot of churches into their movement, bring a lot of churches in. And in doing that, they’re also excluding a lot of churches that don’t go along with their ideas and their practices. There are ones that don’t go along, the ones that Irenaeus is objecting to, and he wants to understand them so he labels them as heresies.

Now, he’s not the first one to do that. We have Christians before this time that are also within this consolidation process — also trying do this. But Irenaeus has a big project in trying to understand what it really means to be Christian. And at his time, there were basically three different Christian families. And by that I mean there are three groupings of Christians. Within those groupings, there are different Christian groups, but the groupings are based on their theology.

You have the one that we understand the most today, and those are the Yahwist Christians. They’re worshiping Yahweh, the Biblical God, just like the Jews worship, the same god.

Then you have the Marcionites who are worshiping a transcendent god, but this god has no connection to our world. So he didn’t originate this world. He didn’t start life here. He’s just a different god, a totally alien god. This, by the way, is also an innovative new script that we see for the first time in history.

The third family is what our gnostics are clustering around. And they’re the ones that think there is a supreme god who’s not the biblical creator god. A god that is not the god that the Jews and Christians, other Christians, are worshiping. But he is this transcendent god who starts life for our universe. But there’s a lower creator who creates things. He doesn’t mess things up, he is just a lower creator. The world’s not perfect because of that.

SP: Are these three groups that you’re talking about really from the Jewish world, or were the pagans also getting into this? How widespread was this?

AP: Yeah, I should be clearer. These groupings—this is just is how I’ve organized all the different Christian groups in the second century. I’ve noticed that theologically we have three different types of Christianity, each worshiping different gods.

I think Irenaeus understood that. And he’s like, wait a minute. You guys are not even worshiping the same god we worship in our church. You aren’t really Christians. You’re polytheists because you have the supreme god, and then, of course, you have the god I worship in there too. But the truth is, all these gnostic groups were total Monotheists. They were worshiping only the one god, and all the rest are just angels or kinds of lesser entities in their system. But that’s not how Irenaeus frames them for us.

SP: So, in other words, Irenaeus didn’t really understand them in this process of disagreeing with them.

AP: I think he understood it. I think he was trying to polemicize.

SP: Okay. Alright. Fair enough. Then what about Clement of Alexandria? He’s another one around that time but a little bit younger. He gets involved in the picture too, doesn’t he? How does he work?

AP: He’s in Alexandria, about, what, thirty years after? Twenty or thirty years after Irenaeus. He’s in a different environment. In Alexandria, the Valentinians are very popular. These were a gnostic group. They had kind of a competing church at this time with the church of (basically) the Catholics.

And so Clement really has to face this situation.

Here are these Valentinians who are really popular, who are claiming they have the secret knowledge, that they’ve got the special initiation program, that they’re going to tell everyone the mysteries and all that. Clement has to compete with that. So he takes the word gnostic, he takes that identity, and he flips it, and he makes it now work and apply to—I call them ‘Uber Catholics’—these special Catholics that train under him who learn how to do all of these ascents.

Same program, but instead of going to this transcendent entity, they’re going to see the biblical God, who they say is the transcendent entity.

Clement connected those two. Linked those two. He loves the word ‘gnostic,’ and he just takes it over for the Catholics. And really once he does that, the Valentinian tradition loses its oomph. Because it can no longer outcompete the Catholics on that one. Because now the Catholics can claim to have a similar tradition.

SP: Well, so the Catholics then—and we’re talking about Clement of Alexandria all this time—so the Catholics are taking on this Valentinian—and we have talked about Valentinians in our Bible and Beyond world—Clement of Alexandria then is taking on this Valentinian style of gnostics. At that point the Gnostics sort of faded away from that role.

AP: There’s lots of reasons and there are so many different groups. You really have to look at each one and say, okay, well why did their movement fail? Why did it survive this long? For the Valentinians, they’re still around in the third century. But the Catholics develop the idea that they have a secret tradition and that you can learn it through their school, through their education, because it didn’t come through the bishops. It’s really interesting. Clement claimed it came through the educators, the theologians. I think once that happened, then the Valentinians don’t have the market on that anymore.

SP: Interesting. Let’s go back to your initial idea about imagination. I’d like to think about how that was a means for fixing what wasn’t working. You point out that individuals who have some kind of radical imagination shared publicly. How did this kind of social or collective imagination then work?

AP: Yeah, that’s the one area that I think we need to work to understand. How the radical imagination is . . . Something that one imagines and innovates something new. That would be April’s radical imagination!

But how does that then become something that a collection of people buy into and then create a church around it or some kind of social movement? How does the radical imagination of the individual become a social imagination that more than one person shares?

The person can either just share it, maybe share something like we do on the internet, or they can use it to build a community, an actual community, an actual movement.

There were some radical imaginaries — like Valentinus’s, like Justin’s – I’m talking about Justin the Gnostic—that did go communal, that did develop communities around with ways to interpret text together and do certain rituals together. This included lifestyle, for instance, whether I should be married or not. I mean, things like, well, lots of things. We don’t understand how that necessarily happens, but we know it happens. And I can tell you that it definitely happened in antiquity and it still happens today.

SP: That’s interesting. Do you think that this is similar to the way the other two groups organize themselves too, or is it different with these gnostics?

AP: No, everybody. This is how it works, just in general. So, Shirley, you could have a radically new idea and a bunch of people could collectively buy into that idea and share it with you. Then it becomes a social imaginary. If I mobilize it into a community we’re going to start doing stuff based on it, we’re going to share that as our metaphysics, or now we’re going to open a church. Now I’ve got a social movement. Does that make sense?

SP: I’m just trying to understand how these things moved around, because you pointed out that this reappears in history over and over and over again. And do you think it’s because people have new insights all of a sudden, or that they go back and realize there was something that worked? Or how does that happen?

AP: Yeah, it’s both. What I’m really interested right now and for the rest of my career is to try to understand this… I call it artifact migration.

These ancient texts are so fascinating because they get detached from that social imagination. They get detached from the social movement, and now in modernity, they’re just hanging around there.

So people pick them up and they do different things with them.

Some people use them to create new social movements. Some people use them to make a philosophy or a metaphysics that they personally want to live by that they don’t collectively share with anybody.

Sometimes people just—most of the time, I say almost a hundred percent of the time—take this stuff up selectively. So partially. It’s never in total, it’s always just a partial amount of knowledge that’s then used to build something. And I’m super interested in some of the people I call “alpha channels” who, when these gnostic materials came into modernity through the publication, of something like Pistis Sophia for instance, or the Nag Hammadi collection, there are certain kind of intellectuals that work to migrate that stuff into the kind of public knowledge.

Blavatsky was one of these people that did this, through Theosophy. I consider her an “Alpha channel.” Then she’s got other people who then take her understanding of this material and build off of it. So you kind of have a second level. It’s really complicated.

SP: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting when you talk about this imagination. When we in the 21st century go back and discover these ancient things we’ve never heard of before, we run across really weird terms like Barbelites, Ophites, and Simonians that have no meaning to us.

AP: Those are the social imaginaries.

SP: Okay. So how would you describe them so that we can make sense of them when we run across these words, what do they mean to us? Should we ignore them? They don’t have any meaning.

AP: No, I don’t think we should ignore them. I think that we should acknowledge the fact that in antiquity they represented groups of people.

The Valentinians had a particular metaphysics. They worshiped a particular god, they wrote texts, they had their own rituals, and they lasted intergenerationally. They were probably the most well-equipped to compete with the Catholics or the Simonians. They were another group there. They’re not actually initially a Christian group. They’re actually a Samaritan group, a sectarian Samaritan group. And they were competitors to the first Christians. I mean, those were the guys. It was, “Do you follow Simon or did you follow Jesus?” And of course, we’ve sort of lost the Simon story in our general culturalal knowledge. But in antiquity, he was super popular.

SP: And what about, Ophites, where did that come from?

AP: The Ophites come from this reverse reading of the Genesis story. There were some people who started to read the Genesis story where the snake was a good entity who told knowledge, who gave knowledge to Eve, which was a good thing. That meant the god was a trickster who was trying to stop the human from gaining the true knowledge of the god above him. So that reverse reading is usually labeled the Ophite reading.

We also have a Barbelite reading, which is similar to the Ophite reading, and they are another one of these groups.

That really is a good point to raise, because a lot of this can be convergent. And what I mean by that is thinkers don’t have to know about each other to come up with similar stuff, like similar innovations. As long as they’re reading the same text and they’re kind of within the same cultural milieu, you’re going to generate those possibilities. Right?

SP: So that could be partially why this could reappear in different generations without people knowing the previous generation.

AP: And this gets even weirder, Shirley, because if I’m right about this kinship script, when a person thinks they’re now kin to the god and have become separated from the god, once it’s applied to religion that’s a cross-cultural story.

Let’s say I live in Tibet, and I start applying that kinship idea to Hinduism, I may end up with a gnostic-looking new religion coming out of it. I have no reason to call it gnostic. I wouldn’t even know anything about that. I’d call it whatever. But some of those ideas in there are going to have parallels with ideas and other cultures that are running the same script.

SP: Well then on that, that’s an interesting lead into the next question I have. How do they fit within the Jewish and Christian context, then (these sort of imaginaries with these gnostic ideas)?

AP: These imaginaries gnostics, this imaginary, it’s not reliant on a religion.

SP: I see.

AP: Now it can become embedded in a specific religion. It does become embedded within Christian thought. It becomes embedded within some people, I would say, in Jewish thought. Some other people would disagree with that, so I leave that for you. The gnostic imaginary becomes embedded within hermetic thought. There’s no question about that in my mind. And to some extent it’s embedded in neo-Platonism. That’s another whole topic. But Plotinus, in my opinion, was influenced greatly by the Valentians and maybe the Sethians that he met in Alexandria.

SP: Wow. Well, you have whetted our appetite. I know that there’s so much more to this whole subject. It gets even more complex, but I appreciate the way you’re helping us to just imagine that this is not a religion the way we thought of religion, but it’s a whole new way of thinking, a new paradigm.

AP: Yeah, because it allows the idea to travel. That’s what it did. It traveled. And all I’m trying to do is describe theoretically what I see happening on the ground.

SP: Interesting.

AP: Your interest in this article has made me think, “Hey, maybe I just need to go sit back down with that article and just break it apart and make it into a larger book or something that’s more accessible.”

SP: I think you do, because there’s so much in that article. I think we only covered about a third of it. I know there’s a lot more there that we could be talking about, but I think this is plenty for us to digest today.