That the legalization of Christianity and its elevation of importance in the Roman Empire was a factor in the persecution of heretics is a given. The State is always the arm through which persecutions are undertaken. Clerics themselves tend to be less than effective at such things. Excommunication, for instance, only holds immediate power in the world provided the excommunicate recognizing the bishop's authority to do so. In the Balkans there was a rare case where the nobility supported heretics, specifically the Bogomils and the Patarenes. That sect managed to hold onto power for centuries despite the vehement disapproval of both the pope and the patriarchs and their seemingly constant missionaries sent into the region. Only reason they're not still around today is that they met with and were conquered by the Turks who demanded conversion to Islam or a loss of property.

The Gnostics of Antiquity were sometimes, as you say, within the church. The Nag Hammadi texts were certainly held by Christians prior to their burial. That, however, was not universally the case. The heresiologists are definitely talking about them as outsiders to the established Christian communities. The sentiment that would seem to imply that whoever was the elect of that particular Gnostic community had at some point in the recent past wandered into town and set up shop.

The classification of the ancient Gnostic as the intellectuals of Christianity in antithesis to orthodox traditions is an assertion that is not supported by contemporary sources. The intellectual peek for Antiquity lies in the influence of Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, for which both Christianity and Gnosticism show evidence of study.

Among Christians there was an initial inclination to reject philosophy as a tool of paganism, and by extension of Satan, but that notion did not last very long in the mainstream or at least in the practical application by writers of the mainstream. Justin Martyr starts it off by pointing to philosophy as a tool through which Christians can bring over their enemies to the faith, thus inventing Christian theology. Justin's reasoning was that in the creation of man God endowed him with powers of reason. The Greeks were masters in the use reason and it stands that there is the possibility that through reason even a heathen might stumble upon gospel truths. Later writers - especially the Alexandrini Clemens and Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Ambrose and most especially his convert Augustine - were themselves philosophers of high caliber and ability, easily able to hold their own in debate against any of the Greeks and anyone else who happened along.

Gnostics likewise show signs of influence from Greek philosophy. Nag Hammadi itself contains a revised excerpt from Plato's Republic. So, clearly, they were reading the same books and the Christians, but they were not learning the same lessons. There is no Justin in the early Gnostic tradition to emphasize philosophy as tool. Instead, what you have is philosophy being used as inspiration, especially as an inspiration for metaphysical considerations. So, for instance, you have the Valentinian-Gnostic cosmos where the Unknowable True God out in the distance, then spheres of abstractions like Silence and Wisdom, then a ways below that the material world. That metaphysics comes from Neoplatonism, presumably by way of the Hermeticist. While Valentinus stuck several more emanations in their down from the One its the same concept as described by Plotinus. This form of derivation from philosophy, of using Greek metaphysics to alter those of Scripture is something Christians would and did find appalling.

There is also the problem of gnosis. While gnosis does mean knowledge is does not refer to all knowledge, but rather the specific knowledge gained through the initiate's personal experience of a theophany. St. Paul getting knocked off his *** on the road to Damascus, that would qualify as gnosis. The problem in the context of your statement is that gnosis is, in and of itself, an anti-intellectual concept.

A Christian missionary can meet a man on the road and tell him about the death of Christ on the Cross and how it was done to ensure his salvation. He can then use philosophy to create a rational superstructure to account for how the world fits together and if that man on the road should be in agreement with the missionary that man then has faith. The same story does not work if the man meets a Gnostic on the road. The Gnostic can explain his religion, but he cannot share the experience of gnosis. That knowledge can only come of the man's own theophanic experience of the True God, Sophia, or some emanation therefrom reaching into the world and awakening in his soul knowledge of the truth of his condition. Ergo: anti-intellectual.


***

Pseudography in the gospels is not really all that new or even questionable. Ancients routinely wrote books on behalf of famous personages as a way of ensuring the text would enjoy a wider readership by latching on to the authority of past leaders. That the gospels were assigned authors within decades of their writing and not centuries suggests that for the most part we can trust that a Matthew, a Mark, a Luke and a John were at the least leaders of the community that produced the individual works. Your argument on the subject of authorship, however, is moot given that evangelists themselves are virtually anonymous at this point in time. There is not a lot we can say about, St. Mark, for instance, besides the fact of his being an evangelist.

There is no doubt that the gospels do not present the full story of Jesus's life. There around thirty years of his life that go largely unrecorded. The fact that Jesus was not teaching during that period is the most probably explanation. Either the evangelists knew about that period and did not consider it to be of importance, or the Q-text, a lost document which was the primary source for the synoptic gospels, was written by someone who felt the teachings more important than the origins. In any event, work your way back through enough of the textual history and you're going to find somebody who knew a bit about Jesus's childhood and felt it not applicable to the text. And that somebody is most probably a Jew or a Roman who followed him around from day to day.

Gnostic writing is almost universally of later authorship. Popular readings like the various apocryphal acts tend to be much later works. The fact that only known effort of Gnostic at the discernment of textual validity was Marcion's attempt to wash the Jewish out of the Bible should tell you something about how they qualified Scripture.

Additionally, textual criticism is a lot more advanced than you're giving credit for. Scholars go through documents analyzing language and content. Language in terms of what it's written in, what words are used, the patterns of syntax and phrasing and so on. Content in terms of the expression of theology, the arrangement of ideas and so on. And both of which are applied to outside sources and things that we can date with certainty. Writers leaving fingerprints in their style and diction that even millennia of scribes can't wholly obfuscate. (Take Genesis for instance and how textual critics have managed to pick apart three separate writers that were integrated into a single manuscript. Two of them were principally identified by variations on the use of a single word.) When scholars say a work of apocryphon can be dated to somewhere between the third and fourth century there is a complex science underlying that assertion. A science that, if you have the appropriate skill set and access to the materials, you can go back and check the assertion to see if it's true.

***

Taking your own offensive tone in stride, the idea that the Catholic Church is by any means 'afraid' of the revelation of Gnostic texts today is idiotic at best. Five hundred years ago, they might have gotten a little worked up. Nowadays? Who cares. In the hierarchy of the Pope's concerns the revival of an archaic heresy is small potatoes compared to more immediate issues that stem from Protestants, Hollywood and the onward march of secularism.

More importantly, the Gnostics texts are not actually threatening to Christianity. Not in this day and age. In ancient times the mere fact of its being written would incline would to consider it reasonably valid or at least an authority of some kind. In modern times we're used to the distrust of authors, we start out in the opinion that it's mythological or some such and look for evidence that might contradict that initial opinion.

Evidence, the Christian Brothers, a lay catholic order that ran my high school, as a part of a sophomore religion course required us to read the Infant Gospels of Thomas. Now, if there's anyone from whom apocryphal works ought be hidden for the good of the faith and their soul, it's an adolescent. No such luck. We read them, we discussed them. The teacher wasn't even all that mean about it. He offered as a possibly authentic source for things that happened in Jesus's life during the aforementioned gap of the gospel record. And really, nothing at all destructive happened. In fact, of that class I'm probably the only one who went away with anything more than general apathy about having to read another book.

The Jesuits, who ran my university, took an even more extreme route. In those courses we studied the Nag Hammadi texts themselves along side contemporary Christian theologians, pagan writers and classical histories. Textual criticism, hermeneutics, philosophy, theology and such like were all standard tools put to good use in understanding what the books were and how they fit into the broader context. Again, there was no mention of the validity or the invalidity of the texts themselves. A text is a text and for a Jesuit all texts are treated to the same degree of analysis first. Positions in regard to their validity and applicability to be formed afterwards.

There is no need to hide apocrypha in this day and age. They're just old books. They don't actually hurt anyone. Given the text and the rationality behind which its exclusion from the canon, nine times out of ten exclusion was the right answer. And it's clear that once they came to answer the question of canonicity, the question of their disposal, especially the disposal of problematic and misleading works, was a given. Most the time I don't agree with their disposal, but I can see why the idea of such a broad shift in the hypostatic foundations of western thought is not something they could have taken into account two thousand years ago.

***

Your comments on Constantine and Nicea would seem to involve a confusion of the First Council of Nicea with the Edict of Milan along with some vague implications about papal influence and the suggestion of a grab for power.

Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 with another emperor or caesar whose name I can't remember. It followed an edict from some years early calling for the toleration of the Christian faith by the Roman authority. Milan went a step further to order to return of confiscated properties and repealed early laws hindering their meetings and practices. In other words, Constantine already had the Roman Church's wealth as his own, the Edict is how he gave it back to them.

I have little doubt that Constantine's motives in the Edict were more political than religious. Not so much from his deathbed conversion as the fact of his being a Roman emperor. Roman culture of the imperial period was masterful at breeding in plots of assassination and usurpation. A man who was your best friend when you take office is likely to be the one to five or six years later slice open your throat or poison your food. The fact that Constantine not only grew up in that world but was able to rule in it suggests he was quite a long ways from naïve religious fervor.

In validating Christianity he maintain the title of pontifex maximus. That title was not very useful among pagans in that day and age. Pagans in the Republican times were manageable. But, Romans had a nasty habit of inviting the gods of conquered cities to come to Rome, and then taking their conquests as evidence of assent. This all accepting attitude brought a number of cults that were not so accepting into the culture, those of Isis and Mithras for instance, also the eastern mystery cults. Paganism had debased itself in this method to such extremes that the title of highest pontiff no longer meant anything. But, high pontiff over Christianity was a different matter. It allowed him to unite the people and bring back the Republican Roman view of religion as a form of patriotism. On the Christian side, acceptance of Constantine meant that they were no longer persecuted and allowed to practice the faith freely. After all, Constantine was not asking them to violate any core tenets of the faith, in fact he organized the First Council of Nicea some years later as a way of getting to move past their differences and work out what the disagreements are and what can philosophically and rationally have been accepted as the truth.

Constantine was not a theologian. Nicea did not rubber stamp his will or anything tot hat effect. It was a point where disparate beliefs of christology were debated, specifically the Arians and the Homoousian concepts. In the short run it didn't even work. The Homousians won. Their ideas are in the creed. But, soon as it was over the Arians started taking hold of various bishoprics and marginalizing them. It was only years after that the Homousian position returned to dominance and the Arians exiled.

The Bishop of Rome was not the Pope in Constantine's day. From the time of St. Peter until the city's fall the Roman Church was nothing more than just another episcopacy among several hundred episcopacies. A hundred years earlier western theology made it's first move in the heresiology of St. Irenaeus. The movement was basically his suggestion that if it should come that you have any doubts about the validity of a text or an assertion about God you should look to the Church of Rome as an example for what good Christians are. That's about all the Bishop represented in Constantine's day. An episcopacy of particular note.

The eastern churches organized themselves into three patriarchates. The western church had on its own shifted to treat the bishop of Rome as a de facto patriarch, but a patriarch is still not the Pope. The Bishop becomes the Pope with the fall of the Roman Empire. When secular government collapse Rome had a population in the millions and suddenly the entire infrastructure, (as in the thing that makes sure grain shipments are on time), was gone. Without government, the bishop was the only man in the city with sufficient power and organization to make sure those millions didn't starve. Thus, while municipal governments and foederati in the rest of Italy began laying the foundations for principalities and republics, the absence of local government in Rome left the region to the bishop, establishing a nation later known as the Papal States.

***

Zoroastrians are actually still around today. They go by the name Parsee now, I think, and are isolated to a mountainous region in either Pakistan or India.

very interesting. so tell me when did the Papacy or the church in Rome come about?

also when was the cannon decided and what books were thrown out. I have always been under the impression that Arius had to flee as the Edict from Constantine was accept this new cannon or die.

also at this time are you saying the Roman soldiers did or did not have a strong hold in belief that Mithra was the savior reborn every year and these religions were mixed.

The Papacy cannot actually be dated in those terms. At issue is that the foundation of the church of Rome and the establishment of the Papacy are not in themselves the same. Tradition treats them as the same, but evidence would seem to indicate that the office of Pope was something that evolved over the course of a few centuries or more.

St. Peter most probably did found the church of Rome when tradition holds that he did. There's no reason to doubt that date so figure, late first century on the outside. The church of Peter's time was most likely a small community of believers over which Peter was the senior pastor. At some point from Peter's martyrdom to say the mid-second century the senior pastor of the Roman church developed into a bishop. Contemporary with this period are the first epistle of St. Clement of Rome to Corinthians and the epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch.

Clement shows up on later papal lists of Pope Clement I. He writes to the church of Corinth upon learning that the congregation had deposed their clergy. The presbyters had apparently done some things that the congregants found objectionable. Clement argues for respect to be given to clerics by presenting the concept of apostolic succession. Specifically that there is some ritual of laying hands that connects your day to day preacher with one of the Twelve, in this case plus St. Paul.

Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch. In the second century he was arrested by Roman authorities and, given that he was himself a citizen, they found it necessary to bring him to Rome where he was put on trial and then executed in the Coliseum. On the road and in Rome he wrote a series of letters to various churches then extant. The letters show that he had a particular concern for his own episcopacy, especially in the context of how they would survive against the influence of rival sects then circulating. (It's tempting to point to these other 'Christianities' as Gnosticism, but there's no real evidence to indicate such.)

In order, he thought, to prevent the dissolution of the church of Antioch, Ignatius developed in the letter the concept of a monarchial episcopacy. The idea that a bishop rules as a monarch over the parishes in his care and that pastors of those parishes must preach the same religion as their bishop dictates. Thus the bishop as a trusted and holy man would ensure that rival faiths and heathenism would not infect the congregants.

Monarchial episcopacy and apostolic succession developed independent of one another, but by the end of the second century both theories had been integrated into the office of the bishop. The third key was the aforementioned passage from St. Irenaeus of Lyons and his heresiology. It basically amounts to establishing the Church of Rome as an authority in the west. The writings of these three being indicative of theories that were already brewing in the great church, only to be voiced first by them. The combination of them made the bishop of Rome a de facto patriarch to the western church, de facto in that he did not at the time have theological authority over other episcopacies, but there was a growing tendencies of those bishops to defer to his opinion.

The foundation of the Papal States around the fourth or fifth century was the final stage and made the bishop a Pope in the sense of wielding genuine secular power, though the extent of that power was certainly not so pronounced until well into the mediaeval period. Additionally, the Catholic Church would remain a de facto patriarchate, connected to the three Orthodox sees until the great schism of the eleventh century, a scant generation or two shy of the start of the crusades.

***

The issue of canonicity is not a matter of Gnostic or false texts being thrown out so much it is about as canonical texts being put in. The Old Testament was already arranged and organized by the Greek translation, the Septuagint. While the works of the New Testament were written at generally early dates - very early in the case of the epistles of St. Paul - they were not actually organized or even treated a singular work until much later.

For the early church the books and epistles circulates as individual scrolls. The Gnostic works and the more general body of apocrypha circulated freely with the canon. Paper was expensive, they didn't generally have all the books and frankly in the age of Roman persecution they were lucky they had any books to draw upon. Even at that time, however, certain works were beginning to emerge as more authoritative than others. While there was no canon at the time of Irenaeus, in 180, his arguments only stem from books that would become the Bible.

In the fourth century, St. Augustine of Hippo invented literary theory through a work On Christian Doctrine. A former Gnostic himself, he was trying to create a philosophical device that would allow Christian to discern righteous works from heretical ones. He relates to the story of a guy named Christianus who walked into town one day talking about how God appeared to him in a vision and told him this, that and the other'n. How do you take something like that? To you take him at his word that God came to him or do you regard him with suspicion given the prevalence of charlatans. The theory is basically validity through association. Testing what one Christianus says against what is already known, then seeing how they jive together.

Around the same time St. Jerome undertook to translate the Septuagint and a collection of Christian works into Latin so that they would be accessible to western readers who had little use for Greek, of which the dialect Koine was only a lingua franca in the eastern parts of the Empire. The New Testament of his Vulgate includes all the works of modern Catholic Bibles, plus some odd ends that look authentic but we've later found not to be. (The Catholic distinction is due to certain works in the Septuagint - known as Deuterocanonical works, which Jews and Protestants later rejected given that the Septuagint's Greek translation is the only surviving edition.) In a commentary or maybe it was a prologue, Jerome explains the process by which he judges certain works to be valid and other works to not be valid.

Important to note that by the fourth century, Jerome is well after the height of Gnostic speculation and the heresiologists. Manichaeans were an existing problem that the great church was still trying to deal with. Jerome's reasoning was taken by mediaeval catholics as read and the Vulgate alone was treated as canon. In point of fact though, the Catholics never actually come down and say this is the canon, these other things aren't until the Council of Trent in the fifteenth century amid the Counterreformation, wherein presumably early Protestant were throwing around questions about the Bible that made them realize they hadn't yet attempted to figure answers.

***

The Roman Legions were not a cult unto themselves. They were soldiers in a standing army, probably not too different in attitudes from what you might hear of a U.S. Marine or infantryman today. Yes, some of them were Mithraists, but that doesn't make initiation into the cult of Mithras a condition of enlistment. Mithraists probably outnumbered Christians because Christians, especially the Grecian Christians tended against militarism. Pagans, lacking any theological obstruction, were more comfortable with career murder. The fact of the Mithraic cult is an example that Paganism itself was becoming less tenable at the time of Constantine. Republican-era pagans joined cults, but they tended to accept all gods as having particular provinces. They were never so exclusively devout to one. Mithraists and the cult of Isis seem to indicate a theological movement in paganism that was comparable to the shifts towards orthodoxy among the Christians, suggesting a deeper current than just bishop Irenaeus or such having a problem with Valentinian Gnostics.

Oops...your absolutely correct,it was Constantinople.The wealthy Christians did reside in Rome and Alexandria however.They contributed to and were therefore favored by Constantine.If you look through out the new testament you'll find a large portion devoted to reinforcing the Leadership of the church.The Gnostic view was that there is no need for Church Office because it is the internal search for divinity that brings about a direct relationship with God.The curious thing is that hundreds of years latter Martin Luther Also affirmed a Direct relationship with God.He is the Root of modern[excluding Catholicism]Christian church...look around and see if you can count the varies Offices created by modern Christianity.In the final analyses it's fair to say that Very Few people Live the life that Christ lived.No belongings,No employment,No material possessions what so ever.Religion has become big business with a very small fringe of people who are Really trying....If there is a judgement it must be something that levels the playing field so to speak,something that is Irrelevant to any earthly work or faith.I propose that it will be a simple three word question...Were you Trying?

'Reinforcement of the church' doesn't feel like the right to me. Raises the most immediate question: what church? There really wasn't one in the sense we think, not that early in time. While there was a definite inclination for the Christians of that period to acknowledge the authority of the apostles, few of the apostles were still around and those that were seem to be constantly in disagreement with one another. The Apostles seem to have partially disbanded after Jesus' ascension. If the later apocryphal acts can at least be given some vague trust, they suggest that a number of them journeyed east preaching to their eventual martyrdom in India. The rest clustered around Jerusalem, with a few odd balls like Peter and Paul moving through the classical world.

The New Testaments suggests that there were two particular crises dominating their thought in the period. The first was how Jewish Christianity was to become. The second was a political crisis that arose from the question of the authority of some individuals to dictate the nature of Christianity itself. That is to say, once they realized that Christianity had divided into a Jewish and a Gentile sect, the question became whether any individual had the right to say that the other sect was wrong in their beliefs or to dictate what defined the righteousness of their own sect. History indicates that the Gentile sect won out and churches and episcopacies began to evolve, but neither the New Testament nor the patristic writings indicate that they ever came to a philosophic or theologic resolution to the political problem.

There is a loose line of intellectual development that connects Protestants to Gnostics. Martin Luther's emphasis on poverty in contrast with the Medici pope's extravagances is related the philosophy of poverty held by Franciscan brothers. St, Francis d'Assisi acquired his understanding in the founding of the order from a vague syncretism with the Cathar heretics of southern France. The Cathars were one of those less creative mediaeval Gnostics and the only part about them that seemed to have impressed Francis was their ascetic theories. By extension the Cathars can be traced through the Bogomils and Messalians in the Balkans to the Paulicians of Armenia thence direct to the Manichaeans and the Gnostics of ancient heretical texts.

That said, it's pretty clear that most of the early Protestants would have seriously disapproved of the heresy, despite the contemporary Church ranking them in their number. Early Gnostics borrowed from Christian scriptures and apocrypha and manufactured a few of their own besides, but their theology is at root antithetical to Christendom. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians are all built around a theology of pistis. There is disagreement between them about pistis - how it relates in importance to acts and how or if Christians have need of intermediary figures like priests to facilitate their relationship with God, but as a concept pistis remains at the heart of Christianity. Pistis, however, has no place in Gnosticism, where it is replaced by the theophanic experience of gnosis. A theology built around certain knowledge of God is something even Protestants would object to. As implied in an earlier post, I'm inclined to the belief that some Protestants have adopted a de facto form of gnosis, but that's something they seem to get more from liberal philosophy - especially the traditions of Locke and Rousseau - than their actual faith.

As a Southerner I'm a bit weary of the impoverishment attitude. I believe in family and I have a hard time with the notion that Christ would agree with the idea of a man leaving his family destitute in order to wander the desert in pursuit of his faith. And I'll cleave to that notion even if you can name apostles who were sainted for doing so.

no ,,but where can i find them,,,,

Online there are a handful of sources to draw upon. Nag Hammadi should still be under copyright but seems like whoever did the translation isn't looking to make money off of it. Rest are all public domain and easy to get at.

The Gnostic Society Library <www.gnosis.org/library> has all the major heretical works including the Nag Hammadi codices, Manichaean scriptures, the Bruce Codex and the Corpus Hermeticum.

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library <www.ccel.org> has the patristic texts, including the heresiologists Irenaeus and Tertullian. It looks like they also have mediaeval works in there, so the assorted theologians who wrote against the Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars are probably included in there as well. (I don't know the period well enough to refer you to who they are.)

Otherwise, they're all available in print editions. I found a few of them at the Jeff Parish library, so they shouldn't be too hard to track down. If you do look in libraries, the Dewey decimal has a separate listing for works on heresies, I believe it's under 273.

cheers

I see you mentioned the Cathers of southern France. If I remember right about that same time the 1200's Petra Valdez who people started calling them the Waldesians to what you know about them.

I have read some of his writings and sermons and find myself in much agreement with what he was preaching.. Blessings..Miles

I've heard of them, but not much else.

Theology wasn't my major. I've a very developed grasp on the first four hundred years or so of Christendom since one of my majors was classical humanities (and classics professors have an obnoxious habit of pretending religious and practical thought didn't occur in the period, which is why I started on it in the first place). After that period my knowledge is fairly patchwork, relative more to areas of thought that I find interesting - i.e., the crusades, Christian existentialism and theodicy - than general histories.