Beyond righteousness and transgression (original) (raw)
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A Way of Salvation: Becoming Like God in Nag Hammadi
Numen 60 (2013) 71–102, 2013
Contrary to general belief, ethical progress as a means to attain the divine and thereby achieve salvation occupies a central place in the Nag Hammadi writings. Plato's conception of the homoiosis theo or "likeness to god" fijits very well this dynamic view of man, since it optimistically claims the possibility of human development and progress. Plato's dialogues are far from offfering a univocal exposition of how this progress was fulfijilled, but later Platonists show a rather systematizing tendency. The present paper provides an overview of the homoiosis theo in the Platonic dialogues and evaluates its appropriation by both Middle Platonism and the world of Gnosis. It also offfers an exposition and analysis of those Nag Hammadi writings that may allow a proper understanding of the meaning and goal of the homoiosis theo in this collection of texts.
Gnosis: Journal of the Study of Gnosticism, 2021
A modified version will be published in Gnosis Vol. 1 2021. In this article, I present a new reading of the Gospel of Truth, Nag Hammadi Codex I.3. Although Gnostics often have been described as taking part in the Godhead, the consequences are understudied. According to my analysis, the knowers are not subordinated to, but on equal footing with the Savior. Here, I draw the attention to some gradual processes. The Savior understands more and develops in the encounter with the need of others, saved as well as not yet saved. Through mission and deepening insight, the knowers more and more actualize themselves as Saviors, thereby embodying divinity. The consequence of this is a gradual actualization of the godhead itself. As the knowers gradually are enlightened and their divine nature disclosed, the insight of the godhead accordingly evolves. Thus, mutuality is a key concept. The Saviors cannot actualize their own nature without first having been saved and then they need to save others. The godhead, Saviors and saved are interdependent. The godhead evolves into actualized divinity through the evolving enlightenment of all its parts. Thus, the daily-life encountering with others is of fundamental importance on all levels, from the individual to the cosmic.
THE CLEAR-SIGHTEDNESS THAT BLINDED METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF GNOSTICISM, 2021
To be published in ARAM Periodical vol. 33 2021. Sixty years ago, the study of Gnosticism adhered to the field of comparative religion. But over the last 30 years, a strong trend of analyzing Gnosticism in the light of orthodox Christianity has emerged. This approach has established boundaries between the fields of Christian Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Manichaeism, and Mandaeism. I assert that this development is detrimental to all of these traditions as well as to the study of orthodox Christianity. In this article, I discuss the problems facing scholars who justly challenge the stereotypes of heresy and orthodoxy. Some of these scholars have been more successful in dispelling the prejudices projected onto Gnosticism than in understanding the different ways in which Gnostic myth may function—surprising the present author and, perhaps, others as well. I conclude that the clear-sightedness we have gained by dismantling different stereotypes has led to an approach to interpreting Gnostic texts that, yet again, conceals Gnostics’ different traits. They have escaped the cage of heresy only to be buried under the umbrella term “Christianity,” thereby losing their links to other Gnostics as well as non-Gnostic ancient traditions.
In this article, I present a new reading of the Gospel of Truth, Nag Hammadi Codex I.3. Although Gnostics often have been described as taking part in the Godhead, the consequences are understudied. According to my analysis, the knowers are not subordinated to, but on equal footing with the Savior. Here, I draw the attention to some gradual processes. The Savior understands more and develops in the encounter with the need of others, saved as well as not yet saved. Through mission and deepening insight, the knowers more and more actualize themselves as Saviors, thereby embodying divinity. The consequence of this is a gradual actualization of the godhead itself. As the knowers gradually are enlightened and their divine nature disclosed, the insight of the godhead accordingly evolves. Thus, mutuality is a key concept. The Saviors cannot actualize their own nature without first having been saved and then they need to save others. The godhead, Saviors and saved are interdependent. The godhead evolves into actualized divinity through the evolving enlightenment of all its parts. Thus, the daily-life encountering with others is of fundamental importance on all levels, from the individual to the cosmic.
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity
Wiley eBooks, 2016
gateway to the divine message (Chapter 2). Its narrative consists of three correlated panels: humanity the children of Israel, and the Muslim nation (Chapters 3 and 4). This skeletal outline is conjoined by two running themes, the Divine guide and human responsibility, which bind structure and meaning (Chapters 5 and 6). Conversation with previous scholarship helps the author to embody her arguments in the broad rationalist tradition and argue for a Qur'anic call of individual reading of scripture without intermediaries (Chapter 7). The analysis is convincing, engaging, and informed by previous studies. Occasionally, arguing for relation of separate topics under the common structure of "interrelated and substantive nature of deity's guidance" seems a bit forced, to the extent that by these standards every text can be forced into schemes. Yet, the minute detail analysis of Al-Baqara is an innovative analysis that will appeal to graduate students and scholars in the field of Islamic studies. The book is particularly suitable for courses that discuss reformist impulses, arguments, and methodological venues within Quranic scholarship.
Gnosticism Historicized: Historical Figures and Movements
Chapter 4 (pp. 55–71) in Religion: Secret Religion. Edited by April DeConick. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religion series. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2016.
A popularizing account on what is so-called Gnosticism, what the Nag Hammadi library and Irenaeus' heresy catalog contain, and how these two collections relate to each other.
Review of Gnosticism and the History of Religions by David G. Robertson
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2022
American Academy of Religion 89:4) presented a roundtable on "Theosophy and the Study of Religion" that shed light on the extensive intermingling of scholarship with Theosophy as the study of religion coalesced into an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such archaeological work is essential to the functioning of our field as a self-reflexive, critical discipline, because it provides opportunities to reassess too-long-settled consensus, change theoretical boilerplates that have outlived their utility, and-most urgently-expose the hidden complicity of our field in projects of (ideological and physical) domination of subjugated peoples and cultures. David G. Robertson's Gnosticism and the History of Religions joins in on this disciplinary digging, focusing upon the travels of the concepts of gnosis and Gnosticism. Robertson seeks to present a narrative history of religious studies that connects the category critiques of Michael Williams and Karen King with the intellectual histories of mid-century European historians of religions, such as those by Steven Wasserstrom and Benjamin Lazier (6). Over the course of the story, Robertson argues that an ancient religious tradition that never existed (Gnosticism) became essentialized into an ahistorical universal current (gnosis) that persists today as an inherently problematic, theoretically vacuous category of analysis. "Gnosticism is sui generis religion par excellence" (3). The book covers a lot of ground at high altitude and high speed. Chapter 1 surveys the polemical deployment of "Gnostic" in early Christian heresiography before pivoting to a brief history of early scholarship on "Gnosticism" from the term's first emergence in the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 traces discourses of Gnosticism in nineteenth-century Theosophist and occultist movements, highlighting G. R. S. Mead's Theosophist scholarship on Pistis Sophia and other ancient "gnostic" sources. Chapters 3-7 form a continuous intellectual history of mid-twentieth century Europe, focusing in turn on Hans Jonas's emergence from the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; Carl Jung's intellectual formation and the eventual coalescence of the Eranos circle; the scholarly milieu (overlapping with Eranos) in which the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) were first announced and interpreted; shifting valuations of Gnosticism, among Jonas and others, in the aftermath of Nag Hammadi (but, more pertinently, in the aftermath of Auschwitz); and, finally, the formation of the International Society for the History of Religions, leading up to the 1966 Messina colloquium on "The Origins of Gnosticism. " Chapter 8 then takes a hard turn into contemporary Gnostic groups, drawing on