DeConick A.D

109
PAUL AND GNOSTIC DOGMA
working in an abortion clinic. Today she finds herself the leader of a holy
crusade to save all of humanity. It is a job she is called to do but didn’t
ask for. No matter how much she wants to, she can’t quit. She has been
chosen.
Bethany is like the great apostle of the Christian church, Paul, who
never knew the man Jesus but whose sudden mystical vision of Jesus on
the road to Damascus made his previous religious life “shit,” as he puts
it in vulgar Greek (Philippians 3:8). No matter the consequences, there
was no turning back for him. He experienced God in a way previously
unimaginable to him. As a result, his religious affiliation shifted from zealous
Jew to newbie Christian, overnight.
What is most striking, however, is Paul’s swing in spirituality, which, as
we will see in this chapter, had a remarkably Gnostic flair, something that
has been vehemently denied by modern church historians. Yet we know
that Paul’s writings were used as foundational scripture both for secondcentury
Gnostic Christian groups and for Apostolic Catholic groups. His
letters (most likely written in this order) are 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians
(ca. 40 CE); Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon (ca. 50); 1 Corinthians,
2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Philippians (ca. 51); and Romans
(ca. 52). The authenticity of 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians is
contested by scholars, but I remain unconvinced that these letters come
from anyone other than Paul (see Campbell 2014).
Gnostic and Catholic groups developed their own religious sensibilities
out of their independent study of Paul’s letters. Both owned Paul as
their apostle. Modern church historians have argued that this is the case
because the Apostolic Catholics read Paul correctly, whereas the Gnostics
imposed their own views on Paul and misread him. This is a convenient
argument that serves only to legitimate Apostolic Catholicism as heir to
Paul. It does not recognize that both parties, Catholic and Gnostic, were
reading Paul in directions that supported their own faith while ignoring
elements of Paul that might contradict that faith. They were able to do
this because his letters actually contain tendencies that lean both ways.
There are both Catholic and Gnostic seeds in Paul’s writings. Since this
is the case, we need to understand what Paul’s letters tell us about the
emergence of Gnostic spirituality within the Christian communities that
Paul sponsored in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome.