DeConick A.D

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INTRODUCTION
would not come through right belief or the proper reading of the Bible.
It would not come through sacrifice and martyrdom. It was available only
through the personal discovery of our own internal divinity.
The Catholic bishops were threatened by this premise because, if true,
it meant that there was no need for bishops to administer rituals, interpret
scriptures, hear confessions, or run churches. In other words, they would
be out of a job. So the theological controversies between the Gnostics
and the Catholics over the nature of God and Jesus’ resurrected body, the
value of Jesus’ crucifixion, and the rules of salvation were motivated more
by the political struggle for control of Christian churches than the rightness
or wrongness of Gnostic doctrines. The Gnostics, unable to ritualize
or institutionalize their personal experiences of the divine, were the losers
in this battle. The Gnostics did not survive historically. Their highly personal
religion was destroyed under the pressure of Catholicism, which was
able to develop into an organized religion attractive to a mass audience.
Captivated, I bought a copy of The Nag Hammadi Library in En glish
(Robinson 1977) and began reading the Gnostic scriptures firsthand. As I
read the ancient collection of Gnostic texts, I noticed constant references
to rituals, communal prayers, organized assemblies, and church leaders.
The Gnostics who wrote these texts weren’t less organized than the Catholics
or unable to ritualize their personal experiences of the divine. In
fact, the opposite seemed to be the case. The Gnostics who wrote these
texts had developed sets of rituals in order to prompt intense religious
experiences of spiritual transformation and transpersonal integration. And
they were doing so in organized groups with guru-type leaders. What was
going on with this?
I was electrified. Quite suddenly, I knew that I would never become
a nurse. My vocation was clear. My path would be charted in academia,
where I would try to make sense of the unconventional spirituality and
forbidden religion lodged in the scriptures that had been forsaken by the
Christian church. I was determined to figure out why the Gnostic scriptures
had become forbidden scriptures.
A Revolutionary Spirituality
After I took my PhD at the University of Michigan in Near Eastern studies,
I turned my full attention to the Gnostics and their literature. For the