DeConick A.D

123
PAUL AND GNOSTIC DOGMA
and to be on the safe side, even an altar devoted “to an unknown god.”
Paul announces that he has come to proclaim to them the unknown God
whom they are worshipping. He tells them that the unknown God is the
biblical Creator God YHWH, who is lord of heaven and earth. This God
is not a tribal god or an idol who lives in a shrine or requires the service
of humans. Rather, this God gives life breath to all and needs nothing
from us.
In the Athenian address, Paul claims that the unknown God made
all nations from a single ancestor, with the hope that his international
off spring would search for and find him. Yet, Paul notes, even though
we “live and move and have our being” in him, God’s offspring remain
ignorant of him, thinking that his deity could be captured in idols. The
time of ignorance is over, Paul says. Now God has been revealed and
commands all people everywhere to repent and prepare for the Judgment
and the Resurrection.
We may never know whether this is a real speech of Paul’s or Luke’s
invention. But it certainly reflects Paul’s understanding of the unknown
God and of that God’s relationship to all of humanity.
Mystical Baptism
Paul offers those he converts baptism in Jesus’ name. This is the ritual
that Paul believed conveys the Gnostic experience of Jesus the Messiah
as God’s form and figure. Paul thought that, in the baptismal waters, the
initiate encountered directly and immediately Christ as God’s manifestation.
This encounter transfers Christ’s pneuma and nous, his spirit and
mind, to the person. Paul admonishes the converts, “Let the same mind
be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).
How could they have the same mind as Christ? The ancient people
believed that visions of the divine were physically imprinted on the soul,
like a seal in hot wax. Paul believed no different. He claims that their
baptismal encounter with Christ literally imprinted them. As a result, Paul
said, Christ’s Spirit united with converts’ human spirits, enabling them to
grow in strength, to take up arms, to confront their demons and conquer
them (2 Corinthians 10:3–5; Ephesians 3:16–17, 6:10–12). The convert’s
capacity for spiritual transformation and glory is ignited by the experience.
Paul tells them that because their spirits have been united with Christ’s,
they have joined Christ in his death. They are dead to their old lives. They