DeConick A.D

297
PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
brings him joy is painting his shopwindows with holiday scenes. He wants
to be an artist. So he turns colored as he takes up some brushes and begins
to paint oversized nudes of Betty in cubist style on his windows.
Betty and Mr. Johnson have responded to the subversive Gnostic message:
think for yourself; act willfully. They have become gods. And with
this, chaos erupts in Pleasantville. Violence bursts into the streets as the
coloreds and the black-and-whites riot over their town and their future.
A Dead Man’s Religion
The Apostolic Catholic church began to dominate the Christian religious
landscape in the late second and early third centuries due to their more
centralized organization, their accommodation to Jewish and Roman
norms, and their successful exploitation of public media. The less accommodating
grassroots Gnostic communities, on the other hand, faced escalating
hostility, refutation, and rejection.
Like the violence that erupts in Pleasantville when the Gnostic characters
challenge the conventions, some ancient Gnostic texts intimate that
their communities were not just rebuffed but also were persecuted and
suffered physical violence for their beliefs and practices (see Authoritative
Teaching NHC VI.3 26.20–26; 1 Apocalypse of James, Tchacos Codex
[TC] 1 25.9–14; Second Treatise of the Great Seth NHC VII.2 59.22–29).
These attacks were not merely violence at the hands of Romans persecuting
Christians; they also included violence at the hands of Apostolic
Catholics. “We were hated and persecuted,” one Gnostic remarks, “not
only by those who are ignorant but also by those who think they are
advancing the name of Christ, since they were unknowingly empty, not
knowing who they are, like dumb animals” (Second Treatise of the Great
Seth NHC VII.2 59.22–62.26).
This Gnostic author goes on to explain that the Apostolic Catholics he
knows are absurdly ridiculous because their religion is based on a silly doctrine
about a dead man, his body sacrificed for sin. Their church is an inadequate
imitation of the true Christianity that the Gnostic advocates. While
pretending to offer Christians freedom through Jesus’ death, the Apostolic
Catholic church actually delivers them into slavery. Such ludicrous
doctrines, he says, are tragic jokes promulgating fear. They are doctrines