DeConick A.D

305
PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
Christianity could not contain within itself such adversity. Diversity is
one thing, but when the diversity is diametric, it is explosive. As Christianity
formed, decisions had to be made about which God would be the
object of worship—the transcendent God or YHWH. Were the twelve
disciples the clever founders of Christianity or ignorant men who never
left behind their ancestral Jewish religion? They could not be both.
Was Jesus’ death a sacrifice desired by God for the salvation of sinners
or was it something of which the transcendent God did not approve but
exploited to trick the demons? It had to be one or the other.
Was the Eucharist thanksgiving meal, when Christians consumed the
body and blood of Christ, the central ritual or was the central ritual an
initiation mystery, when the spirit began its ascent to the transcendent
world? These were irreconcilable differences.
Given these kinds of baseline oppositions, the hostility between Apostolic
Catholic and Gnostic Christians is not particularly surprising. It was
not possible for both communities to retain their claim to the Christian
identity. One community had to go.
The earliest Gnostic Christian communities may have functioned as
esoteric Christian lodges and Christian reform movements, but it is clear
that by the third century most Gnostic Christians were separatists like
these Sethians who wrote the Gospel of Judas. They were operating from
the viewpoint that Apostolic Catholicism was so corrupted that it was
beyond repair. Gnostics felt they had to hide from or leave the Apostolic
Catholic church to avoid violence. So some of them preserved, on the
fringes of Christianity, what they believed was the true form of Christian
belief and worship, gathering under the radar in less centralized churches
and conventicles. This is what the Gnostics who wrote the Gospel of
Judas did.
The other option was to move beyond Christianity and create new,
competitive Gnostic religions. In the third century, that is exactly what
happened.
Mani and His Avatar
The first world religion is a Gnostic religion. After its founding in the
third century, the religion spread like wildfire down into Egypt, west