DeConick A.D

347
GNOSTICISM OUT ON A LIMB
the Latin West. Their writings were “good reads” for Christians over the
centuries. Believing that they were soldiering against the spread of Gnosticism,
these authors probably never realized that their attacks only preserved
Gnosticism and redistributed Gnostic spirituality into the religious
buffer and our communal consciousness every time their condemnations
were picked up and reread. It is likely that the literature written by the
opponents of the Gnostics did more for the survival of Gnostic spirituality
over the centuries than it did for its destruction.
The other texts to mention are the Gospel of John and the letters of
Paul. As we have seen, these texts are advocates of Gnostic spirituality. To
suppress their Gnostic sensibilities and domesticate the texts, the leaders
of the Apostolic Catholic church imposed strict, orthodox interpretations
on them, which were successfully marketed as the “natural” way to
read John and Paul. This successful reinterpretation of the texts enabled
the leaders of the Catholic church to canonize the Gospel of John and the
letters of Paul within the New Testament.
However, because the interpretation is the only thing controlling the
Gnostic spirituality embedded within these texts, the fourth Gospel and
the letters of Paul are Trojan horses. They await readers who either don’t
know or don’t care about the orthodox interpretation. When these readers
engage John or Paul, the door in the Trojan horse opens up and they
are confronted with Gnostic spirituality head-on.
Gnostic Awakenings
This brief chapter is not the place to map the complex movement of Gnostic
spirituality from antiquity to the present. Nonetheless, explicit Gnostic
renaissances have taken place when actual literature written by Gnostics
has resurfaced. These accidents of history have reengaged Gnosticism in
very public and profound ways. These awakenings have been instrumental
in the survival of Gnostic spirituality and its ever-widening distribution, as
it has been reframed over and over again to meet the needs and interests
of new generations of religious people.
There are four such Gnostic awakenings that we can mention. The
first awakening probably took place in the medieval period, evident in the
emergence of the groups we know of as the Paulicians, Bogomils, and