DeConick A.D

72
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
them. The wool has been pulled over our eyes. The gods are really demons
in the skies.” The people would have said, “What kind of blasphemy
is this?!”
When we think about it, what they were saying was unfathomable to
most people back then. It leaped outside the boundaries of conventional
metaphysics, which for centuries had operated from the position that humans
were servants of powerful gods who had to be ceremonially and
communally appeased. If appeasement ceased, there was no telling what
horrible disasters might fall down upon them from the heavens.
Irenaeus, the late second-century bishop of Lyons, is one of the people
who considered this Gnostic position blasphemous. He tells us that the
Gnostics think of themselves as perfected and exalted and, consequently,
are no longer properly fearful of behaving in ways forbidden by the God
YHWH. They even eat meat that originated as a sacrifice to a pagan god
in a temple, Irenaeus cites as an example. They attend pagan festivals and
gladiator games. They marry divorcées and have second families with their
new wives. And they mess with sacred scripture and Homeric literature,
interpreting it in ways that discredit the traditional meaning by accommodating
it to their own topsy-turvy opinions.
Irenaeus maintains that he and his own congregation remain properly
fearful of God, a posture that the Gnostics call “ignorant” (Irenaeus,
Against the Heresies 1.6.3–4, 1.8.1–2). According to Irenaeus, Gnostics
viewed themselves as more perfect than anyone else, as better than the
rest because of the greatness of their knowledge of the ineffable Power,
the transcendent God. This included thinking themselves better than the
apostles. Because they had attained a level of existence that exceeded all
powers, the Gnostics felt that they were free from the fear of the gods.
Forget YHWH’s laws! They could do as they pleased (1.13.6).
Demons in Charge
From carvings on Gnostic gems like the Ophian gem pictured in chapter
7 and descriptions of the gods in their literature, we know that Gnostics
imagined the dark lords of the heavens as brutal monsters, animal–human
hybrids dressed in Roman military uniforms. Most often the monsters had
the heads of ferocious lions or hissing asps. They carried the scepters of