I
am doing this post remotely as I am still visiting friends and family up in Pennsylvania
and New Jersey for the Christmas holidays. But I thought I would make this post
on a minor debate between me and some colleagues I know at CUA in the hopes of
ending the email debate (Really emailing
during the holidays? Don’t you guys celebrate Christmas or have something better
to do?).
The
issue surrounds the nature of the die Gefallenen text itself. A few have
conjectured that what translations they have seen currently suggest that this might
not be Gnostic in origin (I disagree).
They point out that it seems to lack some of the hallmark Gnostic traits like a
supreme monadic divinity, a demiurge creator god, the use of aeons (an aspect
of God), or some sort of salvation doctrine that involves freeing oneself from
the corrupt material world to the greater spiritual world. They contend that
the text so far appears to them as more apocryphal in nature similar to texts
like the Book of Jubilees or Apocalypse of Peter (less the visions of heaven and hell).
While
it is true that the traditional Gnostic nature appears to be lacking so far. Especially
when one considers the fact that around the 4th Century a school of Gnosticism
known as Valentinianism was just dying off when the text was supposedly written.
I would contend that the die Gefallenen appears to me to be more like a
docetae tradition or doketai in Greek. This tradition technically pre-dates
most traditional Gnostic traditions and is sort of a proto-Gnosticism focusing
on the spiritual concepts of appearances in our reality (as in Jesus only
appears to be human or even material). If true this is suggestive that the text
might be older than 4th Century, but I cannot say.
Much
of the text so far appears to be concentrating on the spiritual world of things
or is at least written from the spiritual perspective of interacting with our
material world. I think the writer (Zuriel) is showing us how the evilness of
the material world was introduced through what are lesser spiritual entities
(i.e. fallen angels).
It
is possible that the monastic community the die Gefallenen was found with may
have kept some elements of an earlier Valentinianism mythos and blended it more
with traditional Judeo-Christian accepted texts to make the whole thing more palatable.
But I don’t think it is apocryphal because the text is not a known text. Almost
all the apocryphal texts were circulating around in the early Christian era so
much that they are mentioned by early Christian writers in their commentaries.
The die Gefallenen is not mentioned at all, and I don’t think one will find it
either.
The
fact is the book is written in a code like language that took some Nazi code
breakers and an enigma machine to crack sort of suggests that a key Gnostic
tradition of secret knowledge. This may have been a text that was not
available to novice monks until they understood some other fundamental Christian
texts. Just look at the Dead Sea Scroll community where they had texts dealing
with the warriors of light and darkness fighting it out that were not mentioned
by earlier Christian writers or even the Jewish writers of the time. These
texts clearly did not circulate and were part of some sort of internal
knowledge privy only to the community itself.
One
point I think we all can agree on is that even if we “scholars” cannot come to
terms with the nature of the text (either Apocryphal or Gnostic) we all can
clearly agree that the die Gefallenen is clearly not accepted canon when it
comes to Christianity.