(no subject)

There's something that doesn't add up with the argument that Elaine Pagels made in Beyond Belief about the Gospel of John being an orthodox Christian answer to the Gospel of Thomas.

She writes, in Beyond Belief and in The Gnostic Gospels, that the earliest known Christian commentary on scripture is the commentary of Heracleon (a student of Valentinus) on the Gospel of John. In fact, all of the members of the Valentinian school quoted from John approvingly; it could even be said to be their favorite piece of scripture.

That doesn't sound like the response that one would expect to an anti-Gnostic piece of literature.

Compare this to their reactions to the Pauline "Pastoral" epistles, or the epistles of Peter, James, and Jude, all of which were strongly anti-Gnostic. Valentinian commentary or exegesis did not reference this material at all, and Pagels writes in The Gnostic Paul that they did not consider it "apostolic."

Bentley Layton mentions, in his essay on the Valentinians in The Gnostic Scriptures, that the Valentinians were most heavily influenced by the Johannine and the Pauline scripture. They also display influences from Luke and Matthew.

On the other hand, there are very few attributions to the Gospel of Thomas in the Valentinian literature.

All of the above makes me think that perhaps the Gospel of John reflected originally an alternative Gnostic (or at least "pro-Gnostic") viewpoint that differed from the Thomas perspective. If so, then it still may be a response to Thomas. The implication of this would be that the differentiation between "Gnostic" and "orthodox" was an innovation of the Second Century.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to gnosticism