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Jun. 9th, 2005 11:42 amThe working title of my book is The Serpent's Wisdom: Radicalism in Early Christianity.
I decided against using the word Gnosticism for various reasons. For one thing, the phrase "serpent's wisdom" implies it. It will also be obvious in the contents that much of the material strongly involves Gnosticism.
But also, many scholars of Gnosticism and early Christianity are moving away from the appellation "Gnostic," because the movements which were labelled "Gnostic" by Irenaeus and Tertullian and the other heresiologists have very little actual common ground. It would be like lumping Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism together and calling them by the same name.
On top of that, the appellation "Gnostic" makes it seem as though there was a more strongly polemic give-and-take between diverse Christian groups in the early stages (pre-Irenaeus) than there perhaps actually was. Much of the theology which came out of the "gnostic" groups shaped and strongly influenced the eventual "orthodox" theology that resulted.
So IMO the strongest axis of actual disagreement between early Christian groups was over the element of political and economic radicalism in the movement. Debates over doctrine were piggybacked on the "carrier wave" of debates over egalitarianism and anti-imperialism. Underlying theological discourse was a dispute between comfortable middle-class people who wanted to be nominally "Christian" without taking on the austerity and wealth-sharing which characterized the movement from the beginning (when it was made up of mostly poor and disenfranchised Galileans), and those who promoted a radical rejection of institutional trappings.
I decided against using the word Gnosticism for various reasons. For one thing, the phrase "serpent's wisdom" implies it. It will also be obvious in the contents that much of the material strongly involves Gnosticism.
But also, many scholars of Gnosticism and early Christianity are moving away from the appellation "Gnostic," because the movements which were labelled "Gnostic" by Irenaeus and Tertullian and the other heresiologists have very little actual common ground. It would be like lumping Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism together and calling them by the same name.
On top of that, the appellation "Gnostic" makes it seem as though there was a more strongly polemic give-and-take between diverse Christian groups in the early stages (pre-Irenaeus) than there perhaps actually was. Much of the theology which came out of the "gnostic" groups shaped and strongly influenced the eventual "orthodox" theology that resulted.
So IMO the strongest axis of actual disagreement between early Christian groups was over the element of political and economic radicalism in the movement. Debates over doctrine were piggybacked on the "carrier wave" of debates over egalitarianism and anti-imperialism. Underlying theological discourse was a dispute between comfortable middle-class people who wanted to be nominally "Christian" without taking on the austerity and wealth-sharing which characterized the movement from the beginning (when it was made up of mostly poor and disenfranchised Galileans), and those who promoted a radical rejection of institutional trappings.
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