Sermon 1—The Gospel of Philip Intro

Sermon #1—The Gospel of Philip Intro

After I finished my 11-part review of Hebrews, and had inserted, into the mix, my sermons on Pride, Music, and Death, I was casting around for some new sermon series to get into; thus, I came back to something I had been peripherally interested in several years ago, when I was looking into the Gnostic Gospels, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1945. The Gospel of Philip was one of the Gnostic works that had attracted me when I first started listening to audio recordings of all these ancient texts, and when I rediscovered the book, recently, I found that there was much to ponder that was an extension of the thinking, on a variety of subjects, I had already been doing.

One of the things that attracts me to the Gnostic gospels is the fact that they are more or less unedited, straight from the horse’s mouth—that is to say, they are unedited by the people who edited the first accepted scriptures and compiled the first version of the BIBLE. Remember that the sacred scriptures, endorsed by the Council of Nicea (325 C.E.), were chosen three hundred years after Jesus’ earthly career, and there can be no doubt that not only the texts they chose, and the texts they didn’t choose, but also the texts they chose to censor, contained material that was more native to the era of its composition (1^st century C.E.) than were the white bread versions finally decided upon by the Holy Fathers of Nicea (325 C.E.). By this I mean that, by 325, the mystical, pantheistic mysteries of much of the Gnostic material had become anachronistic to the minds of the more politico-materialistic church leaders of the Nicean Council. We know that in 325 they edited out a lot of material that was dogmatically offensive to them, then--material that would probably not be considered dogmatically offensive to us now. 

As short-sightedly declusive as this may seem to us today, from our modern-day perspective, the Church Fathers of antiquity must be forgiven for these omissions, because they were struggling--struggling against each other and against the clock, to reach a clearly expressed consensus on a wide range of doctrinal issues, not because there was necessarily any virtue in everyone agreeing with everybody else on every single dogmatic point, but merely because, without a unanimous consensus, speedily arrived at, the Emperor Constantine was not going to agree to endorse the Christian Church as the legitimate “State Religion” of Rome. Under such political pressure it is understandable that the Church Fathers decided that anything paradoxical, of a highly abstract nature, or anything that might promote superstitious attitudes in the minds of the PEOPLE, HAD to be expunged for the good of the Church at large.

Thus, because a large body of ancient material was censored out, (not to mention, as yet undiscovered), much of the material emerging in the late 19^th and early 20th centuries, that we now refer to, generically, as “New Age”, may be actually regarded as of quite ancient origin, since many of the New Age concepts, perspectives, and idiomatic expressions that appear in Blavatsky, Steiner, Cayce, Prophet, Roberts, Underhill, and the rest of the so-called “New Age” crowd, are mirror reflections of material, and LANGUAGE that appears in the Gnostic Gospels. Now, the questionable authority of newly discovered ANCIENT scriptures is a turn-off to most puritanical thinkers, but to my mind, it is precisely the ancient aspect of this material that argues convincingly, to me, in favor of the AGELESS TRUTH of it—in other words, if it were true THEN, perhaps it is true NOW, and forever. 

Anyway, today we will only be able to a quick survey of the main topics explored in The Gospel of Philip. First, we have this abbreviated summary from:

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE BIBLE 

“Gospel of Philip. According to the Pistis Sophia, Philip was one of three disciples charged with the task of writing the words and works of Jesus. Two gospels under his name are known, the first only from a reference by Epiphanius (Heresies XXVI. 13. 2-3), who quotes from it a passage about the ascent of the soul. The second, quite independent, is a Coptic text from the Nag Hammadi library that shows affinities with the later forms of Valentinian Gnosticism and may go back to the last quarter of the 2nd cent. or the beginning of the third. It is not a gospel in the ordinary sense, but a collection of sayings and meditations loosely linked together and constantly returning to a number of favorite themes: Adam and Paradise, creation and begetting, the names of Jesus, etc. Notable features are its use of New Testament material and its references to Gnostic sacraments. The author is familiar with the New Testament books, but uses echoes and allusions woven into his own writing rather than extended quotation and exegesis. The sacraments appear to be five in number: Baptism, Chrism, Eucharist, Apolutrosis and Bridal Chamber.”

[Sidebar: The term “Valentinian” appears several times in this discussion, so it is important for us to know what Valentinianism is. From the Gnostic Society Library:

“The term “Valentinian” refers to Valentinus, one of the most influential Gnostic Christian teachers of the second century A.D. He founded a movement which spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Despite persecution by the Catholic Church, the Valentinian school endured for over 600 years. Valentinus' influence persists even today. 

Valentinus was a second century Christian mystic and poet. He is sometimes referred to as a "Gnostic" because of the importance that mystical knowledge (gnosis) plays in his thought. Valentinus was born in Phrebonis in upper Egypt about 100 AD and educated in nearby Alexandria. There he became a disciple of the Christian teacher Theudas who had been a disciple of Saint Paul. He claimed that Theudas taught him secret wisdom that Paul had taught privately to his inner circle. 

Like many early Christian mystics, Valentinus claimed that that he had a vision of the risen Christ. Following his vision, he began his career as a Christian teacher at Alexandria around 120AD. His esoteric theology quickly attracted a large following in Egypt and Syria. In 136 AD, he went to Rome after stopping briefly in Cyprus. At Rome he quickly rose to prominence and was widely respected for his eloquence. He was so well regarded in the Roman church that in 143 AD he was a candidate for the office of bishop. It seems likely he refused the position. He continued to teach in Rome for at least ten more years.” 

It is important to emphasize the point that Valentinus is purported to have been a student of the Apostle Paul. Remember that Priscilla, one of the leading candidates for possibly having written Hebrews, was also said to have been a student of Paul, and also spent time in Rome. Thus the elegant, colorful writing that adorns the pages of The Gospel of Philip is not unlike the style in which much of Hebrews is written. In short, the ideas of the Apostle Paul are not only available to us through his letters alone, but also through the writings of his students, in the exact way the teachings of Jesus are available to us through the words of His disciples. 

One tempting conclusion it is possible to arrive at from all this is this: maybe the Church Fathers of Nicea endorsed some words of Paul of a certain clear, dogmatic, and doctrinal character, meanwhile deleting words of Paul that might lean in a slightly less dogmatic direction. They also chose to attribute to Paul words that were absolutely NOT his, possibly because they WANTED those words to be by Paul; it was like labeling the scriptures with a brand name—“With a name like PAUL it’s GOT to be good!” On the other hand, arguments over the authority of authorship are really not even in the spirit of the time—a time in which anonymity was the rule rather than the exception, and authors freely mixed the wisdom of the ages regardless of the specific source of it. 

Now that we know about Valentinus, we can go back to some overviews of the book. Two short summaries of The Gospel of Philip appear on the Early Christian Writing page:

“Wesley W. Isenberg writes (The Nag Hammadi Library in English, p. 141):

“Because of the contents, the eccentric arrangement, and the literary types exhibited, it is likely that The Gospel of Philip is a collection of excerpts mainly from a Christian Gnostic sacramental catechesis. It explains the significance of sacramental rites of initiation, the meaning of sacred names, especially names of Jesus, and provides paraenesis for the life of the initiated. It interprets Biblical passages, particularly from the book of Genesis, makes use of typology, both historical and sacramental, and, as catechists do, argues on the basis of analogy and parable. In these and other ways The Gospel of Philip resembles the orthodox catechisms from the second through fourth centuries.”

Bentley Layton writes (The Gnostic Scriptures, p. 325):

“The work called The Gospel According to Philip is a Valentinian anthology containing some one hundred short excerpts taken from various other works. None of the sources of these excerpts have been identified, and apparently they do not survive. To judge from their style and contents, they were sermons, treatises, or philosophical epistles (typical Valentinian genres), as well as collected aphorisms or short dialogues with comments. Only some of the sources can definitely be identified as Valentinian. Because of their brevity and the lack of context it is difficult to assign any of them to particular schools of Valentinian theology. On the other hand, nothing indicates that all come from one and the same branch of the Valentinian church. It is possible that some of the excerpts are by Valentinus himself. Others, however, refer to etymologies in Syriac, the Semitic language (a dialect of Aramaic) used in Edessa and western Mesopotamia; these must be the work of a Valentinian theologian of the East, writing in a bilingual milieu such as Edessa (see Map 5). Probably the language of composition of all the excerpts was Greek.

The longer Wikipedia summary of the Gospel of Phillip begins thus:

“The Gospel of Philip is one of the Gnostic Gospels, a text of New Testament apocrypha, dated to around the 3rd century but lost in modern times until an Egyptian man rediscovered it by accident, buried in a cave near Nag Hammadi, in 1945.

The text is not related to the canonical gospels and is not accepted as canonical by the Christian church. Although it may seem similar to the Gospel of Thomas, scholars are divided as to whether it is a single discourse or a collection of Valentinian sayings.” 

“Sacraments, in particular the sacrament of marriage, are a major theme. As in the other gnostic texts, the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip defends the tradition that gives Mary Magdalene special insight into Jesus' teaching, but does not support twenty-first-century inventions concerning Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife and mother of his offspring.

The gospel's title appears at the end of the Coptic manuscript in a colophon; the only connection with Philip the Apostle within the text is that he is the only apostle mentioned. The text proper makes no claim to be from Philip, though, similarly, the four New Testament gospels make no explicit claim of authorship. The Gospel of Philip was written between 150 AD and 350 AD, while Philip himself lived in the first century, making it extremely unlikely to be his writing. Most scholars hold a 3rd-century date of composition.

[Sidebar: Another internet source, (The Gospel of Philip

Edition and commentaries by Dr.Vladimir Antonov

Translated by Anton Teplyy, Dr.Mikhail Nikolenko and Hiero Nani) contradicts this attribution of authorship:

“The Apocryphal (i.e. not included in the New Testament) Gospel of Apostle Philip, a personal disciple of Jesus Christ, was found by archaeologists in 1945 in Egypt. It contains very important information imparted to Philip by Jesus Christ.

It concerns the highest meditative techniques that allow spiritual warriors to come to the Abode of God-the-Father, which Philip calls the Bridal Chamber. In the Gospel, two narration lines are interwoven: the line of sexual love between people and the line of the highest Love for God. The former is considered as a prototype of the latter.”

So one source says the text could not possibly have been written by Philip, and the other source says the text includes teachings of Jesus imparted to Philip personally (a structural format that appears in several of the Gnostic Gospels). However, remember that the writing tradition of this early period, (100-300 C.E.) featured elaborate quoting and paraphrasing of unattributed authors—many of these works were, in a sense, mere scholarly documentation of common knowledge of the period; this means that the Gospel of Philip may in fact be information imparted to Philip by Jesus Christ, but just not written down by Philip himself, but a by some transcriber, from a letter date, of material originally retained through oral tradition.

As I have said many times, the authorship of a text means very little to me, compared to the wisdom embedded in the text; nevertheless, it is interesting, in a nosy kind of way, to consider these questions of authorship, if for no other reason than as a test of our understanding of the context in which the text first appeared. These considerations do not inform the essence of the wisdom of the text as much as they inform us about the LANGUAGE of the text. The language tells us more or less that the voice of God speaks with a thousand tongues.

Back to the Wikipedia survey of Philip:]

“History and context

A single manuscript of the Gospel of Philip, in Coptic, was found in the Nag Hammadi library, a cache of documents that was secreted in a jar and buried in the Egyptian desert at the end of the 4th century. The text was bound in the same codex that contained the better-known Gospel of Thomas.

From the mix of aphorisms, parables, brief polemics, narrative dialogue, biblical exegesis (especially of Genesis), and dogmatic propositions, Wesley T. Isenberg, the editor and translator of the text, has attributed seventeen sayings (logia) to Jesus, nine of which Isenberg characterizes as citations and interpretations of those found in the canonical gospels. The new sayings, "identified by the formula introducing them ('he said', 'the Lord said', or 'the Saviour said') are brief and enigmatic and are best interpreted from a gnostic perspective".

Much of the Gospel of Philip is concerned with Gnostic views of the origin and nature of mankind and the sacraments of baptism, unction and marriage. The Gospel emphasizes the sacramental nature of the embrace between man and woman in the nuptial chamber, which is an archetype of spiritual unity, which entails the indissoluble nature of marriage. Many of the sayings are identifiably Gnostic, and often appear quite mysterious and enigmatic.

One possible interpretation is that the bridal chamber refers symbolically to the relationship of trust and singular devotion that should exist between God (bridegroom) and mankind (bride) – just as the marriage relationship (bedchamber) implies a devotion of husband and wife to each other that is expected to exclude all other parties. This symbolic meaning is found for example in the Parable of the Ten Virgins – (Matthew 25:1-13),

"Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom".

Another interpretation of the Gospel of Philip finds Jesus as the central focus of the text. This view is supported by the Gnostic scholar, Marvin W. Meyer. According to Meyer, it is clear that without Jesus, the rituals and mysteries mentioned in this gospel would have no context. Furthermore, according to Meyer, this text seems to follow the beliefs of the Valentinian Christian sect, a group that worshipped the Gnostic Christ, and is often linked to what is sometimes thought to be Valentinius' own text, the Gospel of Truth.

The Gospel of Philip ends with its promise:

“If anyone becomes a 'son of the bridechamber' he will receive the Light. If anyone does not receive it while he is in these places, he cannot receive it in the other place. He who receives any Light will not be seen, nor can he be held fast. No one will be able to trouble him in this way, whether he lives in the world or leaves the world. He has already received the Truth in images, and the World has become the Aeon. For the Aeon already exists for him as Pleroma, and he exists in this way. It is revealed to him alone, since it is not hidden in darkness and night but is hidden in a perfect Day and a holy Night.”

[Sidebar: This deep,deep paragraph states, 

“If anyone becomes a 'son of the bridechamber' he will receive the Light. If anyone does not receive it while he is in these places, he cannot receive it in the other place.” 

This concept divides consciousness into higher and lower dimensions, just like the proselyte slave and the Son; it clearly distinguishes between the “bridechamber”, and “the other place”.  Furthermore, it implies that Sonship is only achieved in Heavenly realms, not in the lower terrestrial dimensions.

Going on, two terms in the preceding paragraph deserve comment, “pleroma” and “aeon”. 

Pleroma is a term we have encountered before, and will doubtless deal with again in future sermons. To review, here is the Wikipedia definition:

“Pleroma (Greek πλήρωμα) generally refers to the totality of divine powers. The word means fullness from πληρόω ("I fill") comparable to πλήρης which means "full", and is used in Christian theological contexts: both in Gnosticism generally, and by St. Paul the Apostle in Colossians 2:9 (the word is used 17 times in the New Testament). 

[Sidebar: It is interesting how many different ways “pleroma”, the totality of divine powers, is translated. These four translations of Colossians 2:9 all translate pleroma as “fullness”, and 3 out of 4 of them include the word “body”; but each definition includes connotations of other specific attributes as well:

In the King James 21st Century it says:

“For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.”

The Amplified Bible gives practically a textbook definition of pleroma:

“For in Him all the fullness of Deity (the Godhead) dwells in bodily form [completely expressing the divine essence of God]. ‘

The Common English Bible simplifies it to:

“All the fullness of deity lives in Christ’s body.”

The Contemporary English Version simplifies it even more:

“God lives fully in Christ.”

Back to Wikipedia on “pleroma”:

“Pleroma is also used in the general Greek language and is used by the Greek Orthodox Church in this general form since the word appears in the book of Colossians. Proponents of the view that Paul was actually a Gnostic, such as Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, view the reference in Colossians as something that was to be interpreted in the Gnostic sense.”

Of the term “aeon” Wikipedia has this to say:

“In many Gnostic systems, the various emanations of God, who is also known by such names as the One, the Monad, Aion teleos (αἰών τέλεος "The Broadest Aeon"), Bythos ("depth or profundity", Greek βυθός), Proarkhe ("before the beginning", Greek προαρχή), the Arkhe ("the beginning", Greek ἀρχή), "Sophia" (wisdom), Christos (the Anointed One) are called Aeons. In the different systems these emanations are differently named, classified, and described, but the emanation theory itself is common to all forms of Gnosticism.

In the Basilidian Gnosis they are called sonships (υἱότητες huiotetes; sing.: υἱότης huiotes); according to Marcus, they are numbers and sounds; in Valentinianism they form male/female pairs called "syzygies" (Greek συζυγίαι, from σύζυγοι syzygoi).

Similarly, in the Greek Magical Papyri, the term "Aion" is often used to denote the All, or the supreme aspect of God.”

Thus, even in this short summary of the topics covered in The Gospel of Phillip, in particular the mention of the “male/female pairs”, we can see the connection between The Gospel of Phillip and Valentinianism; this conjunction indirectly connects it to the teachings of the Apostle Paul, in the exact same way that we saw the book of Hebrews to be indirectly connected to the teachings of Paul.

Back to Wikipedia on Phillip:]

“Problems concerning the text

The Gospel of Philip is a text that reveals some connections with Early Christian writings of the Gnostic traditions. It is a series of logia or pithy aphoristic utterances, most of them apparently quotations and excerpts of lost writings, without any attempt at a narrative context. The main theme concerns the value of sacraments. Scholars debate whether the original language was Syriac or Greek. Wesley W. Isenberg, the text's translator, places the date "perhaps as late as the 2nd half of the 3rd century" and places its probable origin in Syria due to its references to Syriac words and eastern baptismal practices as well as its ascetic outlook. The on-line Early Christian Writings site gives it a date ca 180 – 250. Meyer gives its date as 2nd or 3rd century.

Interpretation

The text has been interpreted by Isenberg (The Nag Hammadi Library in English, p. 141) as a Christian Gnostic sacramental catechesis. Bentley Layton identified it as a Valentinian anthology of excerpts, and Elaine Pagels and Martha Lee Turner have seen it as possessing a consistent and Valentinian theology. It is dismissed by Catholic author Ian Wilson who argues that it "has no special claim to an early date, and seems to be merely a Mills and Boon-style fantasy of a type not uncommon among Christian apocryphal literature of the 3rd and 4th centuries."

Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) scholar Richard O. Cowan sees a parallel between the "bridal chamber" that is a central theme in the Gospel and the Mormon doctrine of "the new and everlasting covenant of marriage," or "eternal marriage."

Here endeth the Wikipedia summary. 

Next week we will look at the first several verses of The Gospel of Philip. We will find that many hair-splitting distinctions are made between mundane and heavenly consciousness states, and we must then face the overwhelming complexity of the Gnostic Cosmography. In the meantime let us think about this: the words with which we express our spiritual experience may serve us or enslave us, depending on how we hear them, and integrate them into our larger undefined consciousness. The challenge of any doctrine, ancient or modern, is how its belief helps us embrace the timeless mysteries of being, and how it brings us closer to the changeless Father. Let us pray.

Jesus, thank you for the many roads to you, that all converge in the end in the ONE ROAD to you. Amen.