(From BMCR 2003.07.26)
Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism?.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Pp. 343. ISBN 0-674-01071-X. $29.95.
Reviewed by Nicola Denzey, Bowdoin College (
ndenzey@…)
Word count: 2496 words
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An unprepared reader might pick up What is Gnosticism? expecting either
a primer or a definitive study of Gnosticism's nature and origins. But
this book, written by one of the country's leading scholars of early
Christianity, should not be mistaken for an introductory textbook.
First of all, it never addresses what Gnosticism is. In a rather
subversive move — given the book's title — King asserts that
"Gnosticism" exists solely as a modern reification, a terminological
construct deriving ultimately from an early Christian discourse of
orthodoxy and heresy which has now taken on an independent existence.
"My purpose in this book," King explains, "is to show how
twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism has simultaneously
reinscribed, elaborated, and deviated from this discourse" (54). The
book assumes that readers will have at least a passing familiarity with
the sources which have conventionally been called "Gnostic," as well as
with contemporary terms of debate and prominent figures. This "ideal
audience" of the learned and open-minded has much to gain from reading
King's book. Casual readers, however, would likely find King's thesis
— like the book itself — too sophisticated and too
historiographically esoteric to sustain their interest.
Karen King taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles before moving to
her current position as Professor of the History of Ancient
Christianity at the Harvard University Divinity School. A highly
respected scholar of Gnosticism, King's work has often focused on
issues of gender. What is Gnosticism? is her second book to appear in
2003, taking its place next to her new translation of the Gospel of
Mary (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003). Here, King identifies her
primary research interests as "early Christian identity formation and
the critique of current scholarly categories of analysis" (vii-viii).
This book has been at least twenty years in the making; we have had
tastes of her critical acumen in a series of articles on the topic of
Gnosticism and identity formation which she has presented to a variety
of scholarly audiences since 1993.
Why is a book like King's timely? The past fifty years have witnessed a
series of dramatic paradigm shifts in the Academy that have called for
the revision and re-articulation of our discipline. The first of these
historiographical and hermeneutical shifts which King chronicles is the
rise of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule as distinct from Theology
with its interested, invested focus, its fixed canon, and its implicit
Christian supersessionism. The second shift was initiated by the
discovery of a cache of hitherto unknown ancient Christian texts in
1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Because scholars prior to 1945 had only a
very limited number of primary sources which early members of the
Christian mainstream had termed "Gnostic," the Nag Hammadi treatises
have had a profound impact on our understanding of early Christianity
as richly diverse in doctrine and praxis. The third and most recent
shift has been the re-evaluation of the History of Religions School by
postcolonialist and postmodern scholarship, which drew into question
its implicit Orientalism and colonialist orientation. For these three
reasons, the work of generations of Gnosticism scholars — built upon a
limited number of primary sources and the polemical writings of a few
early Christian heresiologists — needed to be reassessed. More often
than not, this examination has called for substantial revision.
The scope of King's book is ambitious, but necessarily so. She
recognizes that it is impossible to take on the conceptual and
definitional problem of Gnosticism without tackling the conceptual and
definitional problem of "heresy," which then draws into question
Christianity's discourse of orthodoxy. She notes, "…a discussion of
the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy needs to include polemics aimed
at pagans and Jews as well" (21). King then dedicates the book's eight
chapters to evaluating and critiquing "the discourse of orthodoxy and
heresy" in ancient sources, in the work of early twentieth-century
scholars, and in more contemporary scholarship. The book addresses the
process of early Christian identity formation as a whole, with results
both cogent and incisive. It is refreshing to read an approach that
neither marginalizes Judaism or paganism, nor places Christianity in
high relief against otherwise "insufficient" religious options in the
ancient world.
In her first chapter, "Why Is Gnosticism So Hard to Define?" King
outlines two overarching scholarly approaches to Gnosticism, one
genealogical and one typological. The first approach locates the
origins and developments of Gnosticism over time by looking to and
comparing Gnosticism with so-called Oriental religions on the one hand
and "Christianity" (i.e. "orthodoxy") on the other. The second approach
draws upon phenomenological analyses of primarily literary material to
develop a set of coherent and definitive terms, characteristics, and
tendencies. Both approaches, King warns us, went considerably astray;
most significantly, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts rendered
genealogical and typological analyses of Gnosticism largely moot.
Central, too, has been the problem of Gnosticism's infelicitous
relationship with Christianity as a whole. King observes, "the problem
of defining Gnosticism has been and continues to be primarily an aspect
of the ongoing project of defining and maintaining a normative
Christianity" (18). In the final words of the chapter, King clarifies
the task that lies ahead for the remainder of the volume:
My purpose … is to consider the ways in which the early Christian
polemicists' discourse of orthodoxy and heresy has been intertwined
with twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism in order to show where
and how that involvement has distorted our analysis of the ancient
texts. At stake is not only the capacity to write a more accurate
history of ancient Christianity in all its multiformity, but also our
capacity to engage critically the ancient politics of religious
difference rather than unwittingly reproduce its strategies and results
(19).
Accordingly, Chapter Two, "Gnosticism as Heresy," focuses on the
"rhetorical consolidation" of the broad variety of religious options
available to individuals in the ancient world into three recognizable,
mutually exclusive, and easily definable groups: Jews, Christians, and
pagans (22). What was at stake, King observes, was the discourse of
difference and sameness that was crucial to Christian
identity-building. In order to exclude those Christians whom members of
a nascent orthodoxy opposed, members of this group had to make their
competitors look like outsiders; certain doctrinal or practical
differences needed to be fabricated, just as real differences needed to
be exaggerated. As part of the same strategy of distinction,
similarities — whether between Christians and Jews, Christians and
pagans, or different Christian teachers — were either suppressed or
maliciously miscast. So successful were certain Christians in this
endeavor, King notes, that even now the terms "heresy" and "orthodoxy"
imply only difference, not similarity (23). These two terms are best
understood as the consequence of an evaluative process that aimed to
"articulate the meaning of self while simultaneously silencing and
excluding others within the group" (24). King invokes the examples of
Tertullian's Prescription against Heretics, and Irenaeus' Against the
Heresies, in a set of rhetorical attitudes she categorizes as
"antisyncretism." This discourse functioned to define and defend
boundaries (34) and to contribute to the "master narrative" of
Christian decline from a time of pure origins to the doctrinal
divisiveness of the second century and beyond.
Chapters three and four are explicitly historiographical, as King works
through foundational figures and movements of early twentieth-century
scholarship on religion. Chapter Three investigates Adolf von Harnack,
Chapter Four, the early History of Religions school. Here, modern
readers owe perhaps the greatest debt to King, who provides intelligent
and useful summaries and analyses of works which are infamously
impenetrable and more often than not, only available in their original
German. This extended examination of early twentieth-century
historiography is central for King to prove her thesis: that modern
scholarship has only served to reinscribe a discourse of orthodoxy and
heresy established by certain Christians of the second and third
centuries. King points out that as a theologian and scholar, for
instance, Harnack was perfectly aware of the manifold forms of ancient
Christianity, yet like his orthodox predecessors Irenaeus and
Tertullian, he employed the term "Gnosticism" as a rhetorical tool to
produce a normative vision of Christianity (68).
Chapter five, "Gnosticism Reconsidered," is devoted to a discussion of
Walter Bauer –particularly his landmark study Orthodoxy and Heresy in
Earliest Christianity — and to Hans Jonas' Gnosis und Spa+tantike
Geist. King paints Bauer as an innovator, the first to develop an
alternative model of Christian historiography away from the master
narrative of Christian supersessionism. Jonas, rather differently, was
important for his typological reduction of Gnosticism to a series of
qualities or characteristics. His work on the "Gnostic experience of
self and world" (117) defined Gnosticism as a transhistorical religious
movement characterized primarily by the experience of existential
alienation and world-abnegation. Thus Jonas proposed seven qualities of
Gnosticism: gnosis, dynamic character (pathomorphic crisis),
mythological character, dualism, impiety, artificiality, and unique
historical locus (120). King discusses each one of these in turn,
pointing out their difficulties and shortcomings. The chapter ends with
a discussion of the German History of Religions scholar Carsten Colpe.
It is not clear what ties these three figures together, however;
overall, the chapter division here — as elsewhere in the book — seems
more arbitrary than seamlessly sewn together into one master narrative.
The last three chapters of the book discuss Gnosticism scholarship
following the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts. Here, King spends
some time discussing the various sources themselves, particularly the
manner in which they defy the tidy systems of classification and
categorization established by earlier generations of scholars. Indeed,
King is quick to point out that even post-Nag Hammadi typologies of
Gnosticism such as "Sethianism" and "Valentinianism" strain to maintain
coherence when applied to the tremendous doctrinal diversity we find
reflected in Nag Hammadi's forty-six texts. As King notes, "the problem
with variety is not variety itself; the problem is trying to force
multiform, irregularly shaped objects into square essentialist
definitional holes" (168). These chapters are particularly enjoyable
because they move away from historiography to the ancient sources
themselves; however, it is difficult to assess how a reader not
well-versed in the Nag Hammadi texts would follow King's summaries and
arguments.
Readers will inevitably compare What is Gnosticism? to Michael
Williams' Rethinking "Gnosticism": Arguments for Dismantling a Dubious
Category (1996). Williams' provocative work — which quickly became
obligatory reading for all serious students of ancient Gnosticism —
calls for the abandonment of the term "Gnosticism" altogether, stating
that it is best not to imagine that anything like "Gnosticism" or "the
Gnostic religion" ever existed. Instead, Williams suggests that we
remain cognizant of the many diverse groups and individuals that
originally comprised Christianity before they were marginalized and
de-legitimated by an emergent orthodoxy. It is obvious that Rethinking
"Gnosticism" and What is Gnosticism? were written contemporaneously and
that King and Williams were deeply engaged in dialogue with one
another. They each carefully and graciously acknowledge one another in
their forewords; it is clear that their connections have fostered
genuine respect and mutual fondness rather than competition. Still,
since Rethinking "Gnosticism" was first to appear, the problem for King
is whether or not What is Gnosticism? sufficiently advances the
approach both scholars bring to the fore, and whether or not she
successfully treats the same topic in a way that complements, rather
than competes with, Williams' book.
As a partial answer to this issue, it is important to note that for all
their topical similarity and virtually identical theses, What is
Gnosticism? and Rethinking "Gnosticism" are very different books,
because the two authors work very differently. Williams applies
previously established typological categories of "Gnosticism" to
ancient materials, thus highlighting their insufficiencies for
understanding ancient materials on their own terms. King carefully
builds a sort of historiographic genealogy and keeps her focus
consistently on the last century's scholarship, telling the story of
how the reification of "Gnosticism" came to be from within the broader
social and intellectual matrix of twentieth-century interests and
movements. The books differ, too, in their suggestions for future work.
In place of "Gnosticism," Williams suggests we adopt when appropriate
the more specific term "biblical demiurgical" (Williams, 265). But King
rightly points out the problems with this term: it is cumbersome, and
it persists in the same process of naming and categorizing she proposes
we abandon altogether (168, 214-16). Still, she spends more time
critiquing scholars and scholarship than she does solving the essential
problem to which the book is devoted. Is there a future for studying
Gnosticism without "Gnosticism"? She herself raises the question in her
eighth and final chapter, but ends it reflexively: "It is important not
so much to eliminate the term per se, but to recognize and correct the
ways in which reinscribing the discourses of orthodoxy and heresy
distort our reading and reconstruction of ancient religion" (218).
Ultimately, the reader of What is Gnosticism? is left questioning why
King doggedly pursues Gnosticism' s historiographical genealogy. What
precisely is at stake? And how well does she convey this? King states
at the outset that she will reexamine how twentieth-century scholarship
of Gnosticism has reinscribed a second-century discourse, but most of
her detailed examples (Harnack, Jonas, Bousset, Reitzenstein, Bauer)
harken from the first half of the century. The sole contemporary
scholar of Gnosticism to receive a detailed discussion is Michael
Williams, leaving readers with the impression that no one else is doing
the sort of work King advocates. Because she withholds from the reader
what the "state of the debate" truly is, she leaves the impression that
hers is the sole clarion call for a new hermeneutic. This is
misleading, because King's work not so much presents new material as it
presents for a broader audience the methodological approach already
well entrenched in the academy, certainly among specialists of Nag
Hammadi and early Christianity. Perhaps, though, King would argue that
there are only a few scholars who take this approach for granted, and
this book is clearly not written for them.
While this book tears down the scaffolding upon which many earlier
studies of Gnosticism have been built, King stops short of offering a
concrete new direction, though her final chapter and "Note on
Methodology" seems to suggest that such a direction lies in adopting
postmodern and postcolonial reading strategies. It would have been
enlightening and stimulating to see examples of what such a new
hermeneutic, applied to the Nag Hammadi writings either individually or
as a corpus, might yield; there are indeed recent articles and
monographs out there from which to draw, but these are neglected.
Because she does not address the work of modern scholars of early
Christianity who likewise adhere to the New Historicism, King
effectively flattens the background, placing her own methodological
convictions in stark relief against a century's worth of essentially
flawed scholarship. Still, as the only full-length study of the
scholarship of Gnosticism that exists, there is surely a place for
King's volume. Readers can follow the thread of a story ably told about
a relatively new academic discipline now facing the challenge of
modernity.
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