RParvus wrote: ↑Mon Nov 29, 2021 1:11 pm
Neil,
I noticed your plug and decided to add here a few thoughts about how Judas might fit into my Simonian/Saturnilian scenario. Realize that what I offer is here is half-baked, perhaps in more ways than one, but I’ll put it forward for whatever it is worth.
In the recently uncovered Gospel of Judas it is Judas who is the conduit for the “real” message of Jesus. There is much in that Gospel that resonates well with the admittedly little that we know from Irenaeus about the Saturnilians. One item in particular that catches my attention is the idea that men (created not by the highest God, but by lower angels) fall into two groups: one made for an imperishable realm and the other for total perishability. This type of predestinatory division calls to mind the “vessels of destruction” (Rom. 9:22) in the letter to the Romans with its: “Who are you, o man, to talk back to God? Will what is made talk back to its maker? ‘Why have you created me so?’ Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for a noble purpose and another for an ignoble one? - Rom. 9:20-21).
For me it also calls to mind the parable about the types of soil (hearers) in chapter 4 of gMark, the chapter in which Jesus is said to have privately revealed to his disciples the “mystery of the kingdom of God”. As Morna Hooker notes in her commentary on Mark: “The existence of four groups of hearers should not conceal the fact that basically there are only two: those whose hearing of the word bears fruit and those who hearing proves to be fruitless” (p. 132). Yet Jesus, in telling the parable, says that the reason he speaks in parables is to prevent some of his hearers from understanding.
It seems strange that there is so much repetition of the word “Hear!” in chapter four of gMark when at the same time Jesus is there preventing some of the hearers from understanding. Unless it is some kind of clue. Remember that Simonians claimed that Simon’s name meant “Hear!” and that it was given to him by the highest God when Simon heard/obeyed the command to descend to this world. And they believed that Simon was the Christ. And IF the Gospel of Judas was Simonian/Saturnilian in origin, it may be that an earlier gMark was modified at some point by them to provide pointers to the “real” gospel. That would give us a modified gMark for “those on the outside” (Mk. 4:11) that pointed to gJudas for those on the inside. And so it would come to pass that, as Mark 4 says, “Nothing is hidden” (in gMark) “except to be revealed” (in gJudas), “and nothing is concealed”(in gMark) ”except to be brought into the open” (in gJudas). “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear! And he said to them, ‘Pay attention to what you hear!’ ” (Mk. 4:22-23).
In this scenario there would, of course, have to be a third stage of development in which the proto-orthodox had the final say and further modified/cleaned up gMark to mesh with their own beliefs. One way to counter Simonian/Saturnilian pretensions regarding Judas’ private information would be to make him a traitor. Words like the following would belong to the third stage: “For the son of man indeed goes, as it is written of him, but woe to that man by who the son of man is betrayed” (Mk. 14:21). But perhaps initially there were some, Justin among them, that preferred to just ignore the claim of those who, as Justin saw it, were Christians-in-name-only. Why separate Judas from the 12 and wrongly tarnish his status just to counter an utterly baseless heretical claim?
I need to correct the above. I have re-read the Gospel of Judas (what little is extant of it) and think that it, if Simonian, should more properly be assigned to the Basilidean branch instead of the Saturnilian. Irenaeus says that Saturnilus “was the first to say that two kinds of men had been molded by the angels, the one wicked, the other good” (Against Heresies, 1,24, 2), but Basilides too subscribed to this idea as well as Saturnilus’ docetism. Although both were said to have been pupils of Menander, Saturnilus may have been active a bit earlier than Basilides, for Irenaeus speaks of him first. One at least, if not both, may have identified as Jews before coming under the tutelage of Menander, for we are told that Basilideans claimed “they are no longer Jews, but not yet Christians” (Against Heresies, 1,24,6). Justin, of course, considers both offshoots of Simonianism to be Christians-in-name-only (Dialogue with Trypho, 35).
When it comes to the Gospel of Judas, there are a number of things that tilt the balance in favor of Basilidean origin. First of all it is astrological. Each person, including Judas, has an influencing star. Now Basilideans, says Irenaeus, accept the principles of astrologers and “have transferred them to their own brand of doctrine” (Against Heresies, 1, 24, 7). He says nothing comparable about Saturnilus.
Moreover, says Irenaeus, Basilideans “even invent certain angelic names, and declare that some belong to the first heaven, others to the second, and one by one they attempt to expound the names, the rulers, the angels, and the powers of the 365 false heavens” (1,24, 6). This is the kind of thing we see in the Gospel of Judas, although there the number is 360 and is arrived at by multiplying 72 heavens x 5 firmaments. Irenaeus may have heard that their total numbers corresponded to the number of days in the year. That would be 360 or 365 depending on whether you count the 5 intercalary days or not. And notice, in particular, the number 72 in the Gospel of Judas’ calculation. This number, according to Jewish lore, was the number of nations in the world. Now Basilides, says Irenaeus,had something to say about the spirit rulers of the nations:
“But those angels who possess the last heaven, which is the one seen by us, set up everything in the world and divided between them the earth and the nations upon it. Their chief is the one known as the god of the Jews. Because he wished to subject the other nations to his own, that is, to the Jews, all the other principalities opposed him and worked against him. For this reason the other nations were alienated from his nation.” (Against Heresies 1, 24, 3).
Next there is the laughing Jesus. Several times in the Gospel of Judas Jesus laughs at the mistakes of his hearers. Irenaeus says nothing about a laughing Jesus when describing the teaching of Saturnilus, but says Basilides claimed that Simon of Cyrene was transformed by Jesus, was thought to be Jesus himself, and crucified through ignorance and error. Meanwhile Jesus “stood by laughing at them” (Against Heresies 1, 24, 4).
Next there is the secrecy element. The Gospel of Judas begins by calling itself “the secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke to Judas…”. Irenaeus doesn’t mention secrecy in connection with Saturnilus, but says this about Basilides and his followers. “They say… that their secrets must not be uttered at all, but they must keep them concealed by silence” (Against Heresies 1, 24, 6). And according to Hippolytus: “Basilides and his legitimate son and disciple Isidore say that Matthias spoke to them secret words which he heard from the Savior in secret discourse” (Refutation of All Heresies 7, 20, 1. Note that the name “Matthias” here could easily be due to a misunderstanding. Hippolytus may have heard that they claimed the 13th disciple as their source and mistakenly concluded, as many would even today, that it must be Matthias, the replacement for Judas. But in the Gospel of Judas it is Judas who is the 13th. Jesus foresees that the others will curse Judas and he says to him: “You will become the thirteenth.” In the extant fragments of the Gospel of Judas it is nowhere spelled out why the others will curse him. One could plausibly infer it was because of jealousy that Judas was the one to whom Jesus revealed the mysteries of the kingdom and the only one of the 12 who really knew who Jesus was.)
Finally, there is the fact that, according to Origen and a few others, Basilides composed a gospel. I know of nothing like that being said about Saturnilus.
So, to sum up, while I am still quite comfortable with identifying Saturnilus/Saturnilians as the interpolator(s) of some bare-bones letters of Paul, I think Basilides is a better candidate for author of the Gospel of Judas and interpolator of an earlier version of gMark. Assuming that Saturnilus was the earlier of the two, it may be that Saturnilus’ interpolations inspired Basilides to attempt something similar and, indeed, to include a number of ideas from the interpolated Paulines into his own reworking of gMark.