Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

. The Emmaus Narrative Luke 24:13-31 .	. The Paradise Narrative Genesis 2:15-16, 24-25; 3:1-7 .
Exposition of the situation
. 13 And on the same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus about seven miles from Jerusalem. 14 They were talking about all the events that had just happened.	. 15 And Lord God took the man he had just moulded ... 16 And he forbade Adam, saying, "... but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. The day you eat of it you shall die" ... 24 And God sent a trance (ekstasis) on Adam and he slept (hupnein), and he took one of his ribs...and made the rib...into a woman ... .
Blindness before obviousness
15 While they were walking and discussing together, Jesus came near and went with them 16 but their eyes were stopped from recognizing him.	25 And Adam and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.
The instructor's question
	.....Genesis 3:1-7
17 He said to them, "what are you discussing with each other that makes you sad?"	1 The serpent said to the woman, 'Did God say, "You shall not eat from any of the trees of Paradise?"'
The answer of the blinded	The answer of the blinded
18 Answering, one of them called Cleopas said, "...About Jesus of Nazareth, who was a mightly prophet in deeds and words ... How our chief priests and archons handed him over...to be crucified. 21 But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."	2 And the woman said to the serpent, "Of fruit of the trees of paradise we may eat, 3 but, of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of Paradise, God said, "You shal not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, or you will die."
The instructor deceives
25 and he said to them, ......"Poor in spirit (anoetoi, without nous) .......and slow to understand what the prophets said! 26 Was it not necessary that Christ had to suffer these things ....to enter into his glory?"	4 And the serpent said to the woman, "Die? You will not die ...'''
The instructor justifies his answer
Thus beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in the Scriptures	"...for God knows when you eat it, your eyes will open and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil."
A positive assessment of undeceivement (sic)
28 And as they approached the village... 29 they urged him saying, "Stay with us...". So he went inside to stay with them.	6 And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat and it was pleasant to the eye and suitable for learning.
The opening of eyes and recognition
30 And when he was table with them, taking the bread he blessed it and, having broken it, he gave it to them 31 and their eyes opened and they recognized him.	And taking the fruit she ate it and gave it to her husband ... and they ate it, 7 and their eyes opened and they recognized that they were naked.
The disappearance of the object of knowledge
But he had vanished from their sight......	and they sewed fig leaves together and made loin clothes for themselves.

[...]


The two disciples correspond to Adam and Eve through their blindness when confronted with the obvious.

Jesus plays a three fold role: that of:

• the snake as instructor;
• Eve, the mediator of Adam's salvation, as the giver of fruit;
• nakedness as an object of the knowledge necessary for salvation.

When the Emmaus narrative was written, gnosis no longer consisted solely of self-knowledge, tat is, knowing who one is : a divine element, naked and divested of perfection by imprisonment in a body of mud; where on comes from : the world above; to where one will return : into the same world above beside the Father (Extracts from Theodotus, 78). One must also believe in Jesus, the saviour from the world above, who is not the Jewish messiah, but who must be presented to the Jews as if he were to give them the possibility of believing in him.

As regards the Eucharist bread, the blessing address to the Father in the form preserved in the Didache IX,3 and X,2, "We give thanks to you, Our Father, for the knowledge you have let us know through Jesus your servant," endows it with the sacramental virtue of the tree of knowledge. The Breaking of the Bread makes it accessible to men of all times and all places.

[...]

In the Emmaus narrative Jesus is identified, on the one hand, with the serpent of Paradise, the instructor sent by the Father to incite Adam and Eve "to eat knowledge" and, on the other hand, with the (revised and corrected) messiah awaited by the Jews.

[...]

... [some of] 'the gnostic movement' based on gnosis, the knowledge of the path towards salvation...would have sprung directly from the exegesis of the Paradise narrative...an exegesis drawn from ideas of Greek philosophy about god and the sould, ideas which were current at the time ...

Secondly, the Christian movement would have sprung from [aspects of] the gnostic movement through [a] rejudaizing process [for example] in successive redefinitions of the eucharistic bread and of Jesus himself in the Feeding Narrative[s].

But who is the Saviour Jesus now identified with the god revealed in the Old Testament? He [was], as the Emmaus-Paradise narrative[s] [parallels] suggest, the instructor serpent of Paradise. The saviour serpent [was] venerated as such and identified with Jesus by the gnostic sects enumerated in Book V of the Elenchos, in particular by the Naassenes (from the Hebrew naash, serpent). According to the Sethians, the serpent is the perfect Word of the Light from above (=of the Supreme God). According to the gnostics of whom Irenaeus wrote, Eve believed what the serpent said as easily as if she had heard the Son of God. Jesus himself, in the Apocryphon of John (BG 57,20), declared it was he who had incited Eve to eat the fruit. Mani, according to Theodorus Bar Khonai, [said] that Jesus the luminous came to Adam and roused him from a deathlike sleep, that Adam knew who he was, enslaved in the stench of Darkness. The Ophites (from the Greek ophis, snake), according to Epiphanius (Pan. 37), celebrated the Eucharist by breaking and distributing loaves of bread around which a living serpent was coiled, which makes this Eucharist, like that of Emmaus, into a substitute from the fruit of Paradise. The serpent, the Peratae said, appeared in human form during Herod's reign …

The divine being formerly hidden behind the serpent had to manifest itself as a human being so that he could be attributed with the revelations and saving instructions which his disciples transmitted as logia ('Jesus said...'), and with the institution (at the Feeding narrative) of the sacrament of the Eucharist as a substitute for the fruit of Paradise.

To make the Jews accept this saviour, he had to be identified with one of those men mentioned in the Scriptures, whose coming they awaited: Jesus will be a prophet like Moses and the 'messiah' promised by Daniel. And to make the gnostic saviour coincide with the Jewish messiah, both of them had to be redefined: the former will become true man, the latter will become True God. It is towards this conciliation that the Evangelists work[ed] by giving Jesus a simili-biography. The function of the Emmaus narrative, for example, [would have been] to affirm that the heavenly crucifixion of the saviour by the Archons — terminating the reign of astral fatality and alluded to in 1 Co 2:8 —, transposed into a Roman-style crucifixion 'by the archpriests and archons', was predicted of the messiah.

So the serpent effects a double exchange of identity with the Jewish god: firstly, with its negative aspect, as the Jewish god, who has become the devil, is identified with him; secondly, with its positive aspect, as the saviour, who was concealed in the serpent, becomes the Lord Sabaoth. The saviour Jesus is, furthermore, both the Jewish god and his messiah, who has become the messiah of the Father: Christ. He will be called Jesus Christ.

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Jean Magne (1993) From Christianity to Gnosis and from Gnosis to Christianity, Brown Judaic Studies 28; p p.68-69