The Gnostics: Who Did They Believe Jesus Christ Is?

Note: The word Christ like the word Buddha ("the enlighted one") is not a name but a title. Christ (Greek) or Messiah (Hebrew) means "the anointed one." Jesus (Greek) or Joshua (Hebrew) is the name of the historical person. For the Gnostics, the Christ was a spiritual principle. So, in this discussion, it is possible to refer, depending upon the beliefs under consideration to "Jesus and the Christ" or "Jesus or the Christ" or "Jesus the Christ."

In the canonical (New Testament) Gospels, it is recorded that Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do men say that I am?" We can come up with two answers to that question that are totally at odds with each other.

First, Jesus is a physical being, and nothing more, a Jewish teacher or rabbi, Joshua ben Joseph ("son of Joseph"), as far as we know, a good man, a great ethical teacher, who, in his early thirties, got into trouble with the authorities, and was brutally executed. And... he still lives... in our memory, for the example he set us and for the teachings he gave us.

Second, Christ is purely spiritual, not tainted by material existence, so much so that those who thought they saw him actually saw just a fantasy, an image. Today, we might say a hologram, something that appears to have three dimensions but is as insubstantial as the light of which it is formed.

As radically different as these answers are, they are both at odds with orthodox Christianity, which dismisses both as heresy. (Orthodoxy refers, literally, to "straight thinking," just as orthodontics refers to "straight teeth.") For the orthodox, Jesus is fully human, born of a human mother, but a mother who is a virgin, since he is also fully spiritual, conceived of the Holy Spirit. Orthodox Christians (such as Mel Gibson) demand blood and suffering in a sacrifice extreme enough to overcome the sin and death of every human being, so that we can all attain atonement (at-one-ment) with God.

If Jesus were just a good person and great teacher who got killed, so what? How is his death any different from the deaths of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? But, if the Christ is only spirit, then, again, there can be no blood, no suffering, no sacrifice. (Can you nail a spirit to a cross? Can a spirit bleed?)

The Gnostics offered a vision of a non-material Christ who did not suffer and die on the cross. In one terrible Gnostic story, when Simon of Cyrene carries the cross of Jesus (nowadays, scholars believe that it was just the horizontal crossbar), the Christ pulls some sort of switch so that a man is actually crucified, not the un-crucifiable Christ but Simon, just someone who had taken his family out to a nice afternoon of crucifixion-good, free, family-friendly entertainment was hard to find-and ended up being in the wrong-est place at the wrong-est time imaginable.

Read about the Gnostics.

Gnostics and Gnosticism: A Guide for Teachers and Students: Read it.

Who Were They?Read it.

How Do We Know About Them, and Why Should We Care? Read it.

What Were Their Sources for Authority? Read it.

What Were Their Most Important Beliefs? Read it.

The Gospel of Thomas: Read it.

Read my articles about variations of Christianity here.