The Jewish Problem: a theological interlude

Protestants are generally untalented at the visual arts

One of the most impressive pieces of Gnostic writing that we have is a second-century letter by one Ptolemy to a woman named Flora. It is a sophisticated interpretation of what the Old Testament could mean for a Gentile Christian.

Although it's easy to over-emphasize the differences between the Old Testament (written by Jews for Jews) and the New Testament (written largely by Jews for a racially mixed movement) in a cartoonish way, it's also not difficult to be struck by their differences. 

Unlike the wisely economical Muhammad, who discarded both of these texts entirely in favor of his own single composition in the Quran*, Christians --being originally a Jewish movement-- added their sacred writings to the Jewish ones they were taught to revere. Thus, the composite library we know as The Bible. 

It's always been an issue. The first Apostolic council in 50 AD was convened over squabbles about Jewish observances for Gentile Christians, especially the painful practice of circumcision and the dietary rules. Bishop Marcion, also a second-century man, was unable to see any way to harmonize Moses' Jehovah and Jesus' Abba and wanted Christians to wash their hands of the Old Testament completely**. As well as a good chunk of the New; his movement may have been the catalyst for the formal definition of the Christian scriptural canon. You can clearly see the problem still percolating in Luther's reformation, pitting Law vs Grace.

One of the salient divergences between Moses and Jesus has to do with the role of sacred law. Sacred law is at the heart of Judaism, witness the famous 613 Torah commandments which orthodox rabbis discern as the essential structure of religious Jewish life.

In the Gospels, Jesus shows a certain ambivalence about the Law of Moses, both in word and in practice. At times defending, at times re-shaping, at times discarding. The dominant Apostolic voice in the New Testament is the converted Pharisee St Paul, who made freedom from the Mosaic Law the centerpiece of his mission to bring Gentiles into the newly emerging Church.

As trolling atheists and cartoonish gays like to point out, the "Good Book" that Christians revere as the written Word of God finds it an abomination not only for men to "lay with a man as with a woman," but to eat shrimp, cross-dress or consult a fortune-teller. Blasphemy, hitting your parents and adultery are capital crimes. Slaughtering whole villages on divine command is not. 

Ptolemy resolves these issues with clarity and sophistication, using a textual theory that sounds a lot like modern Higher Criticism as well as some traditional orthodox Bible interpretation.

Here's his argument:

The Mosaic Law is actually three different sets of legislation combined into a single text, authored by

a. the God of Israel, 

b. Moses himself, and 

c. the elders of Israel. 

In the dispensation of Christ, b and c are of no intrinsic interest any more and can be ignored.

Only the laws authored by Israel's God are of interest. But for a Gnostic, the "God of Israel" is not the ultimate Godhead revealed in Jesus; he is an inferior and preliminary being, a kind of super angel who created the material world. For some Gnostics, he is an evil tyrant. Ptolemy, a Valentinian,  moderately describes him as neither truly divine nor evil, just limited, temporary and local.

Consequently, this "divine" Law is itself divided into three parts:

a. The Ten Commandments, which are indeed holy but incomplete, 

b. the mixed law --just but inferior-- which Jesus replaced with his own teachings, and 

c. the ceremonial laws, transformed into allegorical "images of the soul."

So the Jewish Problem is resolved: for this Gnostic Christian, all that actually remains of the Old Testament legal code is

Jesus' interpretation of the Ten Commandments 

and 

a treasury of spiritualized images 

(Sabbath, circumcision, festivals, Temple rites)
without any prescriptive force.

Brilliant.

The Jewish Problem is not quite so easily solved for Apostolic Christians, who have maintained that the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus were one and the same divinity. Consequently, the influence of the Old Covenant in orthodox Christianity is palpable. But the general lines of thought would not be unfamiliar to anyone who has studied classical theological attempts to work this out.

Ptolemy, unorthodox though he be, way back in the second century, was a trailblazer.

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* But even the Koran presents problems of internal coherence. The struggling early Muhammad of Mecca is very different from the later warlord Muhammad of Medina. Muslim scholars categorize the texts into Meccan and Medinan, and where there is conflict, the earlier texts are abrogated by the later. Given that they also hold the Koran to be eternal and perfect in every respect, this is an odd way for Allah to reveal himself, don't you think?

**There is a school of thought that posits a Jewish origin to Gnosticism and explains its anti-Jewish attitude as the bitter sense of betrayal felt by some faithful Jews, disillusioned at the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.