The First Christians / pt. 2
Very occasionally in Jewish scripture, man crosses the chasm separating him from God. Doing so is fraught with danger, for we recall that Moses could not even look upon the face of God (Ex 3:6), and when the prophet Isaiah “saw the Lord sitting on a throne” he exclaimed: “Woe is me! I am lost, for… my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!” (Isa 6:1 & 5.) If merely seeing the Lord is anathema, then for man to ascend to heaven is far beyond the pale of Judaism. And, indeed, the later rabbis severely proscribed any consideration or study of such “ascents,” whether visionary or not.
However, at least two anomalous figures in Jewish scripture broke the mould. Both subsequently gave birth to enormous bodies of literature over many centuries. Enoch was a patriarch in the seventh generation from Adam (Gen 5:19), and Elijah was a 9th century BCE prophet (1 Kgs 18). Enoch and Elijah are “anomalous” because both ascended to heaven. Furthermore, they did not die.
In Christian scripture, of course, Jesus also ascended to heaven and overcame death (Mt. 28:6 etc). Some even opined that he was Elijah redivivus (Mk 6:15).
In important ways, then, the Christian Jesus follows a pattern that had existed only at the fringes of Judaism. Now, “ascending to heaven” is a quintessentially gnostic trope. When Enoch walked with the angels he learned all sorts of heavenly secrets—thus making him a conduit to mankind of valuable secret traditions. (In an alternative Jewish tradition, Seth assumes the role of such a conduit.) In Enochian literature (of which a good deal exists), “heaven” is the place of wisdom—gnosis—as Enoch himself reveals:
Wisdom could not find a place in which she could dwell;
but a place was found for her in the heavens.
Then Wisdom went out to dwell with the children of the people,
but she found no dwelling place [on the earth].
So Wisdom returned to her place
And she settled permanently among the angels.
[1 En 42:1-2, underlining added.]
Much overlooked is that the name Enoch itself means “understand, acquire by experience, perceive” and is derived from the root cH-N-K.
The earliest ascent of Enoch in Jewish literature occurs in Genesis, in three cryptic verses:
Enoch walked with the angels after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with the angels; then he was no more, because God took him. (Gen 5:22-24)
Later Enochic literature (beginning in the third century BCE) expanded upon this short Genesis narrative. The portion of 1 Enoch known as the Book of Watchers (chps. 1-36) describes two cosmic journeys by the patriarch and his ascension to the heavenly throne room (esp. 14:8–16:4). Because of his superhuman knowledge, Enoch serves as an intermediary between angelic groups and even evokes fear and trembling among angels when he approaches them (1 En 1:5; 13:3).
In the first person singular, Enoch summarizes his unique wisdom: “And I, Enoch, alone saw the sight, the ends of everything; and no man has seen what I have seen” (1 En 19:3). We note that several gnostic elements are here combined—deathlessness, the knowledge of heavenly secrets, and the instruction of others. Compare the famous beginning of the Gospel of Thomas:
Here are the secret words that Jesus the Living spoke, and that Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down.
And he said: “Whoever understands the meaning of these words will not experience death.”
Here too we have (a) deathlessness, (b) secret knowledge, and (c) instruction.
Enoch’s ascents to the heavenly realm gave birth to an esoteric Jewish genre known as hechaloth (“palaces”) literature (pertaining to visions of ascents into heavenly palaces), always frowned upon by the rabbis of later centuries.
Tension between proto-gnosticism and normative Judaism is also evident in the anomalous figure of Elijah, who ascended “in a whirlwind into heaven” with “a chariot of fire and horses of fire” (2 Kgs 1:11). This astonishing episode contributed to later Jewish merkabah (“chariot”) mysticism, which the rabbis similarly considered heretical.
Ezekiel also had visions “of the appearance of the likeness of the glory” of the LORD riding upon a great throne chariot (Ez 1:28). The foregoing anomalous figures in Judaism prefigure the Christian Jesus the Nazarene, a prophet who (1) pleased God so much as to become “my beloved son”—an echo of Enoch’s promotion to quasi-angelic status in 1 Enoch; (2) taught heavenly secrets; (3) overcame death; (4) ascended into heaven; and (5) will be the eschatological cosmic judge (1 En 48:9–10).
The visions of and ascents to God in Jewish scripture mentioned above also prefigure the trajectory of Christian theology. In what I have termed Stage I “Jesus” (“Savior”) is the pure gnosis—the wisdom that saves. This stage is detectable only in certain logia and parables of the canonical gospels, of the Gospel of Thomas, and of a few other (suppressed and often fragmentary) texts. In Stage II “Jesus” is the spirit of God that unites with a worthy human (I CE). We detect this intermediate stage in works such as the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Gospel of Mark. And finally in Stage III “Jesus” is none other than the God-man Jesus of Nazareth (mid-II CE+). In other words, Jesus christology itself develops from the pure gnosis to the Creator of the World.
In the gnostic view, however, understanding already is divinity. This view was appreciated long before the Christian era:
Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, understanding good and evil…” (Gen 3:22)
Adam was expelled from Eden because he understood and thus became “like” God.
In the gnostic view, gnosis saves. There is no need for any further development. In fact, further development is a corruption, a devolution. The gnostic ascension (read: resurrection) happens in this life, not post-mortem. It is an “enlightenment.”
Gnostics, proto-gnostics, and theologies of ascent have been anathema to organized religions since such organizations existed. Though efficacious and potent for the individual, the gnostic way is a fatal handicap and decentralizing force in a communal setting. After all, no church is possible if its various members each claim a direct connection with the divine. Such a claim renders priesthoods, scriptures, and rituals entirely superfluous. The gnostic requires only effort and willpower to attain his own salvation (see, e.g., GTh 2, 5, 35, 56; Mk 12:30 etc).
It is no surprise that, in what became normative Judaism, the ascent of man to the divine is severely rebuked. For his hubris, in the Genesis account Adam is summarily ejected from the Garden of Eden. Instead of being rewarded for understanding the nature of good and evil, he is condemned “to till the ground from which he was taken.”
But the ascents (and attempted ascents) to God did not end with Adam. As we have seen above, they can be found at the fringes of Judaism, in the form of visions, dreams, and anomalous events such as Enoch “walking with the angels.” These nebulous ascents constitute a “Jewish proto-gnosticism” that involves the promotion of a human being to semi-divine, quasi-angelic status. This also seems to have been the view of the evangelist Mark, whose Jesus is a man imbued with the spirit of God. In the subsequent canonical gospels, however, Jesus is promoted from intermediate/angelic status to God himself—he is born of a virgin, rises bodily from the grave, was pre-existent (GJn), and will return as the eschatological judge.