 And welcome everyone back to another episode of We Are Being Transformed podcast. Guests today need no introduction. Both of them are doing paramount work with Ford facing public scholarship. Dr. Andrew Henry with his YouTube channel, Religion for Breakfast, and Dr. Justin Sledge with his amazing treasure trove of esoteric content, esoterica. So gentlemen, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Welcome. Welcome, Dr. Sledge. Yeah, thank you for having me as well. So our topic today is something that is not without a controversy to say the least. It is the idea of Gnosticism as a term, whether useful or as some camps would say not useful and actually problematic. As a monolithic term, Gnosticism is to say the least problematic. You have scholars who agree with the validity of the label provided at meet certain criteria. You know, this includes scholars like David Brackie, Bentley Leiden, Dylan M. Burns. On the other side of the fence, you have scholars like Michael A. Williams, Karen King, and more recently, Matthew David Litwa, who argue for a complete dismantling of the term. In fact, I recall Dr. Litwa saying that he wrote an entire book on found Christianities and he didn't have to use the word Gnostic once while going through all the different groups. So starting with you, Dr. Sledge and Dr. Henry, I'd love to hear your thoughts after. Can you give us a brief overview of why Gnosticism is such a controversial term, especially within academia? I think it's controversial for lots of reasons. One of which is it's kind of a polemical term like pagan. It's one of these terms that we've inherited from a polemical tradition that really colors our ability to appreciate these texts on our own. Because once we call them Gnostic, then they already have this kind of layer on top of them. So I think that's one of the first concerns that people have about the term. Also, I think that the other overriding concern is even within the category of what we call Gnostic text, everything from Catholicism in the Middle Ages to Kabbalah in the Middle Ages, all the way back to the text of the Nagamadi Library, these texts are much more heterogeneous than they are monolith. And so putting them in one basket, again, distorts our ability to appreciate how complicated they are. And furthermore, there are texts in the New Testament that seem to also prioritize some kind of knowing as a salvific, as a soteriological category. So at that point, the category not only does it capture, it can capture books that we would call Gnostic, like the Apocryphon of John or something like that, but also maybe some letters of Paul. So the problem is that, and I'll say more about this maybe in a minute, is that categories sometimes are useful, but they're never true. And so insofar as categories are, I'm revealing my nominalism chops here, but insofar as they're useful, great, but they're never true. And Gnosticism, maybe one of these categories that has actually outlived its usefulness. Yeah, I'm glad that Justin brought up the idea of like the usefulness of categories. This is one of the greatest pastimes of religious studies scholars is trying to dissect the categories that we use. And if they're deemed to be not useful, you can get rid of them. And I think Dr. Litwa, being able to write an entire book and not needing to use the term kind of shows how useless the term is. I would say I would write a book on magic and I would try not to use the word magic. And I think I could write the entire book without using that term because the category is so fraught. And as fraught as the category religion is, I think it would be shockingly difficult to write an entire book on Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism without using the term religion. So I think a category like that can be useful if we're talking about groups that are oriented toward the supernatural, that have functionaries that we call priests, that have things that they call sacred. Like the word religion does a lot of work bringing these groups together. But as soon as you start applying the category religion to everything, whether it's fandoms or political parties, then the term starts falling apart. And I think this is what happened to Gnosticism. It's trying to be an umbrella term that is too big of an umbrella to be particularly useful. Yeah, like you said, Gnosticism is a label. It's interesting and interestingly enough, just like labels like religion like magic or just in these modern terms, these are things that are products of post 17th century thought, right? So in the Greco-Roman world, you have words like Gnosis, Gnosticos, Gnosticoi. These are all terms that were used to denote certain ways of knowing things, right? So much of a variety of different categories going on. These are people having conversations either within their own group or with each other through time. So I think a good example of Gnosticism just as almost a useless label to denote us versus them is the fact that you have no less than Clement of Alexandria, right? Using that term all the time to refer to the Christians or the true Gnostics. And he's not talking about like any kind of like heretical group or anything like that for lack of a better term. So getting to categories and labels and kind of honing in on that a little bit. Are we losing something in translation when we don't read say Apocryphon of John or Gospel of Judas as a strictly Sethian text? A book of like a book of Thomas the Contender as Thomasine Christianity or the Gospel of Truth as Valentinian, etc. So Dr. Henry, if you could start us on that, if you have any thoughts? I think, I mean, it depends on the category. Actually, don't mind Valentinianism as a category because it does get closer to an actual social group. So part of the problems of Gnosticism is it used to be applied to like a religion. Like, oh, there must have been some sort of church of Gnosticism back there and people would gather in a group on Sundays and call themselves Gnostics. And that isn't the case. But Valentinus was an actual person who had actual students. There's, you know, Irenaeus complains about people that have that are within his own church that go to these meetings and, you know, talk about Valentinian ideas. So that term is useful insofar as it kind of seems to be like a stream of thought, at least from one teacher that might have been an actual social group. Whether we need to like call the texts, like all these texts that are under this one umbrella, Valentinian, like it might not necessarily be necessary. But I think it does more, it highlights more about the text that it does obscure and calling them Gnostic. I think obscures something by calling the Valentinian might be useful. I'm always a fan of using more precise categories. So instead of saying magic, let's just say, like there's types of rituals. There are rituals that heal. There are rituals that protect. There are ones that exorcise demons. And so we're using much more precise terminology. So I would float instead of you saying Gnosticism talk about, okay, there are people who believe in like emanationist theology where the one true God emanated like a light from a candle. You know, the Yazidis talk about God emanating the Mandians do. So there's like groups, religious groups, actual social groups that we can say have emanationist theology or groups that have a demagogical understanding of the divine that there was this one evil being that created the universe or the, you know, the world as we know it. So those in my mind are more precise than lumping people that are emanationist and demagogical all under this one umbrella. You're exactly right. I mean, I would also like to, you know, zoom in a lot closer. You know, I take my lead, I guess, from the philosophy of science where in the philosophy of science, we talk about theories having resolutions where a low resolution theory captures a lot. But it explains that lot very poorly. Whereas a high resolution theory captures a very little, but it explains the interactions very, very well. And so, you know, you're always thinking in the philosophy of science, a good theory is one that strikes a balance between a high resolution, a low resolution theory. And you can zoom in and out as you need in the philosophy of science to describe your theories. I tend to do the same thing when I think about categories like this, like Gnosticism. That's a really low resolution category that like probably doesn't as much harm as it does good. But yeah, when we can zoom in on a category like Sethianizing, you know, Platonizing Sethianism or something like that, that's a pretty precise text. And even getting into some like Valentinianism, recognizing that the Eastern and Western Valentinians didn't agree with one another. I think that's a, it sounds really granular, but this was a, you know, this was a community or a movement of some kind. And they, you know, over time, they existed for hundreds of years and they didn't agree with each other, at least toward the end of it all. And so, and then you get other texts like Thunder Perfect Mind and you ask yourself, what in the world is this? This is, I don't even know what this is. And so I think that the task is we need rather the question, the question is not whether it is spent with Gnosticism or not. I think actually everyone kind of agrees with that, even though in practice, and especially with book titles, they'll never be off, you know, like the word magic. Okay, we'll book you right. You know, some publishers can stick the word magic on there to sell it, unfortunately. But I think the question is not what to do with Gnosticism. It's what to do with how to develop new categories. So talking about demi-urgical traditions, talking about malevolent demi-urgical traditions, and then rethinking those categories, I think is really the task of the day. And I take Michael Williams' point, right, that he, you know, the demolishing work he did and rethinking Gnosticism is fantastic. But, you know, what do we do with that? You know, what do I do when I want to make a YouTube video about the Apocryphon of John? What do I call it? And then I think that question there is, what do I do? What do I call that tradition? And how do I relate it to other traditions? So I think that the question really is a one about, you know, developing new categories like, you know, thinking up what Piste Sophia and the books of Joe are. Those are very strange types of this tradition, this emanationist tradition. And then, you know, relating it to the Mandians or the Yazidis makes it even more Kabbalah, makes it even more complicated. So, yeah, I think the question for me is, what do these new categories look like? And how can we not recreate the air of very, very low resolution, comfy categories that obscure more than clarify? Yeah. And because Gnosticism has its roots as a polemical term, it often obscures that we're often talking about Christian groups. So, like, if we're going to call Valentinianism Gnostic, let's also not forget that it's a variety of Christianity. Like, Valentinus was trying to interpret texts in the New Testament and how to fit Jesus Christ into his worldview and the theology he was building. So I like highlighting the varieties of Christianity. And by calling these groups Gnostic, I feel like people are trying to dodge around the fact that these were forms of Christianity that we're trying to wrestle with the same sort of idea as that, you know, Orthodox Christians were also wrestling with. Like, who was Jesus? How does he fit into this plan of salvation? Why does God seem to act this way in this text and differently in this text? So they're wrestling with Christian theological questions. And popular, I think, and popular Christian movements. Not, you know, we tend to think of them as minoritarian, but clearly Valentinus had a following at Rome. I mean, not that the Bishop of Rome was the Pope or whatever in the second century. But yeah, these are not marginal groups. And we see, for instance, the Apocryphon of John being translated into different dialects of Coptic. This text is moving. And it's, you know, that's a vernacular language at some level and people are reading it and are, you know, someone's reading it. So I think that, again, also to think of them as sort of a fringe, you know, tiny little group or something. I think it's also probably, again, like you said, Andrew trying to dodge the fact that these are these are Christianities and had things gone one way or the other. Things could have gone. Things could have. There's no reason to think that Valentinism couldn't have survived as a as a form of Christianity, despite persecution, just like the Waldensians did from the Middle Ages. Of those two answers. Thank you both for that. And I think it's also, you know, important that you're you, Dr. Henry, you brought up the the concept of how labeling everything Gnosticism obscures the fact that these were all Christian groups. And like, like people in general, these people aren't always agreeing. Like we're talking about Valentinism, Valentinianism. And I think a good example of that is looking at something like the testimony of truth from Nag Hammadi, which is a Valentinian text. But Berger Pearson, all that implies it was written by Julius Cassianus and the Valentinian stuff just wasn't hardcore enough, right? He was he was really searching out for those deep cuts and B sides of the aesthetic truth. So, you know, for him, Valentinian stuff just didn't cut it. He wanted to go even further. So yeah, if we just label everything under this monolithic category, it tends to obscure that. Yeah, not everybody agrees within these supposed Gnostic groups. It tends to give the impression perhaps false that everybody within these groups agreed. So, you know, even within the heretical groups, they're not always on the same page. Those are some of my favorite texts or the polemical texts that are found at Nag Hammadi that are interesting because I don't know. I'd be curious to know what you think about this, Andrew. Is it seems like they polemicize more amongst themselves, at least from the texts that survive than they do with the orthodox orthodox people? Like we see them polemicizing with each other and maybe it's a narcissism of minor difference. But for instance, there's no, I don't know, any texts that take the task Irenaeus. It's as if they felt they didn't need to or that the text didn't survive and there's a reference to them either. So it's interesting that most of their polemics are actually targeted each other, you know, inter Gnostic beef, I call it, as opposed to them taking on Clement or Irenaeus or, you know, Hippolytus or whatever. We don't ever see them respond directly to those folks. Yeah, and that's maybe because and because we like those, you know, anti Irenaeus polemics, maybe we don't have this term Irenaeusianism or something. You know, like the fact that we have the Marcianites and the Valentinians is because Irenaeus uses these terms. He's like, they call themselves Christians, but we call them by the name of their, you know, the root person, whether it's Valentinus or Marcian. And so even even these terms that I'm a little more comfortable using are not, you know, they're polemical outsider terms and no one for Justin Martyr says like the Justinianism Christianity. Like it's we use this other really broad term, you know, Orthodox or proto Orthodox, which is kind of ironic. Brachy points out in his commentary on the Gospel of Judas that the parameters for current scholarly categories of Scythianism and the Scythian myth originated with Hans Martin Schenke in the 70s. So the Scythian myths motif, you know, stuff you find in Apocryphon of John, Origin of the World, Reality of the Rulers is you have these motifs that include a system of invisible, Virgin Spirit, the Barbello and the self originating Aeon with their attendant luminaries. And importantly, the race of the seat of Scyth. So no one in scholarship really questioned these two hard until a momentous event when we actually found the Gospel of Judas, if you agree, Dr. Slick, but much like when you're reading the Talmud. It's a text that shows no matter what group. There's always a disagreement, some disappointment, some not everybody's going to be happy with everything, right? So these people are having this conversation. I think it all goes back to I tend to view Christianity almost as like a game engine or like Dungeons and Dragons, like you have like a certain set of rules and every dungeon master can take those and they can, you know, adapt them to whatever they need in terms of their community's needs and whatever they're they're doing at the time. So I think my final question is going to be what light can Gospel of Judas cast on the diversity within these Christianities themselves, these alternative Christianities? So what is Gospel of Judas telling us today about these groups 2000 years ago? I mean, I think it's just what you said that we impose categories on history. History doesn't work in categories and history doesn't give a damn about our categories. And so insofar as history doesn't care about it and these are real people writing texts. It's unsurprising that we're going to get a lot of variance in this. And the moment we get a variant, we should be, I don't know, that should be that should be completely normal. The fact that anyone was shocked that we found a text with a slightly different emphasis on something. That's what's bizarre is how it's what's shocking is how rigid scholars can be in their thinking as opposed to the fact that history is a mess. So of course, I mean, when we look through texts like I even think of the Corpus hermeticum, you know, if you go through the Corpus hermeticum and say, OK, this is a monistic this is a monistic system of of soteriology. You'll get three or four text in dualism is right there. It's not the dominant form, but there's dualist text in the Corpus hermeticum. So again, these people are fundamentally interested in salvation. They're not interested in philosophical. This is not Kant. They're not trying to tell you a rigorous systematic story that is deduced from tight logical categories that never has exceptions. They're interested in in in in a in salvation, I think. And so when your priority is salvation, it's unsurprising that when they shuffle the decks, they're going to be weird cards in there sometimes. And so I think that's that's completely within the realm of the capacity or the tolerances that we should expect from from from human beings. That's true of the New Testament, too. I mean, just some it's a relatively heterogeneous, you know, tech, even how salvation is affected in the New Testament, whether it's the atonement theory, the ransom theory, it's not even clear from from that library. What exactly is going? What exactly is this soteric soteriological mechanism that is accomplished by the life teachings and execution of Jesus? If we can't find that in the New Testament, we shouldn't expect it from another heterogeneous book selection of books that were never added together as much as Nakamati was ever meant to be one homogeneous collection. Of course, it never was. So I think it just shows us what we know about history. Is that what that what leaves out the mess is not history. I think a book like the Gospel of Judas helps us. It gives us a window into a type of Christianity that we don't often see today. And the categories that my doctoral advisor, David Frankfurt, uses is syncretists versus anti syncretists, as opposed to orthodox versus heretic or something like that. So, you know, syncretism being the mixing and matching of religious ideas. It's it's very much a active, creative, innovative sort of way to do religion where you're kind of making a bricolage of your your religious practice or ideology. And when we look into early Christian literature, we see a lot of anti syncretists like, oh, don't do this. Don't use magical amulets. Don't visit shrines in such a way that you're trying to divine the future using the pagan gods. And I think when we see when we apply this this binary to texts, we see like a effort to canonize texts and then we see Christians that really didn't care as much and they they happily created what I call fanfiction. They'll take us a side character like Judas and then kind of build out a story around him or a side character like Thomas and build out a story around him. So I see it as kind of a syncretist kind of perspective where you're creatively building on the the the mythos as opposed to trying to build a boundaries around it. So I think it's a more helpful way to think about like varieties of early Christianity when you can kind of identify, OK, this this particular church leader is syncretizing here and this and maybe sometimes he's anti syncretist in a different perspective. So it helps us see, you know, think of this text in a non polemical sense. It's not fringe. It's it's not heretical. It's just a different variety of Christianity that is more syncretizing. I would push it back even further and say that's just what the Gospels are. Like they're they're a shared fragments of memory of which basically Jesus fanfiction gets written around the narrative structure. Again, I think the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas, or the the infancy Gospels, they're just continuing the tradition that was at the very beginning of literally the earliest monuments we have to Christianity, which are the the manuscripts themselves and the stories that are captured in them. So in fact, it's a it's a continuity, not a discontinuity. And this goes back to what you said earlier that history doesn't care about our categories and categories are nothing but boundaries and the boundary doesn't exist unless there's someone there to defend the boundaries to enforce it. So, you know, the the border between the United States and Canada doesn't really exist. Like I could walk up there and it's not drawn there on the line and five hundred years ago, it wasn't there. But it exists in so far as the Canadian and the U.S. border guards exist to enforce it. So the boundary between a canonical text and a non canonical text is in many respects that, you know, construct defended by certain certain people. And the same way goes with Gnostic versus not Gnostic. And in many respects of the people defending the boundary over the 20th century where scholars saying that this category mattered. Well, gentlemen, this has been an amazing discussion. Thank you so much for letting your time and your expertise to this. Thank you very much. Have a great night. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.