Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Competing interpretations of scripture in the early church by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth early Christians interpreted their sacred texts in a variety of ways, some of them a bit bizarre to many modern readers, as I pointed out in my previous post.
[00:00:18] Here I discuss two different views of the matter, one by a gnostic Christian named Ptolemy and the other by the most famous opponent of the Gnostics, Irenaeus.
[00:00:27] Here are the introductions to their discussions that I give in my book after the New Testament, Oxford University Press, 2014.
[00:00:36] After the introductions in the book, I give modern english translations of their discussions themselves, one translated from the coptic and the other from Latin. If your interest is piqued in what they actually say, and in the dozens of other ancient christian writings I provide in the book, check it out.
[00:00:52] Ptolemy's letter to Flora one of the most famous disciples of the christian gnostic Valentinus see the Gospel of Truth was Ptolemy, a renowned gnostic teacher who lived in Rome in the mid second century. From Ptolemy's own hand comes one of the clearest expositions of gnostic ideas in a letter addressed to a woman named Flora, a non gnostic Christian who Ptolemy is concerned to educate into the higher realms of knowledge of the faith. The letter is just the beginning of Ptolemys instruction. Regrettably, his subsequent lessons have been lost, but it concerns a central component of his gnostic views, his understanding of the Bible. The proper interpretation of the Bible, Ptolemy avers, depends on understanding the nature of its divine inspiration. Those who maintain that it was authored by the perfect God and father, for example, the proto orthodox Christians, err because a perfect being could not inspire laws that are imperfect. Those who claim that it was written by his adversary the devil, for example. Other groups of gnostics also err because an evil deity could not inspire laws that are just.
[00:02:01] Instead, there is a good intermediate between these two, the just but imperfect and harsh God who created the world. It was he who inspired parts of the Bible. Other parts, though, derive from Moses himself and yet others from the elders around him. Those that are from God can themselves be divided into three parts, those that Jesus fulfilled, for example, the ten commandments, those that he abolished, for example, an eye for an eye, and those that he has symbolically transformed, for example, ceremonial laws. Ptolemy explicitly bases his views on the teachings of Paul and especially Jesus himself.
[00:02:42] This letter has not been transmitted independently and was not present among the Nag Hammadi writings, but can only be found in quotations in the writings of the fourth century heresy hunter Epiphanius. See book 33 of the medicine chest.
[00:02:57] In my book Ptolemys letter then follows Irenaeus against the heresies we have seen a selection from Irenaeus five volume heresyological work against the heresies already in selection 35 and chapter seven. In the selection given here, Irenaeus attacks his valentinian gnostic opponents for how they used scripture to support their theological views. Irenaeus considers the gnostic methods of interpretation bizarre, arbitrary, and even laughable, and he does his best both to mock them and to show their inadequacies.
[00:03:32] In his view, the Valentinians employ symbolic interpretations of texts that have no relationship at all to their literal meanings, and they rearrange the words of a text to make it say something that was completely at odds with what the author literally meant in a famous image. Irenaeus likens this latter interpretative approach to someone who takes a mosaic portrait of a great king and rearranges all the small pebbles that make up the portrait to make them resemble a wild dog, claiming that this is what the author had in mind all along.
[00:04:04] In the final section, Irenaeus argues that his valentinian opponents string together unrelated texts willy nilly in order to create an entirely new text that ends up saying something that cannot be found anywhere in the scripture but only in their own fertile imaginations.
[00:04:22] In my book at this point, I give a translation of the passage from Irenaeus.
