Rev. Fr. Frank Marangos, D.Min., Ed.D.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 1:9
The early Church spent much of its time debunking heresies. Wrestling with the chaos of contending beliefs the Church was compelled to differentiate itself between Marcionism, Arianism, Nestorianism and other ancient lies by legitimately formulating its theological views through the gathering of both clergy and laity in Ecumenical Councils. While most scholars agree that these doctrinal battles culminated in the development of the non-negotiable tenets of the Nicene Creed (4th Century), the recent emergence of heretically based novels, films and magazine articles attest that the X-Files of ancient defeated voices are as much a temptation today as they were in the second, third and fourth centuries.
The rage of the early Christian world, X-Files might be described as exotic religious texts that claimed to express truths about Jesus, his mother, the content and interpretation of the scriptures, and the nature of the church. An amalgamation of Greek Philosophy, magic and eastern ideas, these manuscripts coalesced into a sectarian heresy that came to be known as Gnosticism. Based on the Greek word for knowledge (gnosis) Gnostics held the central belief that salvation was not accomplished through the Church that was founded on the mystery of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ but rather on an individual's ability to discover true knowledge and wisdom on his or her own! Whereas Orthodox Christianity preaches salvation to all that will accept it, Gnosticism espouses the belief that only an elite will be able to comprehend the breadth of hidden truth.
Fortunately, the false teachings of Gnosticism and those that pertained to the other heresies of early Christianity were debunked by theologians such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, and Athanasius, who emphasized the apostolic exposition of revealed truth. For these great defenders of the Faith, the truth of the gospel was not a matter of a secret but of a sacred tradition that centered on the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Transmitted by a legitimate apostolic succession of bishops that verified the authentic and continuous voice of the apostles, this sacred truth X-posed the illogical doctrines of the Gnostics as ridiculous . . . as worthless X-Files!
For nearly two millennia the X-ed Files of Gnosticism remained buried in the arid sands of ancient history. In 1945, however, a number of early Christian Gnostic papyri manuscripts, translated from Greek into Coptic, were discovered by local peasants near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. Since the discovery of these documents, there has been a resurgence of interest in Gnostic doctrines throughout the world. In fact, numerous social scholars (Armstrong, H; Bloom, H; Pagels, E; Hitchcock, J) have all noted a strong Gnostic trend in contemporary media. The vogue of mystical and exotically charged books such as The Da Vinci Code and The Jesus Papers are the direct result of the re-emergence of these ancient worn-out debates. The appearance of Gnostic creedal tenants such as: (a) the suspicion of authority, (b) private spirituality, (c) the rejection of external forms of worship, (d) the distortion of sexuality, (e) the rejection of bodily Incarnation of God, and (f) the refutation of absolute truths, attest to the Old Testament exhortation quoted above . . . indeed, "what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
According to Dan Brown, the Jesus Seminar, and Good Morning America, the traditional gospels written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John can no longer be trusted. Instead, we are asked to discard 2,000 years of reliable witness and scholarship and replace it with the message conveyed in "new gospels." We are encouraged to look to architectural symbols, secret rituals and previously discarded apocryphal texts such as the Gospels of Thomas and Judas for the reliable and authentic understanding of the nature of the Church and the Person of Jesus Christ. Confronted with such an irrational invitation from a frenzied media to discard what is valid for what is spurious one cannot but recall Saint Paul's admonition to the Galatians concerning the Gnostic pretense of new knowledge:
"I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!" (Galatians 1:6-9)
What can be done to guard the authentic Christian message from those that would once again attempt to de-construct it? What can we do to help our children differentiate fact from fantasy articulated in novels like The Da Vinci Code that has sold over 46 million copies in 35 languages? I would suggest that we turn our collective attention to the prayerful study of the theological writings of the early Church Fathers . . . the ramparts that sustained the orthodoxy of the Gospel in the past! In so doing, we will begin to develop our understanding of an Orthodox Christian world-view that will provide the intellectual scaffolding and filter for successfully distinguishing truth from perversion of sugar-"coded" falsehood.
Although there are many variants, at its core Gnosticism asserts the belief that that the world in which we now live is our prison. Having rejected the notion that God is the Creator of the cosmos with all its potential sacramental elements, the life-goal of the Gnostic is to escape the created order through the knowledge (gnosis) of deep self-illumination. By abandoning the search for God, however, humanity is destined to rummage blindly through life, running from one "clue" to another, like Langdon, the pathetic character in Dan Brown's novel, trying in vain to discover the cipher to the code . . . the grail of our existence!
G. K. Chesterton once said that when people cease believing in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing, but rather, they will believe in anything. The apocryphal myths contained in the X-Files of early heretical texts have once again emerged as the protagonists against the Sacred Tradition of Orthodox Christianity seeking to lead the catechetically uninformed and spiritually fickle into a hollow pursuit whose ultimate destination is death and destruction. Let future generations find us, as we found our forbearers, worthy of defending the apostolic creedal truths of Orthodox Christianity against historical revisionists who base their conspiratorial accounts on the X-Files of ancient lies.
Rev. Dr. Frank Marangos is the Executive Director of Communications and former Director of Religious Education for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. He is an adjunct assistant professor of religious education and homiletics at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Copyright: 2006