Eva Dale 0:00 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:32 I'm joined today in the ASC Tech Studios by David Brakke, Professor and Engle Chair in the History of Christianity in the Department of History, The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He studies and teaches the history and literature of ancient Christianity, from its origins through the fifth century, with special interests in asceticism, monasticism, Gnosticism, biblical interpretation and Egyptian Christianity. Dr. Brakke, welcome to Voices. David Brakke 1:01 Thanks for having me, I'm glad to be here. David Staley 1:03 And I know that you study what you term marginal or esoteric Christian groups, and I'd like you to start there. First of all, what groups are we talking about? David Brakke 1:13 We're talking about both groups that are intentionally marginal, like, say, monks, who leave normal life and live apart from others, and we kind of think about monks as kind of a mainstream Christian thing to do, but in the period I study, this was a new phenomenon, and at times not really trusted by the main church bodies. So, I have those kinds of marginal folks. Then, there are Gnostics, who, in some ways, became marginalized by other Christians because they were seen as dangerous and wrong in their opinions and in their views about Christianity. And both of those traditions, both monks and Gnostics and related groups, often have an esoteric dimension to their lives, that is a dimension that is reserved for special people who are part of the "in" group, right, and have some special knowledge that other Christians and other people just don't have. David Staley 1:13 Tell us who the Gnostics are. David Brakke 1:20 The Gnostics were Christians who were active, primarily in the second and third centuries, who apparently called themselves "Gnostics", which comes from a Greek word "gnosis", which means to know or have knowledge. So, these are Christians who are highlighting some special knowledge that they have, and the special knowledge that they had was that the God of the Old Testament, the God who made this world and gave the law to Moses and everything, is not, in fact, the father of Jesus Christ, as other Christians believed, but instead is a kind of hostile lower ruler who dominates human beings and prevents us from knowing the true God, who is a higher, more supreme deity than the God of Genesis, and that's what they know that other Christians did not know. David Staley 3:11 And where does Jesus, then, fit in this pantheon for the Gnostics? David Brakke 3:15 Jesus comes from this higher, previously unknown god, and has come to reveal to us what we seem to have forgotten, that there is this higher God than the God of Genesis, and to reveal that to us, bring that gnosis, knowledge, to human beings, and by dying on the cross to somehow defeat these lower rulers and bring their reign to an end by dying on the cross and rising again. So, Jesus is definitely the Savior, but he is not, as other Christians saw him, the culmination of, say, the Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible. Instead, he's a kind of rescuer from that tradition. David Staley 4:02 Is he divine? David Brakke 4:03 Almost definitely, very, very, very divine. Big time divine. Because he comes from a level of existence beyond what we normally can even have knowledge of. David Staley 4:14 Was he human, then? I mean, if he was crucified, presumably they thought him human? David Brakke 4:17 Yes. They talk about this in different ways. Sometimes... they definitely think the crucifixion really happened, so he must be human in some way, because he suffered and died, but they talk about his humanity in various ways. Sometimes the human Jesus is kind of a, like a garment that the divine being put on, so to speak. In the Gospel of Judas, which is a Gnostic text, Jesus refers to the man who dies on the cross as "the human being who bears me", so the speaking savior is divine, and the human who died on the cross is human, and somehow they're the same person, but they're clearly distinct entities. David Staley 5:05 You referred to the Gnostics as "dangerous and wrong" - in what way? David Brakke 5:10 Well, for other Christians, they were seen as dangerous and wrong precisely because they were teaching that the God of the Old Testament is not the father of Jesus Christ, and in the view of other Christians, this was an opinion that could only be, in their view, demonically inspired, this was not true, and people who paid attention to the message of the Gnostics would clearly lose their salvation. So, the Gnostics were dangerous, and then there were other groups that held similar kind of views to this that were not, strictly speaking, part of the Gnostic community, and what was particularly dangerous about them is that if you just talk to them, you know, they sounded like other Christians. I mean, yes, we pray to Jesus, we worship Jesus and so forth, you know, but their real opinions, so say these other early Christian leaders, will lead people to their spiritual deaths if they follow them. So, quite dangerous. David Staley 6:03 So, tell us what happens to the Gnostics, because they're so dangerous and so wrong, according to other Christians - so what happens to Gnostics? David Brakke 6:10 Eventually they become kind of marginalized, in the sense that other Christians across the Roman imperial world start sharing their information about their teachings and writing stuff, and bishops start to emerge who can do things like discipline their congregations and so forth. And also, new movements arise that are a little less scary as the Gnostics. One Christian that kind of emerged in the middle of the second century was a guy named Valentinus, and he kind of promoted a kind of more gentler version of this view of teaching, and the Gnostics kind of found themselves marginalized and feeling like they kind of lost out. And then, of course, at the beginning of the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine starts to support Christianity, and then there could be active persecution, both active persecution of heretical Christians, but also very active support for what were considered the Orthodox churches, like the Emperor gave these churches lots of money, so there was a lot of incentive for ordinary Christians who weren't spending their time thinking deep thoughts of theology to go to those kinds of churches, rather than, say, a Gnostic church or a Valentinian church. So, you know, you have reports of them still around in the fourth, fifth centuries. People talk about them, but they don't seem to be a big thing, and one of the things that happens, I think, is that it's in the fourth century that monasticism really takes off, and so Christians who had a kind of interest in more esoteric, eggheady, kind of intellectual ways of thinking about Christianity had a new outlet for that that was not heretical. And so, I think a lot of the kind of impulses and desires for kind of higher knowledge, things other people don't really know, and so on, that kind of gets channeled into this movement in a way that is less dangerous to the mainstream church. David Staley 8:12 Are there Gnostics today? David Brakke 8:13 There are indeed. David Staley 8:15 No kidding? David Brakke 8:16 Yes, there is a church that calls itself Ecclesiastica Gnostica, the... or I should say, Ecclesia Gnostica, the Gnostic church. They tend to be more kind of this group I mentioned, Valentinian, followers of a guy named Valentinus in their theology, and not strictly the classic Gnostics, who are a little more hard edged. So, yes, especially since Gnostic writings were discovered in the middle of the 20th century, the Nag Hammadi texts, and then there was another Gnostic codex discovered in the later 20th century. This is kind of made available to people Gnostic literature that they had not had before, and people have taken great interest in these ideas, and even more pervasive is kind of gnostic themes in even pop culture. You know, kind of, in some ways, a movie like "The Matrix", where the world we think is the real world is, in fact, not really the real world, but there's this alternative world, is very much inspired by Gnosticism. And in fact, the makers of the movie had read Gnostic texts and were inspired by it when they made the movie. Blade Runner, too, the guy who did that, Philip Dick, he also was kind of into Gnostic stuff. So, there are active religious people who are now identifying with these ideas, but also it's kind of out there in a culture, in a way that people don't really... sometimes they're just not aware of, but it's there. Eva Dale 9:43 Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences are nationally ranked as top 25 programs, with more than ten of them in the top ten. That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college at artsandsciences.osu.edu. David Staley 10:08 So, you have worked with one of these Gnostic texts, "The Gospel of Judas: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary", you've done this. First of all, tell us about the circumstances of the discovery of this Gospel of Judas? David Brakke 10:22 As I mentioned, there were, in the middle of the 20th century, around 1945, a set of thirteen ancient codices - a codex is simply a book, so not a scroll, but a book like we're used to - were discovered in the Egyptian desert, and they contained Gnostic writings. What happened was - we think, this is a big problem, because the account of what happened is based on, let's just say, sketchy evidence - but we think, in the late 1970s, an additional codex, now known as Codex Tchacos, was discovered in a cave or something or tomb in Egypt, kind of south of Cairo, but not as far down as Aswan, right? David Staley 11:09 The Aswan Dam? David Brakke 11:10 The Aswan Dam, right, so in what we call middle Egypt. And then, its fate is a little bit uncertain. By the time this thing was discovered around, let's say, 1980, everyone was aware of these Nag Hammadi codices, they had become very famous. And so, the people who were involved in having this and finding it knew this was very valuable, that is that, especially in their view, rich Westerners would be interested in this. And so, what ensued was several decades of people trying to get the most money they possibly could for this document, and so the end result was that it was not published, that is made available to scholars to read, until 2006. So, it has only been around for us to read since 2006. David Staley 12:01 In your description there, you're not at all concerned about its authenticity? David Brakke 12:06 No. It has actually gone through a process of radiocarbon dating, which makes clear the papyrus - because it's made of papyrus, which is a plant thing, so it can be radiocarbon dated - it shows that it must originate sometime between the late third century and the early fifth, and we have other, you know, texts from Egypt, from these periods, that are dateable, that as we know when they were written. And it's handwriting, the way it spells words and so on, kind of matches fourth century things. So, we know the text is ancient. It's not a forgery. But the other thing to say is that we already knew there was a Gospel of Judas, because an early Christian author in the late second century, around the year 180 mentions it, and says, Gnostics promote this gospel called the Gospel of Judas. Can you even believe it? So, this is a bad thing, and so forth. But of course, we didn't have it. It was lost. And it had been written in Greek, but this text that was discovered in Egypt was in Coptic, because that's the language of Egyptians at this time. So, it's a translation of an originally Greek text. When the translation was made, we don't know, but the text was certainly copied sometime in the fourth century, in the 300s. David Staley 13:28 So, tell us what we learn in the Gospel of Judas, then? David Brakke 13:32 Well, what we learn is that the Gnostics were very angry at other Christians who did not agree with them. The Gospel of Judas is essentially a work of... it calls itself at the beginning, this is a report of judgment, and indeed it is a judgment that is pronounced against other Christians who, mistakenly or maliciously, however you want to think about it, worship the God of Israel, God of Genesis and so forth, as the father of Jesus Christ, and these Christians mistakenly, maliciously whatever offer the Eucharist as a sacrifice to this God, in commemoration of the sacrifice of Jesus. And this gospel condemns these other Christians for doing it, the other Christians don't show up instead, it's the disciples of Jesus who are there, right? And they, except for Judas, are mistakenly doing these things and saying these things, and Jesus harshly rebukes them. He does not come from that God, he has a different origin, and Judas is the only disciple who understands this. So, it's a - David Staley 14:39 That flips the script, doesn't it? David Brakke 14:41 Totally, yes, yes, he's the one who knows all this, and this is why he... actually, Jesus needs to die, or at least the man who bears Jesus needs to die, and basically the gospel describes Jesus telling Judas why this has to happen, and encouraging Judas to do what he is known to have done. So, yes, but the overall tone of the gospel is highly negative. It really is mostly a condemnation of other Christians and the gods, quote, unquote, that they worship, as doomed and wrong, and yeah, pleads with them to change their ways. David Staley 15:19 What do we learn about Jesus in this gospel? David Brakke 15:22 Well, of course, about Jesus Himself, the real Jesus, absolutely nothing and nothing about the real Jesus, or Judas, or any of these. I mean, the whole thing is fictional, obviously. But, what we learn about Jesus, according to the Gnostics, is that he indeed has come from this unknown, unnameable God that they can call only the invisible spirit, and Jesus has been sent and comes from that God to indeed alert us that that's where we come from, and we should not be worshiping the God of this world, the God who created this world, as God. Instead, we should be following this higher God and realizing that our true selves belong to a higher level of reality than this created universe. But the God who created this universe was created and deputized to do this work of creating universe by the higher God, but the God who created this world has rebelled and become an apostate and has kind of taken charge of us and enslaved us to Himself through our mortality, right? Time is the way he enslaves us. So Jesus has come, not only to alert us to this fact, but also indeed to defeat this lower God and his fellow rulers, because he has a whole panoply of stars and angels that help him and so forth. And apparently, it's his death on the cross that kind of undos them by leading to their defeat. This is a very traditional Christian theme, by the way, that... that the death of Jesus and h is resurrection is a way that the enemies of God, Satan and so on, are defeated, you find this in Paul in the New Testament, for example. So, that's what we learn about Jesus, and we learn he's certainly divine. He has a human being who bears him. Kind of how they relate isn't quite clear, but, yes, so it's very Jesus centered, despite the fact that now other Christians found it horrifyingly not Christian in their view. David Staley 17:23 So, this is obviously of great importance to scholars. David Brakke 17:25 Yes. David Staley 17:26 Are there, or have there been any, I don't know, sort of doctrinal implications of the discovery and translation of these Gnostic gospels. David Brakke 17:35 Probably not Judas in particular, but yes. I mean, what I would say is that we have learned better what early Christian theologians, who we now think of as Orthodox, were trying to get rid of, what they were trying to avoid, why they formulated their teachings in the way that they did, right? What we're finding from the Gnostics - I mean, certainly apart from, we should say, as historians and just interested humans who were just interested in people of the past no matter what - but certainly what we learn is when they were creating doctrines of who is the creator of this world and how does Jesus relate to him and what does Jesus do to save us, we're now seeing much more clearly the kinds of ideas that the Orthodox Christian theologians who formulated these doctrines were combating, and that they were concerned about and worried about, and so that gives us a better kind of view of how what we might call Orthodox Christian doctrine really came to be. David Staley 18:37 Are these Gnostic texts...have they been redefining? And if not, what has been the big event, the big paradigmatic event in your field, say, in the last, I don't know, 30,40, years? David Brakke 18:48 Yeah, this is it. I mean, I would say that what has changed the field of early Christian studies in the last 30 or 40 years is the discovery of new texts, not just we didn't have them and then were discovered - and you can think of not only the Nag Hammadi codices that I've mentioned, or the codex that contains Judas, but also even the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are Jewish, but of course, very illuminating as to Christian origins and how the ideas that Christians had could develop, right? So, there's that rediscovery of those kind of texts, but the other big thing that has really happened is, you know, there are a lot of early Christian texts that do not, like these Nag Hammadi texts, that don't survive in Greek and Latin, which is the languages everybody knows in my field, but also in languages like Coptic, which is based in Egypt, or Syriac, which you will not be surprised to learn, is based in Syria and is a dialect of Aramaic, which is the language that Jesus himself spoke. And these kinds of texts have often been neglected because they're in these languages that most historians haven't studied, they haven't learned, and so one of the other big, really field changing things has been, everybody now, in the last 30 or four years, has felt like they've had to learn these languages and integrate these other sources into our narrative and understanding of early Christianity. And so, I would say that, you know, this kind of, you know, a new set of sources and evidence, apart from what we've been studying for a thousand years, has been really field transforming. David Staley 20:26 How did you end up as an historian of Christianity, as opposed to, I don't know, a physicist or a violinist or something else. Why this field? David Brakke 20:35 Well, physics and violin was never going to happen. Yeah. You know, science was not my thing, and I have no hand eye coordination. But anyway, to be honest, you know, like most people who do this, I mean, I did grow up in a religious home, but always one that was very intellectually engaged. So, we, you know, were always encouraged to think critically and, you know, and freely about the Bible and Christian history and theology. But I also was always really into literature, and I liked stories, novels, poetry, I studied all that. So when I went to college, I was an English major, and had the idea at first that I would be a high school English teacher. Then, of course, as often happens when you're in college, you think, okay, now I'm going to become a professor of English, which was my next plan, because I met professors, and I saw what their lives were like, and I thought, yes, I want to live that life. But then, I took a religious studies course in the New Testament, and I thought, oh, my goodness, my kind of religious interests and my interests in literature can happen together. And so, that's how I kind of changed course suddenly and ended up deciding that I would go into this. It's actually after I got my PhD that I became more and more...well, I'll put it this way, less and less kind of literary in the way I approach things, and more and more historical. So, it's been a long process. David Staley 22:04 And the distinction being...? David Brakke 22:06 The distinction being that, you know, less attention, perhaps to simply the esthetic elements of some of these texts, because, you know, you could study the gospels, the Gospel of Judas, Matthew, Mark, Luke, all these things, kind of as one would study Shakespeare or whatever, for kind of the metaphor, the poetic language and how things work, and more and more interest in the context of these works and in the way they function as sources for understanding the people who produced them and read them in antiquity and what their lives were like. So, getting out a little bit of the more, just, how does the text work, and more into the world around the text, I think, is how I would characterize my kind of change over time. David Staley 22:53 Has there ever been a moment in your career where you had a eureka moment? David Brakke 22:57 I'm happy to say there have been several times, but probably the most important one is the one that is going to fuel my next project, which was... I had been working a lot on a single Bishop named Athanasius who lived in the fourth century, and he's famous because he was the first person to list precisely the 27 books of the New Testament that are in the New Testament today. And I was kind of reading the letter where he announced this, and I had this, indeed, eureka moment where I realized there are other people who are reading early Christian texts, but have no idea that there should be such a thing as a New Testament. They're just using all kinds of different early Christian texts. And he's aware of this, so this is not a question of, everyone's been talking about what should be in the New Testament, and I'm going to tell you what I think my 27 candidates are here; instead, this was a question of someone coming in and saying, we should have only 27 books, and these other ways that people are using scriptures and thinking about them are wrong. I wrote an article that kind of said all that, some people didn't like it, but I still think it's true. And yeah, so, and it's kind of changed the way I think about the kind of literature I study, which we tend to sometimes look at early Christian literature, and think, did it make it in the New Testament? If so, why, and if not, why not? You know, as though early Christianity was a giant project of, let's create a Bible or something. And now I kind of realize that's not the case, and it has opened me up to seeing all the different ways that ancient Christians interacted with literature they considered to be authoritative. And that's just been really... it's been eye-opening for me and inspired many of the projects that I've been involved in, and...yeah. David Staley 24:59 Well, you mentioned this one project, tell us what you're doing next for your research. David Brakke 25:03 My next big project, that will be a book, is indeed to talk about the New Testament and how it came to be, but to do so in a way that, first of all, shows that it wasn't inevitable, that is that there were different ways Christians thought about scripture, and they used texts in a variety of settings and forms that did not presuppose that eventually there would, or should be, a closed list of 27 authoritative books. So, you know, I'm interested in that kind of dynamic, and so why did this even happen? But then, to look at once there is this 20 - because it does happen, right, we do end up with this New Testament - what does that mean for how Christians think about writing books, about other forms of literature, about the even physical codices, the books that contain the New Testament? So, how did the formation of one set of literature, - a canon, as we call it - how did that affect all sorts of things Christians did: reading, writing, doing what we call magic, stuff like that. So, that's what I'm working on. David Staley 26:13 You don't entertain any counterfactuals in this book? David Brakke 26:17 Counterfactuals...actually, sometimes. I mean, I would say that good historical thinking, usually, at some point involves thinking about counterfactuals. What if this had not happened? Because, what you're looking for sometimes, is the thing without which something couldn't have happened, you know? So, you're sometimes looking for, you know...well, you asked the question, if Athanasius, this guy who wrote the first, you know, listed the 27 books, if he had not done that, would this still have happened? Now, it's a completely counterfactual question, and in some ways, there's no way to answer it, but just simply asking the question draws one's attention to other dynamics in early Christianity that might or might not have led to a similar result, and it also forces you to think about, what was the difference that this text, this event, this person, this action, really make. So, I don't think in print, I very often say, okay, let's imagine a different thing, but it's definitely an important way that I reason, I think. David Staley 27:27 And I know you have a project working on the "Secret Book of James". David Brakke 27:31 Yes. David Staley 27:31 I'd like to hear a little bit about this. David Brakke 27:33 Yes. It was found at Nag Hammadi in the mid - in the 1940s, right? So, it belongs... it is not a Gnostic text, however, because not everything found at Nag Hammadi, all 13 codices, not everything in it was Gnostic. But, this is a book from probably the late second century that purports to have been written by James, the brother of Jesus. It's a secret book, and, in fact, it's kind of funny, because it says, I've written this in the Hebrew dialect so that only a few people can read it, which, of course, it was never written in the Hebrew dialect, it was written in Greek, and now we only have in Coptic. But, what's fascinating about it, in some ways, is it's a book that is aware that now there are lots of different gospels about Jesus circulating, and it has a scene where all it says, all the disciples are sitting around reading their different books about Jesus, and it tries to make sense of that phenomenon. What does this mean, what are we to do with this? And unlike a lot of other early Christian texts, it doesn't say, okay, we should only read the good ones, you know, like a bishop at the same time is pretty much gonna say we should have only four gospels, and that's it, no more. Don't read anything else, certainly not Gospel of Judas, that kind of thing. Well, this book kind of takes a sense that all of these texts may be ways of accessing knowledge about Jesus, and what we need to learn is how to read properly. So, we need to understand how language works - you know, it doesn't use the language I'm using - but we need to learn how language works and how parables work. So, it's a very interesting, and in some ways, a kind of offbeat text. So, it's definitely in line with my interests in the kind of weirder stuff that early Christians did. Although, I must say this Athanasius guy I work on is not at all weird. So, I do do some things that are... he's like an icon of Orthodox, mainline Christianity, so I don't just do strange people. David Staley 29:27 David Brakke, thank you. David Brakke 29:28 It was great. Thanks for having me. Eva Dale 29:30 Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer. Produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. Transcribed by https://otter.ai