Paul Wasn't a Gnostic

Some Thoughts on Colossians 1-3

Reading Paul in Context

I’m currently reading through Dr. Jeremiah Mutie’s new book The Quest for Early Church Historiography. While it’s only 203 pages, I’m taking my time because there is a lot to digest. Mutie’s book is a great corrective to the corrosive, speculative revisionist church history of unbelieving scholars, as it exposes the philosophical — and not historical — foundations of scholars like Bart D. Ehrman and Elaine Pagels. As I read through the book, I was reminded of the fringe scholarly opinion that the apostle Paul was a Gnostic whose teaching was in conflict with the more Jewish teaching of the apostle Peter.

For the person unfamiliar with Scripture, this can seem like a plausible claim. Paul, after all, uses terminology, imagery, and concepts that seem to map on to some of the Gnostic systems of his day. Consider the following passage from Paul’s epistle to the Colossians —

He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.¹

Paul identifies men as occupying only one of two mutually exclusive categories — the light or the darkness. He identifies two mutually exclusive realms of being — the invisible and the visible. He further states that there are invisible powers, principalities, and powers from which Christians have been delivered. And, finally, Paul states that all things consist in him (i.e. in the divine Son).

indeed, the Gnostics took this passage (and the remainder of Col 1) to teach that the invisible God created the visible Christ, who in turn created all the dominions, powers, and principalities over which he is the supreme authority. One of these lesser powers, in turn, created the material world of darkness, from which Christ came to deliver the gnostics, transferring them into the kingdom of light (the immaterial, invisible, non-material realm). On a purely linguistic level, one can see how unbelieving scholars would draw lines of influence or parallels between Paul and the Gnostics.

But is that kind of a reading justified when we take the whole letter into consideration?

Absolutely not.

Paul’s teaching is, indeed, lofty, reaching into eternity past and eternity future, as well as up to the highest heavens, leading him to tell the Colossians —

If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.²

Yet the meaning of these lofty words is explained just a few verses later, where Paul writes —

But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.³

[…]

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them. Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged. Bondservants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but in sincerity of heart, fearing God. And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for[a] you serve the Lord Christ. But he who does wrong will be repaid for what he has done, and there is no partiality.⁴

This kind of flesh-and-blood, earth-focused yet heaven-bound set of directions makes no sense in a philosophy where the material realm is considered evil, something which came into being by the work of a lesser, jealous deity, and from which man needs to be saved.

One is not heavenly minded because he speculates about the greatness of the invisible world. One is not heavenly minded because he despises the material world which God created for man’s benefit, blessing, and purposes. One does not need to be delivered from materiality. Rather, one needs to be delivered from sin, conformed to the image of Christ, the invisible Creator of all who did not despise his creation but entered into it in order to save his people. Those who have been brought into the kingdom of light, in other words, shine as lights in the darkness by living according to the teaching of Scripture — and Scripture instructs us on simple, everyday, physical matters (no pun intended). The moral goal is not to escape from sexual intercourse or taking pleasure in physical things, but to glorify God in whatever one does.⁵ The spiritual goal is not to transcend being a human, but to imitate Christ, the perfect man.

What we see in Paul, then, is language that may bear superficial similarities to the teaching of the Gnostics. Yet upon closer examination, we see that Paul is not a “proto-gnostic” or something akin to one, but a Christian theologian given by God to the church to show us two sides of the same theological coin. Paul was not a Gnostic.

—h.

1. Col 1:13-17.

2. Col 3:1-2.

3. Col 3:8-11.

4. Col 3:18-25.

5. Col 3:17.