The Problem of the Old Testament and Gnosticism

Gnosticism is the early Christian belief which posits a dualism between the Demiurge and the Supreme God of Jesus. Of course, there are multiple varieties of Gnostic belief throughout different ages and locations, but the general gist is that the god of this material world and the Old Testament is a lesser, sinister and created god, the Demiurge, and the God of Jesus and the New Testament is the true God, the Supreme Being.

Gnosticism was severely repressed by the early Christian church as a heresy and is now primarily an archaic historical sect, but it attempted to answer an important question. How can the ethnonarcissist jealous god of the Old Testament become a universal all-loving God?

Christian orthodoxy, both the Western and Eastern Churches, attempts to syncretize the god of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament but fails to do so convincingly. The transformation of a god who sat on a throne in Jerusalem and assisted a race of Semites in a campaign of ethnic warfare against countless enemies, from various minor local tribes to whole nations such as the Egyptians and Babylonians, and undertook a personal interest in the purity of the family tree of his “chosen” people by expelling half-breeds and forbidding miscegenation, into one who commands that all men are equal before him and that the meek shall inherit the Earth is not a convincing one.

The Old Testament includes a great many stories, almost all without much historical basis, which attest to the horrific crimes reportedly committed against the world by the Hebrews and their god Yahweh. Among them are the genocides of the Canaanites, particularly the Amalekites, which are taken as a point of pride in the texts, and Joseph’s wise and cunning fiscal escapades in Egypt, by which he takes advantage of a famine to seize the lands of the peasantry, enslaving them and influencing the Pharaoh to grant their most fertile lands to the Hebrews. By the end of his story, reading it objectively, you actually feel relieved when the next Pharaoh then enslaves the Hebrews. How can such a god love all of mankind, when he himself says that he only loves his “chosen” tribe? (Malachi 1:2-3 NIV “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his mountains into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.”).

Protestantism, with the advent of mass literacy and the printing press, was the natural reaction of the middling classes, having finally been able to read the entirety of the Bible in their own language, the Old Testament and the New. Too smart to blindly follow the priestly class, but too dull to uphold the cognitive dissonance, they began to interpret the Old Testament according to the status given to it by Christian orthodoxy, that of the divine word of god. Thus Protestantism was the infection of the Christian mind with the Old Testament mind virus, until then kept in containment. Old Testament literalist revivalism created Christians who, by believing in a miserable hateful god, became miserable hateful people who themselves hate life. They spawned a society which birthed witch trials, apocalyptic adventists, and evangelical Christian Zionism. The world is of sinners in the hands of an angry god.

Gnosticism was a reaction to the discordance between the god of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament by rejecting the notion that they are the same deity, arguing that they are in fact two separate gods. An ethnonarcissist god cannot transform into a universal God. God must be omnipotent, all-knowing and all-loving from the outset, an all-powerful and merciful God cannot become all-powerful and merciful, he must have always been all-powerful and merciful.

Of course, there are major flaws with the Gnostic view of the world. As the world we inhabit is of the Demiurge, the Gnostics viewed it as necessarily evil. In order to protect the enlightenment of the Supreme God, one must guard the knowledge by maintaining secrecy, guarding Gnosis from agents of the Demiurge. The world is then a cage constructed by the god of the Old Testament which entraps divine souls in profane bodies. Quite a bleak outlook, and unfortunately falls into the same anti-life sentiment of the Old Testament, but from a different direction. Unfortunately for the Christian faith, it seems that the Old Testament cannot be saved.