CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TEN
VALENTINUS AND HIS SCHOOL
While Marcion is the first person known to us who published a well defined collection of what later came to be called New Testament books, the question remains open whether he was actually the first to do so or something of the sort was already in existence.
VALENTINUS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT
Some light may be thrown on the question by a remark of Tertullian’s. There are two ways, he says, of nullifying the scriptures. One is Marcion’s way: he used the knife to excise from the scriptures whatever did not conform with his own opinion. Valentinus, on the other hand, ‘seems to use the entire instrumentum’ (which here means the New Testament), but perverts its meaning by misinterpreting it.
Valentinus was contemporary with Marcion: he came from Alexandria in Egypt and lived in Rome from about ad 135 to 160. Like Marcion, he was in communion with the church of Rome when first he came to the city—indeed, if Tertullian is to be believed, he had at one time reason to expect that he would become bishop of Rome (this would have been at the time when Pius was actually elected). He probably owed to his Alexandrian training a love for allegorical interpretation, but his thinking developed along mystical and gnostic lines to a point where he broke with the church and became the founder of a gnostic school whose members were called, after him, Valentinians.
When Tertullian said that Valentinus ‘seems to use the entire instrumentum’, Tertullian himself had quite a clear idea of the contents of the instrumentum. But did Valentinus, sixty years before Tertullian wrote, have a clear idea? He would not have spoken of an instrumentum, for his language was Greek, not Latin. But would he have envisaged such a collection at all?
VALENTINIAN LITERATURE
Since 1945 we have been in a better position to say something positive about Valentinus’s use of scripture than had been possible for over a thousand years. In that year the discovery was made in Upper Egypt of what are now called the Nag Hammadi documents, from the name of the town near which they were found. These documents, fifty-two in all, were collected together in thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. They were written in Coptic, but most of them were translations from a Greek original; they probably belonged to the library of a gnostic monastery, which was put into safe hiding in the fourth century ad. They include some Valentinian treatises; one or two of these (in the Greek original) may even have been the work of Valentinus himself.
This is particularly so with one of the most famous of them, called The Gospel of Truth. This title does not imply that the treatise is a rival gospel; it indicates rather that the treatise presents a meditation on the true gospel of Christ. Some of the Christian fathers refer to the Gospel of Truth as a manifesto of the Valentinian school. Now that it is available for study, its character can be clearly recognized. What concerns us here is the witness that it bears to the New Testament writings. This witness may not entitle us to say, with W. C. van Unnik, that ‘round about ad 140–150 a collection of writings was known at Rome and accepted as authoritative which was virtually identical with our New Testament’. But the treatise alludes to Matthew and Luke (possibly with Acts), the gospel and first letter of John, the Pauline letters (except the Pastorals), Hebrews and Revelation—and not only alludes to them but cites them in terms which presuppose that they are authoritative. Allegorical interpretation such as is found in the Gospel of Truth implies not only authority but some degree of inspiration in the texts so interpreted, whether the lessons derived by such allegorization are acceptable to later readers or not.
Another Valentinian treatise in the Nag Hammadi collection is the Epistle to Rheginus on Resurrection which, like the Gospel of Truth, antedates the developed system of Valentinianism and may also be the work of Valentinus himself. It presents an interpretation of Paul’s teaching on resurrection and immortality in 1 Corinthians 15 (although scarcely an interpretation of which Paul would have approved). To its author Paul is ‘the apostle’; his words carry authority. Echoes are discernible in the treatise of other Pauline letters—Romans, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians—and the author shows acquaintance with synoptic and Johannine gospel traditions.
Neither in the Gospel of Truth nor in the Epistle to Rheginus is there any mention of a recognizable collection of New Testament writings. There is indeed in the Gospel of Truth a fascinating account of what is called ‘the living book of the living’, the ‘testament’ (diathēkē) of Jesus which he appears to have both received from his Father (cf Rev. 5:7) and fastened to his cross (cf Col. 2:14). But this is a spiritual book, written in the Father’s heart before the world’s foundation and now revealed in the hearts of those who accept the divine knowledge. Kendrick Grobel indeed thought that the writer’s language might mark ‘the transition from thinking of the pre-existent, unearthly Book to thinking (also) of an earthly embodiment of it: one of the Gospels, all the Gospels, or the as a whole’; but this possibility is too slender for any weight to be laid on it. It is not improbable, however, that the two treatises presuppose some conception of a category of early Christian writings produced by special inspiration and vested with special authority—the fourfold gospel, perhaps, with the Pauline corpus—but this cannot be proved in the absence of express evidence.
But let this be said: in the light of such treatises from Nag Hammadi it can be argued with some show of reason that Marcion’s ‘canon’ was his revision of an existing collection of New Testament writings—in particular, that his Apostle was his revision of an existing copy of the Pauline letters.
PTOLEMY
Ptolemy, the principal disciple of Valentinus and probably his successor as recognized leader of the Valentinian school, acknowledged the supreme authority of the New Testament writings (in effect, those which were acknowledged in the Gospel of Truth and the Epistle to Rheginus), when they were properly interpreted—interpreted, that is to say, in accordance with the presuppositions of Valentinianism, Those writings were ‘supremely authoritative because they contained the apostolic tradition which came from the Saviour Jesus’. The most orthodox churchman could hardly state the essence of the case more aptly. Indeed, Ptolemy is the first person known to us by name who criticized Marcionism. This he did in his Letter to Flora in which, over against Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament, he showed how the Mosaic law, when rightly understood (i.e. understood according to Valentinian principles), retained in the Christian order.
Tertullian, Prescription. 38.
Tertullian, Against Valentinians. 4. Since before the episcopate of Pius the Roman church appears to have been administered by a college of presbyters or bishops, Valentinus may possibly have aspired to be admitted to this college.
See p. 181. There is a good discussion of the force of the juristic term instrument in Tertullian in Harnack’s Origin of the New Testament, pp. 209–217; Tertullian, he says, calls the two Testaments instrumenta ‘because they are for the Church the decisive documents for the exposition and the proof of her doctrine’ (p. 212).
Most of them are now available in an English translation in The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. J. M. Robinson (Leiden, 1977). A facsimile edition, in twelve volumes, is being published at Leiden (1972–) under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt, in conjunction with UNESCO; another series in eleven volumes, The Coptic Gnostic Library (Leiden, 1975–), contains transcriptions, translations, introductions, notes and indices.
First published in Evagelium Veritatis, ed. M. Malinine, H.-C. Puech, G. Quispel (Zurich, 1956), with facsimile, transcription, French, German and English translations, notes and vocabularies. A good annotated translation was produced by K. Grobel, The Gospel of Truth (Nashville/London, 1960). Another translation, by G. W. MacRae, appears in The Nag Hammadi Library. pp. 37–49.
E.g. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.9.
W. C. van Unnik, ‘The “Gospel of Truth” and the New Testament’, in The Jung Codex, ed. F. L. Cross (London, 1955), p. 124; cf his Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings, E.T. (London, 1960), pp. 58–68. But if van Unnik exaggerates somewhat, H. von Campenhausen goes to the other extreme in criticizing him in The Formation of the Christian Bible, E.T. (London, 1972), p. 140, n. 171.
There is a famous allegorical interpretation of the parable of the lost sheep (Mt. 18:12f. par. Luke 15:4–6) in The Gospel of Truth. 31.35–32. 17, known to Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 2.24.6), where the sheep symbolizes humanity’s wandering in ignorance of the true knowledge and even the number ninety-nine receives unsuspected significance. In The Gospel of Truth, 33.40–34.20, there is an interesting discussion of the divine aroma (‘the sons of the Father are his aroma’) which seems to develop Paul’s thought in 2 Cor. 2:14–16.
First published in De Resurrectione, ed. M. Malinine, H.-C. Puech, G. Quispel, W. Till (Zürich, 1963), with facsimile, transcription, French, German and English translations, notes and vocabularies. A translation with introduction, analysis and exposition was produced by M. L. Peel, The Epistle to Rheginos (London, 1969). Dr Peel has also translated it (‘The Treatise on Resurrection’) for The Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 50–53.
It bears a close resemblance to the view of Hymenaeus and Philetus, denounced in 2 Tim. 2:17f.
The Greek word diathēkē appears untranslated in the Coptic text. See pp. 19, 181.
The Gospel of Truth, 19.35–20.30; 21.3–7; 22.35–23.30.
New Testament
K. Grobel, The Gospel of Truth, p. 89.
This insistence on proper interpretation is found equally in those who argue that the New Testament (and indeed the whole Bible) is authoritative when interpreted in accordance with the teaching preserved in its purity by the apostolic churches. See pp. 151, 269.
R. M. Grant, The Formation of the New Testament (London, 1965), p. 127.
See H. von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible, pp. I65f.
This letter is preserved in Epiphanius, Panarion, 33.3–7; an English translation is conveniently accessible in R. M. Grant (ed.), Gnosticism: An Anthology (London, 1961), pp. 184–190. ‘Flora’, like ‘the elect lady’ of 2 John, is conceivably the personification of some church (the church of Rome?).
More or less contemporary with the earlier Valentinian treatises is the antignostic document called the Epistle of the Apostles, allegedly sent by the eleven to acquaint their fellow-believers throughout the world with a dialogue between them and the Lord after his resurrection: it makes free use of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John as well as of some apocryphal writings, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. See Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, New Testament Apocrypha I, pp. 189–227.