confidentiality relationship between a parishioner and a priest was as inviolable as the one between a patient and his doctor, but was telling Fletcher what Shay had said breaking a trust if the same words were already in a gospel that had been written two thousand years ago? 'You used to be an atheist,' I said, changing the subject.
'Yeah.' Fletcher smiled. 'I was pretty gifted at it, too, if I do say so myself.'
'What happened?'
'I met someone who made me question everything I was so sure I knew about God.'
'That,' I said, 'is why I'm in the office of a rabble-rouser like you.'
'And what better place to learn more about the Gnostic gospels,'
Fletcher said.
'Exactly.'
'Well, then, the first thing is that you shouldn't call them that. It would be like calling someone a spic or a Hebe-the label Gnostic was made up by the same people who rejected them. In my circles, we call them noncanonical gospels. Gnostic literally means one who knows- but the people who coined the term considered its followers know-it-alls.'
'That's what we pretty much learn in seminary.'
Fletcher looked at me. 'Let me ask you a question. Father-in your opinion, what's the purpose of religion?'
I laughed. 'Wow, thank goodness you picked an easy one.'
I'm serious...'
I considered this. 'I think religion brings people together over a common set of beliefs... and makes them understand why they matter.'
Fletcher nodded, as if this was the answer he'd been expecting. 'I think it's there to answer the really hard questions that arise when the world doesn't work the way it's supposed to-like when your child dies of leukemia, or you're fired after twenty years of hard work. When bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people.
The really interesting thing, to me, is that somehow religion stopped being about trying to find honest solutions... and started being about ritual. Instead of everyone searching for understanding on their own, orthodox religion came along and said, 'Do x, y, and z-and the world will be a better place.''
'Well, Catholicism's been around for thousands of years,' I replied,
'so it must be doing something right.'
'You have to admit, it's done a lot wrong, too,' Fletcher said.
Anyone who'd had limited religious instruction or a thorough college education knew about the Catholic Church and its role in politics and history-not to mention the heresies that had been squelched over the centuries. Even sixth graders studied the Inquisition. 'It's a corporation,'
I said. 'And sure, there have been times when it's been staffed badly, with people who think ambition trumps faith. But that doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. No matter how screwed up God's servants are in the Church, His message has managed to get through.'
Fletcher tilted his head. 'What do you know about the birth of
Christianity?'
'Did you want me to start with the Holy Ghost visiting Mary, or skip ahead to the star in the East...'
'That's the birth of Jesus,' Fletcher said. 'Two very different things.
Historically, after Jesus's death, his followers weren't exactly welcomed with open arms. By the second century A.D., they were literally dying for their beliefs. But even though they belonged to groups that called themselves Christians, the groups weren't unified, because they were an very different from one another. One of these groups was the socalled
Gnostics. To them, being Christian was a good first step, but to truly reach enlightenment, you had to receive secret knowledge, or gnosis. You started with faith, but you developed insight-and for these people. Gnostics offered a second baptism. Ptolemy called it apolutrosis- the same word used when slaves were legally freed.'
'So how did people get this secret knowledge?'
'There's the rub,' Fletcher said. 'Unlike the church, you couldn't be taught it. It had nothing to do with being told what to believe, and everything to do with figuring it out on your own. You had to reach inside yourself, understand human nature and its destiny, and at that moment you'd know the secret-that there's divinity in you, if you're willing to look for it. And the path would be different for everyone.'
'That sounds more Buddhist than Christian.'
'They called themselves Christians,' Fletcher corrected. 'But Irenaeus, who was the bishop of Lyons at the time, disagreed. He saw three huge differences between Orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism.
In Gnostic texts, the focus wasn't on sin and repentance, but instead on illusion and enlightenment. Unlike in the Orthodox Church, you couldn't be a member simply by joining-you had to show evidence of spiritual maturity to be accepted. And-this was probably the biggest stumbling block for the bishop-Gnostics didn't think Jesus's resurrection was literal.
To them, Jesus was never really human-he just appeared in human form. But that was just a technicality to the Gnostics, because unlike Orthodox Christians, they didn't see a gap between the human and the divine. To them, Jesus wasn't a one-of-a-kind savior-he was a guide, helping you find your individual spiritual potential. And when you reached it, you weren't redeemed by Christ-you became a Christ.
Or in other words: you were equal to Jesus. Equal to God.'
It was easy to see why, in seminary, this had been taught as heresy: the basis of Christianity was that there was only one God, and
He was so different from man that the only way to reach Him was through Jesus. 'The biggest heresies are the ones that scare the Church to death.'
'Especially when the Church is going through its own identity crisis,' Fletcher said. 'I'm sure you remember how Irenaeus decided to unify the Orthodox Christian Church-by figuring out who was a true believer, and who was faking. Who was speaking the word of God, and who was speaking... well... just words?'
On a pad in front of him, Fletcher wrote GOD = WORD = JESUS, then spun it around so I could see. 'Irenaeus came up with this little gem. He said that we can't be divine, because Jesus's life and death were so different from that of any man-which became the very begin 264 ning of Orthodox Christianity. What didn't fit this equation became heretical-if you weren't worshipping the right way, you were out. It was sort of the first reality show, if you want to think of it that way: who had the purest form of Christianity? He condemned the folks who got creative with faith, like Marcus and his followers, who spoke in prophecies and had visions of a feminine divinity clothed in the letters of the Greek alphabet. He condemned the groups that swore by only one gospel-like the Ebionites, who were attached to Matthew; or the
Marcionites, who studied only Luke. Just as bad were the groups like the Gnostics, who had too many texts. Instead, Irenaeus decided that
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John should be the four cornerstone gospels of what to believe-'
'-because they all had a narrative of Christ's Passion in them... which the Church needed, in order for the Eucharist to mean something.'
'Exactly,' Fletcher said. 'Then Irenaeus appealed to all those people who were trying to decide which Christian group was right for them.
Basically, he said: 'We know how hard it is to figure out what's true, and what's not. So we're going to make it easy for you, and tell you what to believe.' People who did that were true Christians. People who didn't were not. And the things Irenaeus told people to believe became the foundation for the Nicene Creed, years later.'
Every priest knew that what we were taught in seminary had a
Catholic spin put on it-yet there was an incontrovertible truth behind it. I had always believed that the Catholic Church was evidence of religious survival of the fittest: the truest, most powerful ideas were the ones that had prevailed over time. But Fletcher was saying that the most powerful ideas had been subjugated... because they jeopardized the existence of the Orthodox Church. That the reason they'd had to be crushed was because-at one point-they'd been as or more popular than Orthodox Christianity.
Or in other words, the reason the Church had survived and flour ished was not because its ideas were the most valid, but because it had been the world's first bully.
'Then the books of the New Testament were just an editorial decision someone once had to make,' I said.
