The Rise of the Heretics and the Need for A New Testament Canon – Valentinus and the Gnostics

In the last post, we looked at how the heretic Marcion truncated the canon of Scripture by rejecting the Old Testament, highly editing the Gospel of Luke, editing 10 of Paul’s letters, and rejecting the rest of the New Testament. This week we will take a brief look at Valentinus and the Gnostics. As we will see, their heresy did not exist mainly by altering the biblical texts but rather by adding books rejected by the Church and reinterpreting the biblical books to line up with these additional books.

Valentinus lived around the same time as Marcion, in the middle of the 2nd century. He (or his followers) produced a writing known as The Gospel of Truth which laid out their understanding of the Gospel and the New Testament writings. In this writing, they did not reject authentic New Testament books but rather reinterpreted them in ways that utterly altered the true meaning of the text.

The Gospel of Truth refers to several New Testament books and treats them as authoritative – Matthew, Luke-Acts, John, 1 John, Paul’s letters (except the Pastoral epistles), Hebrews, and Revelation. However, the Gnostics also created and included a number of their own writings and considered them Scripture. Many of these writings were recovered in the 20th century in what is known as the Nag Hammadi texts. These include the now-famous Gospel of Thomas, and several other Gospels, Acts, and epistles which were rejected by the early church as inauthentic.

The consistent issue in these texts, and in the Gnostic interpretation of biblical books was that the Gnostics believed that all matter was inherently evil. This directly contradicted the teaching of Scripture that creation was initially good and it was sin that was evil. This required a radical reinterpretation of individual texts, and also of the very nature of Jesus. If matter is inherently evil, then Jesus could not have been truly human. This obviously required not only a radical reinterpretation of biblical texts to ignore their clear meaning and actually give an interpretation opposite of their meaning, but it also changed virtually every key doctrine of the Christian faith. The Gnostic understanding of creation, humanity, sin, Jesus Christ, atonement, salvation, sanctification, and the nature of our eternal existence are all radically changed by Gnosticism. For these reasons, the early Church clearly rejected Gnosticism, its writings, and its proposed canon of Scripture.

In light of the challenges posed by heretics like Marcion and the Gnostics, it became important for the Church to define the canon of Scripture. We will look at that process next week.

In Christ,

Bret