Fortress of Truth
How the choice to speak "gnosis" to spiritual authority lies at the center of heresy-and how to transcend it
“A person does not see with the soul or with the spirit, Rather the mind, which exists between these two, sees the vision and that is what...”
- Jesus Christ in The Gospel of Mary
In the garden, Eve wielded her free will by making a choice–a choice that Christian doctrine deemed negative, solely. The way the “fall” of humanity was tied to Eve, and all women, was a masterful revision of a much more ancient story about the connection between nature and feminine divinity. Eve and her choice–from knowledge to the serpent–became associated with the source of sin, shame, and even evil.
“Heresy” literally means choice–derived from the Greek word “hairesis.” From the earliest days of Christianity, this word was one of judgment, pointed at those who failed to conform to what the emerging Church believed to be good and right.
In the eyes of the Church–ancient and modern–when we consciously choose to listen to our inner voice, emotions, intuition, discernment, we are being a “heretic.” Choosing to listen to ourselves, over outside authority, means that we take on a new level of responsibility and step into the unknown. This is a space that can feel uncomfortable and even scary–this place of mystery is also that of possibility.
Here, you begin to question–what do I believe?
A higher perspective becomes all the more complex as listening within brings new insights to light. This type of revelation was mirrored by the discoveries of early Christian scriptures found in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Divine timing, and advancements in archeology, illuminated a treasure trove of information that had been lost for almost 2,000 years—including The Gospel of Mary, Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi.
This body of work belonged to ancient heretics–and the loss of their texts was not accidental. Scrolls hidden in jars by monks, so as not to be burned, were recovered centuries later, revealing wisdom and ideas that sent shockwaves through the Christian world.
Who was featured prominently in many of these key heretical texts? Mary Magdalene, as in them she was portrayed as a teacher, leader, visionary, favored apostle–possibly even “koinonos” (partner) of Jesus Christ.
This new awareness of Mary Magdalene amplified key aspects of her story that existed in the “approved” canonical texts, in which Mary is witness to the resurrection and present at key moments in the life of Jesus. Holding all these facets of Mary together, including a gospel in her name, makes it crystal clear that Mary had a “right” to high spiritual authority in Christianity–possibly rivaling that of Peter.
However, power is not what Mary was after (at least not if you read into these texts). Mary Magdalene exemplified “gnosis,” which is an inner spiritual pathway for connecting with God, where no outer authority is needed. This gnostic way was problematic, to say the least, for the movement to create one, holy, catholic*, and apostolic Church, with a capital C.
A Credible Witness
In today’s age when true crime series are among the most popular media, it is common knowledge that the witness is key–and must be highly credible. According to the gospels, when it comes to the mysterious circumstances of Jesus’ death–a messy trial, a brutal punishment, a missing body–Mary Magdalene was the witness in question.
This is it–Mary’s prominence as a witness to Jesus’ resurrection was the primary reason she could not be erased entirely. As convenient as it may have been to edit Mary out, she was needed to support the narrative of the resurrection story. The Church’s solution for how to handle Mary Magdalene, and all that surrounded her, was formed over centuries, eventually crystalized under Pope Gregory the Great in his Homily 33 in 591 CE. Enter the greatest lie ever told, a narrative crafted to legitimize and diminish her, simultaneously: Mary Magdalene as a penitent prostitute.
The Greatest Lie Ever Told
The greatest lie ever told was a narrative crafted with intention over hundreds of years to deal with an inconvenient truth: as the witness to the resurrection, Mary Magdalene could not be erased.
Still, in the canonical texts lay an inconvenient truth: Mary, who despite being a woman, qualified for the highest level of authority under their own criteria for apostle.
An apostle, or disciple, was considered one of the inner circle of Jesus Christ. It is from this lineage that the Church rests their claim to power and authority. The technical term is “apostolic succession”: the teaching that bishops represent a direct, uninterrupted line of continuity from the first Apostles of Jesus Christ.
Acts of the Apostles–a canonical text that many believe was written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke–states the criteria that must be met for a follower to be an apostle. Based on Acts, a case can be made for Mary Magdalene meeting these standards. But, when the heretical texts such as the Gospel of Mary and Gospel of Phillip are brought into play, the argument for Mary as apostle grows exponentially.
There is one aspect, though, to apostolic succession that stands out among the rest: to witness Jesus in the immediate days following his resurrection. Even then, there was a catch.
Among the early Jesus movement, there was a vast spread in perspectives on how the death and resurrection of Jesus happened and what it meant. The orthodox (or emerging Church) view was literalist: they believed that Jesus’ resurrection happened with his full human body supernaturally rising to heaven.
The orthodox perspective was that “Jesus himself had come back to life,” Elaine Pagels writes in her compelling case for why this is the linchpin of Church authority. As she describes in The Gnostic Gospels, a literal interpretation of the resurrection event was the primary link between Jesus Chrsit and the authority of the “worldwide organization that developed within 170 years of his death into a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons.”
However, this was only one end of the spectrum, when it comes to theories surrounding what the resurrection meant to early Jesus followers, namely the gnostics perspective, which connects back to Mary Magdalene. The competing perspectives on the details of Jesus’ resurrection were the primary reason why these heretics were not just dismissed, but destroyed in order to protect the literal version of this key story–and the power it created.
Gnosticism 101
Gnosticism is perhaps as misunderstood as Mary Magdalene, both inextricably connected to how certain narratives and voices won out in the long battle of history.
Who were the gnostics?
This is a challenging question given that for centuries, all we knew about these early Jesus followers was filtered through the lens of their harshest critics–the Church fathers, creators of the orthodox doctrine. Even the term itself is controversial. “Gnostic” is one of those blanket words that in one sense captures the essence of its subject perfectly–and in another, it is wide enough to cause confusion to the point of infamy.
What does gnostic mean?
Quite accurately, the philosophers, theologians, and practitioners who fall under the gnostic category are focused on “gnosis,” a Greek word that means knowledge. It is a specific sort of knowledge, as Pagels writes: “gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge — rather it’s intuitive insight through observation or experience.”
The gnostics believe connecting with God is a personal pathway where the journey is the destination. While the means and methods may differ from group to group, the intention of all gnosistic methods are (Pagels again) “to know thyself, at the deepest level, is to know God… this is the secret of gnosis.”
Gnosticism is not unique to Christianity. This form of spiritual practice that highlights the individual's experience with the divine can be traced all the way back indigenous practices across cultures, geographies, and timelines–a story for another day.
What do Christian gnostics believe?
Gnostic expert Pagels identifies the following shared core beliefs:
God was both male and female;
God is in each and every person;
Jesus did not suffer on the cross;
Life is not a battle against sin, but of the lies of this world;
And lastly, that resurrection of Jesus was spiritual, not physical.
If one word needed to be used to describe the gnostics, it would be mystery.
Mystery surrounds them–in that there is so much we do not know about them, and how mystery sits at the very center of their teachings, as a philosophical and spiritual practice of communing with Life’s enigma. This element of gnosticism transcends Christianity. For thousands of years–there have always been religious groups with “mystery traditions” in which some had access to higher, secret teachings, usually enacted through ritual.
Still, the ultimate heresy of the gnostics was not the pathway within and how this inherently subverted the power of the emerging Church’s authority. It wasn’t Mary Magdalene’s portrayal, or the way gnostic communities tended to uphold women teaching, preaching, and baptizing. The nail in the proverbial coffin was the gnostic belief in a spiritual and metaphysical interpretation of the resurrection–rather than the literal tradition that became the backbone of orthodox theology.
The “faith of fools” is how The Gospel of Phillip, referred to the idea that Jesus rose from the dead with his literal body. As wild as it might seem, there are gnostic texts where Jesus doesn’t die at all, including the First Revelation of James. Crazier still, this idea that Jesus did not die is corroborated by none other than a very holy text of an entirely separate religion–the Qu’ran.
For the gnostics, resurrection happens while one is living–a belief that aligns with ritual practices of other more ancient mystery traditions.
In Body or Spirit?
With all these competing perspectives around this pivotal event of Jesus’ Christ legacy, we might ask: why did orthodox Christians double down on a literal view of the resurrection and reject all other beliefs as heretical?
As usual, it had to do with power. Pagels believes that this doctrine specifically–of a literal resurrection–serves as the basis of papal authority to this day stating, “the doctrine of bodily resurrection also serves an an essential political function: it legitimizes the authority of certain men who claim to exercise exclusive leadership over the churches as the successors of the apostle Peter.”
Gnostic Christians, who did not interpret the resurrection as a physical event had a lesser claim to authority, Pagels says. But this begs the question: why was the Church hedging this strongly against a metaphysical interpretation of the resurrection event?
There is a very specific and little discussed reason why the Church felt it necessary to consolidate and differentiate the details of Jesus’ resurrection: he was far from the first resurrected god-man.
Stories about deities that die, descend to the underworld, and return with higher levels of divinity had been told for millennia before Jesus Christ, across cultures and gender lines. To go back even further in the historical record, the very first story of a resurrected deity was that of Inanna of Sumeria. Inanna is the first goddess in the written record, the original “Queen of Heaven” a title later bestowed on other goddesses, and eventually Mother Mary.
Often, if not always, the religions that contained divine death and resurrection narratives had “mystery traditions,” in which the initiates went through rituals that acted out elements of these stories. In mystery schools, initiates enacted rituals we see in the gospels, like baptism and resurrection. Initiates would symbolically “die” to their lower nature and be spiritually reborn in divine essence–not unlike how many indigenous traditions believe shamans must die on some level to access higher realms of spiritual wisdom.
This was the culture that had surrounded the Hebrew people for hundreds of years by the time of Jesus, from Osiris in Egypt, to Dionysus in Greco-Rome, to Marduk in Babylon, all deities with resurrection stories. Putting these puzzle pieces together, it begins to make sense why the narrative surrounding the death and rising of Jesus Christ needed to transcend all the others. To stand out and gain traction, every element of Jesus’ story had to be extraordinary in order to reflect his ultimate divine power.
The same metaphorical interpretation Christian gnostics applied throughout their theology was behind how they regarded Jesus’ resurrection. For them, Jesus rising was a spiritual event that reflected the divine potential of all of his followers.
Indeed, the gnostic view that resurrection was a spiritual event aligned with and possibly explained one key method of gnosis–visionary insight. In the Gospel of Mary, the Apocalypse of Peter, arguably the Gospel of John and even the book of Revelation, the resurrected Jesus appears and shares teachings in his apostles’ visions–in the mind's eye, not the body’s.
It begins to all make sense–why the gnostics would not have believed in a literal resurrection, why they would not have cared for external power structures of authority. Connecting with the divine, for them, was a sovereign experience, with Jesus accessible at all times through inner vision. As the Gospel of Phillip describes this egalitarian outlook: “whoever is reborn of the Heavenly Father and heavenly Mother becomes a whole person again… holy down to the very body… for this person is no longer a Christian, but a Christ.”
So if apostolic authority was tied to a literal resurrection in the eyes of the nascent Church, the gnostics, for lack of a better term, didn't care. This philosophical posture would naturally put Jesus Christ's legacy along the same lines of earlier resurrected divinities of other cultures–which is a key reason why the gnostic view of the resurrection was flawed and even dangerous in the eyes of literalist orthodox theology.
This divide is what separated the orthodox from heretics, exterior from interior, literal from figurative, known from unknown. Gnosticism’s power stemmed from its disinterest in control and oppression–yet what made this contrary ideology unique, and empowering on an individual level, is what left it open for criticism.
Reframing Dualism
Until the revelations of gnostic texts in the last hundred years (or so), all we had were critical accounts written by Irenaeus, Tertullian, the early Church Fathers attacking the leaders of the gnostic movement, namely Marcion of Sinope and Valentinus of Rome.
Marcion was a groundbreaking leader in Christianity. He was the first to put forward a potential “canon,” eleven books total, consisting of a selection of Paul’s letters and a gospel of his own called The Gospel of the Lord, that was a shorter (and possibly more true to the original) version of Luke. He was highly popular–another critic of his, Justin Martyr, wrote that Marcion influenced that he “caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies.”
Marcion’s canon left out a group of books that came to dominate the orthodox Bible–the Hebrew scriptures that Christians call “the Old Testament.” To Marcion, there were clear differences between the God that Jesus’ described, “the Father,” and the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. Mattias Klinghardt, the preeminent scholar on Marcion, describes how difficult it is to determine the truth about this figure who became a lightning rod as the Church struggled to establish itself: “Marcion’s portrayal, therefore, demands utmost caution.”
This level of care is necessary with all of gnosticism, including the leader Valentinus of Rome. Trained in Alexandria, Pagels describes him as a man held in the highest esteem during his lifetime, no matter the controversy: “even his enemies spoke of him as a brilliant and eloquent man: his admirers revered him as a poet and spiritual master.” Some believe that it was Valentinus’ himself who penned the pivotal gnostic texts The Gospel of Truth and The Gospel of Phillip.
Valentinian gnostics are believed to have practiced an initiation, reminiscent of other mystery traditions, that catalyzed them into the desired state of gnosis. Pagels describes the beliefs behind this process:
“Achieving gnosis involves coming to recognize the true source of divine power–namely, “the depth” of all being. Whoever has come to know that source simultaneously comes to know himself and discovers his spiritual origin: he has come to know his true Father and Mother.”
Once this level of “gnosis” was achieved, the initiate received the sacrament of “redemption,” whereby they were released from the “sphere of judgment” of the lesser earthly deity called “the demiurge.” Spoken aloud, the initiate would declare spiritual independence, stating: “I am the son of the Father–the Father who is preexistent…I derive from Him who is preexistent, and I come again to my own place whence I came forth.”
“Dualism,” as much of gnostic thought has been labeled, was not about polarity–it was about the transcendence attained by moving beyond not only the spiritual forces of division and control, but the human ones too. However, the rejection of the Old Testament law and texts was too much for the orthodox tradition, which took steps increasingly over the centuries to identify and stamp out gnostic heretics.
Power of Words
Even if the gnostic leaders fell short of apostolic succession due to their lack of belief in a literal resurrection, a position in the hierarchy they did not want anyway, their beliefs and texts continued to spread ideas that (at best) poked holes in and (at worst) destroyed the Church’s claim to power.
It is difficult to cut someone–or many–out of a system they do not desire to exist within. This reality infuriated the early Church fathers who believed that priests and bishops were there to rule “in God’s place,” railing against the personal pathway of gnosis.
On the one hand, the Church fathers saw the gnostic teachings as arrogant and irreverent, as Tertullian complained: “every one of them (gnostics), just as it suits his own temperament, modifies the traditions he has received, just as the one who handed them down modified them, when he shaped them according to his own will.”
Where the orthodox leaders saw “danger to clerical authority” (Iraneaus), the gnostics saw their hierarchy as an empty desire “to command one another; outrivaling one another in empty ambition” (The Tripartite Tractate). The gnostics scoffed at the Church leaders who “name themselves bishop, and also deacon, as if they had received their authority from god,” snidely calling them “waterless canals” who do not understand mystery, in the Apocalypse of Peter.
Eventually the gnostic texts were outlawed, buried, and burned, but before then, the emerging Church made an even more decisive power play against them. No, the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE did not create the canon–the list of books that are in the Holy Bible, but it did create the Creed–specifically to screen and stamp out the heretics.
To this day confusion around this abounds and while the details of what happened may be cited incorrectly often, the energetic truth is correct: the intention of the Council of Nicaea was to stamp out the heretics, not through what was written, but what was spoken.
Let’s separate truth from fiction.
The Council of Nicaea was a real event, in Turkey, in 325 CE, initiated by the Emperor Constantine. Yes, Constantine I did convert to and decriminalize Christianity in his lifetime, but he did not crack down on pagans in one fell swoop. The canon, the list of books in the Holy Bible, was not created at this Council event–in fact, the Bible was not created through pure inspiration or conspiracy. It was humanly debated in a process that happened over centuries, and the Bible was not formally affirmed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
What did happen at the Council of Nicaea was the creation of the Nicean Creed: the formalization of a spoken ritualistic pledge of faith with the direct intention to consolidate power and eliminate heretics. Namely, the gnostic Marcionites and the Valentinians.
Spellbound
To ancient people, and arguably all humans, oral rituals were more potent and powerful than those written in a text.
The idea of a creed, words spoken in unison during spiritual worship, was not new to Nicaea or Christianity. This religious practice is as old as humanity itself, with modern anthropological and psychological science shedding light on the mechanics of why the Nicene Creed would have been such a turning point.
A mystical, but scientifically supported truth is that religion, spirituality, and belief in supernatural forces is natural to human consciousness. Evolutionary psychologists believe that being highly sensitive to patterns, seen and unseen, would have enabled early humans to gain information about the world that supported survival. If belief in the power of what we cannot see but only sense is inherently human, then stories are the innate way we hold and express these beliefs, with rituals the primal way we embody them.
Mythical storytelling is how we make sense of the ideas that sit in the space between what we can explain and what we cannot, the known and unknowable. Ritual is the way we create a sense of safety and community that brings these ideas to life. We are wired for belonging, with positive emotions broadening and building our cognition and connection to one another according to psychological science. Ritual is a powerful tool for how we have coalesced the tribe, invoking and creating sustained group cohesion.
The Nicene Creed, based on the older Apostles & Roman creeds, is spoken with a rhythm, in unison, as a profession of faith in worship services. It begins, “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” and ends with an affirmation of the resurrection, concluding with “and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; whose Kingdom shall have no end.”
In the positive, rituals are known to be calming, allowing us to reach more transcendental states of awareness, feeling closer to the divine (Bronislaw Malinowski). But there is also a cadence of unity to ritual and repetition created with an exercise like the Creed that comes with negative aspects. For example, marching in a drill is known to “inculcate automatic unthinking obedience” in soldiers so they can go farther and longer together in unison (William H. McNeill).
There is a reason that words spoken in a certain way have been called “spells.”
Where does the line end and begin, between transcendental community experience and mindless group cohesion?
If we turn to the Creed, there is one key line added later–at the Second Ecumenical Council of 381 CE, placed there for a specific intention: we believe “In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.”
Rituals like this have long been how humans judge and understand one another in order to identify their “own.” This is exactly how and why the Nicene Creed was formulated–to separate the “wheat from the chaff” allowing the clergy to find and exclude heretics. Church officials paid close attention to who would speak these words, professing their allegiance to the Church, with a capital C, and who would not.
It is said that Marcion and his followers refused to speak the Creeds–but Valentinians took another stance, conforming where necessary. Iranaeus called this practice of the Valentinians out, “such persons are, to outward appearances, sheep, for they seem to be like us, from what they say in public, repeating the same words (of confession) that we do; but inwardly they are wolves.” This, and other statements, demonstrates how the Church directly used the Nicene Creed to coalesce their power not only through group cohesion, but as a tool to weed out the heretics who threatened their claims to authority.
The Heretic’s Stones
If only we could divide history into the villains and the heros–this is exactly the tactic the Church itself took in its vilification of gnostic heretics, but unfortunately the truth is messier, and more human.
It was exactly because the gnostic Valentinians valued inner authority that it did not bother them to adhere to certain practices so they could survive, and flourish, if quietly. Doing what was required, some Valentinians were absorbed into the Church. This trend is apparent through those who surround Mary Magdalene’s story–figures and groups who you may want to condemn at one point are champions at another turn. Bernard of Clairvaux the medieval monk, for example, led the persecutions of the Inquisition but protected Hildegard of Bengin–a topic for future podcasts & essays.
The truth most will not admit is that there is so much we don’t know and cannot know surrounding Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, and this early religious movement’s story. Pointing fingers and casting blame is easy and instinctual. A pause of breath, and a higher holistic perspective, is required for us to move forward with open heart and mind when the truth is what is desired.
Organized religion is arguably how Christianity survived and spread over thousands of years. What if the gnostics had a little more fight in them? What if they had been more organized? Would their ideas around Jesus have touched more people, guiding them in a more autonomous spiritual path? Or, if it weren’t for the Church, would even more of Jesus’ teachings, and Mary’s, have been lost to the sands of time?
What if the unfolding of new perspectives on gnosticism, Mary Magdalene, and a sovereign form of faith is all happening in divine timing?
This dynamic play between personal and collective power is at the heart of Mary’s story and legacy, both why she was diminished and what she leads us back to when we come to find her.
The “secret teachings” found in the Gospel of Mary turn the reader within, to a space called the nous, a place where heart meets mind, intuition meets logic. Paradoxically, all that we desire to know is found in the unknown–hence why gnosis is all about mystery. It is in this same space that we must be in, the mystical arena where Mary accessed her visions of the resurrected Jesus himself, in order to access the truth we seek.
Mary, the Toweress, represents a different sort of fortified power than we are offered by the old, enormous strongholds of the Church–this is a choice, a heresy unto itself, but one inextricably tied with the nature of our human free will. Whether Tertullian likes it or not.
We can walk into the fortress of beliefs built for us, speaking aloud our allegiance as we cross the moat and enter the gates of what is already decided and known. Or, we can stand outside these walls, resting in the unknown space, between the sun and the moon, slowly building our own towers, choice by choice, stone by stone.
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Source List
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Luminous Gospels: Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Philip by Lynn C. Bauman, ward J. Bauman & Cynthia Bourgealt
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy
The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels, by Matthias Klinghardt
Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350–450 by Maijastina Kahlos
The Religious Mind and the Evolution of Religion by Matt J. Rossano, Review of General Psychology, (2006).
What Intense Rituals Signal to Your Brain, by Brian Gallager, Nautil.us (2023).
When Did We Get the Final Canon of the New Testament? by Bart Ehrman, The Bart Ehrman Blog (2022).
Find our full source list here:
Living Resources on Mary Magdalene
Welcome to a treasure trove of diverse perspectives on Mary Magdalene, and all her legend and legacy touches.
Brava!!! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 This was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I appreciate the meticulous care put into the research and delivery! I was unaware of a text called the Resurrection of James. What a service this is, thank you so very much for sharing!