I’m only one chapter in Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels, but it’s already really good. It starts out talking about the orthodox versus the gnostic interpretations of Christ’s Resurrection, where the orthodox position was that it was a literal fact. And the gnostics perceived the Resurrection as more of a spiritual truth, and that through the Resurrection, gnostic seekers could experience the living presence of Christ themselves.

This is a pasage I really like about how the gnostics were more interested in creative interpretation, over the maintenance of a literalist translation. I myself am very much aligned with this sort of approach, I think.

Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive. Each one, like students of a painter or writer, expected to express his own perceptions by revising and transforming what he was taught. Whoever merely repeated his teacher’s words was considered immature. Bishop Irenaeus complains that
“every one of them generations something new every day, according to his ability; for no one is considered initiated [or: “mature”] among them unless he develops some enormous fictions!”

He charges that “they boast that they are the discoverers and inventors of this kind of imaginary fiction,” and accuses them of creating new forms of mythological poetry. No doubt he is right: first- and second-century gnostic literature includes some remarkable poems, like the “Round Dance of the Cross” and the “Thunder, Perfect Mind.” Most offensive from his point of view, is that they admit that nothing supports their writings except their own intuition. When challenged, “they either mention mere human feelings, or else refer to the harmony that can be seen in creation”:

“They are to be blamed for . . . describing human feelings, and passions and mental tendencies . . . and ascribing the things that happen to human beings, and whatever they recognize themselves as experiencing, to the divine Word.”

On this basis, like artists, they express their own insight - their own gnosis - by creating new myths, poems, rituals, “dialogues” with Christ, revelations and accounts of their visions. (p. 19-20)

And this one continues later in that same line of thought (p. 23):

But what gnostics celebrated as proof of spiritual maturity, the orthodox denounced as “deviation” from apostolic tradition. Tertullian finds it outrageous that
“every one of them, just as it suits his 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.”

That they “disagree on specific matters, even from their own founders” meant to Tertullian that they were “unfaithful” to apostolic tradition. Diversity of teaching was the very mark of heresy:

“On ehwt grounds are heretics strangers and enemies to the apostles, if it is not from the differences of their teaching, which each individual of his own mere will has either advanced or received?”

Doctrinal conformity defined the orthodox faith.