Shortly before his death Professor Nock asked me to arrange publication of the following lecture on Gnosticism (which had been read at the Harvard Divinity School and elsewhere). Of several unfinished lectures and papers he wished it alone to be printed. Anyone who knows his work or who could have seen the mass of material which he had already collected to supplement and annotate this paper will understand the hesitations which such a perfectionist must have overcome in order to authorize its appearance in so incomplete a form. He was clearly preparing to transform it into a major article with full augmentation and reference to other work. Though it remains only a sketch, however, it presents his final evaluation of a subject to which he had devoted frequent attention in articles and reviews for almost forty years. A few months before his death he wrote an important summary of recent work and of his own views on early gentile Christianity as an introduction to the recent paperback reprint of Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background (Harper Torchbooks, 1964). There he said that Gnosticism “may fairly be called the crucial issue today in the study of early Christianity.” In his brief discussion the present lecture was evidently very much in his mind.

The publication in January, 1953, of fragments of an unknown recension of the Greek Bible gave the first unambiguous warnings of a revolution to come in the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Earlier the publication of the great Isaiah scroll of Qumrân, Cave I (IQ Isaa), and later of the second fragmentary roll of Isaiah (IQ Isab), created noise and excitement, but none of the major text-critical schools was forced to shift significant ground. Champions of the Hebraica veritas who had increasingly dominated the field, especially in Europe, noted the close affinities of the scrolls with the traditional text. The failure of IQ Isa to produce a significant number of superior readings despite its antiquity embarrassed lingering survivors of the great critical tradition of the nineteenth century, and delighted biblical exegetes and historians who wished to ply their trade without entering the miasmal precincts of text-critical labors. Despite some attention paid to its occasional affinities with the Old Greek, most scholars, whether prompted by traditionalist prejudgment or sheer inertia, were pleased to label the text vulgar or even sectarian, avoiding thereby a serious reexamination of their text-critical theories.

Few criticisms of Christianity are so emotionally charged or so inexorable in their logic as the argument against the almightiness and goodness of God based on the fact of human suffering. “Either God cannot abolish evil or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not, then he is not all-good.” Numerous solutions to this dilemma have been offered by theologians, philosophers and poets which have pointed to the educational value of suffering, the realization of such second-order goods as compassion from the existence of first-order suffering, the promised compensations for earthly suffering in another existence, and so forth. Even the best of these solutions leave great dark areas. Suffering, in fact, is not always ennobling. Must God have created so much and such devastating first-order evils to produce compassion? Can we possibly comprehend what could count as a “compensation” for the brutal, pointless agonies to which human beings are subject? We seem constantly faced with the necessity of saying in extremis that it is, after all, “a mystery.” I happen to agree that it is a mystery, but in Christianity “mystery” means not merely a problem that we cannot see through but something that is revealed. The problem is of such importance that we simply cannot be satisfied with a few rhetorically convincing forays signed off with the reminder that God's will is inscrutable. I agree with Fr. Daniélou, “The question is fraught with anguish for too many sorrowful hearts to be lightly put off: we must get to the bottom of it.”

A well-known statement of R. Abba in the Yerushalmi (Jerusalem Talmud) attributes the historical origins of ordination — or, to be more precise, of “appointment” — to R. Johanan b. Zakkai. In contrast, however, the Babli (Babylonian Talmud) bases ordination on the biblical verse: “And (Moses) laid his hands on him (Joshua)” (Num. 27:23), thus recognising Moses as the founder of the institution. Borenstein rejects the Babylonian tradition completely, as does Newman, although the latter suggests somewhat vaguely that some kind of ordination may have existed prior to R. Johanan b. Zakkai. Gulak also maintains that ordination did not go further back than R. Johanan b. Zakkai on the grounds that during the period of the Temple the appointment of urban judges was in the hands of the High Court.

The theological crisis in Judea occasioned by the destruction of the Temple in the year 587 B.C.E. left its indelible imprint upon the contemporary literature. The conflict between the popular belief in the inviolability of the House of God and the stark reality of the national catastrophe raised fundamental questions about the nature of God and divine justice. The books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Habakkuk, in particular, bear repeated testimony to the pervasive urgency of the problem. Once the inevitability of the fall became an ineradicable conviction in the prophetic consciousness, the need for an explanation became no less imperious than if the disaster were already an accomplished fact.

Throughout the history of western Christianity, a major stumbling block has been agreement upon the definition of certain terms. Milton and his critics have shared in the difficulty of communication which lack of a common terminology has caused. Nowhere is this more evident than in his discussion of the Son of God in the Christian Doctrine, where his employment of “substance,” “subsistence,” “essence,” and “hypostasis” has confused students who were attempting to understand the complex meanings which lie back of these words. Milton has often not followed the interpretations of these words usually held in Christianity; rather, he has adopted meanings which were very early associated with them but which lost currency centuries ago, even though they have never been completely forgotten.

In the last issue of the Harvard Theological Review, Mr. Eugene McGee has rendered the service of repeating the old caricature of Nominalist Eucharistic theology (this time pinning the donkey's tail on the English reformer Cranmer) and extending this line of argument in such a way that it can be clearly faced and perhaps finally silenced. For, contrary to Mr. McGee's claim, he is not the first to “discover” the Nominalism of Cranmer. Throughout the forties and fifties of this century there raged a controversy over whether Cranmer could be called a Zwinglian and, if so, to what degree. In this controversy were drawn Dom Gregory Dix, G. B. Timms, E. C. Ratcliff, C. C. Richardson, and G. W. Bromiley. In the course of their arguments both Dix and Richardson referred to the Nominalism of Zwingli and Cranmer, who, Dix and Richardson felt, shared essentially the same position. “Cranmer,” Dix said, “was a man of the high Renaissance period, with all its deliberate ‘subjectivism,’ which sought so intently to segregate what was present in the forefront of consciousness as words as the only significant element in human life.” Richardson expanded on this charge. “The philosophic presuppositions of Zwingli's thought on the Eucharist,” he said, “are derived from Nominalism and humanism. Like most of the Reformers Zwingli attacks transubstantiation from a Nominalist point of view.” McGee's exposition bears a striking resemblance to Richardson's development of this thesis, and is to be regarded as its “re-presentation.”