What and why is Easter?

The primary Christian feast day is evidence of the apocalypse cult that still lies buried beneath the edifice of modern Christianity, which peeks out from time to time.

A question for you. Why is Easter the main day of commemoration for Christians, and not Good Friday?¹

Good Friday marks Jesus’ death on the cross, and Easter his resurrection from the dead ‘on the third day’.² Which of these should be more important to Christians? Well, listen to how they speak, what the main message of the faith is: ‘Christ died for your sins’. When, then, isn’t his death the main holiday? You might say that Protestants speak like that much more than Catholics—but then, walk into your local Catholic church right now and look at what is depicted right behind the altar, at the focal point of attention for the entire congregation. Not Jesus’ resurrection; Jesus’ death. The cross, after all, is the symbol of Christianity.

Jesus’ death on the cross is at the absolute centre of Christian theology: it is the Atonement, the event that made possible the reconciliation of human beings to the divine. Meanwhile, the official views of most Christian churches imply that Jesus’ resurrection on Easter was (to put it far too crudely) a kind of proof that the plan worked, that death couldn’t hold him because he had defeated sin and the devil. But it was his death on Good Friday that actually defeated sin.

Why, then, is Easter the big day? To be sure, you might say that it would be inappropriate to celebrate the anniversary of someone being tortured to death, and you’d necessarily not be wrong. But there’s no reason why the most important day of commemoration in a religion has to be a celebration. Jews aren’t out having big parties on Yom Kippur.

So why? If you google this question you can find a bunch of Christian writers rationalising it from a theological perspective. But it’s more interesting to look at this from a historical perspective. As I see it, there are two fundamentally different kinds of Christian hope for a future state. First and foremost is the hope of the earliest Christians, based squarely on Jewish beliefs about the Messiah, that emphasises a general resurrection at the end of time and a bodily life on a transformed earth. But there is then a later type of hope that was grafted on top, focussed on salvation after death and spiritual life in heaven. Since late antiquity, the latter has been the bread and butter of both the average Christian believer’s thoughtworld and indeed much Christian art and philosophy. But Christianity has never been to completely exorcise itself of the former. And Easter’s continuing prominence is one of the fossils of this earlier hope: because while Jesus’ death is the most important event for the modern Christian story, his resurrection was central to the earliest believers.

Apocalypticism

The key fact is that the absolute earliest form of Christian belief we have evidence for, and which was probably what Jesus himself preached, was that the end of the world was imminent, the Messiah would soon announce himself, the dead would be raised from their graves and a new stage in world history would be initiated.

If you know anything about modern Jewish beliefs about the Messiah, this should not sound at all strange to you: with the exception of the words ‘imminent’ and ‘soon’, this is all perfectly mainstream Judaism, as expressed in the last two of Maimonides’ ‘Thirteen Principles’. And if you don’t know much about modern Jewish beliefs, then take a look at those principles: you’ll note that there’s nothing in there about going to heaven or hell after you die. To be sure, some Jews do believe in something like ‘heaven’, a nice place where good people’s spirits go in between their deaths and the resurrection. But this is not essential to Judaism, nor is it the focus. Insofar as modern Judaism emphasises expectations for a future state after death, it’s not your soul going to a heaven, but rather bodily resurrection at the end of time.

In this aspect, modern Judaism really doesn’t differ much from the kind of belief that was prevalent among Jews in first century Palestine. The Pharisees—intellectual ancestors of modern Judaism—seemed to believe all of this pretty much as modern Jews do, and apocalyptic literature about the resurrection at the end of time was all the rage. But there was one big difference in emphasis: the part about the Messiah’s return being ‘soon’. Maimonides famously said that Jews believe in the Messiah, ‘though he tarry’. But in first century Palestine, perhaps because of the uncertainty caused by the Roman conquest, there were all sorts of groups who would try to convince you that the Messiah was not tarrying, and his return was right around the corner. One of them was called Jesus.

Here’s a thought experiment. If you are a Jew who has met a charismatic rabbi, and the rabbi’s teaching focusses to a huge degree on the Messiah’s coming and the importance of preparing for it, then it is not at all a stretch to imagine—if the rabbi is charismatic enough and your belief in him strong enough—that maybe you conclude your rabbi actually is the Messiah! How else could he be so sure about all this? Probably most of the rabbi’s followers don’t make this leap of faith; but a few probably will.

Now, if the rabbi dies and life continues on as normal—well, probably you get disappointed, decide you were wrong, and become a normal Jew again. But maybe, just maybe, your belief in your rabbi was so strong, or your psychological dependence on him so great, or your own state of mind so unstable, that maybe you convince yourself he didn’t really die, he’s just hiding. Or maybe (if you can’t bring yourself to believe that) you accept he died, but insist he will come back before too long, the first person to be resurrected before the general resurrection. Or maybe he’s already come back, and it’s all just a matter of time before this is revealed.

OK, I lied. This wasn’t a thought experiment, this is an actual description of what actually historically happened—with Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who lived in New York and died in the 90s. It’s not a matter of speculation that this is the sort of thing that happens when a large number of devout Jews come to really focus on their beliefs about the Messiah, it’s just simple observation.

In first-century Palestine there were dozens of Jewish preachers insisting that the Messiah would return soon. Jesus wasn’t even the most important or most famous during his lifetime—he was probably way less important than John the Baptist.³ Jesus stands out only because (a) his death seems to have been particularly gruesome and (b) perhaps as a result, his probably-traumatised followers began insisting that he had come back from the dead, and he would soon reveal himself to the world as the Messiah.

I have harped on this context so much because it really helps situate the celebration of Easter. Jesus’ resurrection was important to the earliest Christians because it was supposed to be the beginning of the general resurrection that was at the absolute centre of Jewish belief (and still is). His death was obviously an important prelude to his resurrection, but it wasn’t yet invested with the spiritual and metaphysical significance it would later take on. The resurrection was chock-full of spiritual and metaphysical significance, because it announced the beginning of a new era, which (early Christians believed) would unquestionably come soon. The earliest Christian sources we have, St Paul’s authentic letters and the Gospel of Mark, are full of this kind of stuff. The most famous example comes at Mark 13: ‘So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.’⁴

This is such an explicit, falsifiable prediction that Christians ever since have been trying to rationalise it away and pretend this verse says something other than what it obviously says. Indeed, the first historical attempt at rationalising away this prediction is actually from the New Testament, in the later Gospel of John! But even if we ignore this one verse, the earliest sources are so suffused by the imminence of Jesus’ return that you could almost pick verses at random and get good evidence. My favourite example is when St Paul had to act as an agony aunt for couples who wanted to get married (so as to have sex without sinning), but had heard that celibacy is holier. A Catholic priest asked about this problem today might say that celibacy is only a calling for a small number of people, and marriage has its own kind of holiness. But Paul’s advice was rather: if you really can’t stop yourselves from having sex, you should get married—but ‘in view of the impending crisis’, you only have to hold out without sex a little bit longer, and you’ll be extra holy when Jesus returns any day now.

The idea that they were living through an ‘impending crisis’, that the existing metaphysical order was crumbling to dust, really was the foundation of Christianity in this period. In the same letter we find a truly exhausted Paul having to explain to new converts that, just because Jesus has come back, it doesn’t mean that ‘anything goes’: you should still try to be a good person, and in particular you shouldn’t run off with your stepmother. These aren’t the kind of problems you find in your average religious community—but they are common among groups that foresee an imminent eschaton.

St Paul himself had been a Pharisee: indeed, by all accounts a remarkably pious one, something he remained kind of proud of even after he became a Christian. While we probably won’t ever be able to say exactly what caused him to decide that this particular preacher was the Messiah, what’s clear is that his Pharisaic beliefs set him up well for being an early Christian. The Pharisees looked forward to the coming of a Messiah and the resurrection of the dead; in becoming a Christian, Paul just had to add that the Messiah had already come, and the resurrection had in fact started with the Messiah’s own return from the dead. His metaphor was that Jesus’ resurrection was the ‘first fruits’, the plants that ripen earliest at harvest time: the other fruits (resurrections) are already on their way, and harvest season—the end times—is here. Another metaphor he used was that the created order had gone into labour, and was in the process of giving birth to a new world.

Oh, to be sure, Paul obviously believed that Jesus’ death had a purpose: the Messiah didn’t come down early and get tortured to death by accident. But (to massively oversimplify one of the greatest thinkers in human history) he doesn’t have an overly developed theology of what exactly what Jesus’ death was for, except for setting up his resurrection.⁵ When modern scholars look at his most theologically involved letters, into which later Christians have ‘read in’ ideas about Christ’s saving death on the cross and how it allowed for individual salvation, they see writings about a completely different issue much closer to Paul’s personal life: the relationship between the existing Jewish community and the new community of Christians, not all of whom were circumcised Jews.⁶ The difficulty for Paul was explaining how Jesus’ resurrection could both be the fulfilment of God’s promises to Jews, and the start of a new and even more special non-Jewish community called ‘the church’; but even as he asked these questions, Easter, not Good Friday, was at the centre of his thinking.

The breakdown of the early Christian edifice

Paul died before Jesus returned. So did all of the people who had known Jesus during his life.

Christianity didn’t end at this point, obviously. But it’s hard to carry on a fervent belief in an imminent but indefinite apocalypse for decades and decades. You can still intellectually believe that the apocalypse is coming, of course, but it’s hard to keep yourself emotionally running at 110% for an indefinite length of time. Christians later in the first century didn’t stop believing in Jesus’ second coming, but they stopped running off with their stepmothers. Or, to put it less flippantly: if I were forced to guess, I’d say that the couples who wrote to Paul for advice probably just eventually settled down into married life, because it’s very difficult to keep yourself celibate for that long, waiting for an indefinite promise with an expected date that keeps moving into the future.

The sources we have from this intermediate period, later in first century, bear this out. If we look at the Gospel of Matthew and the two-part text consisting of the Gospel of Luke and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, they certainly both carry over Mark’s emphasis on the coming of the Messiah and the general resurrection.⁷ But there’s also a lot more concrete ethical content: the Beatitudes, the Golden Rule, all stuff that matters for a community that is trying to learn how to live in the world rather than waiting for the apocalypse.⁸

And it’s also often been noticed that, thematically, Luke and Matthew are (respectively) incredibly concerned with how Christians should relate to the existing social order, and how Christians should relate to non-Christian Jews. Paul clearly wasn’t thinking too hard when he wrote about the former question, and the latter question was for him primarily a theoretical or spiritual concern, and only secondarily a practical or political one. But Christians later in the century couldn’t just wait for the Second Coming to solve the problems of living under Romans and alongside Jews.

To be sure, there were still people who still managed to emotionally feel that they were living through the end times. The book of Revelation has a whole system of mystical metaphor linking particular historical events in the first century to the progress of God’s plan, and it’s clear that the guy who wrote it felt very viscerally the significance of these events.⁹ But the direction of travel for Christianity as a whole is clear, and it only accelerated in this direction after the last person who knew Jesus died, at the end of the first century or maybe at the start of the second.

Tradition has it that this last holdout was St John, so let’s say it was him. The Gospel of John, usually linked (somehow) to this disciple,¹⁰ was finished after his death, and shows clear signs of the strain this moment caused. In particular, the Gospel describes how ‘the rumour spread among the brothers and sisters that this disciple would not die’, at least until Jesus’ return, and takes pains to debunk this ‘rumour’, citing the authority of the disciple himself. But we’re lucky enough to have the Gospel of Mark for comparison, and we can see that this was not a false ‘rumour’ but rather a belief following directly from the core of early Christianity: that Jesus would return during the lifetime of the first generation of believers. If St John was the last member of that generation left alive, then his death would have marked a turning point. Christians could no longer believe in a truly immanent second coming: what we see in the Gospel of John is exactly the opposite, Christians explaining away apocalyptic prophecies and predictions, and developing a theology of divine presence in the church for the period before the second coming.

For the very earliest Christians—the people who had known Jesus personally, or people like Paul and Mark—the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection was clear and immediate and unambiguous. He was the Messiah, he initiated the Jewish eschaton, his resurrection was the beginning of the process that would culminate (within a generation!) in the general resurrection promised by God. But less than eighty years later, this whole system of belief was falling apart. Christians still believed that Jesus was the Messiah in some form, that he had risen from the dead, and that all this was of the greatest religious importance; but the Jewish framework for making sense of these facts was faltering. Jews could ask (as they still do ask): if Jesus was the Messiah, where’s the eschaton?

As a result, as we move into the second century, things get increasingly weird. A whole strain of Christianity known as ‘Gnosticism’ begins to emerge, asserting that the god who created the world—the Jewish god of the Old Testament—was a false and evil god, who had created an evil world. Jesus did not fulfil this evil god’s promises, but was rather somehow linked to a higher and more powerful good god. Rather than Jesus’ life and death marking the beginning of an era when the righteous would be returned to the world (which is good), the Gnostics saw him as somehow helping the righteous transcend or escape the world (which is evil).¹¹ The meaning of both Jesus’ death and his resurrection were in serious flux.

Orthodoxy and the modern faith

Gnosticism, as far as we can tell, was not peripheral in the slightest: it was as close to mainstream as could exist in fragmented second-century Christianity. (The greatest pagan philosopher of late antiquity, Plotinus, wrote a whole treatise rebutting Gnostic Christianity, but spent no time on any other form of Christianity.) But modern Christianity is descended from the group of Christians, often referred to as ‘orthodox’ in hindsight, who wanted to hold on to much of what the Gnostics got rid of: the idea that Jesus’ God was the God of the Old Testament, that he was the only God, and that the messianic promises of the Old Testament were fulfilled in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But to hold onto these ideas, orthodox Christians had to somehow develop a new framework for interpreting the Old Testament promises and the New Testament writings about Jesus.

This process of intellectual development was slow, and often consisted as much of negatively rebutting ‘heretical’ ideas as positively coming up with new ones, and indeed there were many originally-’orthodox’ developments that ended up being rejected for being too close to ‘heresy’ themselves. And, indeed, it’s not the case that the exact same set of ideas took hold everywhere—although in Western Europe, the synthesis created by St Augustine became absolutely foundational.¹² But roughly, the story goes as follows, with the question marks designating points at which different Christians have different interpretations:

While the world that God created was indeed good, somehow (?) sin entered the world, as seen in Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. As a result, all humans are sinful (?), and are thus separated from God. When Jesus died on the cross, he somehow (?) ‘took on’ the sins of the world. As a result of his suffering and death, some people (?) can now receive God’s saving grace and be reconciled to him—made at one with God. Those who receive God’s grace and are saved will be united with him in heaven after their death; those who do not will suffer (?).

It is unquestionable that each of the elements of this story can be found somewhere in the New Testament, and that each of them can be understood (if you’re happy to get creative with your interpretation) as the fulfilment of a prophecy from the Old Testament. But the combination of all of these elements into a unified narrative of Jesus’ death as ‘atonement’, a narrative that could replace the Jewish eschatological narrative of Messianic return and resurrection, was the work of centuries.

The idea of atonement didn’t replace the second coming and general resurrection in Christian belief. But it did somewhat displace them. Officially, the hope of faithful Christians is still directed towards ‘the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come’, as the Nicene Creed has it. Yet the ideas of ‘salvation’, ‘life after death’, or (even more crudely) ‘going to heaven’ play the key role in the beliefs of far more individual believers.

This isn’t just a matter of ‘folk beliefs’, either. Consider literature: Dante is the only author whose imagery and symbols can compete with the New Testament in terms of their influence on the Christian imagination; but his Divine Comedy is structured as an ascent towards a spiritual union with God in heaven (‘the Empyrean’), not towards bodily resurrection and the remaking of earth. Or philosophy: someone like Aquinas has much more to say about heaven and hell than about the second coming, and arguments for God’s existence like Pascal’s wager are much more focussed on the state of the soul after death than the state of the body and soul after the resurrection.¹³ Elite and folk Christianity alike were redirected away from the second coming and last judgment, and towards the relationship with God in the present and in the afterlife.

This wasn’t a side-effect: it was the whole reason orthodox Christianity could succeed at all. Orthodoxy emerged as an answer to the question, ‘how can we make sense of Jesus’ place in God’s plan, if he has not yet returned to earth?’ The ideas of atonement and salvation were remarkably successful in answering this question. But in order to be successful, they necessarily had to downplay the centrality of apocalypticism. If believers think they can achieve spiritual union with God after their deaths, then (as a psychological matter) it just won’t matter to them as much when Jesus returns. A religion focussed on salvation and atonement and the life of the soul after death just has a different focus from a religion focussed on the remaking of the world and bodily resurrection.

Easter as a living fossil

But I don’t want to give the impression that orthodox ideas about atonement have displaced the older perspective, with its central focus on the Second Coming, completely and totally. This would be to misunderstand Christianity. To paraphrase Nietzsche,

… the concept ‘Christianity’ presents, at a very late stage of culture (for example, in Europe today), not just one meaning but a whole synthesis of ‘meanings’: the history of Christianity up to now in general, the history of its use for a variety of purposes, finally crystallizes in a kind of unity which is difficult to dissolve back into its elements, difficult to analyse and, this has to be stressed, is absolutely undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say precisely why people are actually Christian: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined.)

Christianity is a complex and multi-layered phenomenon, precisely because it is a historical phenomenon. There was simply no way for orthodox thinkers to abandon the second coming of Jesus and the resurrection of the dead, even if they had wanted to (and they didn’t). The orthodox project was, in large part, all about opposing the Gnostics’ complete rejection of Christianity’s Jewish heritage; and these ideas are at the heart of that Jewish heritage. At the same time, these ideas caused problems for all Christians after the end of the first century; so orthodox thinkers, usually unconsciously or unintentionally, had to submerge them, shifting the focus of attention to other ways of thinking about Jesus’ importance.

But submerging ideas like this puts them under pressure, and they cannot be kept submerged forever. The most obvious version of this re-emergence in Christianity are apocalyptic sects, which arise when people become convinced once again that Jesus’ return is right around the corner. (Some of these sects have experienced exactly the same disappointment as first century Christianity did, and the inevitable subsequent splintering.) But there are more subtle versions too. For centuries, cremation was considered sinful by Christians because the burning of a body was thought to embody a lack of hope that the body could be resurrected; witches were burned precisely to symbolise that their sin was so great that they could not share in that hope. Meanwhile, some Christian thinkers have bucked the example of Pascal and Aquinas and genuinely tried to place the hope for the second coming at the heart of their theology. (I am most familiar with C. S. Lewis, but he’s hardly the only one.)

And then there is the Christian calendar itself, and the emphasis on Easter. As explained above, for the earliest versions of Christianity, premised on Jewish messianic prophecies, Jesus’ resurrection was the absolute centre of the Christian story. But for the orthodox story, Jesus’ death is the atonement, the act by which he took on the sins of the world, and the key step in God’s plan for humanity. Had orthodoxy completely replaced the earliest Christian apocalypticism with a new, coherent, and forward-looking intellectual edifice, then Good Friday would be the centre of the Christian calendar, reflecting the theology of atonement.

But orthodoxy didn’t do that; it couldn’t do that. The celebration of Easter predates orthodoxy, and the intellectual pull of orthodoxy was not powerful enough to displace it as the great Christian feast day. Easter and not Good Friday retains this title precisely because Christianity is not a coherent body of doctrine, but is rather at least two (and in fact, more than two) completely different stories sitting on top of each other in a trench coat. Christianity is messy and full of contradictions, the product of centuries’ worth of thought piling atop each other without ever fully being harmonised. The true message of Easter is not that He is risen and will return; it is precisely that He has not returned and will not return, and that Christianity is just the product of some of the greatest minds in human history trying—but never quite succeeding—in rationalising away a failed doomsday prediction.

I’ll drink eat chocolate eggs to that.

1. Well, obviously the real main day of commemoration is Christmas, for Christians and non-Christians alike; but Christians are supposed to care about Easter the most.

2. Ancient and koine Greek texts counted sequences weirdly: the first day in a sequence was ‘one day’s remove’ from itself, meaning Sunday was said to be at three days’ remove from Friday, even though we moderns would more sensibly count it as two days later. This is why (for example) in Plato’s Republic Socrates says that poetry is ‘at the third remove’ from the Forms, even though there are only two stages between poetry and the Forms.

3. Indeed, it seems likely that Jesus started out as a John the Baptist-ite before going his own way—everyone agrees that John baptised Jesus, but why would the sinless Messiah need to be baptised by a mere human teacher? The Gospel stories about John the Baptist seem to reflect the difficulties that early Christians had with these questions: there is a bunch of obvious historical nonsense, seemingly created to serve as purpose-made rationalisations, about how John was actually Jesus’ cousin, and he was sent to prepare the way for Jesus, and John actually said that Jesus was the Messiah!

4. See also Mark 9:1: ‘And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”’ This verse is perhaps even more directly relevant to the ‘rumour’ that the Gospel of John intends to ‘dispel’ (see below).

5. This is a controversial interpretation. Read Romans (especially chapter 6) and come to your own conclusions. But I think a weak version of this claim is undeniable, even if it would have to be qualified somewhat to withstand textual objections.

6. This way of interpreting St Paul used to be called the ‘New Perspective on Paul’. But it’s so obviously the correct interpretation if you put aside your assumptions and read Paul with fresh eyes in his actual historical context, that many scholars nowadays who say they are against the ‘New Perspective’ actually accept this broad outline; they just reject some more specific claims made by famous ‘New Perspectivists’ like N. T. Wright. If you are interested in Paul, I strongly recommend the Very Short Introduction written by E. P. Sanders: some of the specific scholarly arguments are a bit out of date, but nobody is better than Sanders at getting you acquainted with the right general way to approach Paul’s letters, and pointing out how it differs from the approach of influential (mis)readers of Paul like St Augustine and Martin Luther.

7. Luke is sometimes said to have already begun the move towards an ‘imminent eschatology’ unconcerned with the end-times (‘the kingdom of God is within you’), but in some places, like Luke 20:34–35 (where he seems to suggest that Christians won’t ever die!!!), he seems even more apocalyptic than Mark or Paul. Plausibly both elements are present in Luke: the end of the world wasn’t a focus for him like it was for Mark, so sometimes he focusses more on the here and now; but at other times he feels the need to remind his readers that as well as the here-and-now implications of Christianity, the end of the world is also just around the corner.

8. By contrast, Paul seems to think that ethics is obvious and uninteresting, and only brings it up to point out when somebody (like running-off-with-his-stepmother guy) has fucked up. Indeed, he makes it clear that when he was preaching, he wouldn’t mention anything about ethics, only talking about Jesus and his death and resurrection.

9. This, by the way, is why the Number of the Beast is 666: there were common codes at the time for converting names into numbers, and if you apply the most common code to the name of Emperor Nero, you get 666. If you put his name in the genitive case (don’t worry what this means if you don’t know), it gets you 616 instead, and sure enough, there are variant manuscripts where the number is written as 616 rather than 666.

There’s a debate in Christian theology between those who interpret Revelation as a series of prophecies about the end times, and a much smaller group who think it was instead a metaphor for first-century history. The obvious resolution to this debate was that it’s both: this guy very clearly thought the first century was the end times.

10. The most defensible version of the theory goes like this. There was a community of Christians based somewhere—when scholars are forced to guess they often say Ephesus, but it’s probably best not to guess—who had a particular connection to one of Jesus’ disciples: he might have founded the church or been its spiritual leader, and they called him the ‘beloved disciple’. This community wrote its own version of the Gospel story, perhaps with some early help from the beloved disciple, though it definitely wasn’t written by him alone and wasn’t finished until after he died. This is the document we have as the Gospel of John.

The theology of this gospel is quite distinct compared to other early Christian sources, and arguably shows some familiarity with Greek religious ideas as well as Jewish ones. So we’re quite lucky to have three other documents that clearly share a similar theology: the short letters called ‘1 John’, ‘2 John’, and ‘3 John’. It’s pretty obvious these weren’t written by the beloved disciple himself; and so, the theory goes, they can give us some insight into life in the community that wrote the Gospel, which in turn can help us understand the Gospel.

Scholars who accept this theory often don’t want to assume that the beloved discipline definitely was St John as opposed to any of the others, because he’s not explicitly named in any of these texts, he’s just called ‘the beloved disciple’. For my part, I think that there’s no reason to think it wasn’t St John, and it makes the most sense of both external and internal evidence, even if the identification isn’t completely certain.

11. ‘Gnosticism’ is a term that lots of scholars dislike, and even those who do use the word might think that my usage of it here is slapdash and irresponsible, generalising carelessly about numerous movements that are much more subtle. For example, my definition of Gnosticism would probably apply to the second-century figure Marcion, yet Marcion unquestionably existed outside of any of the traditions that are usually understood as ‘Gnostic’.

I appeal to authority for my definition. The definition of ‘Gnostic’ given in the Enneads of Plotinus—an important late antique text and, crucially, not a text written or edited by orthodox Christians looking to tar anyone with the ‘heresy’ brush—is: ‘those that affirm the creator of the cosmos, and the cosmos itself, to be evil’. The existence of someone like Marcion, who existed outside of the communities and lineages that are usually understood to count as ‘Gnostic’, just shows that something like this way of thinking was widespread, beyond any one religious movement (or even any well-defined set of movements).

I agree with the arguments that ‘Gnosticism’ as a term cannot pick out any coherent religious movement. But by the same token, there can be no problem with using the word to designate a position that might be held by members of many different incompatible religious movements. And indeed, it is useful to have a term to refer to this position; the term used both by orthodox Christians and Platonist pagans is ‘Gnostic’; no other alternative really exists; so I feel justified in using the word ‘Gnostic’ this way.

12. Not for nothing has it been said that the Reformation was a series of debates about the proper interpretation of St Augustine. Western Christianity (= Catholicism + Protestantism) might as well be called ‘Augustinian Christianity’.

13. As this might suggest, Platonism was a major part of the orthodox cocktail.