Sony takes on 'Enemies' for Clarke book

By Gregg Kilday
Sony Pictures has optioned film rights to Richard Clarke's nonfiction best seller "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" for producer John Calley.

"Enemies" -- which was published last month by the Free Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster -- has been at the center of the current national debate about America's readiness to respond to terrorist threats before Sept. 11. Clarke, who was a counterterrorism expert in the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, appeared before the 9/11 Commission the week the book was published. During that hearing, he testified that the Bush White House didn't consider terrorism "an urgent issue" in the months before the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington.

His political memoir, currently in second place on Amazon.com's sales ranking, offers Clarke's assessment of the anti-terrorist efforts of the past four White Houses, all of which he worked in. "The book, written in a compelling, highly readable style, at times almost seems like a fiction thriller," Amazon.com reviewer John Moe wrote.

Calley, who stepped down as chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment in the fall, is producing such films as Mike Nichols' "Closer," an adaptation of Patrick Marber's play about two couples that is scheduled for a December release, and the big-screen adaptation of the fiction best seller "The Da Vinci Code," along with producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard.

Clarke was repped by ICM in the deal.

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The End of Gnosticism?

By RICHARD BYRNE

Boston

From the moment that Karen L. King entered Brown University's graduate program in religion, in the 1970s, she wanted to study Gnosticism. She was one of several religious-studies students of that era whose interest in the Gnostics was sparked by increased access to a treasure trove of ancient writings that had been discovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.

The brittle papyri found in Egypt were filled with lost sayings attributed to Jesus and provocative notions about his death and resurrection and the creation of the cosmos. Such writings had been labeled "heretical" by influential second- and third-century Christian bishops, and most of them were destroyed. People who adhered to such beliefs were eventually hounded out of mainstream Christianity and became a footnote in its history.

Now a professor of ecclesiastical history at Harvard University's Divinity School, Ms. King is one of the foremost experts in a field that has received immense popular attention since the publication of Dan Brown's best-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday) and the April news blitz surrounding the Gospel of Judas — a newly unveiled lost text of early Christianity.

Yet the buzz around Gnosticism has drowned out an energetic and fundamental debate among scholars of early Christianity: Does Gnosticism even exist?

Ms. King has not lost her relish for the study of the texts that fall under that rubric. But she and other scholars — most notably Michael Allen Williams, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington — are asking hard questions about a definition of Gnosticism accepted for nearly 1,500 years.

Is the term imprecise — or even useless? Has its continued use by scholars stymied new breakthroughs in research on the Nag Hammadi texts?

Ms. King says that her work on texts such as the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary led her to the conclusion that "Gnosticism" is a bankrupt term for the Nag Hammadi writings and those whose beliefs they reflected. "With both texts," she says, "I kept trying to get them to fit into the mold, and they kept slipping out."

Both Ms. King and Mr. Williams have written trenchant book-length critiques of the term in the last decade. But many other scholars in the field, while agreeing that the term must be used with precision, argue that "Gnosticism" is still useful and necessary.

Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees the campaign to scrap the term altogether as a bit over the top. "I think it's a knee-jerk reaction," he says.

Sitting in the living room of her home in suburban Boston, Ms. King passionately insists that "Gnosticism" needs to go if scholars want to paint a more diverse and authentic picture of early Christianity. Yet she acknowledges the strength of the current against which she and others are swimming.

"It's extremely difficult to change a master narrative," she says. "And we've had this master narrative of Christianity since at least the fourth century. ... It's become entrenched."

History's Mysteries

That "master narrative" of Christianity traditionally sets those it calls Gnostics — a word derived from the Greek word gnosis, or "knowledge" — against the Christian orthodoxy from which they deviated.

In this narrative, the dividing lines are sharp. Where Christians embraced the God of the Old Testament as part of a new Trinity, Gnostics rejected that God as the Supreme Being. (Some of them believed the Old Testament God who created earth was a lower spirit, or "demiurge," and argued that his lesser status explained the manifold imperfections of his creation.) Christians believed that Jesus was crucified, died, and physically rose from the dead, while Gnostics held a variety of opinions about Jesus' death and resurrection, including the possibility that it was symbolic. Christians relied on a shared knowledge of scripture as interpreted by bishops, but Gnostics held that "secret" teachings of Christ and his apostles also existed.

This definition of Gnosticism was formulated mostly by its enemies. Until the 1940s, almost everything scholars knew about Gnostics came from the writings of early Christian bishops such as Irenaeus of Lyon, who in the second century attacked the theology and the ethics of Gnostics and declared them to be heretics. In refuting the Gnostics, however, the bishops did preserve some accounts of their beliefs — and even their writings.

Until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, those ancient polemics were the primary sources for most scholarly explorations about the Gnostics. In her 2003 book, What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap/Harvard University Press), Ms. King devotes three chapters to tracing how scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries approached Gnosticism before that scholarly windfall. She argues that the lack of new evidence about Gnosticism forced researchers to work creatively within the definition written by the enemies of Gnostics more than 15 centuries before.

Elaine H. Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University and author of a number of important books on early Christianity, points to the German scholar Hans Jonas's influential 1934 work, Gnosis und spδtantiker Geist (Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity), as a good example of how that dynamic played out. Sifting the ancient evidence with psychology and existential philosophy, she observes, Jonas described the Gnostics as essentially alienated from the world. From that sense of separation, they fashioned a theology that emphasized a duality between body and spirit — and extended that duality to create new myths about the cosmos.

"His book was so compelling," says Ms. Pagels, "that it became the framework in which people saw the discoveries made 10 years later. His scheme was so persuasive that it was taken by many people to be the underlying structure."

Doubting Dualism

The discovery of 45 lost texts at Nag Hammadi in 1945 gave scholars a new perspective on Gnosticism. They now could read "gospels" and "revelations" by believers the early Church fathers had labeled heretics. The papyri even contained attacks against orthodox Christians that accused them of heresy. (A Nag Hammadi text called the Apocalypse of Peter, for instance, assails "those outside our number who name themselves bishop and also deacons. ... They are dry canals.")

The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts "shows that the Gnostics sincerely and reverently held these beliefs," says Mr. Ehrman. "Their attacks on the proto-orthodox as heretical were one of the most illuminating things for me."

The impact of the discovery in scholarly circles was by no means immediate, however. Dissemination of the texts was slowed by academic turf wars. Few scholars were proficient in Coptic, the language in which the newly discovered papyri were inscribed.

By the 1970s, however, scholars were working on the texts in earnest. The publication in 1978 of The Nag Hammadi Library (HarperCollins), edited by James M. Robinson, a professor emeritus of religion at Claremont Graduate University, provided English translations of all the texts found in 1945 and two additional texts found in 1896.

In 1979, Ms. Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels (Random House) was a popular success that brought the Nag Hammadi texts — and the theological, social, and political issues they raised — to a wider audience.

But as the notoriety of Gnostic writings grew, some scholars — including Ms. Pagels and Ms. King — grew dissatisfied with what they saw as the outdated interpretive framework that had attached itself to the texts like a barnacle.

In What Is Gnosticism?, Ms. King argued that the promise of "a new chapter in the history of Christianity" offered by the Nag Hammadi discoveries had not materialized. "The new riches did not provide quick or easy solutions," she wrote. "Indeed, the surprise is that for decades little has changed."

But Ms. King was not the first scholar to fashion a book-length critique of Gnosticism as it had been defined. In 1996 Mr. Williams, of the University of Washington, wrote a book bluntly titled Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton University Press). In that book, he crafted a comprehensive analysis of the ways that the Gnostic texts themselves rejected many of the assumptions generally held about them. Mr. Williams concluded that the texts varied so greatly in outlook and substance that the overall term made little sense.

For instance, he asked, did the myths created by Gnostics about the creation of the world by lower powers ("demiurges") really mean that Gnostics rejected the world? "In fact," writes Mr. Williams, "demiurgical myth seems in many instances to have been associated with greater involvement with the larger society, not less."

Reflecting on his book a decade later, Mr. Williams says that "at least as problematic as the term 'Gnosticism' were the categories used to describe it. ... People seemed to have open avenues to go to any certain text with a category in mind, and a set of expectations, and, of course, you find what you're looking for."

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