Heavenly Stories: Tiered Salvation in the New Testament and Ancient Christianity by Alexander Kocar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Heavenly Stories: Tiered Salvation in the New Testament and Ancient Christianity by Alexander Kocar Carl Johan Berglund Alexander Kocar Heavenly Stories: Tiered Salvation in the New Testament and Ancient Christianity Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 Pp. 312. $69.95. In this revised doctoral dissertation (Princeton, 2016), Alexander Kocar offers intriguing and thoughtful readings of a wide-ranging selection of early Christian writings—the Revelation of John, Paul’s letters, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocryphon of John, Clement’s Excerpts from Theodotus, the Tripartite Tractate, and Heracleon’s Commentary on John—presented under a thematic umbrella that fails to add anything of value to the individual studies. Regarding Revelation, Kocar questions the common assumption that all references to Jews are coded allusions to Christians, and he reasonably proposes that if the author and his intended audience still considered themselves to be Jews, the 144,000 (Rev 7.4) may actually be the Jewish tribes, the great multitude (Rev 7.9) depicts gentile Christians, and those who falsely claim to be Jews (Rev 2.9, 3.9) represent Christian supersessionists claiming to have replaced the Jewish nation. Using Old Testament prophecies of an eschatological feast for both Jews and gentiles (cf. Isa 25.6–10), Kocar finds that John lays out different paths to salvation for Jews and gentiles, where only Jews are allowed within the new Jerusalem, and the rest of the new earth functions as an enlarged Court of the Gentiles. In conformity with the radical new perspective on Paul, Kocar argues that the apostle remained a Jew and demanded that Christian Jews continued to observe Jewish traditions, but only asked for communal solidarity and respect from gentile Christians—thus advocating for two different paths to salvation, coupled with two different ethical standards. In his two chapters on the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocryphon of John, Kocar finds an intriguing new perspective on how the two writings grapple with [End Page 109] the interconnected issues of converted Christians who relapse into sin and the dynamics between free will and demonic influence. In Kocar’s view, neither text views human sinfulness and wrongdoing as wholly internal or external to a person, but as a combination of one’s own actions with irresistible influence from spiritual agents such as the devil (Herm. Man. 12.5), an evil angel (Herm. Man. 6), or the Counterfeit Spirit (Ap. John). Under such evil influences, people are not fully accountable for their actions, but still have the responsibility of defending their souls against attack. Thereby, the Shepherd and Apocryphon can discern between ideal Christians, whose conduct is worth emulating, and repenting sinners, while admitting both to the afterlife. By using the same questions and theoretical framework on both of these texts, Kocar commendably moves beyond traditional categorizations of early Christian texts as either proto-orthodox or heretical. In a similar vein, Kocar argues that the strict tripartite anthropology of the Tripartite Tractate and the Excerpts from Theodotus is intended to explain differing results of the authorial group’s evangelistic efforts. Using a Stoic theoretical model in which moral responsibility is limited to areas where the moral subject has agency, Kocar argues that these two texts maintain disparate ethical demands for their three different categories of people. The more privileged category, which is more naturally inclined toward good action, has a responsibility for evangelizing, teaching, and inspiring others, while the less privileged is only accountable for themselves. Thereby, Kocar is able to present a more nuanced picture of early Christian determinism than the traditional understanding based on Irenaeus’s heresiological efforts. Kocar’s approach to Heracleon is based on the traditional view, in which Heracleon’s Valentinian identity is beyond question and Origen can be implicitly trusted to transmit his words more or less verbatim. From that basis, he does well to admit the difficulties of delimiting Heracleon’s words from Origen’s epexegetical insertions, to acknowledge that Heracleon never deploys sweeping cosmological narratives in which different natures explain moral differences, and to point out that Origen might be accusing Heracleon of commitments that he did not hold. With such a good start, Kocar’s analysis would...