The Serpent Gets a Bad Rap

The serpent did not deceive Eve when it told her that she should eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  It’s precisely that knowledge that makes us human.  Without it, we were merely pets in Yahweh’s garden.  With it, we can connect with the true God and our spirit can return home to Him. 

(I’m going to use the name Yahweh to refer to the god of the Old Testament.  In ancient texts, Gnostics refer to Yahweh as the Demiurge – the god who created our physical world.   Jesus is the son of the true God, not of Yahweh.  Yahweh was created from God, but drifted apart from Him.  A human has the spirit of the true God trapped inside of a body and mind created by Yahweh.  Our mission on earth is to bring God to our consciousness to overcome the confinements created by Yahweh, and to return to God – in a mythical sense.  Got it?)

In Genesis 2 Yahweh says to Adam, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden (of Eden);  but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”  Later, after Eve is created from Adam’s rib, the Bible says, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”

At this point in the story, Adam and Eve were essentially unconscious.  They were like bison roaming the plain.  Adam and Eve went about the Garden eating and sleeping without the awareness that anything was good or evil – it just was.  Their actions were instinctual.  They were neither happy or sad, good or bad, or proud or ashamed.

Then the serpent told Eve that actually, she wouldn’t die if she ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  In fact, her eyes would be opened and she’d become like God.   So Eve ate and Adam ate.  When Yahweh asked Eve about it, she said that the serpent had deceived her.

But was Eve really deceived by the serpent?   The knowledge of good and evil did make Adam and Eve like God in that they could tell right from wrong (they now felt shame for being naked).  Why did this anger Yahweh?  Aren’t Christians supposed to emulate God?  Aren’t we supposed to emulate Jesus?  Maybe Yahweh was angry because humans would now have the ability to judge him.

In his anger, Yahweh cursed Adam and Eve.  He made their physical existence to be full of pain and suffering and made it so that their bodies would die. 

But Gnostics say that Adam and Eve were actually born when they ate from the tree.  In other words, it was at this point in our evolution that we became humans instead of animals.  Plato has Socrates say that the unexamined life is not worth living.  Gnostics would agree.  Life in the Garden of Eden was no life at all.  It was merely existence.

Because we are human, we can access the true God within us.  Yahweh doesn’t want this.  Yahweh wants us submissive to him.  Greed, envy, and revenge are his specialties.  But we can separate ourselves from Yahweh and connect directly with the true God.  This is what Jesus meant by salvation.  Seeing beyond Yahweh’s creation is the only path to redemption

 – according to Gnostics.