Transmigration
We now turn to information derived
solely from heresiological reports. Heresiologists were interested in
connecting “heresies” to ancient philosophies, such as Pythagoreanism.
Accordingly, they underscored Carpocrates’s doctrine of transmigration (souls
moving from body to body)—held to be a classically Pythagorean doctrine.
Interestingly, Carpocrates and Basilides—both contemporaneous Alexandrian
theologians—both upheld a form of transmigration on the basis of biblical texts.
Basilideans appealed to Rom. 7:9 and Deut. 5:9 . . . Carpocrates, in turn, drew
attention to a text of increasing authority—John 1:21—where the Judean leaders
ask John the Baptist, “Are you Elijah?” The Form of the question gave Carpocrates
pause. The leaders could have asked, “Are you the prophet like Elijah?”
but they did not. According to Carpocreates, these Judeans assumed that the
soul of Elijah had returned to the body of John. Such a theory would explain
John’s strange behavior, for he wore the same camel-hair clothes as Elijah, ate
the same food, and was a desert-dweller like the prophet of old. Christ himself
affirmed that “Elijah has come” in the person of John—yet unrecognized;
and in another passage Jesus said about John: “He is Elijah”—not a prophet “like”
him (Matt. 17;12; 11:14-15) (cf. Tertullian, On the Soul 35.5).
For Carpocrates, however, Jesus
incarnated a soul much greater than that of Elijah. The soul that came to
indwell Jesus was one of those could that remembered what it saw when it went
around in the great cosmic revolution with the unborn Father (Irenaeus, AH 1.25.1).
This image alludes to a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus, where unborn souls
circle the outer rim of the universe following the gods and beholding (in Plato’s
language) the very Form of Beauty (Plato, Phaedrus 247 a-e).
For Carpocrates, the Beauty beheld
was the vision of the unborn Father. Jesus remembered this vision, for his soul
was pure and vigorous. So it was that when his soul descended into a body, his
limbs perfectly obeyed his sovereign mind, Jesus lived a life of virtue and
integrity, uprooting his bodily passions—violent emotions like rage, jealousy,
and grief (Irenaeus, AH 1.25.1; Pseudo-Tertullian, AAH 3.1, Among
the virtues of Jesus, Epiphanius noted self-control and righteousness [Pan.
27.2.2]). Such passions were designed to punish human beings (for passions as punishments
see Corpus Hermeticum 10.20-21; Stobaean Hermetica 23.46). Jesus
overcame them and so attained the state of the Stoic sage—apatheia, or
freedom from negative emotions. (M. David Litwa, Found Christianities: Remaking
the World of the Second Century CE [London: T&T Clark, 2022], 128)
