The Fall of the Gnostics

welcome everyone who is joining us via livestream on YouTube and Facebook and to everyone who is joining me here Toronto Centre place for our history theology and philosophy meetup group we do these every Tuesday at 7 o'clock Eastern and we obviously are trying to encompass a wide variety of subject matter under that wide rubric but also hopefully always bringing up themes that are relevant in our daily life so that we can accomplish our mission together my name is John Hamer and I serve as coordinator of the Meetup we always begin with our mission which is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and end needless suffering to promote peace and justice to live life meaningfully together we're going to and we had advertised that next week was good we were gonna have our lecture that Sheheen will do on badass habibi's and we were looking forward to this one a lot so this is the idea that within early Islam there's actually lots of very strong female figures who had a lot of impact on the movement and on that religion and how it has developed but it may be those voices aren't as emphasized and heard and so Shaheen is going to bring some of those out for us and give us several mini bios of these badass habibi's and how they have shaped that movement but instead of doing because of the scheduling snafu on our end not cheating so while Shaheen was very gracious labled pushed it one week out so this will actually happen in two weeks not next week and next week we'll do a surprise lecture this was not advertised but it's been one that people have been asking about and talking about we're calling it the Great Goddess and Greek mythology and so we're going to take a look into this idea that is popularized especially in the middle of the 20th century about this idea that perhaps underlying all of these tales we have when history emerges and we have the Greek myths recounted and there's essentially this patriarchal Pantheon led by Zeus of the Olympians and that Zeus spends all of this time for example seducing all of these female goddesses that maybe had important cult centers around the Greek world and maybe what the this is a recollection of is that there was in fact very strong previous to the historic era of the Greeks there were very strong female lead cults maybe of these kind of prehistoric religions and that possibly that these are also related to more matriarchal societies as opposed to the patriarchal society and they're actually quite sexist society that emerged in classical ancient Greece and so we'll look at both the kind of the the evidence and speculation about that we'll look at the holdovers of what some of these expressions of the feminine divine are in the Classical Age and then also as kind of the cults of the of Isis and the and the Great Mother and things like that as those kind of continue on into the Roman world and ultimately even if we see continuances in for example the idea of the cult of Mary the mother of God that continues on through the Middle Ages and then to the modern times in Christianity so anyway we'll look at that next week but our topic tonight is the fall of Gnosticism we've talked a couple times before about some of the Gnostic texts so there isn't this is a theme we've touched on more than once but it's actually such a big topic I find that as I was kind of preparing even this lecture today I wasn't able to like cover maybe even a quarter of the things I wanted to talk about and to put into the slides and so we'll see what kind of a a potpourri of the things that I threw into a mist tonight and we'll have lots more left over for next time we're talking about Gnostics so we'll always mention and remind people who are joining us that our ability to stream these and to continue to do lectures and have these meetups is really due to your generous contributions and we thank you for those you can always go to our website Center place CA where you'll find PayPal buttons I've lost control is it a slide thing alright I mean oh no it's maybe a battery thing on this guy hope not but I'll just make the appeal that you could use the PayPal button whether or not it highlights or not they're kind of right here and of course we thank everybody who for your contributions here who join us in person there we are very good so fall of nauseous is so what couple of the things that I want to hit on tonight as we're talking about who Gnostics are what they're where they're coming from why did they come up with all of the ideas they have so let's kind of point out that so as we're getting to this time period when the Gnostics are going to be around which is let's say in the century leading up to Jesus and then the next let's say three or four centuries after that people are realizing that when they are taking the Hebrew Bible the Christian Old Testaments and you read it literally you're going to run into some complications or problems you know there's gonna be some interpretations that you may not like if you're reading it literally there is also increasingly an interest in and an awareness of ideas like the problem of evil so which is to say why do good things happen to bad people why is there so much suffering in the world and also in general the question about well what is the meaning of life there's also I want to look at how for example when there's all of these different influences that come together so second temple Judaism as exposed to Zahra astron ISM which is the state religion of the Persian Empire in which Judaism the Jerusalem is a province of the Persian higher batting fluence is such things as the apocalyptic movement so the idea of seeing a imminent end of the world and also the dualism the physical dualism that's or aster taught that essentially there is a cosmic good and a cosmic evil these are kind of introduced into second temple dualism but also then if you are in you know in that area which then is conquered by Alexander the Great and is exposed to Greek ideas now suddenly the same the same area it has to contend with Greek dualism which is this matter and non matter material and immaterial dualism for example that is so formulated by Plato so we'll look at all those things these is just kind of a preview of one of the things we're looking at and then finally for people who have become Christian of people who are in the Christian community so this isn't true for the various Jewish Gnostics that for example reject Christianity or reject Jesus but for anybody who is becoming a follower of Jesus of Nazareth then they also have to reconcile essentially how does Jesus relate to God so if we are all for example monotheists and increasingly even the pagans were philosophically monotheists or or at least maybe dualist if we're monotheists or dualists how do we understand essentially if God is God and there's this Jesus guy is Jesus God how do we how do we formulate that and work that out and so the Gnostics have their own way of formulating that as well or actually multiple ways so just to kind of roll back and look at some of the inheritance and so if you are part of the vast let's say Greek speaking Jewish community in Egypt and then and indeed the Jewish community in let's say the first century AD in Alex andrea was larger there than any other place so including any place that would have been in Judea any individual place and so one of the things I'm gonna be quoting here from the brick Testament cuz it's one of my favorite hitter Asians of the one of my favorite translations of the Bible but essentially it's a one that it's animated with or illustrated with using a little Lego guys so God if we go back to some of the stories as portrayed in the early part or in the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament for the Christians isn't always acting in ways that we might think of as being good if we think of God as being all good so we know for a bunch of different things right in the the Noah's story so in Genesis 6 12 through 13 God saw that the earth was corrupt for all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth and God said to Noah I have determined to make an end of all flesh for the earth is filled with violence because of them now I'm going to destroy them along with the earth so this is sometimes hard to square away with the God who is all good they're gonna he's going to destroy everything and indeed in the story God destroyed everyone and everything that's not on the ark which is always why the fact that this particular Noah's Ark story becomes a kids story always seems pretty pretty strange right because anyway people kids like animals and rainbows and things like that but there is a dark side to the story as well right another example as written anyway we talked before about maybe the background and origins of the the story of Abraham and Isaac but as it's written in Genesis we now it reads after these things God tested Abraham he said to him Abraham and Abraham said Here I am God said take your son your only son Isaac whom you love and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I'll show you so even though in the story ultimately an angel prevents Abraham from actually killing his son and so that within instead they substitute a ram for they offering nevertheless the way the story is written at least as a test here God is ordering something quite horrific another example so the part of the tale is that God is giving to his people a promised land but the way they're going to get it is actually that God is specifically ordering hamp them to Massacre everybody who already lives there and kill all of them so an example just happens actually very frequently throughout the entire text but there's an example in the book of Joshua the Lord said to Joshua see I have handed over to you the king of AI with his people his city his land you shall do to I and its King as he did to Jericho at its king so previously that actually massacre can kill everybody in the city of Jericho and so only its spoil and livestock you may take as a booty for yourselves so as as opposed to in Jericho where they just killed it and destroyed everything and so set an ambush against the city behind it and so in this particular story God has helped them plan out how they're gonna do it they pretend that they're coming up as a as an army and when the everybody from I all of the warriors all leave and to confront the Israel as the Israelites run away and pretend do you know they do a feint and when everybody runs away then the people that are in that are coming to ambush go into the undefended city and kill all the they burn it to the ground and they ultimately slaughter all the people in it so the Lord said to Joshua stretch up your sword that is in your hand towards I for I will give it into your hand all Israel returned I attacked it with the edge of the sword the total of those who fell that day both men and women 12,000 all the people of I another example we have is for example in the in the book of Job the Lord says to Satan have you considered my servant job there is no one like him on the earth blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil so the guy according to God is completely blameless and up an upright and he points out to Satan they pick this is actually already as they've had a wager about whether or not he if Jobe is just is just liking God because God has been blessing him Satan has said if you if you take all these things away from him he'll curse you he still purchased persists in his integrity God says although you incited me against him to destroy him for no reason so God and the text here is saying that here we're taking a person who's perfectly righteous and blameless and for no reason killing all of his family and livestock and all of it and his property and and his his health and destroying it all that kind of thing so anyway this problem in the reading if we were reading this all literally if we thought the visas historic events that actually happened and we have just a very big surface reading this has caused a lot of people including very much so the the Jewish people whose scriptures this it these are a bunch of different conflicts and there's all kinds of different solutions to these readings and we've read and done lectures on several before so for example last fall we had a lecture on Philo of Alexandria who is a very important Jewish philosopher Greek speaking philosopher in Alexandria at this time who really explains that these stories are to be understood literally that they're metaphors and and that these don't express how God actually actually is and this is in fact the the window that a lot of early Christian groups also also take and the way they go forward with it but in any event if you do go back as modern fundamentals do and read these quite literally the conclusions that you that you might jump to are are fairly stark in terms of your understanding of whether this God is actually good or not okay so I want to go to a window into the Gnostics and look at some of the Gnostic texts that are written around anyway in this kind of time period about how the Gnostics are understanding and rewriting their version of the square so there is a gnostic sacred story written into a book called the apocryphon of John or secret book of John and this is so therefore attributed to the Apostle John John the beloved and supposedly according to this text anyway John is told this directly from Jesus so Jesus who is his very United beloved companion has given him this secret knowledge the text then retells the creation story of Genesis in a very complex and I'm gonna say esoteric detail and in so doing explains like how the entire cosmos both was created but how it exists and what its purpose for and it also then thereby explains essentially the meaning of life as understood by Gnostic Christians like the author of this text so here's a little bit of this text and I which is to say John since this is written in John the Beloved the first person asked to know it and he which is to say Jesus said to me the Monad is a monarchy with nothing above it it is he who exists as God and father of everything so we've introduced here a new word that the Gnostics are gonna understand how they understand what God God the Father and they're using the word monad God the father of everything is the indivisible one who is above everything who exists as in corruption which is in the pure light into which no I can look he is invisible the invisible spirit of whom it is not right to think of him as a god or as something similar for he is more than a god for he does not exist in something inferior to him since everything exists in him for it is he who establishes himself he is eternal since he does not need anything for he is total perfection and so you know if we've kind of have done a bunch of different study of both of Greek philosophy and so a platonism and also Aristotle's ideas some of these are gonna sound kind of familiar to us so this idea that for example he doesn't need anything and and everything is there nothing's I mean everything's inferior to him everything exists in him but not he and anything else in other words this these are ideas like the the source of everything the unmoved mover the inevitable candy is something that's even beyond what ancient Greeks or anyone else would have thought of as a God because we're talking about the singular one from which everything comes total perfection the monad okay so as we continue on to understand though what happens how do we have a universe out of the monad and so his the monads thought so as this singular being has thought that thought itself performed a deed and she came forth so now we have that first thought which is for thought from his mind she is the fourth thought and this is now what the using the term anyway the Gnostics are going to call it the bar below so one of the most important emanations from God the unknowing an unknowable infinite ineffable God now there's going to be a series of additional divine beings and one of these are the first of these is the bar bellow of all her light shines like his light that perfect the perfect power which is in the image of the invisible virginal spirit who is perfect and so from then this first thought there then emanate a series of additional emanations and these are paired ions and ions just means divine beings who emanate from the monad and they're like for thought thought indestructibility eternal life truth and they're paired because in this understanding of the cosmos each essentially each one of these has a gender and so there's a male and a female together and this is showing that the universe is not only has total order but as come we balanced and so that all happens then the word of creation the logos comes forward and the word of creation is Christ the auto Jenny's so this thing that is now going to generate all the rest of creation comes forth and then the last of the Aeons usually in different tellings but in this one especially in the apocryphon of John is wisdom or Sophia and so Sophia is Greek for wisdom and is a female or as a feminine noun and so therefore is often viewed as a goddess or a female and paired with a male in this case because it's an ion and so and Sophia of the epinoia so so divine revelation a wisdom being an a on conceived a thought for herself she wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the Spirit he had not approved and without her consort so now she is doing the thing that the original monad did you know that first thought creative thought but she's doing it without her male consort as a pairing and she's doing that also without the permission of the monad and so anyway this sort of hasty or reckless attempt to know ultimate truth that even wisdom is trying to have this is going to be what causes all the problems in the universe as far as the Gnostics are concerned and so the results of wisdoms unauthorized conception is that now she emanates a being who is a flawed god and that being in the Apocrypha and john is named the Yalta bells and the secret now and this is like a secret knowledge that John is is giving in the Apocrypha is that now Yalta Baath who goes on to enact the Genesis story and creates the flawed material world is that this yell Tabo becomes the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible of the Old Testament and so therefore all of those things that we read about God doing you know at the beginning of this this simple answer that the Gnostics here have is well that's not that's because that's not God at all who has been operating this way this is in fact a false material god who thinks he's God but he was actually acting in very evil ways but there is in fact the true God the monad that it is existing not in the physical plane but in this holy holy spiritual plane and so anyway if you guys needed to know wanted to know what the secret the Gnostics have been holding on to you was you that's the big one right there so yeah there jamu nuts I think lightness is using the same MO not yes being his fantastic worldview is he something using this as a source material so yeah the question is yes well we should do likenesses we're gonna have to a lecture on life Nets eventually cuz he's so interesting that modern philosopher who is also was one of the co-creators of calculus also has a very abstruse philosophy of his own of how he's creating he understands the universe which is in a lot of ways they a reply to the challenge of Descartes and how you know kind of the mind-body problem that Descartes has and so Leibniz creates he uses the same word monad to create a sense that I think every every single individual thing in the universe is a monad that doesn't have that can't interact or connect with each other and it's only the I think it's only the Spirit of God that is actually causing any cause and effect between monads and so I may be getting likenesses it's a very complicated idea what he has and I have to study it again to be reminded of exactly what it is I would say it's a completely different use of the idea of the monad than this except for in a sense that because there's lots and lots of monads and lightness is understanding whereas in this case we're talking about the one singularity that is at the beginning of everything and so it's the same I mean if you're drawing on Greek right so it means something we're oneness and so all of the little oneness is I think our our individual in that live Nets whereas we're talking about just there's only one one in this case right so the monad is about only one that and in Gnosticism also Gnosticism is this text that I'm reading from it's it's only been rediscovered in the 20th century Leibniz didn't have any access to it so he wouldn't have been able to read it okay so so this is in the sense then a solution to like all of these kinds of there is a solution to these kind of problems it is to say gnosis so for the author of the Apocrypha of John this state of affairs the fact that all of creation all of the material world has been created by a flawed God who has all this power over us and who sometimes tries to wipe us out with a flood and etc all those kind of things no worries because in fact we are going there is a solution to all of this so the material world has come about through the ignorance through ignorance of the true God the monad the true God is the monad in fact as we've just said that God is so ineffable that we should even call him a god and we shouldn't actually call him he because transcends gender there's none of those things humans however can return to that spiritual realm from which a particle within us is all all emanated through gnosis or knowledge so in the same way that ignorant and error is what got us into this on desirable situation to begin with knowledge is what's going to pull us out of it and so part of that knowledge for the Gnostics now who become Christians including the author of the apocryphon of John who's this whole thing is a revelation from Jesus to John is going to involve Jesus so for some Gnostic Christians Jesus then is the incarnation of the logos of the Monad so the Monad speaks a word and that word creation let there be light that portion of the Genesis story that becomes Christ and so for some of them Jesus is actually incarnated in flesh in order to lead us out of where we're at and give us this kind of gnosis and secret knowledge but for others they're like I don't even think that the logos that Christ could ever have really been in a body because flesh is so corrupt he must have just been seeming to be in a real person he's actually just a spiritual being the entire time and everybody was simply tricked by an apparition and so they're also they're kind of on the fence about this so several the different Gnostics have those different ideas but either way for the closest followers for the people that have been brought in to the secret knowledge of the Gnostics of people who they may well be in a regular Christian congregation and then somebody kind of comes up and says hey that was a great sermon you know that the bishop gave about resurrection of the souls and things like that we have a study group that meets on Wednesday Tuesday night you want to do you want to come over to our study group because we've got some you know you'll want to hear from you know what this this guy you know one of our team what our teacher has to say because we've got some real good insights on that and so they will essentially within the congregation's of what would be otherwise really quite ordinary Orthodox Christians maybe there would be like an interior group that has some of these texts that that talks about them shares them and in fact probably participates in special rituals that are designed to allow the person not only definite gnosis in terms of intellectual knowledge but to have gone through several kinds of rituals that bring you and into a place where you can experience oneness with spirit is the idea so what they want to be able to do then is to have a direct experience of gnosis or knowledge of the Monad as opposed to something that is either where there's something in between right as you are you are like only for example participating through the church's sacraments or through the intercession of a saint or something like that you are now going to actually directly experience oneness with the true creator so how is it accomplished so it's accomplished especially through knowing yourself and so what you are essentially doing is on the one hand a process of intellectual introspection because and one of the reasons why they tell these long creation stories of all these emanations is because they are arguing or they believe that your own mind and the mind of humans are actually made in image of this creation process and so this long mythology or a long creation story that's talking about how truth or other kinds are emanated out from the ineffable source that works in the same way as how essentially your mind works and so as you know yourself better as you go through an intellectual process of introspection and as you meditate on increasingly abstract philosophical principles then you are going to get to a place where you can achieve a state of mystical union with the one with the Monette did you have a question or comment yeah can we get you a give the microphone so that people can hear online too about Jesus being the incarnation of the of the logos of the world yes oh and from that perspective was he the like what happened before was he the unique incarnation of the word or it was he like in another incarnation following some kind of sequence so like was there some kind of switch some kind of novelty with Jesus according to that perspective or so but what happened before that if now right right yeah so yeah there's a novel switch so essentially there's a / and this is not even this is actually not totally divergent from Orthodox Christianity either let's say so there is a pre in the in this theology there's a pre-existent Jesus so Jesus is one of these original eons because Jesus is the word of God the logos of one of these very important early emanations of the of the monad but then what's happened all the way up until Jesus comes to earth is that nobody has nobody has that knowledge of the monad to come back and so by coming to earth and experiencing or seeming to experience all the things that Jesus does he's essentially tricked the yalda BIOS and and they all de both has you know and his servants have killed Jesus's body or seemed to but in fact actually while he was there he was able to impart this gnosis to the disciples who are now able to spread it to us so that we now can achieve a salvation that is the salvation of knowledge so and so that's what's changed and so it's not not wholly different it's just that they in a sense that for Orthodox Christianity Jesus is also the logos but it's not an emanation instead of Jesus's a a second person of God where as opposed to being an emanation of and there's a theological distinction and then also that something else is operative in terms of the incarnation and atonement of Jesus then simply imparting gnosis or knowledge because knowledge is not because because the problem in the world is not simply ignorance in Orthodox Christianity so that would be the distinction okay so I'm gonna take a couple examples to show how this works and how this varies from traditional Christianity as well so one of the very important the most important texts that we have from the Gnostics is called the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Thomas is probably written in multiple in stages in the earliest text may well not have too much to do with the Gnostics but we don't know because what we have is a version of the text that's later and that has elements that we might call nostos izing it's not the the same kind of Gnostics that are that wrote the apocryphon of John but they have similar kinds of ideas and and we'll just see that okay so if that that gospel starts and says these are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and didymus Judas Thomas recorded and so we can already see that at the title of this is sort of how the other one worked to when we were looking at the apocryphon of John because again that was something that Jesus was giving secret teachings in that case to John the Beloved in this case what we're saying is that what the gospel here is claiming is that he gave it to a guy named didymus Judas Thomas should say a guy named Jude who is a didymus and a Thomas which both cases those are the Greek and Aramaic words for twin and so there is a guy in the canonizing Testament named Jude who is the brother of James who is the brother of Jesus so this is Jesus's brother Jude but in this case what the what the Gnostics are claiming is that he's also Jesus's twin and so possibly here what as an idea of there's a lot of cases in in Helena and in Greek mythology and other mythology is where there is a divine twin and a mortal twin so Hercules has you know his mortal twin and and castor and pollux you know there's a divine one an immortal one and so it may well be the Jude here is the mortal twin of of Jesus anyway so whatever that whatever that may be here's what it how it starts he said Jesus said whoever discovers the interpretations of these sayings will not taste death and so the Gnostics and the Gnostic meaning of life here is a life or death matter if you understand this kind of knowledge if you discover the interpretation if you understand what this really means if you have gnosis you're not gonna you're not gonna die you're not gonna die because what you'll find out ultimately is that the seeming death that we have here in mortality is is nothing as meaningless because the physical bodies here have are simply the illusion the true the real life is occurring in that spiritual life and if you understand that you will understand that you're going to live forever and not taste death jesus said those who seek should not stop seeking until they find so that part of it is similar to the canonical sayings of Jesus but then there's an extra part of it here in not Thomas when they find they will be disturbed when they are disturbed they will marvel and they will reign over all so when you find out the gnosis you know you're gonna be disturbed to find out this thing that you thought all of these things about your mortal life here that life everything that we see you're gonna realize wait a second we're in the matrix you know this is a this is something that your mate and he initially disturbed by when when whatever neo just realizes he's in the matrix but after he's disturbed he's gonna marvel and then by the way he's gonna have all those matrix powers because in a way he is right he is now outside of what the yalda bath and they and the kind of fake gods of this world are trying to do to control us here's another one saying three jesus said if your leaders say look to look father's imperial rule which is to say this is also translated the kingdom of God the kingdom of heaven the kingdom of heaven is in the sky then the birds of the sky will get there first so the kingdom of heaven if they say it's in the sky the birds are gonna get there if they say it's in the sea then the fish will proceed proceed you rather the kingdom of God the father's imperial rule is within you and it is outside you so in other words it's all over you know in all this kind of way it's not this literal place that's physical you know like you say heaven isn't just a place in the sky or in another planet or something like that it's in fact actually spiritual when you know yourselves then you will be known and you will understand that you are children of the living father but if you do not know yourselves then you live in poverty and you are the poverty so the only way not again knowledge here is the only way that you're going to actually know the Monad the true father the living father and if you don't you're going to simply live in poverty which is to say mortal flesh all of this physical world that is called poverty all throughout this gospel okay so the maastricht believe you know they have a solution to the problem of evil lots of I'm gonna look at some of the other background that they are building on and rejecting to look at this kind of problem so this is not something that only the Gnostics are worried about it's not something that only Greeks and Westerners are worried about obviously simultaneously in in South Asia or in the same centuries before this the fact that there is suffering in the world is one of the observations that the Buddha have made and indeed the first noble truth of the Buddha is often translated life is suffering and so this leads to the additional truths and also indeed the path that the Buddha has the middle path that is essentially the way to get out of suffering or to transcend suffering and have a sensation of it we also have an ideas for example that are coming from Greek philosophy about the problem of evil and also essentially why is there suffering why is the world so unsatisfactory and we've talked about it before we've had a whole lecture on Plato's allegory of the cave from his dialogue the Republic and so part of the idea that Plato has is going to be actually it sounds kind of learn to some of the things that the Gnostics have already conveyed which is to say there is a real world of ideas this world of eternal forms a world that does not decay a world that doesn't have all of this error and decline and and death and that our physical world according to Plato is a reflection of that and that's what the allegory of the cave essentially the people we are all people that are chained in a cave we're experiencing the physical world by watching essentially a shadow puppets on a wall we're in the matrix we are seeing all of this 3d stuff but in fact this is not the real world the real this is simply a reflection or a shadows of what the real world is and if we were to go out of the cave and see the actual light we'd be blinded by it it's no coincidence that's plato's idea here is our echoed in the Gnostics because the Gnostics come after him and are influenced by him so but the Gnostics are also dealing with Scripture and the scripture is written earlier than Plato and has a different solution to the problem of evil embedded into it that was becoming unsatisfactory so all of this time period is called the Second Temple period of Judaism because in 587 the original temple is destroyed by the Babylonians the Jewish leaders are taken into exile in in Babylon and a bunch of the other ones flee to Egypt where they establish a diaspora community in Egypt that is still ongoing up till this time period when the Gnostics exist as I mentioned when those leaders are trying to ponder why did this happen so they're asking themselves wait a second if the God of Israel is God why then did he let God's temple the Temple of Jerusalem where all worship was to be concentrated why did that get destroyed the Assyrians who said that their God sure is the is the true God when they conquered the northern kingdom and destroyed Samaria they said well this is because our God is God and your God wasn't God and likewise the Babylonians have a similar kind of general idea Marduk is the real god one who's powerful here and so they have to kind of decide well wait a second why would that be the answer we could tell based on how the the moral of the story that happens again and again and again in the text the editors of the early biblical texts say what was happening here is that God was punishing his people because they kept forgetting him because they weren't consistently worshipping only real God and they were instead continuously relapsing into paganism and worshipping all these pagan gods and so the text is very clear about that so in the Torah in the Deuteronomic history which is to say those books of the Hebrew Bible that go from the period of book of Joshua judges Samuel Kings all those books the text follows a cycle that is really most exemplified in the book of Judges in the this is a picture here of Samson so we know that story pretty well probably Samson and Delilah so Samson is a judge which is to say a ruler of one of the tribes of Israel and he has superhuman strength but not superhuman intelligence and and he one of the reasons why he has that strength is because he won't guess of course his hair long you won't ever get hair cut and but Delilah who is his girlfriend's is working with as the enemies the Philistines and he keeps telling her what his weakness is and she she ties him up and things like that all these things about and and eventually eventually she gets it out of him and they shave his head and things like that and he was able to kill him so anyway the point of it is though is that what happens every single time he's only one of the judges and what happens every single time in the story is the Israelites forget God they start worshipping other gods God gets angry so he sends let's say the Philistines to imprison them and slave them all and things like that then everybody remembers oh yeah God you know so when they aren't when they aren't prosperous they then their hearts turn back their chastised and they pray then God sends the delivery sends a judge like Sampson like the better judges before him like Deborah and then they overthrow the Philistines of the Midianites or the Moabites whoever was the bad guy at the of the weaker rather of the forty year period and then the people are prosperous again because they're prosperous they then forget God and that happens again and again in a cycle right and so yeah this is like the end of the Samson so in the end he dies with the Philistines so it is dying acting massacres all the Philistines the people remember God until the next generation and that renews renews the cycle right so the problem with that answer so that answer as a solution that's a simple answer and it would be nice sometimes people with the problem of evil you always want if you could have a simple answer it'd be great and so for example if you're in a mega church here in the in North America in the United States what the answer to the problem of evil often is that God blesses good people with with righteous with wealth and the reason why you're so rich and the reason why you have a big SUV in a giant house and all those kind of things is because you're a righteous and the way you can also show that righteousness is by paying a lot of tithing to me as the pastor of the mega church so that I can buy a new jet and that cycle continues and that's I'm gonna say why you're so prosperous and why you're so good you can be very confident of the fact that you're really really good and so that's the prosperity gospel and it generates a lot of wealth for mega churches and it makes rich people very happy about why they're so good you know the problem of it is then is if they have something terrible happen to them you know then then it doesn't explain why that happened because they didn't do anything different and they kept on giving all their tithing and all that kind of thing and that it still got cancer it died well it's because it doesn't actually it doesn't actually predict reality you know any better than you know any better than coin flipping predicts you know the particular end of the reality you could always have a bit of a belief that my willpower alone will allow heads to happen the predicting rate the prediction rate of my my thesis and my belief there is about 50% you know and so it's so therefore you can believe it but it won't it won't be a predictor of reality so that's also true unfortunately with the Deuteronomic solution to the problem of evil just not worshiping the pagan gods has not met that there's been a twenty six hundred year run for the Jewish people with no setbacks so in other words Judaism they have not been pagan this whole time you know but there has continued to be negative things happen to the Jewish people right and so that was true way back into the Second Temple period after the Persians were overthrown by Alexander the Great his successors are the Seleucid kings of Syria they come and destroy the temple and really did attack Jerusalem and they set up within the temple to desecrate it they set up statues of Zeus and so in other words bad things continue to happen and the people that in the keep getting destroyed and in fact even the temple gets destroyed ultimately by the Romans okay so if the problem of evil is not simply caused by disobedience to God then what what's causing it simultaneously there are other Greek philosophical thinkers the atomists who are reasoning this out and coming to a conclusion that many people in modern times do so if God were willing to prevent evil he is God willing to prevent evil but is not able then God's not omnipotent says Epicurus one of these Adam miss philosophers and at the beginning of the school of epicureanism if he is able but not willing so in other words if he's able to prevent evil but not willing to then he is malevolent is he both able and willing then why did we have evil so this is a restatement this is the problem of evil is he neither able nor willing then why call him God right and so this is a pretty neat restatement of the problem of evil so there are other people though that are simultaneously have had other solutions and so one very prominent one in this time period is the problem is the solution posed by the Persian Prophet Zarathustra czar aster in creating essentially the religion of mazda ISM what we call so our Astra anism the one of the earliest world religions the state religion of the Persian Empire which is to say worship of one God who is the wise Lord the hora Mazda so Sara through stress solution to the problem of evil is that God is good but God is in this cosmic struggle with a very powerful force of evil the angry mind you which is essentially the a much more cosmic version of the devil so it's where this idea of a devil comes from but is in fact actually almost as powerful as the wise Lord but not quite so so a streon ism introduces this idea that you know even though there is a cosmic struggle and the Angra Mainyu is in fact very powerful he will eventually be defeated the force of evil will be defeated because in the future what will come is a saw a shot which is to say one who brings benefit a savior is going to come in Zoroastrianism who will be at the end of the world and then when the world is destroyed this world of Sorrows is destroyed there will be a day of judgment and all of the souls that have done good will go to a paradise they'll be resurrected bodily and go to a paradise and all of this souls who have chosen evil will be consigned to Hellfire and so all of these ideas are formulated in Zoroastrianism and they enter into second temple Judaism and and obviously then it's successors especially Christianity picks up on these Judaism doesn't keep a lot of all of these entirely as central to it at this kind of time period so what happens then at this kind of time period is there is a movement from what had been the prophetic tradition in second temple in first temple Judaism to a and second temple Judaism a apocalyptic tradition and so this idea that now enters into things that there's going to be an end of the world that there is going to be a solution of the problem of evil is that good is eventually going to be rewarded after the destruction of the world and evil will eventually be punished this gives rise to all this apocalyptic traditions and so one of the examples of this is the book of Daniel which is an apocalyptic book it's the very last book to be composed that actually then makes it into the Canon of the Hebrew Bible and so we can kind of see here's an example out of the Book of Daniel and as I watched the beast was put to death and his body destroyed and was given over to be burned with fire as for the rest of the beasts their dominion was taken away but their lives were prolonged for a season or a second time so the beasts in this case that he's seeing a vision of is the cell you Sid kingdom of Syria although it gets reinterpreted all the time that's some more recent thing like the United States or wherever you want the Soviet Union whoever you want to have it be about to be destroyed in your current reading of the book but anyway there's an idea then of an apocalyptic future where evil is going to be punished the very next verse predicts or in a vision where Daniel see as I saw one like a son of man coming from the with the clouds of heaven and he came to the ancient one and was presented before him to him this is to say the son of man this Savior figure was given Dominion and glory and kingship that all peoples nations and languages should serve him his Dominion is an everlasting Dominion that shall not pass away and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed so again there's going to be this future paradise as the old world is destroyed there'll be a coming Savior the Savior essentially it's a messianic tradition and this is where we get the word the association of a messiah which is had previously just met King but now that they are looking forward to this this future Savior style King that it becomes this looking for a messiah like this and of course Christians then interprets Jesus as as fulfilling this role and Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man throughout the canonical Gospels okay so in these first Temple biblical literature God in the earlier part of the Bible in books that you God is actually interacting directly with prophets like Moses and prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah wrote for God in their own name now as the canons closing in the Second Temple period as you can't get away with that and it anywhere near as much because who are you you don't you you're you aren't the same as as Moses you're no Moses people be able to say you know you're no you're no Jeremiah and so as a result the later prophets the later writers in this period will often write in Isaiah's name so they'll continue to write Isaiah prophesies and say well Isaiah wrote this I got another another two whole chapter of Isaiah right here and so that'll happen but another thing will happen is you will also have like a vision that will be written in the name of an ancient figure so the Book of Daniel is even an example of that so Daniel is written in around the year in the second century anyway BC and it's set 400 years earlier than that or or whatever so it's not written contemporaneously and so we have these figures like Daniel Jacob Abraham Enoch Adam all these guys and now Texas emerge in their names and a famous one of these is the Book of Enoch so again it's from that period of time it started anyway the earliest parts of it are maybe written in the 4th or 3rd centuries which would be thousands of years after Enoch supposedly would have lived Enoch is not probably is not a historical character but anyway is a figure in the in Genesis from Genesis 5:21 the reason why he attracts attention is that the only it's very just barely mentioned and then it's meant she's one of the ancestors of Noah and has just mentioned that he walked with God and God took him and so therefore he's a great candidate for apocalyptic visions and so in the Book of Enoch and there's actually this is just the main Book of Enoch there's actually five or six different books of Enoch Enoch is visited by angels he's shown visions of how the cosmos works the names of angels demons they do everything to show you where they keep the snowflakes you know so that you always wonder where'd all these snow come from that we got today well they've got a whole place up there where they're keeping the snowflakes for when they need them you know this kind of thing and so we're seeing that kind of thing you know in other words you back into say in the third fourth century they don't have the same a scientific awareness that we do right so it's explaining those things but also it gives all kinds of these predictions of this future when again the evils going to be punished good is going to be rewarded okay so that's a lot of background and things like that but I want to kind of show why are the Gnostics are coming from so that when we have the origins of kind of Gnostic thought it's coming from again this this probably Egyptian Greek speaking Jewish community and then later especially the Christian inheritors of that so so already always Christianity is emerging out of the Greek speaking and Greek influenced Jewish tradition as opposed to rabbinic Judaism which tends to reject most of that Greek influence later and so the Gnostics here are kind of taking all of these pieces and synthesizing them together so all of these scriptures like the apocryphon of John and so many more of these are visions where we'll see essentially a gnostic writer we'll talk about a character like John the Beloved who is an important figure they'll be writing in his name and they'll be showing either secret teachings were often a vision that somebody has and as they are doing the same exact thing that Enoch is doing where he's seeing the whole cosmos and so they're taking that apocalyptic model of the literature and synthesizing that though with the inheritance of the Hebrew Bible itself so Genesis they're often retelling these kinds of stories and explaining them given their their own insights and biases they don't think that these stories that were perfectly understood and X and acceptable when they were written down in an Iron Age Kingdom that wasn't worried about I'd say neighbors and things like that they weren't thinking about their neighbors as being people and we were only worried about themselves because they were at an earlier era of development when the stories are actually written down now these are being retold but in the place of the previous ideas essentially platonic spiritualism is providing the whole intellectual mechanism and apparatus and so if they've taken middle Platonism and propped it up inside there in order to animate the whole thing okay so how do these guys then fit in with early Christianity so when we look at the way Christian history is told traditionally it's generally speaking told as if Jesus is in text it's told in this order so we tell history in this historical order as opposed to the order starting from when the thing is actually written so we'll get to why this is a backwards way to tell it so Jesus is a guy who's living in the 30s of the Common Era ad in Galilee according to the way we tell the story he founds a church he's recognized as the Messiah which is in Greek that's Christ right so the Christian here's where we're getting that Jesus predicts his own death and resurrection he's executed by the Romans and then the risen Christ is said to appear to his disciples who give all the testimony that Christ is alive so then the Christian apostles then go forth they spread the good news or gospel to other Jews and then fairly quickly thereafter to all the world so to all of the Gentiles which is to say the Greek speaking converts and every one of those guys then gets martyred through persecution but prior to being martyred all the Apostles found churches which are to say Christian communities in all the cities of the greek-speaking Roman Empire and even the West and those are then have bishops that are appointed to oversee them and so therefore there's a line that goes directly from Jesus to the bishops who are the people that are in charge of these different communities so that's how it's told the narrative is obviously promoted by the bishops as you can imagine this is a very Pro Bishop kind of narrative and so these are the people that found themselves kind of leading or as the leaders of the mainstream Christian churches in the 2nd and 3rd centuries when the texts and everything like that are being compiled and canonized the Christian story is being kind of put together and so the narrative definitely explains why the bishops are in charge and it also traces their authority through apostolic succession back to Jesus so the way the bishops would draw the diagram of all of this there's one and Catholic and Orthodox Church it's been led by bishops and then everybody who doesn't conform to it like the Gnostics or simply break offs of this thing that has gone all the way back so there's ezb Annette guys there's these Marcy Knights as Gnostics but they are not part of the mainline and so because we're writing the story here by adding these things behind it there is Jesus and so on so forth leading up to apostles the apostolic succession it's the perspective of the guys who won right and so history is what we say is written by the winners and that war at least it's history's won by those who write the history down anyway but it's almost always a lot more complicated than that and this is going to be true here too so early Christianity almost all scholars all historians who look into it agree is not this one a simple one-line thing that where Jesus started it and it can you need to where it is but rather that there were multiple early Christianity's that emerge when we first have any texts about them that they already have multiple variants and in fact each of our earliest texts is written by a different Christian community that is in in in some cases very serious opposition to each other and so some of these groups are the Ebionites which is to say these groups of Jewish Christians who still think it's critical and critically important to live Jewish law to observe Jewish law and on the other end of that are the marcia nights these are the guys who are following a very important early leader named Marcion who rejects essentially hebrew bible and the law and anything about it and instead is trying to have a an almost entirely let's say Hellenized version of christianity and then there's the guys who are gonna win who historians retroactively Lee called a proto Orthodox because they're gonna evolve into the Orthodox Catholic there is the mainline of Christianity and they have this kind of middle ground which is that no Christians don't have to you know obey Jewish law we don't have to keep kosher but there's some things that we should probably keep doing like the Ten Commandments and things like that mostly obviously not the not the Sabbath because we're gonna be on doing Sunday instead of Saturday and this kind of a thing and so they and they instead their position is that we don't throw the Old Testament away but we don't read it literally we read it typologically which is to say every one of these things that's happening in the Old Testament is a story of and a prediction of the Christian gospel so the whole idea of for example crossing the Red Sea or crossing the Jordan River is that essentially the people to become set apart to become the true Israel to become that they had to be baptized and even the flood is also a baptism typology the whole reason why the world had to have the old old world destroyed it's not it's not somewhat much a story about literally killing everybody but in the same way that Christians understood that the old person is is dead when they get going the waters of Baptism and a new person is alive in Christ when they come out that's what that story is now typologically signifying as opposed to worrying about it any kind of literal interpretation okay so I've shown this up good questions about the same second century also not a dualistic religion many key ISM yes has emerged what is the effect agnosticism to them yeah so the question is so there's another there's another world religion that's emerging a little after a little after Gnosticism so there is a Persian prophet named Manny who is synthesizing Christianity and specifically Gnostic Christianity and Austrian ISM and it becomes a world religion and so I did say is probably the answer is is that Manny is specifically influenced by Gnostic Christianity and so when man aqui ISM which is his religion emerges and it poses a quite a Merrick major threat to Christianity it's the main main world religion that is Christianity's it's a rival before the emergence of Islam and in fact it becomes the state religion of some of the Central Asian states and it survives on and China and places like that until anyway the Middle Ages man aqui ISM I would say is that's one of the surviving holdovers of the Gnostics so as we'll see the people in the Roman Empire the crit the Orthodox are able to stamp out Gnosticism but Gnosticism is continues on in other forms through the other world religions so I I've shown this chart in previous times when we had a lecture on lost Christianity's and I won't do in too much detail but as opposed to the the way the bishops are telling the story where everything just starts in a direct line from Jesus to the proto Orthodox I've argued that probably in fact actually the the group here that we talked about the Ebionites who are the Christian who were actually observing the law have probably a little bit more of a direct back-channel or whatever they're more directly connected to the original group that that Jesus and his followers and his his brothers specifically found because we have some evidence that's that this group called the poor of Jerusalem is afterwards led by Jesus's brother James and then later by Jesus's brother James's brother Jude continues to exist until in Jerusalem until Jerusalem's destroyed by the Romans and thereafter is continuing to exist in exile but within kind of the broader Palestine area until finally it's extinguished by the state religion of the Roman Empire because the Ebionites are deemed to be in the fourth and fifth centuries they're deemed to be heretics and so so this group ultimately loses out but it may have a more direct connection originally as opposed to the proto Orthodox who really are built on this Church that Paul founds among the Greek converts so anyway but there's also this other group that we want to talk about here that's what this is the focus that we've been doing so how are the marceia Knights how are the Gnostics and other groups related so in the same way that I made that chart before it it kind of looked like maybe Gnostics or a break off of Marcia Knights and there may be another break off valent in Ian's actually what's going to be probably more the case is that it's simply also very confusing and complex how all these different groups relate to each other so there are different groups of these kinds of Christian duelists who have nostos izing ideas and so there's on the one hand these Marci Knights the follower of this guy Marcia and there's Gnostics who I was quoting at the beginning from this apocryphon of John that have this very elaborated mythology that's a little different from marcy ins and is different later from Valentinian who also essentially has another group and his group spreads and splits into different factions so what I'm going to suggest is that that although some scholars just like draw a circle around the let's say the Gnostics proper and say well this is really what we mean when we're referring to Gnostics some also just think of Gnostics as a type and so that the the word can be used more broadly to describe some of these other nos to sizing groups that may well be let's say they're influencing each other anyway and related to each other and one of the reasons why I think that that actually makes a bunch of sense is that when we get the main gnostic library that we have so this library that we have been discovered in the 20th century that now commodity library it turns out actually that all of these are all mixed up together and so it's not that these guys were only marcia knights or that these guys were only Gnostics proper or only valent in Ian's but rather they have texts from all the groups and so it may well be that people who have this kind of interest are picking and choosing from the text and they may well be in terms of their own personal practice they're only doing let's say the Valentinian initiations or something like that but in in any event they are they're finding them all interesting so we've talked about we've taken quotes from it but it one of the interesting things that we've had and there were our ability to get to know the Gnostics and why I was able to actually at the outset give you guys like the central Gnostic secret is that we really have now the secrets right so we really have the texts because there were twelve codices that were found buried in a jar near the Egyptian town of nag Hammadi and so it's near where Christian monasteries monasteries of st. Pico meais and were and that may well be that that monastery where those monasteries had this collection in their archives it was ultimately all reassembled and it's in now in the Coptic Museum in Cairo it's all been translated and people can have access to all of these so what happens is there's 12 codices which is to say books but then within each codex there's actually multiple individual book or texts that are kind of all together and so there's actually 52 tractates total there all of them written in Coptic which is the Egyptian language but it's this Egyptian language that has as it's been written in Greek because the Greeks have been in charge of Egypt and Alexandria for centuries at this time and then again then again in the Roman Roman period they continued to speak or write in Greeks of Egyptian continues until Egyptian continues to be used as a language until Islam conquers Egypt and then slowly Arabic displaces it as a language that's somewhat related and so therefore as opposed to Greek and Latin those didn't have any they didn't have any sway whereas Arabic has displaced it and so now Coptic or the Egyptian language has been retained as as the liturgical language of the Christian community of Egypt so the Coptic texts when we go through them we now have them translated in English but anyway they're also available to be studied in Coptic every one of them is a translation of Greek originals some of them are better and worse and there's multiple scribes and so different texts and essentially it's a whole library it's not any one person who made these altogether so the library is a collection of a person who's or a group of people that are interested in Gnosticism but like I say they aren't all Gnostic in origin so the six codex for example it contains what is described anyway as a very poor Coptic translation of Plato's Republic so we can see why already I think you can see why Plato's Republic and Platonism would have the same interest of interest to people who are also Gnostic and one of the things that happens in antiquity is if you have a text that you like that you have to make a copy of it if you're going to have your own copy anyway and you maybe in terms of the Republic you got to be translating it out of Greek into Coptic anyway and so as you're doing that there's always the temptation since every you know don't just have a Xerox machine there's always the temptation to simply also write additional stuff in or maybe what happened was that originally somebody had written a a translation and then somebody written a lot of glosses or notes that are really good that are right next to it and so what will happen when you make the copy is you'll maybe just write the one thing and then you write the note you know and so then the text changes as you go and so this certainly happened with this copy of the Republic which becomes much more of a gnostic republic as a result another example of that that's just even within the library that we can see how this kind of textual growth goes is that there is a philosophical text called you know sister blessed and so what ends up happening then is you take that completely let's say we we now think of that is secular but anyway this philosophical text and then it's broken up into sections by somebody and then in another part of the library those have been relabeled as the Sophia of Jesus Christ and so the same exact texts and statements now is put into the mouth of Holy wisdom and the Holy wisdom that's emanating from price so now it's become a completely Christianized text even though the text itself is the same as this what the philosopher is said and so we can see how some of these Gnostic texts even arise that way so other texts have gone these similar Gnostic redaction and I argued at the beginning that in fact the Gospel of Thomas is probably one of those where we have a sayings gospel of Jesus that has been nos Desai's by adding those extra sections okay so I just want to give a couple other one last other taste of this since we have this kind of really amazing library now so there's a text or a poem that's called the Thunder the perfect mind which is in the a long kind of poem that's in the voice of a female speaker it's just probably holy wisdom and the text mirrors all of these I am statements like we have in the Gospel of John where Jesus is saying I am and when he does that he is also mirroring God in the book of Exodus who says I am when he's asked where his name is by Moses so here's a quotation from Thunder the perfect mind do not be ignorant of me anywhere or anytime be on your guard don't be ignorant of me for I am the first and the last I am the honored one and the second one I am the and the Holy One I am the wife and the virgin I am the mother and the daughter I am the bride and the bridegroom it is my husband who begot me so we can kind of see in this we maybe don't expect from like say other Christian texts that there is now a place that the Gnostics have in Scripture itself for the feminine divine right so Holy wisdom is a female figure and one of the things that she here is is expressing as these kind of Gnostic paradoxes right and so these are also we can maybe even see as a paradox that that women sometimes also face in society so there is this idea of on the one hand you're being viewed as wife and virgin you know this idea of holy and so hear me you here is and learn of my words you who know me I am the hearing that is attainable to everything I'm the speech that cannot be grasped I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name I'm the sign of the letter and the designation of the division so so yeah so these are kinds of imponderable paradoxes this is the kind of thing that Gnostic texts are all full of because of the idea that is you start with you know paradoxes that are ungraspable and you go to further and further abstractions of thought so that you can ultimately achieve you know the intellectual union with the one the monad right ok but I was going to suggest here also one of the things that when the Gnostic Gospels were first found there was a thinking well maybe the Gnostics actually represented a place where let's say we could get more female voices because female figures Eve and Mary Magdalene and Eve's daughter and Holy wisdom and other other female portions of the divine are portrayed in bigger roles and so what we're gonna see also next week I think when we are doing our lecture on the on the great goddess and on the female divine unfortunately is that just because there may be a role for the female divine and indeed women in the divine mythology it doesn't necessarily mean that women in the communities are any kind of a better role and so it may well be that you may have this prominent role of of a great goddess and yet you will still have quite sexist lived experience for the people who are part of that religious cult and so one of the one of the the most unfortunate I for me I think verses in the Gospel of Thomas is this one here so Simon Peter said to them let Mary Mary Magdalene here one of the disciples leave us for women are not worthy of life so that's a bad thing coming out of Peters mouth yeah exactly and so but anyway Jesus is the answer here though he's like ah he's not he's not sticking up in the right way right now so I myself shall lead her in order to make her male so that she may to become a living spirit resembling you males for every woman who will make herself male will enter the King have it okay so that's a lot to unpack but essentially this is one of the things that unfortunately we see if we the closer we look at kind of these Gnostic texts so even though we have this idea that that both let's say wisdom is as female nevertheless wisdom is actually what caused the whole problem you know of the material world in the first place if we remember that in the myth it was wisdom doing things without the consent of her consort and without consent of the Spirit the male consort that caused everything to go awry so that's already a problematic not necessarily Pro feminine viewpoint likewise when we saw that first emanation for thought which is sometimes described as the womb of creation and Gnostic texts and so therefore has these female divine qualities nevertheless that forethought is also sometimes described as thrice male so not just male but like super male and all those kind of things and so the idea of it seems to be and also expressed here is that there is this very big idea in in Gnosticism about balance between the genders and the genders being in those Aeons male and female components and indeed in the original creation story God creates Humanity male and female together in God's image but then there's the second creation story where Eve is created out of it out of a rib from Adam and so this is essentially it getting to the Aristotelian negative impression of gender which is that there is one type of human that is human of which then males are the main type and females are the inferior quality of and so therefore the males need to have the female element restored to them in order to be wholly integrated in Gnosticism but in this case as we're seeing here with what marry females need to get up a level in the perceived hierarchy of order as far as the Gnostics are concerned in order to achieve full humanity and so so no matter how much we would like to have found in the Gnostics let's say people who embrace wisdom wisdom being a feminine quality and maybe embracing the feminine divine and so maybe we might find them being wise they don't always get to the values that we might want them to have as ancient people or want to do so how did they and how do we how did what's the fall of Gnostics so unlike the Ebionites we mentioned those Christians who follow Jewish law who maintain their own separate communities for most of the existence of Gnostic Christians they operated within traditional Christian communities like I was kind of mentioning you would might have your own little Gnostic study group that has got the secret knowledge that is initiating let's say the people who you think in the group are smart enough to be in the group with you in his own lifetime Valentinus who is this great Christian theologian who is presenting or actually Christianizing even further so many of these Gnostic ideas he is not to considered a heretic in his lifetime but soon after that as the proto Orthodox bishops are kind of getting control of everything and they're taking control and especially then when the church becomes the state religion of Christianity they these guys strongly condemn Gnosticism so Irenaeus the Bishop of Lyon here he writes a very severe book that he writes it's called against heresies and he says especially including Gnosticism so-called you know he's trying to root that out and so probably then the whole reason why we have all of these texts from nakamachi is that the monks they're appreciated them somebody hoped you know when all of this kind of persecution of Gnostic ideas when that all dies down I don't want to burn these now because I'm gonna hopefully I love these books and so hopefully you know this will all die down and we'll bury them and I'll come back get them when when the coast is clear kind of thing but ultimately what ends up happening anyway and the Roman Empire is that the coast never is clear and so ultimately Gnosticism is eliminated there's kind of a period of time when the Gnostics are kind of kicked out of the traditional churches and they have in some cases their own churches but at a certain point those churches are also shut down and Gnostics Gnosticism is extinguished from the Roman Empire and so that's the fall of Gnosticism yeah is this work yes it is I read Elaine Pagels book many many years ago yes and I can't say I remember very much but I remember that she said that Gnosticism really couldn't it couldn't defeat defeat it couldn't take over from mainstream Christianity it was too hard to be a gnostic you had to have the time which meant the money to do the studying and you had I supposed to have the the brains and the temperament to do this it was always a small group it had to be people who know knew who had I said esoteric knowledge it couldn't it couldn't spread out to everybody and for Christianity to become what it is it had to be available and had to be accessible to everybody in Gnosticism never was right yeah tonight I think that's a very good insight too you know so that the idea of it is how did these bishops how did these bishops essentially take very kind of sophisticated when they formulates their idea of Trinity which is nevertheless going to be a very inclusive of all kinds of the same kind of platonic and it was Tattaglia and ideas of philosophy and cosmology and things like that although just not the same formulation not as as not as boldface sleep as the Gnostics have in terms of their platonism how do they then convey this very tough classical philosophy and science to the masses to all of the peasants that are going to now have to be Christians and so the way they do it is they formulate Creed's and so at certain point you're when you're saying like the Nicene Creed and things like that and you're saying that you believe in one God and you believe in three persons and you believe that Christ is fully human and fully divine you have this whole thing that you've memorized that is very complicated it's expressing very complicated philosophical ideas but you just don't have to know anything about it or understand what it means at all because you've memorized it and so that's how they were able to work it out I think yeah sure my understanding of two words for knowledge in ancient Greek this is not I'm not talking about the implications for agnosticism but just for the more general sense of what knowledge is since that does concern us tusen so there are two words the Greek that I know one is good gnosis of course yeah and the other is a pista may yeah so just mentioned Plato so when Plato asked the question what is knowledge in the theodicy he's the word pissed me mm-hmm didn't use the word gnosis right so that's interesting so a piston a in the context of Plato certainties refers to sort of an argument that you posit a definition of virtue or courage whatever you're discussing and then you examine the definition yeah and then you see if it's general enough and it's not you're enough think it's deficient some respecting you reshape it or reject it and come up with another one so that's sort of like a disc just disputing the merits of a definition that would be epistemology yeah the other one gun osis has found the Greek expression for example you know ste Soton know thyself yeah now the interesting about canosa's you know skien means it means to know needs to recognize and to be acquainted with and the root of that the English word narrative comes from that root you just eliminated the G and you have the end so narrative so narrative is another form of knowledge yeah that's not to do with so much as defining a term ending defending the definition but telling the story yeah and you know I think in your definition they're sort of in your presentation rather you can see that at least these two types of knowledge work yeah present yeah and the third actually is not from the Greek but from the Bible's which that's also part of the yes question - sir - no yes you dare that means first an even if it's sort of sexual intimacy yeah and so to be one with the Monad I think is that sort of knowledge yeah so you have these sort of three tonalities of knowing that are present in in this discussion yeah thank you so much over that I had a lot appreciated mmm no as far as I know Saint Agustin in his early days was him was a mannequin that's correct right I'm wondering what present a scholarship sees as the possible influence on the Gnostic elements in manichaean ISM on his later theology including his idea of the elect which would be very peril parallel I would imagine - to the to the let's say those who have the largest portion of light among the Gnostics who were seen as a type of elect and also his seeming denigration of the material in the physical right including possibly women you know sexuality all of that so I'm wondering what president a scholarship sees us as you know how much of an influence there seems to be and also how that influence has played out later in Protestantism which very much sourced like us for its theology and and even unto you know let's say in my jealous ISM so yeah yes no I I think that scholars find that because because of Gustin is so important to Latin Christianity and as opposed to greek Christianity and then afterwards to Protestantism that comes emerges out of Latin Christianity that in fact there's all kinds of almost a direct direct doses of manichaean ideas that make their way into Agustin because he and he is before he formulates you know his way of being able to intellectualize and understand you know decide he's prepared to be a Christian he has previously studied Platonists he's studied Neoplatonism and he's also been a man aqui and so as a result of that he has both of those kind of threads in him and that he emphasizes those kind of things more I would say in terms of the the not liking sex part that that's for whatever reason so we didn't make a lot of emphasis on it although we just barely skirted on the idea of the Hebrew for to know and as a euphemism in in the Old Testament for sexual intimacy in addition to having that kind of knowledge and there is that kind of a sense in the in both in Plato and in the Gnostics where the imagery of the lover and and erotic love does play into kind of the mystical union that you can have with the the monad with the one nevertheless the Gnostics are very in Plato two are very anti material world and and so they're very anti sex and procreation and certainly the mana keys are also quite against that and especially the let's say the later duelists that make their way into the west of the Cathars where the elect are are essentially swearing off procreation because you do not want to have any more sources of light sparks of light imprisoned in embodies so so even though they are kind of on in that way nevertheless this that's happening in in a lot of Greek philosophy and also in mainline Christianity too so Paul and everybody they're all quite ambiguous at best about sex they're like well you know it's not good but if you if you have to get married first then it's okay then you know that kind of a thing as opposed to it being very good agustin isn't as worried about sex as his number one thing that he's against he he spends like in his confessions he spends the bulk of this his whole life actually having a you know what a lover that he's consistently with that that he only puts off when he gets old enough that he doesn't have sexual temptation anymore and then he's kind of over it so he he isn't as I don't think he's worried about it as that in terms of the sexual part of it but in terms of some of these other ideas about elect and fallen and those kind of things I think those definitely pull through okay this one went long guys thank you for slogging through it although it's a very complicated esoteric stuff and I appreciate it thank you [Applause] do attendance here

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 146,496

Keywords: gnostic, gnosticism, gospel of thomas, lost gospel, esoteric Christian, esoteric knowledge, gnosis, early christianity, history of christianity, heresy, gospel of mary, mary magdalene, da vinci code, lecture, theology, lost Christianity

Id: T5C8b6Ci78w

Length: 95min 46sec (5746 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020