The Gnostic Gospels

what we're talking about tonight is uh the gnostics and specifically a bunch of gnostic writings gnostic gospels that had been lost and so these are parts of the kind of large corpus of ancient judeo-christian now christian writing that is deemed by the early church to be heretical and so therefore did not make it into the christian new testament and largely because all ancient texts in order for them to make that to us normally had to go through medieval monks and nuns actually copying them by hand and so essentially if the monks liked somebody like uh pliny or uh cicero then cicero got all his works all copied uh and if it was somebody you know like i don't know anyway somebody they didn't like as much then then that didn't make it and so if you're a heretic you know it especially usually didn't work in a lot of cases the the the text might actually have gotten erased or in some circumstances even you know destroyed uh in some other kind of way uh but then again one of the things that always can happen is if you um happen to be living in the near east especially especially good to live in in egypt if you take all of your texts and writings and scrolls and you put them in a jar and you walk just away from the nile far enough so that there's no water in the air and you just go right into the desert and bury it it turns out that that can last for anyway over a thousand years and things like that and uh and that a bunch of monks did that and so that we ended up now finding in the middle of the 20th century all of these lost gnostic gospels uh they've all been translated and so now we can actually uh have been able to access them for the last half century okay so traditionally the traditional way that the christian story is told by the christians you know they sometimes write history is told by the victors and so the the christians who won uh tell the story that there was a guy named jesus christ uh who founded a church and he lived let's say in the 30s uh of a.d in galilee in judea he claimed to be a messiah or the messiah which is to say in greek the christ the anointed one he founded a church commissioned all these apostles to go around and spread the good news which is the english for the word gospel that's what gospel means he in the course of those gospels predicted his own death and resurrection he's executed by the romans returns from the grave he appears to the female disciples and then to the male disciples those apostles then spread the gospel first to other jews so all of those initial disciples are all jews they spread that news to other jews afterward they begin to convert gentiles as jews call the greek speaking pagans that are the majority of people in the eastern roman empire all of those initial apostles meet martyr's deaths like jesus so they're also all executed in various kinds of ways in order to seal their testimony meanwhile the apostles have all founded individual congregations or churches in different towns and cities and according to the tradition here then the as the traditional way of telling it they've appointed overseers or bishops of those churches and so that takes us to essentially uh the line then of bishops or the what's called the apostolic succession so apostles point bishops who appoint bishops and so forth all the way down to this day and so this is definitely the narrative as it was understood and promoted by the bishops as you can imagine this is a very pro-bishop message you know who led then the mainstream christian churches by the time of the second and third centuries so the narrative explained why bishops were in charge on the one hand and it justified their authority by apostolic succession back to jesus as far as the bishops are concerned some people would occasionally wonder what happened to all these apostles why don't we have apostles anymore uh you know we it the you know the bishops reality is the bishops got rid of them you know and so because apostles actually ended up being a very disruptive element after a certain amount of time so the idea of an apostle is a person who is not in any one particular place leading a community but rather people who are going in twos around all around anywhere wherever they're led by the spirit and speaking by the spirit speaking different kinds of revelation often chastising let's say congregations for what they're not doing chastising bishops for their behavior or their um the way they're operating things and at a certain amount of time the bishops are not having any more of it and they more or less think for all these spiritual people isn't there something else you guys would rather be doing than going around in this kind of traveling and begging and this kind of thing for your meals why can't we we have this wonderful monastery here and wouldn't you all like to go and live in there and and not and maybe even take a vow of silence you know that might be a great idea for all of you and so anyway that's more or less um functionally what happens so for the bishops then the narrative of the church's foundation is that there was this mainline christian church led by bishops which has brought us to so what in antiquity was the one catholic and orthodox church that's before all of the church splits apart into the various denominations today and in the meantime from that perspective from the perspective of those proto-orthodox leaders who become then the orthodox and catholic leaders all of the other people that have different views are simply heretics and they're heretics who are break-offs as far as they're concerned from the actual the church as it was so the breakups uh include people like the ebia knights the marcia knights and the gnostics who we're going to talk about tonight however as we've talked about in previous lectures here the simple narrative written retrospectively from the perspective of the group that won it's really um you know uh not the way i mean it doesn't really go that way actually the whole the story as it really was is much much more complicated than uh the story as the bishops uh retold it and would have it and so actually uh what we can look back to when we are in the first century and then when we can see more we have way more evidence for by the time we get to the early second century there's not simply one church uh at all and rather there are multiple christianities uh that have different ways of understanding uh what the religion is supposed to be about and these ways are vastly different from each other and they are at odds with each other and in fact the people often um hate each other more than they hate anybody else because you almost always hate the person who's closest to you than than uh let's say a completely alien person so they only can spend so much time being mad at pagans because there's these heretics right next to them that they don't like right so before the emperor constantine before the conversion of the head of the roman imperial state there isn't one single christian church structure or centralized authority constantine actually brings that together by creating the the institution of the church council the ecumenical council so which is to say is this um greek word for the whole world and so it's a council that brings together all the bishops of the whole world and the ecumenical council creates a creed that is able to explain what all christians are supposed to believe and so that puts everybody on the same page for the first time and the council creates for the first time an actual hierarchical structure so in addition to bishops now now there are bishops above bishops which are called metropolitan bishops or in english we have archbishops and so now suddenly um there is a hierarchy um so it's changed but back before constantine then there are multiple competing christianities uh the proto-orthodox group we call them these are the guys before they are they before they win in which case once they win then they are the orthodox or catholic group which is to say orthodox means people who have the right teaching and so nowadays we use orthodox to refer to the eastern church and we use catholic to refer to the western church but it's one church you know until the breakup in the middle ages and so i'm just going to interchangeably say orthodox or catholic or before they win proto-orthodox which is to say the people who the orthodox people's foundation is built on but before they are the winners right so they ultimately win but there's no reason actually to believe that they're even the earliest group among these groups um so what do the orthodox look like so these proto-orthodox guys um they have already this very complicated christology that we've talked about a bunch in our different lectures and complained about how complicated it is to try to explain the doctrine of the trinity and how um you know not only all the people who here who are um let's say muslim and jewish who are trying to you know wrestle with it generally speaking all the christians who who come here in every chinese if you i i more or less defy almost any christian to talk about it for let's say more than seven minutes without accidentally saying something that's heresy you know and so you you pretty much at a certain point you're gonna suddenly make an analogy which is modalism or you're going to make an analogy which you know unfortunately is like essentially arianism and so you're going to get into trouble if you um if you don't just keep saying the same thing over and again which is the creed you know so so if you have to say new words for seven minutes you're gonna i defy you not to say heresy but anyway it's very tough so um so they have this idea there's a complex christology jesus is understood to be fully human fully divine uh there's this very complex theology the father jesus the spirit our god jesus is not the father or the spirit the father is not the spirit the father's not jesus all that so it's um that's complicated and very starkly monotheist and so um there is not it's not a dualist or do atheist in the sense that satan is not some kind of an alternate god satan is clearly an inferior being who is a creation and god uh is a in rebellion against god so it's different in that sense there's only one god which is even if the god has three persons so very complicated okay about these other groups though so the ebionites for example so ebia knights are sometimes we could say the jewish christians these are the christians anyway who had let's say been converted i mean the original followers jesus and his original followers are all jewish but these are especially groups that continued to convert primarily among jewish other non-christian jews and then continue to live essentially as jews who are also christians in other words jews who believe that jesus was the messiah and they though still believe for example that it's essential to practice the law of moses and so are also therefore keeping kosher and all this kind of thing there as a whole bunch of um uh things even in the canonical gospels there are precepts that uh continue to um that could be used in favor of essentially ebianite [Music] interpretation of how christians should act so for example matthew and matthew's gospel jesus says things like i i'm not coming to oh yeah we'll have to get the microphone to you one second um i'm not coming to eliminate the law but to fulfill the law not one jot or tittle one tittle of the law is is is put away it all is still in force and so essentially uh the community that the gospel of matthew was written in um is definitely in favor of practicing jewish law so yes i'm sorry i don't think that you might but you do because of the people online need to hear you all right i was just wondering can you clarify what year this was for each of the in this place case the ebia nights so thank you so the ebia night so what most of our information for any of these groups is coming from the second century uh we have ad 80 everything's a.d yeah because of it's all after christ's uh these are christians and so the ebia knights will possibly date all the way back to jesus's lifetime so we don't know but because we just don't have any data that is helping us out there's very little christian writings outside of the new testament that are from the first century and so we have to kind of piece it together by the time the groups have emerged and are yelling at each other it's the second century and the third century and so in the which is to say the 100s and the 200s and so it's still before christianity becomes a state religion but it's this time period where we now have a little bit more of a window into what's going on and we have to kind of then unpack it and so i believe that the ebionites go back to the first century and i also believe that the proto-orthodox go back to the first century um same thing with these other two groups so they all go back to the first century but they're all still very active in the second century joe i just want to know are there any eb nights today that date back to that time like this so you know the ubia nights have died out oh there are so there are definitely revivals so so the idea is you you may have heard of like jews for jesus or messianic jews or any number of modern uh jewish either either jewish groups that have become uh let's say christian in the sense of uh thinking that jesus is the messiah or deciding that for themselves or christians who have decided to uh judaize because they believe that the law is important so that's still a theme that continually recurs and so people will in both of those from both of those different direct directions even sometimes come together so it may be judaizing christians and messianic jews and they get together and make a church or synagogue of jews for jesus or whatever it would be but they don't have any continuity with the eb units the ib knights died out um uh and we don't have many of their writings even yes it's it's actually late so um they had died out in the roman empire by let's say the six or seven hundreds they might have continued to live in for example the arab middle east and influenced islam uh well into the muslim period um i met some jews for jesus back in the 70s who believed in all the jewish rights and customs yeah yeah it's very interesting so we have had um uh when we did we did a lecture it was a year ago now on um jesus's jewish roots and we actually had um the rabbi who came here is from a i believe i was given to understand anyway first what he was telling me is from a messianic um jewish synagogue church and so a lot of his followers so he is from i could tell is from ju regular jewish background but had decided that jesus is the messiah and so anyway was quite informed about jewish and law and everything like that whereas like a lot of his so he had like brought four four people from his synagogue who all were from christian background who had now studied torah and everything like that because they had become essentially judaizing christians you know what i mean so it's a it's an interesting crossover and i think it's really neat but anyway it's not uh unfortunately we don't have the continuity and we also don't have that for the gnostics we'll see as we'll see um so uh the ancient um proto-orthodox christians when they became orthodox were it turns out they ended up being pretty good at stamping out these other groups and so they don't we don't have continuity but in a lot of cases we have it's these are ideas that continue to inspire people and so there are new gnostics you know in the 21st century okay so um ebia knights so in addition to this anyway like we mentioning these are um christians who still follow jewish law are jewish jews who essentially are have to believe that the messiah is jesus and so they're that crossover they have their own gospel which is sometimes called the gospel of the hebrews or the gospel of the ebionites we don't have it it's lost so we only have some quotations from proto-orthodox people who believe these guys were heretics they indicate that they think it's related to the gospel of matthew we don't really know because we can't tell anybody what we don't have it sadly um this group ebianites may have grown out of the group that's called the poor or the poor of jerusalem so uh ibionim this kind of thing is essentially the ebionite in other words the word eb a night may come from the hebrew word for poor and uh it and paul when he's talking about the church in jerusalem that is being led in paul's day by james the brother of jesus he calls that group the poor of jerusalem and so all through paul's language letters and then also the letters of james and uh and the related letters jude and peter they they talk about uh the poor and they talk about the rich and so the people in the poor church the ebia knights possibly the proto ebia knights they call themselves the poor and they also if you think of like the thing of jesus is saying blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom so the kingdom of this church is belongs to the poor and woe unto you rich essentially all of these gentile converts who have in the cities of uh of the greek speaking world who have joined up when and become part of paul's church uh woe unto you rich because uh you aren't you know the true christians as far as the poor of jerusalem are concerned so it's possible that that's where this group comes from we don't know so one of the ideas we had when we had a lecture on lost christianities as opposed to that timeline that i gave before where the bishops more or less say that the orthodox proto-orthodox is that was founded directly by jesus and they are the inheritors of that i'm suggesting that one way that could be one way these are possible this isn't for sure so is that those poor followers of john the baptist and jesus and his brother james this jacobites jacobus or jamesian church um is the it becomes the ebianites of this poor of jerusalem whereas the paul the church that paul founds among the gentiles so among the greek speaking uh people who had been pagans but now have become christian but without having to follow the jewish law so the paula's church then possibly is what emerges and comes into becomes the proto-orthodox the orthodox and catholic church and out of which um further uh ideas the marcionites and the gnostics emerge out of out of that paul church and diverge even further away from judaism so by the time we're getting to the gnostics in some sense we've left a lot of our uh the jewish roots of this religion behind and it has become way more um especially platonist but we'll we'll see that okay so those are those first two the proto-orthodox and the ebionites now we'll talk about the martianites so these are a group that is uh founded by a guy called marcian and uh of the of marcian's work these are kind of dualists hellenistic christians they're essentially like i say these greek speaking ones that have very little connection to judaism for them paul is the chief of the apostles and the chief source on christianity and they got rid of everything else except for their scripture is essentially just some of paul's letters and just the gospel of luke and actually even just an edited version of that so that's for them that's the idea and really that paul is the basis for that they have a different overall theology which is dualist and which is to say they believe that there is uh good and evil that are uh two very uh balanced powers as opposed to what we were talking about a monotheism where god is simply good and evil is absence of good or evil is in rebellion from from good in this case there is a good god and an evil god that are in a cosmic uh battle and the old testament god specifically as far as marcin is concerned is in fact that evil god and so the evil god that occurs in the old testament that tries to destroy everybody with the flood and all this kind of thing uh uh and it does all kinds of gets wrathful and this sort of thing that's the evil god and the good god is the true god of spirit who is jesus's father the god of the spirit world were the marxianites the first or the early ones to propose uh christ's sacrifice as a redemption in a sense like you know because there's the whole line of god having to send his only son yes as a sacrifice um and i heard somewhere that and i don't know if it was the martian eyes that were being talked about but it was a similar kind of ideology and that they were the ones that proposed this idea of you know jesus having to come as a sacrifice because the good god had to send a son as a sacrifice so the old god would just let things right um so for all the early christians they have to they'll come up with very different ideas about why uh jesus had to die and so that's like you say one of the one of the ideas and it isn't um by the way it's not even necessarily doctrine to this day because in fact there are multiple different reasons why uh why the atonement is necessary so so in fact it's not like there's just one theory for atonement theory um in terms of this being uh it i i get your reasoning which is to say this makes a lot more sense because um this this idea of ransom theory so ransom theory is this idea that since the devil is owed something you know for why i don't you know like you say it's not necessarily clear why but in the case of in this case where you actually have the devil as an actual um uh god that is you know more or less is just as powerful as the good god then that um you know then that that kind of makes more sense than if it why why do you have to ransom to a lesser power god is omnipotent god doesn't need to do that you'd think right and so in that sense it's um it seems like would make more sense but in fact uh the marcia knights and the gnostics don't even think that the um that the that the crucifixion ever really even happened uh because they have gone to a place where uh the true jesus is just entirely a god and is entirely a being of spirit and so in that sense the uh the crucifixion is itself just a trick uh and so they've so probably not you know but it's uh it would make in some sense make more sense for them but in fact early christians are all very divided over this and in fact that that is this the division remains you know people still have different um different views about why that would have occurred okay so for these guys for marcion so this alternate answers uh for these non-proto-orthodox christians so this is not what ended up happening in christianity but some of these early christians like marcion read the hebrew bible and they felt they couldn't reconcile the literary actions of the god of israel with their own understanding of ethical behavior so i mean we had here for example the flood right and so this idea that god decides is going to destroy all of creation except for noah and the people and the animals that get making on the ark many then determined that if christ is truly divine he must have just appeared to be human and they probably had been influenced then by the dualism that occurred or there was also going on uh in the in the zoroastrian religion so the the primary religion of persia that had been uh incredibly important in the middle east and still still continue to be even in the roman period to or also from platonism so plato who also has a also a very strong dualism and his philosophy continues to be resonating at this point in uh you know anyway all the way much longer than this so what are these two different kinds of dualism so in zoroastrianism we have this thing that we've just been talking about that the cosmos is governed by two competing principles so these are uhura mazda the wise lord and anger mind you the destructive principle and so for zoroastrians for zoroaster the prophet of this religion this answers this problem of evil because a lot of times we wonder well why do why do the righteous suffer if you have been good you've been following god you've been doing everything and god is good why is it that you get punished with cancer you know why why is it that some horrible villain you know uh why does he make a billion dollars and not get cancer you know whereas this uh wonderful uh you know widow has to suffer for all these different uh through all these different ideas and the answer then for duelists of this variety is well angry angry mind you here is uh is actually uh thwarting actively thwarting what god would want to do because there is this cosmic battle going on between good and evil which is why the good are afflicted right and so that's one way of having a dualism the other kind of dualism that we have is like plato's kind of dualism that we talk about which is the separation of um the world into uh the ideal which is to say the immort immaterial so the eternal forms things like justice things like love uh things like math things that are are perfect and eternal and they're and not perishable and then everything else all this material stuff that is mortal that's going to die that's continuously corrupting and corrupted and so in this kind of dualism the reason why suffering happens is that this whole physical world that we see that seems to be where you're getting sick and all these other things that's all nonsense meaningless ultimately anyway because your true eternal self is the immaterial soul or spark of divine light that's inside of you that will ultimately be liberated from this mortal coil that is all about suffering and perishability and everything like that and so those kind of those are two different dualisms both of those dualisms actually affect christianity in in ways that christians often have a very muddy idea about which one it is you know so for example um people often think of themselves as having this immaterial soul or that's like a like a ghost and things like that and so then when you die it's kind of liberated and yet then you and so that's kind of the you go to heaven and heavens this wonderful spiritual place and all the dogs are gone there you know and everything like that and so when you have that in a way that in a sense that's the kind of greek spiritual um uh spirit heaven but then you also have the persian everybody's going to get bodily resurrected uh in the kind of post-armageddon after afterlife when the world is renewed and the evil principle is finally defeated and so you also have them that one and so both of those kind of get merged together into christian theology yeah abrahamic theology okay so we've been talking about martians and marcian is the founder of uh this it's called marcia knights because of he's the leader of it and the proto-orthodox didn't like him and so they called it a heresy and so anyway they call them marcia knights so marcion as i mentioned then wanted to take christianity all paul he didn't he that the old testament was talking about uh essentially communication at best that prophets are having with the evil god and then all of the rest of the scriptures of the new testament is often written by paul's detractors and he just wanted to cut all of those out so those wouldn't be used in christian worship okay there's a question back here and just quickly since we've already moved into the gospel of luke etc uh the who would you say purported the idea mainly that uh sit in regard to dualism and good versus evil uh satan runs the earth and that was usually the i mean that's in genesis that was as my i understand the general you know thesis of the whole piece yes so so the idea yeah so who per you know has the idea that satan's running yeah so so satan is in fact yeah so i'll just mention satan is not actually in genesis no i yeah so philosopher no the snake the snake just the serpent and so the serpent is later interpreted by this time by christians to be satan but when the text of the of that part of genesis is written uh the ancient hebrews don't have an idea of satan yet and so that is not what's meant it's really just a serpent in the original story so back in old testament times this idea of satan and the devil and all these things just hardly exists so there's very in almost all of the oldest part of the old testament there's not that character doesn't recur so if you think of even genesis um the serpent if the serpent actually was satan you'd think he'd show up in the very next chapter when when he's inspiring let's say kane to kill abel that that happens totally without uh cain talking to the devil or anything like that and so anyway so but by the time it has come around to jesus's time this has been heavily um uh brought into judaism probably because of this the jews were part of the persian empire for several centuries and so probably as a result of zoroastrian influence this idea of an evil cosmic force um is imported into uh judaism and it's there as of the time period of jesus second temple judaism but but it is a um it is an open for debate so for example the jewish different jewish sects some of them are very much believers in satan and the cosmic battle and things like that so for example the people who are writing the dead sea scrolls the essenes those guys are pretty excited about like cosmic evil and they're pretty very excited about a messiah and an apocalypse and all that kind of thing whereas the people that are in charge of the temple at the time the sadducees the sadducees do not believe in any of that stuff they think that all of that is not in the in the oldest part of the bible and so the people have added new things and they and they reject all of that and they also for example reject the idea of afterlife at all because that's not in the oldest part of the bible so there was a big diversity of beliefs at that time so in terms of this though christians are pulling out largely out of the judaism that is apocalyptic and that does believe that there is a devil that is a tempter and that's certainly mentioned like you say in the in luke's gospel so what becomes these uh the four canonical gospels do have the figure of the devil in them but it isn't clear how powerful the devil is right so uh so it was allowed for the early christians to then debate amongst themselves how powerful this figure is and so for um for the marxianites for the gnostics if this becomes a much more important powerful cosmic devil for the proto-orthodox he's essentially a rebel angel and uh and that way and for they and he might have gotten knocked out of the story entirely for the ebionites so depending on where we're at okay so just to looking at this then marcion then like i said rejects the old testament because uh he believes that the god of the hebrew bible was a different evil entity and then he created actually his own rival church structure and it's becomes actually quite successful and popular in what's now turkey so anatolia and so he is for a while a pretty serious competitor to the proto-orthodox so then lastly then we get to these guys the gnostics who are actually the topic for tonight so like marcy and their duelists generally but unlike him they also then create a very elaborate mythology and so they have a amazingly complicated cosmology they create essentially new stories that explain essentially their philosophy or their theology in the form of a very long kind of uh expansions of the genesis story of creation so the gnostics believed uh that they alone possessed the true secret gnosis or knowledge and they rejected the idea that jesus was human at all and and uh and actually they also believed that's human body so everything physical is itself evil so the uh the evil god created the whole physical world and they had and the evil god has captured true spirits the divine sparks that are in true individuals not everybody's got one even but when whatever the true sparks are they're imprisoned essentially in these physical bodies and the mission of the g of jesus actually is to open that pathway for those sparks to get back to the real universe the universe of spirit okay so one of the very first guys in this um uh who is a leader of the gnostics is a guy called valentinus uh he's from egypt which is should come as no shock to everybody the egyptians like this kind of stuff uh and so a lot of times esoteric things comes out of egypt so he is in the second century he may well at least he um traditionally uh claims to be a disciple of a guy called thudus who was in turn then one of paul's disciples so he claims a fairly close lineage to paul he may have been influenced by christian philosophers and also by pagan philosophers so people who are neo-platons middle platonists that are teaching at the schools in alexandria so alexandria is still the center of uh hellenistic thought so this is where the museum is this is where the library is the museum is the school of where of all the muses right where they're teaching philosophy he had a number then of disciples and he became really serious enemies with proto-orthodox leaders of the time so tertullian and irenaeus who wrote treatises against his teachings so essentially then if we look at the way that kind of that structure of those groups work we essentially have the ebionites the marcianites and the proto-orthodox they each have their own kind of church structures they have their own leaders they'll have their own bishops in their own kind of areas um the they both have uh they're both they you know the orthodox are sort of in the middle in terms of uh their christology so the ebionites are going to be have held more to the whole jewishness and and probably reject any divinity for jesus and instead are are focused on god as god only and so they're probably more in that kind of direction the martianites have kind of left the judas jewishness really behind and are now sort of platonous almost and so the proto-orthodox are kind of in between those two the gnostics however don't have their own structure in their own churches usually but rather they are little groups that occur with inside the other christian churches especially the proto-orthodox church and so what will especially happen is uh you might have a little group of people inside your your big congregation in a big city uh who are meeting them separately it's like you have your own bible study course on a wednesday or something and when they all go over to the other person's house that person who has been initiated into the gnosis is able to share them these secret teachings with this kind of elite inner circle and those are the guys who really know what christianity is all about uh whereas the the rest of the church are just meant to be kept in darkness because uh it's not given to them to know the secrets of eternal life and everything um so if the gnostics were just members of these different churches wouldn't their own teachings be sort of modified versions of the teachings within the churches they were in as opposed to just having their own set of teachings so they're secret teachings so so there would have been their own thinkers and things like that in some cases there are important leaders like valentinus who wanted to become a bishop of the church and things like that um uh but i'm just suggesting that it's more complicated for the proto-orthodox people to to root these guys out because they can't just point to them and say oh there's a there's a gnostic you know church over there like the marcia knights instead they're oh look there are gnostics in my church you know they is what they would kind of happen um because again it's like spread through sort of a secret by secret way so we already have back in new testament times um what's possibly a warning that proto-orthodox writers have against the gnostics and it's included in uh the epistle of ii timothy which is a disciple of paul who is writing pretending that it's paul who's writing and is probably warning leaders about about other leaders who are protognostic so he writes he writes avoid empty and worldly chatter those who indulge in it will stray further and further into godless courses and the infection of their teaching will spread like gangrene such are hymeno hymenaeus and philades they have shot wide of the truth saying our resurrection has already taken place and they are upsetting people's faith and so essentially they are teaching we don't know anything more than this but what they're saying is they're teaching a let's say a much more spiritual resurrection so uh the people in uh you know the guy who's writing here is paul uh in the letter to timothy's church he's believing let's say in a in a in a literal eschatology there's going to be an end time where there's going to be a very physical bodily resurrection maybe and now instead he is in confronting these kind of leaders within his own church who are saying no no no this all this resurrection talk is entirely spiritualized it's already occurred and guess what we have a lot of other gnosis that we can explain to you about how the actual uh salvation works and how what's the true uh christian gospel and so uh essentially this is happening probably already then in the first century okay so we've talked around a lot about it so what is gnosticism in general so the word comes from the greek hypnosis meaning knowledge and the gnostics salvation comes through learning the secret esoteric knowledge that allows you to mystically participate with the divine so it's a it's a very particular it's not just that knowledge is good it's a very particular kind of esoteric secret knowledge um there have been a yes i don't i don't know so i don't and unfortunately i'm not a greek speaker and so i haven't looked it up so the question is what's the greek word for gnostic and i i i don't know i have to say i would you know say you could say like nostecoy or something but i don't really know what um the greek would be we'd have to look it up i'm sorry okay there the word has been applied to a whole bunch of different groups and so they don't all have continuity with each other so even though lots of groups are called gnostic because of a general belief they might have those could be even let's say non-christian jewish groups from antiquity to medieval groups like the cathars and the bogo mills to modern people today new age people who are gnostic but have no continuity with ancient gnostics so anyway they don't form a single continuous group today the one traditional organized group of gnostics that have survived from antiquity down are the mandaeans and this is a group of mandaeans i think in either northern iraq or in iran who are in some sense look back to john the baptist as one of the leaders of their religion and continue to practice things like baptism and they also have um essentially a uh a theology that's gnostic and that possibly goes all the way back to the gnostics uh and then of course there's a whole bunch of neo-gnostics now in you know in the 21st century people part of the new age people who when the gnostic texts came forward this was just a thing that people found really cool and and they decided they were gnostics there's a lovely book by gerard russell i can't remember the title but it's about lost religions or minority religions or something uh of the middle east the mandaeans are in there yeah um all sorts of others including the um the people who uh who have come to live in dearborn or um not not ohio dearborn michigan airborne michigan uh he says yeah the the chaldees or cauldees says you can go into a supermarket there and hear aramaic yeah yeah it's neat yeah and so we lived in michigan for a while and knew um some child people who were childhood um yeah so there unfortunately and these guys have been in the middle of the all of the fighting in the last little while and so have been attacked um uh by isis and stuff like that sorry um i'm i'm promising i'm not trying to take advantage of holding the mic um with the in submersion and the whole baptism i i don't know whether it's just setting with the river but it reminds me so strongly of when people go to the ganges and immerse themselves in the ganges in order to cleanse themselves of their sins and i'm wondering if this is just something that emerged independently because i know some people have argued for jesus having some kind of eastern teachings or having come across such things so so i don't know the origin of that particular practice and so it's interesting there's often there are early connections but it also was uh it wouldn't be jesus going anywhere um but the the so jesus is as a disciple of john the baptist john the baptist is known for this as a spiritual practice this spiritual practice uh existed already in judaism so ritual bathing for ritual purity uh and so but uh it changed under under john the baptist's practice into something new uh which is uh uh whereas as opposed to a ritual purity that is is only good until you become ritually unpure again this was a uh a baptism of you know essentially entering into a new spiritual realm or something like that of you know a cleansing of sin permanently kind of thing uh and so anyway so there is a but so the immediate uh source uh for this particular um ritual in christianity and probably mandaism uh is is jewish ritual bathing but in any event um anyway ritual bathing it you know goes all the way back uh in in paganism too and so it could it's probably just they all have that same idea as going back for cleanliness so okay um i'm just going to mention then just to just recap so we've just talked about how there's these possibly buddhist ideas and other kinds of things that are in india that are in through persia that are maybe also influencing the zoroastrians or maybe influencing jews and christians same thing platonism has also introduced you know is jews that are hellenized it's also affected them so it all kind of comes together there's gnostic ideas anyway that are are running all around and so they're drawing from a wide variety of sources to get to christian gnosticism all the way up until very recently all of our knowledge from gnosticism about gnostics came from the proto-orthodox so essentially the people who won and they wrote big long tracts against valentinus against the gnostics as heretics uh and so they wrote all the different things about why they they thought gnostics were bad erenaeus for example um has things quite confused so he accused gnostics of debauchery and hedonism based on their uh dismissal of the material world so essentially because uh none of you know nothing in the material world matters he used more or less uh accused them of not caring about marriage in this life and so and so that therefore they could you know have orgies or all kinds of things that you um accuse your enemies of in point of fact the gnostics were probably uh the opposite like we say where they uh believed that sex all sex is bad so they would have been maybe if anything more puritan than the proto-orthodox in the sense of sex okay so we mentioned then that that changed in the middle of the 20th century uh when a bunch of codex codices which is to say little books that are buried in the egyptian town of nagamadi were found right after world war ii near ancient orthodox monastery and so ultimately that collection was assembled and went to the coptic museum in cairo so there are 12 little books plus eight leaves of a 13th book and all of these contain a bunch of different tracts and so when you take them all out together there's 52 tractates so there's 52 different little books that are inside these kind of bound together in books they're all written in coptic which is egyptian but it's the egyptian language that is written using the greek alphabet so after the egyptians have stopped writing as much in ancient in the hieroglyphs or in the um demotic uh the the i'm sorry the yeah the hieratic and demotic so which is to say the um abbreviated and simpler versions of the hieroglyphics they've been ruled by the ptolemies you know for three centuries prior to um essentially killing the romans killing cleopatra or uh and ending the dynasty and it becoming a roman province directly and so in that amount of time uh cleopatra even though she's you know we think of her as this queen of egypt and everything like that she's you know full on a macedonian she's a greek and so is all her um you know a whole of her dynasty and so in that amount of time there has been a lot of greek influence in her capital which is alexandria founded by alexander and all it's the center of greek thought right and so anyway so egyptian has been being written it's still the egyptian language and so it's related much more distantly but it's distantly related to semitic languages like hebrew and uh but it's uh and arabic but it is it's a different language family that used to be called the hemetic family and it's now called the afro f what is it called well yeah so it used to be hematosemitic and that now it's called afroasiatic anyway so anyway so uh it's it's like that and so but it's written now with in coptic here which is to say the greek alphabet and it's still the language the liturgical language of the coptic uh christian church so there's still a large percentage of the egyptian population at a certain point egypt was a christian nation uh it was conquered by the arabs they everyday language became arabic and uh but anyway coptic continued to be the old egyptian language continued to be the liturgical language or church language of the christian church so the coptic texts are all translations the ones in nagamadi these ones that uh get got dug up they're all translations of greek originals probably and there are multiple translators some of these translators are good some of these translators are not so good apparently and there's a bunch of different scribes from the different translators so just looking at all these books that we have it's a collection made by a person or a group of people that are interested in gnosticism but it's not that they're necessarily all gnostic texts or they weren't originally all gnostic texts so for example codex 6 contains a very poor coptic translation of plato's republic however that that version of the republic has now been also heavily modified so that it includes gnostic ideas so it's no longer a perfect translation or anything like that or a word for word or a literal translation it's actually an expansion of plato in order to make plato's work more gnostic many of the texts then have been made gnostic and christians so like for example the republic is not originally a christian text either but here it's being modified and so for example in codex 5 there's a philosophical text called uh agnostus the blessed and that that is essentially a pagan uh text philosopher text but then codex number three uses the same source text so the same things that this uh guy yugnostus was saying but now it's put into christ's mouth and it's divided up into questions the disciples will ask a question and christ will answer and now it's called the sophia of jesus christ but it's the same text you know but now and and even the people in the library might have figured that out themselves there's not that many books you know anyway but in any event that's what ends up happening so the same wisdom has now been repurposed as jesus wisdom so other texts have gone similar uh gone through similar gnostic reactions so there might have been an early christian source for example when we think when we get to the gospel of thomas there might have been a very early sayings gospel that has now been expanded with gnostic editions okay so i want to look at some of these gospels so that we can actually get into it and see some of these i just picked some modern gnostic imagery because it always looks cool the esoteric stuff right and so just to give you guys a feel for how esoteric all these texts are um so we talked about uh valentinus who's one of these early gnostic leaders we only had uh what his detractors said about him however it's completely possible that one of the texts that's in the nakamadi library which is entitled the gospel of truth is actually a text that's by valentina's so we knew that we knew of a text that irenaeus who's a proto-orthodox writer contempt condemned valentinus for writing such a book and so it may well be that we now have the book and we can actually look at it and so i'm just going to read a little quote here from it that kind of shows the christology this christological question from the gospel of truth now the name of the father is the son it is he who first gave a name to the one who came forth from him who was himself and he begot him a son he gave him his name which belonged to him he is the one to whom belongs all that exists around him the father his is the name his is the son it is possible for him to be seen the name however is invisible because it alone is the mystery of the invisible which comes to the ears that are completely filled with it by him for indeed the father's name is not spoken but it is apparent through a son since the father is unengendered he alone is the one who begot for himself begot him for himself as a name but before he brought forth the eons in order that the name of the father should be over the head as lord that is the name in truth which is firm in his command through perfect power for the name is not from mere words nor does his name consist of appellations but it is invisible he gave a name to him alone since he alone sees him he alone having the power to give him a name for he who does not exist has no name the name therefore is that of the father as the name of the father is the son yeah exactly no wonder gnosticism was so popular when you like start spreading it around within the congregation right no so so we mentioned how complicated um the trinity is right and so and so what's going on here is uh in the gospel of truth uh is that apparently here you know some you know valentinus maybe um has had a way that he's trying to work out the christology and make it so that you can understand what the whole point of it is and what the sense of it is so the idea maybe if we can kind of try to get through this and to figure it out is uh that uh the god the creator god uh is unknown unseen unseeable you can't even say that god's name because that's not allowed uh in terms of the uh when we get to the four letters as they are written in the hebrew bible you're not to say them and so we're not even supposed to know you know that we might pronounce those letters yahweh or jehovah or whatever it would be we're not it's not to be known or not to be said and so um and it's also unseeable so the idea though is is that god then is ungendered also begot a son who is him and who is that god in other words that still that son is still god uh and then ins and in so doing has given a name um to uh that god which is father and is also son uh you know which wouldn't otherwise be seen or known or knowable if it weren't for the fact of it occurring right so if we didn't have this christological uh nightmare you know you know we wouldn't have any way that we could describe god in positive terms we would only have uh negative theology where we say god is infinite invisible all those kind of negative uh things which is to say not bounded not seen all that sort of thing so that's essentially anyway the idea that maybe that valentinus has but which also possibly isn't quite trinitarian because it may well be more or less saying that the father is the son but it depends it kind of seems like he's saying that if so it's not trinitarian okay i want to define a couple gnostic terms as we go forward so one of them is the monad and so when we were talking about the father here a second ago this is the one absolute god uh the creator which is to say that they use the word the monad right and so the perfect aeon over whom i'm sorry who rules over what they call the fullness which is to say the pleroma uh the region of light and life then there are aeons which are emanations from the monad who are universals and they are generally paired and there are such things as things like slot and silence and so these aeons then aren't that different in some sense from uh platonic forms of which the last of the aeons is sophia which is say wisdom the divine and divine feminine form wisdom she gives birth to the demiurge which is the flawed god of the old testament who creates the material world the demiurge is also the name that aristotle gives to the unmoved mover the prime the first cause right so the cause of the physical world then there are archons who are the evil angels who serve the demiurge and then gnosis right which we've already talked about so that knowledge that brings the true eternal life so overall the the the kind of cosmology the vision the theology that the gnostics have although they don't all agree with each other is the material world that is created by that flawed creator the demiurge whose work is a flawed simulacrum of the ideal reality this kind of platonic universe the material universe the true god is a source then of the ideal universe of light and spirit that we can't see the unseeable and this cosmic accident happened can be understood by learning then this very complicated mythology um that is like essentially a allegory drama about how the different aeons were emanated from god uh in in different order so some humans uh contain this divine spark of light that can be returned to the divine realm through a process of enlightened awakening and that's essentially what gnosticism is about so you experience enlightenment you experience wisdom when you rehearse and learn all of the secret gnosis and jesus then is the one the son of the one true god who sent in the material world in order to bring about salvation through enlightenment as opposed to any other thing so not ransom or any other way that that might be understood so next one of these texts in nakamati the gospel of mary so and specifically this is the gospel of mary magdalene so there's a bunch of different mary's in the new testament the proto-orthodox folks emphasize their authority through peter especially so if you look now to rome uh peter and paul are all over everything and there's keep the pope has these keys because christ gives peter the keys in the gospel of matthew gnostics by contrast tends to denigrate peter so peter ends up usually being kind of a jerk or a hothead or an idiot in gnostic gospels and instead the kind of good people in the in the gnostic gospels or the authoritative ones tend to be mary magdalene and also thomas so thomas in the orthodox gospel is the guy who's the dowdier you know who doesn't believe jesus was resurrected he's the um the wiser disciple in the gnostic gospels we have fragments from nag hamadi of this gospel of mary magdalene and in this text jesus is said to have loved mary more than the male apostles and to have told her alone secret teachings gnosis which peter doubts are true teaching so he doesn't believe that this is that mary actually got taught this and so let's just quote a little from then we'll read a little bit of this text the gospel of mary so he jesus answered and said to me mary magdalene who's the author of this according to the text anyway blessed are you that did not waver at the sight of me for where the mind is there is treasure and there's a lot of emphasis on thinking and mind and and that kind of thing in gnosticism mary then goes on to describe her vision about how the soul can overcome the various powers of ignorance and there's a big long four-stage process and then there's multiple sub-stages and things like that and so when the soul goes through all of that according to this this enlightened enlightenment through hypnosis the soul answers and said says you know so that's gone through all of that enlightenment what binds me has been slain what surrounds me all of this physical matter in other words has been overcome my desire has been ended so just like in buddhism you try to eliminate desire desire is the cause of suffering and ignorance has died so now we're focused on true knowledge as opposed to ignorant desire for material things in a world i was released from the fetter of oblivion all of this material realm that is worthless which is transient right so it's all going to dissolve away uh from this time on i will attain to the rest of time of the season of the aeon in silence so now we've transcended this transient material realm so when mary had said this she fell silent since it was to this point that the savior had spoken to her but andrew answered and said to the brethren say what you wish to say about what she has said i at least do not believe that the savior said this for certainly these teachings are strange ideas so when he when mary gives him this gnosis andrew jumps up and says i don't believe it this is strange stuff peter answered and spoke concerning the same things he questioned about the savior did he really speak to a woman with a woman without our knowledge and not openly are we to turn around and all listen to her did he prefer her to us mary wept and said to peter my brother peter what do you think do you think that i thought this up myself in my heart or that i'm lying about the savior and so you can imagine um actually that this is the kind of conversation that would occur in a regular proto-orthodox church that you might be going to when a person who's agnostic kind of comes up to like you as a member who's never heard of all this stuff before and so then you get told all of this gnostic gospel stuff and the secret gnosis and it's all so different from everything you've heard these are strange ideas and so it's worked out actually in this gospel essentially an internal apologetic to how you kind of how that person works through it oh peter and andrew both kind of felt that same kind of way but it ultimately works out that we should be listening to mary because mary did not just make this up that this is this is the true teachings and according to this gospel next so another one is called another one of the books that we have one of these last gospels is called the apocryphon of john so this is a second century gnostic text that claims to be a secret book of john the son of zebedee as told to him by jesus and it contains an elaborate mythology that explains the gnostic creation story and the understanding and organization purpose of creation so there's plenty of these different gnostic creations and this is just going to be one of the examples that we'll look at so quoting from that book i john asked to know it and he jesus said to me the monad so remember that kind of gnostic term is a monarchy with nothing above it it is he who exists as god and father of everything the invisible one who is above everything who exists as incorruption which is in the pure light into which no i can look so again this is the same kind of idea this platonic immaterial idea invisible and also incorruptible right so the the world of the forums is perfect it's not like the material world that corrupts he is the invisible spirit of whom it is not right to think of him as a god or 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 so he's the un unmoved mover he's the turtle since it does not need anything he's the first cause he is therefore total perfection is the idea here in the um cosmology or theology that's in the gnostic gospel here of john and his the monad's thought performed a deed and she came forth from his mind she is the forethought of all her light shines like his light the perfect power which is the image of the invisible virginal spirit who is perfect the first power the glory of barbello the perfect glory in the ans and so then after that aeon uh barbello then there comes fourth a pentad of paired aeons forethought barbello thought indestructibility eternal life truth then [Music] then comes the word of creation which is christ then the autogenies come for us so in other words this is unending stream and this is a very long explanation of how creation works in terms of sort of philosophical underpinnings but it's become more of a mythological story narrative and then finally the last then of the aeons sophia so the sophia of the uh epinoya being an aeon conceived a thought for herself she wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the spiri of the spirit he had not approved and without her consort so even though she's wisdom at the end of all of these emanations these spiritual emanations um sophia the last aeon decides that she's going to try creation her own hand at creation and that causes the catastrophe right so the result is the creation of a flawed but powerful god which is named yaltaba which is essentially the idea of the yahweh or jehovah of the bible the old testament the altabaoth then goes on to enact genesis so the physical world's creation and is the source the demiurge that creates the physical world then special roles are given to adam eve their son seth noah's wife naraya which is not actually named in the old testament and it ends then with the savior explaining his role to john so it's a long elaborate retelling essentially of the judeo-christian story now through gnostic cosmology another one of these that has another one of those kind of stories is called on the origin of the world and so it's another elaborate gnostic creation myth and cosmology it's different and so we might as well just see the range of these um the author then mixes jewish manichaean christian greek philosophical and mythological ideas within magic and astrology and so it reworks genesis giving eve a much more exalted role which is interesting so this is just a little excerpt from on the origin of the world and when they had finished adam he abandoned him as an inanimate vessel since he had taken form like an abortion in that no spirit was in him regarding this thing when the chief ruler remembered the saying of pistus which is to say his mother wisdom he was less afraid lest the true man the adam of light enter his model form and become its lord for this reason he left his modeled form 40 days without a soul and he withdrew and he abandoned it now in the 40th day sophia zoe sent her breath into adam who had no soul he began to move upon the ground and he could not stand up when the seven rulers came they saw him and were greatly disturbed and when they saw that adam could not stand up they were glad and they took pity on him and put him in paradise and they withdrew up to their heavens and after the day of rest sophia sent her daughter zoe being called eve as an instructor in order that she might make adam who had no soul arise so that those whom he could engender might become containers of light when eve saw her male counterpart prostrate she had pity upon him and she said adam become alive arise upon the earth immediately her word became accomplished fact for adam having arisen suddenly opened his eyes when he saw her he said you shall be called mother of the living for it is you who have given me life so that's quite a different retelling anyway that in the madame and ease story but you can also see this idea that um the i that it has to also explain this complicated uh reason why uh true souls or light spirit sparks or whatever are trapped inside these um mortal prisons of our bodies that we shouldn't actually you know that has caught been the cause of all this problem all how of all these good gods ended up um with this terrible circumstance of the of the world as we now have it uh the gnostics you know have explained through elaborate cosmology why that has happened one more of these ones the text is called the thunder perfect mind it's among then like i say this is a miscellany of these kind of texts the text mirrors i think the i am statements that are in the canonical gospel of john so there's all kinds of different places where christ says i am the way the truth and the light i am the bread of life i'm the water you know all these kind of things uh and so in all of those cases essentially christ is saying i am which is an echoing of the god of the old testament who says i am that i am for to moses uh in exodus so the female speaker here however is probably sophia it's probably wisdom and so uh here's what she says do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time be on your guard do not 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 hear me you hearers and learn my words you who know me i am the hearing that is attainable to everything i am 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 um a lot of esoterica you know here but essentially of understanding uh the value of you know wisdom and the different ways that we can anyway contemplate it oh here's more sorry there's another little quote here give heed then you hearers for i am the one alone who exists and i have no one who will judge me for many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins and inconsistencies and disgraceful passions and fleeting pleasures which men embrace until they become sober and go up to their resting place and they will find me there and they will live and they will not die again so again unlike what the um the proto-orthodox are saying about the gnostics here the gnostics are quite down on let's say fleeting mortal pleasures of the body you know so getting drunk and having sex and all the kind of things like that and instead what gnostics want you to do is sober up think about the big picture wisdom stuff you know go be a philosopher and that's when uh you know you will not you'll actually have true eternal life and so we'll just talk about one last one of these which is the most important text in the library which is the sayings gospel thomas um it's sort of like the lost gospel cue that the authors of mark and matthew had access to very likely or hypothetically and it preserves potentially an independent first century source that has been edited by gnostics in the second century and expanded to include gnostic ideas so in its present form it's attributed to jesus's twin brother and so you didn't know how jesus had a twin brother did you but it's called in the it's called in the text didymus judas thomas so actually his name is jude or judah or judas but in fact the you know he's the same guy as the apostle thomas thomas is simply the aramaic word for twin and you know he didn't maybe know that so and then the uh greek word is didymus and so the guy is called didymus judas thomas which is to say uh anyway twin twin jude the twin you know so the idea of it is then a lot of times in greece for example in greek mythology when you have a divine being uh like hercules hercules then has a i think he's he's the mortal one and he's got a divine brother right or anyway castor and pollux for example you might and so uh the one caster is you know anyway one of them is divine and one of them's mortal so a lot of times will happen is there'll be twins that are born and the one in terms of the mythological stories and the one is divine and the other one's the mortal one and so this is the same thing that's happened so there's essentially jesus is the divine twin for the gnostics and then uh thomas here is the the mortal one so um this is how it starts these are the secret sayings that the living jesus spoke to did him as judas thomas and jesus judas thomas recorded and he said jesus said whoever discovers the interpretations uh i'm sorry or he said maybe thomas said whoever discovers the interpretations of these sayings will not taste death so this is how eternal life has happened because you'll actually find out that physical death doesn't matter because the physical world is is meaningless so jesus said those who seek should not stop seeking until they find which isn't that different from let's say a bunch of different sayings in the in the canonical new testament but then it goes on when they find they will be disturbed when they are disturbed they will marvel and they will reign overall so when you realize the secrets of all of this gnosis you won't you'll be like really disturbed that all of this is actually true that this physical world that everything that you valued is actually totally meaningless but when you find that out when you finally get it you're going to really marvel and then when you truly have that mastered you actually are the master of everything because you no longer are victims to the whimsies of the world's physical nature that is impacting you another one of these sayings jesus said if your leaders say to you look the kingdom of god god the father's imperial rule is in the sky the birds of the sky will precede you if they say it's in the sea the fish will precede you rather the father's imperial rule which is when you say the kingdom of god is within you and it is uh outside you that's not that different from one of the sayings that it is recorded in luke but it goes on here now with the gnostic edition 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 you have to have knowledge and when you do you're going to be know that you're the actual spirit child of the true spirit father and if you don't know that you essentially are you are the poverty the physical world and finally uh here whoever has come jesus said whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass and whoever has discovered a carcass the person of that person i'm sorry if the person the world is not worthy so once you realize the physical world is just a dead hulk it's nothing it's just the physical things then the world is no longer worthy of you because you are that desi vine spark that has transcended it all right um so just to sum up and i appreciate you guys for all of the having gone through like a lot of text here uh and through some fairly esoteric teaching that the gnostics have but one of the things i think that we can see having now got a hold of these texts that we didn't have for millennia is that many of the charges made by proto-orthodox critics of gnostics aren't actually justified so certainly not the uh the idea that they were hedonists and this kind of a thing it's quite the opposite likewise while gnostic christianity overlaps at its origin with the mainline tradition it has undergone a rapid and very substantial divergence and one of the things that that i think shows the fact that it has these vast pantheons where there's not only just the supreme god but then hundreds of aeons and lesser gods and things like that that are emanating out so a very complicated um theology that is not replicated in ultimately orthodox christianity it shows that there was a kind of an amazing diversity of early thought among christianity and then finally um uh the overlap then between christian gnosticism and philosophical writings like neoplatonism so uh middle platonism uh heavily influences all of um uh this kind of gnostic thought and we've even talked about how some of the words like dem urge and uh some of the ideas of things like the forums and emanations and sophia and everything like that are major crossovers with the philosophical tradition that's active in places like egypt and because of that and other wisdom traditions show that there's a big interplay and intellectual sharing occurring between christian and pagan thinkers in general and that will ultimately be important as as much of that thought is incorporated also into mainline christianity as we'll see in future lectures so that is the lost gnostic gospels [Applause] questions yeah i think this is a case of john thank you for reading all this stuff so we don't have to [Laughter] we should bear in mind that these accusations made against the gnostics we see it again and again and again you don't like somebody you accuse them of the sins that you are either committing or wish you were right yeah and and also these get by the way they uh the cathars who are let's say a gnostic sex sect they also get the same accusations in the middle ages even though again they are probably um because of this idea of being opposed to the material world and actually in the case of the cathars being opposed um for their elite uh of creating new babies and things like that they were actually quite opposed to imprisoning new sparks of life into um you know mortal coil prisons which is never a um it's a it's a highly philosophical position but it's not a great position in terms of not having your religion die out you know but yeah it's because because you aren't really usually able to have a second generation you have to continually convert people but in any event um again the or the catholic um anyway chris medieval christians uh who are uh opposing cathars are again accusing them of you know orgies and things like that like you're saying as opposed to when they probably are not are refraining from sex altogether um so so when did those agnostic ideas uh become removed out of the uh orthodox uh religion like was it the nicean uh council where they decided to remove all that uh gnosticism out of it well so yeah so the question is when did it get removed and so what i would argue is that it's not so much a matter of removing uh because nobody has like like some kind of a much more elaborate new testament or something there is no there is no canon of the new testament until actually centuries after the nicene council so it's actually another couple centuries before everybody's agreed what belongs in the new testament and so and so there is simply plenty of books running around everywhere and there are different communities and and at some point or other and it's it's actually in the first and second centuries people are already arguing with each other saying you're not really christian you're not christian you know and this kind of thing and frankly even then the generation before that um you're not jewish anymore you know you know you guys are false you know you guys are jews that have rejected you know the true messiah so you're you're you know god can raise up children of abraham like he can raise up rocks or whatever so that's already in the in the um in the first century and so what they're doing is not that they have removed anything but there are different people that have different ideas and some of the people's ideas don't get included in what um in in once you get to the nice scene stuff um did remnants of that gnosticism thought uh make its way into further centuries you mentioned the cathars when were they or right so the cathars are in the middle of the at the middle ages and so it's like the 12th century and they're occurring in especially in the south of france and the north of italy uh they may have gotten some of the ideas from the bogomills who are a little bit earlier than that who are in essentially bosnia that kind of area in bulgaria um in uh and they also have their kind of a a separate sect um we it's very hard for us to trace continuity so um so whereas people would like to know that there was some kind of a an extra gnostic group that was like hanging out in syria somewhere you know we don't have their texts and so we can't um we can't prove that they were there to you know physically transmit it so it's always possible that um the ideas themselves can revive um it's a dualism is one of the one of the obvious answers to when people are dealing with the problem of evil and so the same questions that marcion uh was facing which is why does this old testament gods just seem like uh such a jerk you know or whatever you know and so what and why uh that doesn't seem and why why do i keep suffering you know and all this kind of thing and so um and so those same you know and so saying that there is a that the physical world is really bad and that we should renounce that a lot of these ideas um continue to resonate and so they can also crop up anew whether without continuity so we can't say for sure that there's continuity if they're hanging out somewhere in in syria or turkey and then reinvent in fact the bulgarians and then from there the northern italians and then the southern french what we do know is that uh between the creation of the inquisition which is which the popes did to handle the problem as as the pope saw it and also the um uh the use of an internal crusade for the first time so declaring uh a crusade against other christians um which is to say for because they're heretics as far as the pope was concerned that actually successfully wiped them out so the cathars did not survive either you um i think mentioned at one point uh uh the possible connection with buddhist thought uh with agnostics yes how would that have happened geographically and uh chronologically and yeah so it's complicated um so there are interconnections between um so you know alexander gets all the way to india and there is founded even before that uh on the boundary between the persian empire and india is actually a large set of greek colonies in what's now afghanistan so uh the one of the ways that the when you rule an empire like persia so the persian empire went all the way from bulgaria all the way across to the indus river right so it's a huge massive empire and one of the ways that you divide and conquer people is so they controlled all of um let's say western what's not turkey which is where homer and all of these greek thinkers the first philosophers are all from that zone when those guys rebelled uh the persians put down the rebellion and they scoop up half the people and they take them to afghanistan you know and plant colonies there and so now those guys since they are no longer next to a whole bunch of greeks they can't rebel very easily instead they have to kind of be loyal to the emperor the shah because of um they have to fight against indians and stuff like that right so they you now suddenly have made an enemy into a friend and that's empires did that for you know like that's what happened to the lost 10 tribes of of israel right and so uh so there's a vast greek kingdom in afghanistan uh that anyway that ultimately uh also influences influences india because they conquer a bunch of india and then also vice versa um uh when the alexander's expedition and things like that they are aware of um indian uh religion and indian philosophy in the form of what they called gymnosophists which is to say naked philosophers uh and they are really impressed by these guys who um you know are not into material things so whether they're like jane's or something you know but it's people who are uh brahmins or jains or something where they have renounced all of the you know the physical uh form they're eating very little they're not eating meat and all kinds of other things like that and they have gotten rid of uh physical stuff and so how there's so there are connections and so therefore some of the contact will have happened there's a lot of people who would like to say well we don't know what happened with what jesus was doing between the ages of 12 and the ages of 30 maybe he went to india so jesus didn't go to india so that it doesn't happen through a direct connection like that but there is there are crossovers where people who are in alexander's camp are directly talking to people from india there are merchants that cause direct connections so there's the capacity just to exchange thought elizabeth yeah there was certainly merchants there were there were jews living in china there there was a colony i don't know how how recently they died out but i remember years ago up at bethcetic there was a display of artifacts manuscripts from this jewish colony there were jewish merchants who went to china and i guess they settled there and there we these manuscripts in hebrew but with chinese illustrations yeah and i remember reading something about how um other jews would come there and and they would ask them all sorts of questions because they they had forgotten a hell of a lot about judaism and they wanted to know so there was not a lot of people people didn't travel like we do today no rowley suitcases but they did travel yeah and and so in in that sense too it's not just jewish colonies but so for example um if you i mean in the hundred and the thousand and one nights uh the aladdin story is actually it's not set in agrabah as in the disney movie it's actually set in china so well yeah aladdin it is a it is a chinese herbs arab merchants are in china because again there's that that's going on and also we've talked about before we did a whole lecture on manichaeism and so manichaeism is a is a later uh jewish uh dualist religion that is has both zoroastrian and uh judeo-christian like a synthesis of those kind of ideas that this guy manny who's a prophet has they convert he's able to ultimately his disciples are able to convert some central asian kingdoms which which allow the religion to kind of take off and flourish in the middle ages and it actually its last practitioners it gets killed off in the west and everything like that but its last practitioners were in china again so there was some mana keys that were off in china so yeah there are people around yep um the spread of ideas back and forth buddhism to the east and the uh the greek ideas uh you know from the west going east um a lot of that occurred in what we call the silk road but there's actually three silk roads the one that we're tend to be more familiar with and it was all to do with trade right um the one we're most familiar with is the land one yeah there was actually two other so where i'm from or where i was born in the south of india yes there are just multiple uh religions going back millennia right thomas went to that part and so that's central to the christianity uh in that south part of india and then of course later the the portuguese you know like century a millennium and a half later the portuguese but uh also you have the syrian orthodox uh that are were very prominent there and uh and are still prominent and you have the the jews uh who have a synagogue and it's still there um and they were tended to be black jews both there and in goa further up um so the synagogue is still there and and still uh very much part of you know what goes on in that world religiously and then of course there's buddhism and hindus and all the the major um indian religions um but uh the i went to the synagogue i went to the black uh jewish synagogue and the floor is actually covered in uh chinese tiles uh all so the so there and there is a distinct if you look at the uh the things on the wall there's a very distinct history between those two countries china and in southern india if you look at the boats for example they look like chinese junks the way the nets are arranged so you know and that was all around the turn of of of christ right right after christ and actually some of it predates christ too uh like the black jewish uh for example um but so that's one thing that's a whole uh you know um pair meeting of ideas going east and west and traveled uh both landlord and maritime we're definitely going to have to have a whole lecture where we get into like that topic because it obviously has excited a lot of us a lot of times and we've been wondering about that and so there i mean there i've read a few books on this and there's some essays and things and there's and and it's like you say there's multiple ways one on the one hand the land roots through the through uh the the mongols and everybody else the huns but then also like you say the maritime route which i think even went back on the on the water route yeah there's two maritime routes and there's actually a book called how trade shaped the world where it articulates the three roots uh in great concrete detail the second thing i was going to say was um the teacher i had in buddhism um taught he was actually trained as a baptist minister initially okay and went to the it was also communist and i went to the east went to burma and he was there for eight years and uh got steeped totally in the uh at that time the burmese um thing but he taught he taught to the western mysteries which are all the greek right and it just very recently came across this um uh reference to him apparently the karmapaw who is the equivalent of the dalai lama in another part of tibet right there was three of them the karmapa and he were very very close and there's just recently a reference to um the teacher was my teacher was in in assisi at the time when the karmapa called for him and the the the reason apparently the karmapa called for him was he was disputing the the western mysteries as a route to enlightenment because because the teacher was saying there are multiple paths to enlightenment one is the buddhists and one is the greek you know so that and what you were saying you know those ideas are in contention so but that you know you're going back to the gnostic gospels and so it was i was just reading this the other day and it's going like wow just in recent history those two paths were really still in dispute for the similar reasons to what's happening yeah christology what i will say about some of it is that like so for example some of the mixing when we have it and we experience it in the now although lots of places have traditions that it goes back 2000 and more years until we can establish it through you know we have texture and tradition and everything like that a lot of cases like the claims will be that they go all the way back but we are aren't able to verify it using you know history but in any event like you say there are there anyway there have been that we're very aware of those trade routes and everything like that depending on anyway well one more and then we gotta wrap it up yeah you were mentioning uh textual evidence for you know such as we have and there's a paucity of it of course the earlier you go and and it is intriguing but ultimately not very demonstrable but there is archaeological evidence apparently that there was contact trade contact between the mesopotamian world and the indus valley civilization going back to about 3000 bce so it's it is intriguing you know i mean these people were not ignorant of each other and who knows you know how much if any ideas might have as well passed along but it's you know not unlikely and and then another important uh figure that should be mentioned is um pyro who was um considered one of the you know if maybe not founders but major reinforcers of greek skepticism if you know if one counts socrates perhaps as as an initiator but pyro uh formalized and and advanced the ideas very very much and had an influence on stoicism and et cetera et cetera and so he was in india he he very famously went to india yeah that's the person actually yeah along with alexander and he was a very informed observer of such figures as the gymnast office so yes so it i mean there are arguments made that uh scholarly arguments and textual arguments that uh that he was very he was a young man then uh and he was very very much influenced by what he saw and heard there right and so there are definitely we know that there's that interaction takes place and so the only thing i would caution that i was trying to say is that more or less when we for example there's a traditional story that thomas the apostle thomas made it to india this is um probably not a historical story it's a tradition but that is located there there are ideas that apostles went all over the place you know that saint santiago de compostela made it say jacob made it to capostello the thomas made it to india and all those kind of things there's the idea that the ethiopian dynasty has that they have the ark of the covenant and the they're descended from uh the queen of sheba and solomon and their idea of that is at least 700 years old and so it's a long-standing tradition but it doesn't probably date back to the time of solomon and the queen of sheba who were very likely to be mythological and not historical figures so anyway so that's all i'm saying in terms of a question and caution on that but with all of that i appreciate all of the discussion oh there's just one more thing leandra wanted to say hi from argentina to everyone he regrets that he can't be here but he's hired so that's it very very good well thank you very much and thanks all for joining us and from as far away as argentina and beyond so bye-bye [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Centre Place

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Length: 100min 25sec (6025 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021