The "Gnostic" Gospels: who else is a fan?

I don't completely understand this.

You "read 'em & enjoy 'em", but "then ignore them"?

I understand this regarding, say, the Pistis Sophia and the Gospel of Judas, and even the Gospel of Mary (though the echoes in Mary of other "post-resurrection" literature is clear). I can see where the Gospel of Philip might be too much to take too. But do you include in your "ignoring" the Gospel of Thomas as well? I'm not an expert on gospel archaelogy, but I believe the original of Thomas is thought to originally stem from 50-60 A.D., and there are clearly echoes of G of Thomas in all the 4 traditional gospels. I'm surprised you would include such a work as Thomas in your complete rejection of the Gnostics.

Not that I don't understand a love of the traditional gospels. I'm just curious as to your seeming total rejection of the others.

Peace.

G of Thomas, 42.

'Be a passersby.'




Happy Shabat everyone.

What is it about the Gospel of Thomas that you find appealing that you do not also find in MMLJ?

Ooh, this thread looks like fun...

Actually, if you think about it, the Gnostic Gospels areless likely to have been.. er, "edited" shall we say, because:

a) they were suppressed and hidden at a fairly early stage and therefore not around long enough to have to suffered as much change as the Gospels of the winning party

b) were written by people who obviously didn't care about having to blend in with the imperial Roman power structure like the eventual winning side did.

Of ocurse, this isn't to say that the Gnostic gospels are any "truer" or a more accurate description of what went down with Jesus and the early Jesus movements in eretz Israel before the destruction of the Templpe, but they are probably less liekly to have been tampered with than the current "official" ones.

For the sake of argument...

If Jesus quoted the Buddhist sutras to the Jews rathers than Jewish writings, he'd just have confused the bejeebus out of everyone since that's what happens when you try to commnicate to people of a given culture using the symbols, ideas, etc. of a different culture.

Either that or he didn't want them to know what he was really on about, as is the case with the Bush administration and its flunkies, who routinely wipe their asses with Constitution and spit in the faces of the Founders, keep quoting the Constituion and the Founders.

I'm not saying that's what happened, just that there could be reasons for it other than what you think.

At first I didn't know what "MMLJ" meant. Like, what do MLK and MJ (Michael Jordan) have to do with with the G of Thomas?

I'm not sure I tried to imply I didn't necesarily also find similarly appealing themes & philosophies & general religion in the 4 traditional canons. As I study Thomas more & more over time, however - and, I should say, the same about MMLJ - I find Thomas often flushing out sayings or stories from the others, or mimicing, or alluding to, or along those lines. Often they're basically one & the same.

Sort of fascinates me at this point, that's the most I can say about it. Plus, in the gospel stories it was always hard to not to have kind of a special adoration of the Apostle Thomas, & to have a gospel "suddenly appear" (for me as a Christian, that's sort of how it feels) bearing his name, who am I to not to bear witness to it in some fashion or another.

amazing for me that such a richness of spiritual thought & belief - centered once again around Yeshua of Nazareth, even if only in many cases esoterically - basically was lost to history for more than 1500 years. if nothing else it will change tones of debate in some circles.

i've always wondered about all the ideas, philosophies, knowledge, etc. that must have been floating around the Holy Land circa 0 AD. in addition to the multilevels of all the schools of Jewish & Hebrew thought, the Holy Land was an incredible crossroads for, in addition to commerce, ideas East & West running from the northern hinterlands of the Roman Empire over through the far reaches of the former Alexandrian Empire & beyond. i've always figured any kind of smart man - much less the Messiah - would have gleaned much from this incredible array, soaking it all up if only in a workmanlike fashion.

good food for thought.

I'm not quite getting the context for this one but one thing is again pretty clear, at least to me - that that Yeshua of Nazareth dude was as round as he was square, as complex as he was simple, as multileveled & holonisticaly depthed as he was 100% Judaic & completely new, & straight & narrow as a blind alley cat.

Must have made for quite a picture, but I guess that's the whole point, or at least one of them.

One simple saying, two closely-related transcriptions, two sublimely divergent interpretations. To wit:

Gospel of Thomas, Logia 10.

From a translation/interpretation by Andrew Phillip Smith ["A new version (of G of Thomas) based on its inner meaning"]:

Jesus said, I have set fire to the earth and, look, I am watching it until it burns.

From a translation/interpretation by Jean-Yves LeLoup [G of Thomas - "The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus"]:

Yeshua said: I have sown fire upon the world, and now I tend it to a blaze.


One is Jesus; one is Yeshua.

One has "set fire"; one has "sown fire".

One did so "to the earth"; the other "upon the world".

One "looks"; one is immediately present.

One "watches"; one actively "tends".

One watches as everything "burns"; the other tends "it" to a blaze.

Boy, inner meanings & gnosis, & the fire next time.

Excuse my late reply to this thread but it's a subject of interest to me and lately happen to come across a book on the topic which farther approved my previous understanding of the topic.

What you stated in the above statement is not untrue but it fails to show the impact of the main source of the Gnostic philosophy, or at least you didn't dig deep enough.

Here is an excellent book on the topic which covers Gnostic philosophy from its inception in Iran/Persia from Zoarastrian Dualism soon enough its different branches such as Manicheanism, even Mithraism spread the philosophy to different people in the region, including Jews, Romans, Greeks, Heremes, Cathars, Sabians,...., and later the Sufis, Knights Templars, Rosecrucians, and Freemasons.

This book is worth the time to read although it's a bit heavy at times.

Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times

^ Did you also read her "The Gnostic Gospels?" She breaks it down and makes it clear. But as to the question of "who else is a fan," I guess that I'm starting to get into it. I got the impression that Gnostic Christians were such opposites from orthodox Christians. I just thought that they were just a different group like the Arians, Marcionites, Nestorians, etc.

Gnostics had much in common with Arians and Nestorians from the bedrocks of early Christianity that they Viewed Jesus as the Great Messanger (Great Messiah) but not a physical manifestation of God Himself. Another word, they were Non-Trinitarian. btw, Arianus was a Zoroastrian Magi before becoming Christian.

Arius, the founder of the Arian movement, was most certainly NOT a magi. While its clear that Zoroastrian dualism affected the Christians to a certain degree, the notion that Zoroastrianism was the clearest influence on the Gnostics is an odd position to take. Especially with movements coming out of the highly Hellenized Alexandria, Greek tradition was vastly more relevant.

The great schools of Magis had been established in the region during the first Persian Empire (Achamenid)-- long before Alexander and the Hellenization period. Its collective teachings were reffered to by enlightened Greeks as Gnosis meaning the knowledge [from the East, Persia] in Greek directly in contrast to the superstitions of the Oracles.

The Oracles weren't "superstition" in opposition to "knowledge", and Hellenic culture had its start considerably before Alexander. There were no schools of the magi in Egypt or Greece, never mind that Alexandria didn't even exist at the time the Achaemenids occupied it.
Plato, for instance, used the term gnosis as well in his philosophical works. Are you going to try and claim that was Persian?

"Gnosis" is not a Persian creation.

Despite the forces of darkness living amongst us, it's never been easier to search for the truth. Indeed, more people are interested and have access to find it.

For some of the history of Gnostics, aside from the book I recommended in this thread, one can easily find plenty of information online from various sources, if one is interested.

here is an excellent article/essay that provided a good reading on the sources that shaped the Greek thought before and after the sacking of Persian empire. Including the books and scholars that were captured and the building of the library in Alexandria, and the cources of its collection. I encourage everyone to take a look.

http://www.essayvtm.netfirms.com/Greece.htm

In Alexandrian times air degraded to an ordinary object of physical science and mechanical engineering. Some Gnostics tried to save the doctrine by applying the name pneuma (air) to a new medium of finer matter, but soon a new candidate, the Boundless Light of the Persian Zoroastrians, gained momentum.489 Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Sufism and alchemy all eventually turned to light as the substratum of the spiritual world, and started a permanent conflict between scientific and spiritual aspirations. In the Gnostic gospel of Thomas Jesus says:

“If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’, say to them, ‘We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.’”490

The fourth gospel of the Christian Bible, leaning heavily on Gnosticism itself, borrows the ancient imagery of air, winds and words in Genesis,491 but connects it with the new metaphor of light:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [..] In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.492

Plotinus, the father of Neo-Platonism, wrote that ‘to dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, [the soul] must thrust towards the light.’493

Euclid of Alexandria, in his Optica, had studied the relationship between the apparent sizes of objects and their angle occupied at the eye. To Euclid, light streamed from the eye to the object; to Plotinus, light streamed from the celestial world into this world, filling it with matter. Therefore Plotinus could not agree that some parts of the seeing eye would not receive light:

Those attributing the reduced appearance to the lesser angle occupied, allow by their very theory that the unoccupied portion of the eye still sees something beyond or something quite apart from the object of vision, if only air-space.494

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This may well be the worst article I have ever read that wants to claim its "academic". Just appalling.

I Agree. The Gnostic Gospels just found out about them last week and became really interested. And so me being a christian and growing my faith all the time, I found the gospal of thomas and Mary Magdelene "too human" to believe. Some quotes were astonishing and could not get my head around it.

Iran invented appalling pseudo-academic articles.

This is a great addition to our search for truth and knowledge:

http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/GreekIndex.php

The Beginnings of Greek Philosophy
Zoroaster is said to have travelled to Anatolia, the Asian peninsula south of the Black sea that is now Turkey, but in the seventh century BC was Ionian Greek in the West, Lydian in the centre and bordered Assyria in the east, with Persia beyond. If this is more than mere legend, it offers the possibility of a direct Zoroastrian influence on the Greek philosophy of the Ionians, like Pythagoras of Samos and Thales of Miletus. In dealing with pre-Socratic thought, A N Marlow tells us we find ourselves in an atmosphere more akin to that of the Orient than to that of the West. An indirect influence seems certain.

Pythagoras was said to have learnt from the Magi of Babylon, and the Neo-Pythagoreans’ doctrines of immortality and dualism owed much to Magian belief. Plato mentions Zoroaster in Alcibiades, describing him as a son of Oromazdes—the God Ormuzd. Since Persian tradition says Zoroaster travelled both to India and China, an influence of Persian religion on Buddhism and Chinese philosophies is also likely. These suggestions are not to disparage the marvellous inventiveness of the Greeks, the Indians or the Chinese, but the remarkable blossoming of religious and philosophical sentiment from the sixth century BC might have had a common seed, and that seed might have been Persia, in the center of all these astonishing changes, and the base of Zoroaster, who preceded the other great men of the time.

A complication is that the earliest Greek myths seem to have been similar to those of the Hindus as well as some of the Persian myths. How did Indian influence reach Greece so early? All of these peoples were Indo-European, and so the Hindu pantheon has affinities with that of the early Greeks, since both are derived from a common source. So it is often difficult to decide where the true points of contact are, but at this date contact with Persians rather than the Indians seems more likely. Radhakrishnan writes that agreements between the myths of the Greeks and the Indians indicate that:

The two peoples must have been in contact at some early period, but neither possessed any recollection of those times and they met as strangers within the Persian Empire.
The emergence of the Persians must have stimulated interest in Anatolia in northern legends. The Ionian Greeks were stimulated by Persian cosmology to think on a cosmic scale and a timeless scale. They began to see morals and nature as the strife between opposites, and the qualities of air, earth, fire and water began to be seen as “elements,” though the term itself is a later invention. As F H Smith pointed out, the apeiron (the Boundless) of Anaximander is, in Hindu, the Nameless and Formless, called aditi, the “unlimited”, in the Rig Veda. Moreover, this aditi is ordered by the immanent rita (law, order), later called dharma, the Persian arta or asha (Truth), just as in Anaximander an immanent dike, Justice, ensures that all things eventually return to the apeiron whence they came:

From which all things take their rise, and by necessity they are destroyed into these, for all things render just atonement to one another for their injustice according to the due ordering of time.
After the time of Alexander, the way lay so open to Oriental influence and parallels with India become more frequent and less remarkable.

Philosophy is peculiarly Greek, but the lines of thought of many early Greek phlosophers seem to emerge from the new cosmology of Zoroaster. Zoroaster’s remarkable new ideas stimulated the philosophic mind of men who sought to do better than their enemies. The investigator has to remember, though, that most of the Persian works of Zoroaster’s school have been destroyed, so many connexions are irrecoverable, and the apparently clear links between Hindu thought and the pre-Socratic Greeks might simply be reflecting the lost common ground in Persian thought.

Westerners have never been happy even to consider that the glory of Greece owed anything to anybody, let alone Persians who are thoroughly disliked now that they are run by mad mullahs. But the Persians and the Greeks had the same origins, as did the Indians, and in 500 BC probably did not seem much different from each other, though subsequent breeding with the indigenous stock doubtless led to differences in appearance and outlook. So, any debt of Greeks, Chinese or Indians to the Persians has not been adequately explored, simply for reasons of prejudice.

Wonderful read here about the Cathars who shared a great deal with the Gnostics:

http://www.amazon.com/Crusade-Against-Grail-Struggle-Templars/dp/1594771359#reader_1594771359