Unknown

our topic this evening is the Gnostic Jesus we've done several past lectures on gnosticism and Gnostic texts including recently when we were in Leon we talked about uh one of the most important early critics of the gnostics IRAs of Leon and we've also done a number of lectures on on Jesus both the way Jesus is reconstructed academically uh the historical Jesus the search for the historical Jesus but also the way different groups um contemporary groups and then later historical groups remember Jesus and understood Jesus and so not too long ago we looked at uh how

Jesus is understood in Islam and tonight we will talk about how the gnostics understand Jesus the different ways they do among the few points of General academic consensus about the historical Jesus um we can say that there are a few basic points that all historians sort of agree about the historical figure and one of these is that he was executed by the Romans during the governorship of the Roman uh prop pontious pilot and and so because we know the dates uh the ponus pilot uh was in office and we also can do kind of the

calculation to find out when there was an appropriate uh Passover time people have dated uh Jesus execution either to 30 or 33 but essentially we have that idea as a kind of historical point in the timeline that we can actually anchor to so when we're looking at that crucifixion picture and it's invisioned in artwork uh the last 2,000 years um Jesus crucified is all often portrayed with the Beloved disciple which according to Christian tradition is the uh John the Beloved along with different women including Mary Jesus mother and they're pictured then at the crucifixion scene

and that comes from the description in the Gospel of John which places some of Jesus female disciples including his mother unnamed in that gospel and one male disciple again unnamed the Beloved disciple at the foot of the cross by contrast to John's account of the crucifixion the earliest account that we have in the gospel of Mark has all of the male disciples flee and uh sometimes in some cases even deny that they knew Jesus most particularly the story of Peter denying uh that he had been a disciple of Jesus three times and so in addition

to that uh in all the gospels but especially beginning in Mark the disciples are also portrayed of not really understanding who Jesus was and not expecting that he would be executed and they also didn't understand why uh if Jesus is the Messiah why an execution would have happened at all what's the point of that how how does that work and so there is confusion even in the gospels as they are written and indeed in our earliest texts Christians have competing views on this and so um I think most Scholars of the historical Jesus um imagine

that there were no disciples present at the crucifixion likely uh and therefore um because the disciples were not expecting it and they were themselves in danger of being arrested so how could the disciples not know um as we read the canonical gospels the disciples confusion just seems bizarre Jesus actually is continuously predicting this outcome he's telling them that he's going to be killed he's telling them them that he's going to be resurrected um and yet uh as we read the gospel accounts we can't help but ask ourselves then how dense are these disciples that they

are not just listening to even more and more explicit predictions of the outcome and why it has to happen by Jesus but what I'll say is in terms of the that's certainly how it works in the texts but this is because the gospels are all written decades after the events and they're already written by Christians who have decided for themselves the answer to this question so Christian communities have been wrestling with this for decades already by the time the gospels are written and so those explanations are then put back into the text as um as

explanations in Jesus lips and predictions in G Jesus lips all of which are anachronistic all of which are not um d to the historical Jesus but to Jesus of the gospels what's also interesting is how radically different understandings were right out of the gate so who was Jesus what does it mean to say that he's the Messiah that he's the Christ so very early on Christians do not agree on the answers to those questions and our earliest Christian author who we often sight when we are trying to get back at the Historical Jesus Paul um

who met the brother of Jesus and some of the Disciples of the historical Jesus but never himself met the historical Jesus in person he describes a spiritual experience with the Risen Christ uh but not meeting historical Jesus Paul already develops and expresses a very high christology even though his writings are happening just 20 years after Jesus execution so christology is how Christians talk about what does it mean what what is Christ life mean who is Christ and so on and when we talk about a high christology we're talking about um Christians who are really emphasizing

Jesus Divinity so Jesus as the Lord or Jesus as the only begotten the one son of God whereas a low christology um more is concerned with Jesus humanity and so just by just logically um the closer you get in time to when the historical Jesus was alive since when a uh a man was walking around and Gathering disciples and teaching you would think that um that this would develop from a low christology to a high christology and that our earliest writings would actually uh have a low christology but that isn't the case we actually have

both right from the start including a fairly height christology not all Christians though in the first century agreed with that high christology that Paul had Paul's focus on Jesus as the Christ and on Christ as Lord in other words Christ as the um the visible glory of God made manifest um an idea that helenistic Jews like pho of Alexandria had already uh sort of talked about when he they are creating their own sort of philosophical Greek philosophical understanding of um of Jewish monotheism and how do we perceive the Creator who is ineffable and unseeable uni

invisible we're not even supposed to say his name how can we relate to this unknowable Creator in the world while through his uh Glory or through the creation itself and this is uh understood anyway use the word Lord uh in those um for that manifestation or for that reflection or that Hy hypothesis of God which then Paul describes as Christ the Risen Christ so for example uh among the early Christian groups we often talk about the jamesian or jacoban church the church that's led by Jesus Brothers um as we've seen in previous lectures on that

group they seem to have seen Jesus as part of a movement that included many authoritative prophetic Martyrs martyrs um prophets who sealed their testimony um by being killed and those included John the Baptist who was killed by one of the herodians uh James the brother of Jesus who was killed by um a high priest in Jerusalem and uh and then of course Jesus in addition to that group um the author of The Gospel of Mark who is actually not part of that group and is antagonistic towards that group emphasize Jesus Humanity throughout his gospel by

portraying Jesus as really emotional and very very humanlike and often he even just gets angry and sometimes for no reason which that seems to express a lower christology Jesus is not this impassible manifestation of a Divine man walking around as much in mark Mark and so if we look at that back at that jamesian church a low christology um the author of the New Testament Epistle of Jude um when he's identifying himself and he's probably a pseudepigraphic author but claiming to be Jude um and identifies Jude as a brother of James even though James is

the brother of Jesus and so you would think um that Jude would say James the brother of I'm sorry this is written by Jude the brother of Jesus or maybe even Jude the brother of Jesus and James anyway rather than claiming to be Jesus brother though um this author claims to be Jude brother of James which may indicate a reverence within this Jacobin Church the jamesian community a reverence that they had for James in addition to Jesus and John the Baptist in another one of these texts that come from this group the new testament's Epistle

of James uh which claims to be written by the brother of Jesus again it's probably a pseudepigraphical text but written in James's name the author shares teachings where James more or less is quoting you know quoting he's he's teaching him himself as if he was just sharing these teachings but these are sayings that in the gospels for example would be attributed to Jesus but in the Epistle of James he's not saying Jesus taught us this it's just James teaching us this so again this might again indicate a a higher level of Authority for uh the

person of James within this community and reverence for James is indicated in the 12th saying of the sayings gospel t we're going to talk about this saying's gospel because it also includes a lot of ideas that are identified with Gnostic Christianity but um many scholars think that there are different layers or different um different components of these sayings that have been gathered together and this one um wouldn't be from the Gnostic component of it if that's the case anyway let's read it this is one that is indicating again a a kind of amazing reverence for

the figure of James the brother of Jesus the disciples said to Jesus we read we know that you will depart from us who is it who will be great over us Jesus said to them wherever you have come you will go to James the just for whose sake Heaven and Earth came into being so this is uh assigning to James the brother of Jesus James the just um an exalted place in cosmology you know the Heaven and Earth have come into being for his sake um and uh anyway he's also saying that he's to be

Jesus successor so this may have come again a saying that is coming from the jamesian community originally that's make made its way into Thomas we also talked about in addition to the jamesian Community this Markin low christology the low christology that we see in the text of the Gospel of Mark and so for example um in the original text of chapter 1 of Mark veres 40 to 42 Jesus reacts in Anger for no particular reason seemingly anyway when a man who um has leprosy just asks Jesus to have his disease healed so we read there

a leper came to him beseeching him and kneeling said to him if you will you can make me clean moved with anger Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him I will be clean and immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean so that already just sounds very strange in terms of our probable conception of Jesus that most people have he doesn't seem like kind of guy who's just moved with anger for no seeming reason anyway and Christian scribes were also very uncomfortable with this portrayal and they seem to

have corrected the text by replacing the word anger with the word compassion and so in many translations people will use this later uh version it will say moved with compassion D Jesus stretched out his hand um but uh Bart Erman and other Scholars make um arguments I think that are very strong for the original for the anger as being the original reading um because uh again they they this is when Luke and Matthew are using this phrase they don't have they just leave it out that the whole emotion at all together and they wouldn't delete

moved with compassion um and uh and Jesus is reacting in Anger at several other points in Mark's narrative as well so he heals somebody um when he's angry in Mark 3:5 so in other words there's anger and this may be um a special example that Christians later found uh odd and wanted to maybe clean up so let's just ground ourselves a little in the first century so that we can kind of um see this time period when these early um different competing visions of who Jesus was you know from his actual lifetime Ministry that we

can see at the left- hand side of the timeline here where he's maybe you know if he died in 30 as opposed to 33 the 3 years prior to that between his baptism under John the Baptist and his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate uh and then um before him John's uh execution by Herod Antipas and then after him um James's Ministry where for a couple decades he is leading uh the church in Jerusalem sometimes called the poor of Jerusalem before his martyrdom and simultaneously um Paul's Ministry which occurs first in um the Levant it's called Arabia

but anyway probably the area uh kind of the desert area on the outside of Palestine then later in Syria and finally in Anatolia and Greece before the very end of his career when he plans to go to Rome and ultimately Spain but is arrested and killed along the way so those are the um lifetimes of the historical figures which we have in those blue bars and we're only starting to get writings you know again after Jesus death U while Paul is um dis disputing uh with his enemies enemies which in other lectures we have made

the case are probably um from the jamesian church but in any event then we start having other writings so there's possibly as early as the 50s and the 60s uh a saying source which um Scholars hypothesize and call Q uh which would then later known to the authors of Matthew and Luke but has subsequently been lost in that same kind of time frame possibly a source of the sayings uh that later get incorporated into Thomas which goes through much development and um exists uh in its present form in a much later um uh version then

the earliest and and we also have on there possibly the sence gospel which is a source hypothetical source for uh the Gospel of John and then the gospels that we actually have uh beginning with Mark around the year 70 Matthew Luke and John in the 80s and '90s okay so in that amount of time um from when people had actual contact with the historical Jesus and then all the way up through the middle of the century when people who had known Jesus were still alive we already are having competing christologies both low and high developing

and they are being written down then by Christians in the second half of the century towards the end especially so um just like we don't have any writings from the historical Jesus we don't have any portraits of him or any um descriptions even of his likeness and so during his own lifetime time he and his followers lacked the importance and wealth to create portraits that survive and like I say the texts also don't give descriptions by the time Christianity um spreads enough and that there is is that it's present among Elite people who can pay

for uh creating artwork that's already the end of the 3D century and into the 4th century and when that happens as in this uh portrait of Jesus one of the earliest really um from Roman Gaul you can see here that Jesus doesn't look like we would portray him he doesn't have the beard and he's dressed essentially uh like a Roman like a Roman philosopher or even uh Senator uh and and it's because ancient people have very little historical awareness and so they often then would just picture everybody uh the way they picture themselves um this

also happens here in a similar a Sim contemporary uh fourth Century depiction uh of Jesus again without a beard raising Lazarus Lazarus is the little little guy on the right in all wrapped up in his shroud so again this is Jesus as a Roman so when Roman portraits occur they tend to picture Jesus as a contemporary Roman garbed as a a senator or philosopher often he has a wand because he is performing um miraculous Feats magic tricks and that's how it's portrayed artistically in the earliest pictures Jesus rarely has a beard although when he is

resurrected as the Risen Christ then he often appears bearded and so he is a um two versions of this Divine man the Divine man who in his lifetime Ministry is portrayed as kind of a magic philosopher and then as the Risen Christ he's essentially takes on the the VIS or form of Zeus or Jupiter and the Romans aren't alone in depicting Jesus like themselves throughout history um we have medieval Chinese Christian pictures of Jesus where he's dressed as Chinese we have uh medieval um European ones where he's dressed you know like the medieval medieval European

times and we have um you know Church African ones for like Africa and so forth so the modern academic disciplines of history and literary criticism allow Scholars to propose various reconstructions of the historical Jesus and we've talked about this when we've done lectures on that topic and so the most common um with whom Bart irman is a m major proponent is Jesus as a failed apocalyptic Prophet U another academically defensible portrait is Jesus as a social reformer perhaps akin to what cynic philosophers contemporaneously are doing in the Roman Empire and this is proposed by um

uh by folks like John Dominic crosson and others um or possibly as uh a zealot a political revolutionary I I think that this is the least compelling by far but it's popularized by um um what's his name yeah R anyway Asen anyway so a person who is not really a a uh a specialist on the topic yeah but anyway but he's a popularizer so anyway those are different potential pictures however first century Christians did not have access to you know the modern academic tools history literary criticism so forth and they're really not trying to write

history um the author of Luke is trying to give their gospel a historical veneer but in but there still have a a different agenda than a historian has historian's goal is to um determine what is the most likely thing that happened historically and what is things that are very unlikely to have happened or impossible to have happened um and in fact all of the evangelists their goal is instead to convince you that Jesus is the Christ and to convince you to become Christians which is a different goal so like I said we had a lecture

on the Muslim view of Jesus um and in Islam Jesus is seen as the Messiah um but it's just a different definition of what Messiah means he's also seen as an incredibly important Prophet uh and can do miraculous things but um Islam is very clear he is not God in any way or a Divine Son of God and so as we saw all the Muslim texts are very late but they may have uh been heirs to a tradition that was maybe born from an offshoot of the jamesian church the ebionites which are um Christians who

continued to follow Jewish law and that group seems to have Main maintained a low christology in other words Jesus is the Messiah but not that doesn't mean that he's God or the Son of God it means that it's a very particular uh title that uh is important but not um anyway but is separate they're maintaining a stricter monotheism so while some early Christians had that low christology like I say um defining Jesus messiahship as important but a human prophetic role uh other s uh the Proto Orthodox Community the community that eventually wins out and becomes

nyine Christianity which most all of Christianity Today is descended from those group sought to balance their view of Jesus as both Divine and human and this ultimately um gets resolved into the Creeds as that Jesus is both fully human and fully Divine nevertheless they're they're kind of striking the balance on they the Centrist there were some Christians early on who saw Jesus as being fully Divine who really only seemed human and so as we've had in several lectures we call this last group The Dost from the Greek word doain which means to seem so he

only seemed like a human he only seemed to suffer he only seemed to die on the cross he was actually um a Divine being sent to us as a savior um there is a wide community of uh theologies and christologies or not Community diversity of um of groups that that kind of fit into this category some of whom are Gnostic although not all gnostics are docetists uh and some of which are not Gnostic so gnosticism does propose higher christologies so in other words a focus of Jesus as Divine and while some Gnostic writings have a

docetic view of Jesus others do not in the same way uh early Christianity generally included a wide diversity of beliefs about Jesus a wide diversity existed among Christians who have been by their enemies and also by Scholars grouped together under the label gnostic so our word Gnostic comes from the Greek gnosticos which means having knowledge and it's not a unlike some of the other names for pejorative names that you have for your enemies this is not one that I think the gnostics would particularly dislike gnostics because gnostics did emphasize attaining personal knowledge knowledge of the

true universe as uh the most important thing that which is set essential to Salvation that which essentially frees us in our from our material concerns or temporal mortal concerns so that we can ex contemplate um the Divine and imperishable and understand that we are part of that imperishable realm so generally um like I say this includes their nosis their knowledge includes the idea that the material universe that we can sense the sensible universe as Plato described it is flawed and probably evil a mistake and that the true universe is the immaterial and imperishable spiritual realm

uh what Plato would have called the intellectual realm that the realm that can only be you know sensed by our intellect not by our our our physical senses so there are competing ideas about gnosticism Origins and I think we'll have to do that in a completely different lecture because we want to go to the Gnostic portrait of Jesus but different Scholars have made cases that um that gnosticism emerged out of judish sorry Jewish mysticism the meraba mysticism there's also the idea that maybe it is from a Jewish group in Alexandria like pho who who have

a kind of helenistic uh Jewish philosophy or they're interpreting um Jewish scriptures through the lands of platonism and other Scholars have suggested that there are all kinds of sources within so are asianism the world religion of the Persians that may have been the source of inspiration for gnosticism and just because people like to throw it into the mix people wonder is it possible that some Buddhist ideas which seem similar are in fact transmitted uh from India across Persia and across the Middle East to um to the Levant so ideas that can be labeled as Gnostic

are found early on in Christian writings including Paul's letters and also in the Gospel of John the Janine letters but um there also you know that Paul is not uh a gnostic as gnosticism it uh emerges in its full form when we have fully Gnostic texts let's say uh and nor is really the Gospel of John in the form that we have it but nevertheless um those texts could still fit within um the universe of gnostics as they might have they might have used or enjoyed them or use them to help develop their ideas depending

on exactly how early gnosticism is is emerging within Christianity so in in contrasting the spiritual realm with the sensible Material World gnostics following platoo frequently made use of the analogy of light and so as we're just looking at sort of these Gnostic um maybe Gnostic seeming teachings that are within the Gospel of John the Gospel of John makes dozens of references to Jesus as being light those include for example 8:12 when Jesus spoke again to the people he said I am the light of the world whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will

have the light of life and so that would be very that would be very um understandable to a gnostic so I am already is a um a saying that equates Jesus with uh with God and also um I am light you know so light is this analogy to that even Plato used to the um uh to the imperishable world and if you follow me you'll get out of Darkness the material world and you'll have the light of life eternal so again light leads you to the imperishable um and in chapter 12: 46 Jesus says I

have come into the world as a light so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness so there's plenty more where that came from in the Gospel of John so the Proto Orthodox Bishop irus of Leon that we talked about uh when we were visiting Leona a month ago came from a church in Anatolia in Asia Minor what's not turkey it was a church that really valued the Gospel of John and irus as a result of that was the first Proto Orthodox Christian leader maybe the first early Christian leader altogether to argue

that uh Christians should really be using all four gospels that ended up into the New Testament Cannon so Mark Matthew Luke and John so irus said that he had kind of had a mystical reasons why he felt that those should all be included while all of the other contemporary gospels many of which he was aware of should be rejected and kept out of the cannon so Urus also wrote a very lengthy condemnation of uh gnosticism different forms of gnosticism and um it's possible that he did that in part because he wanted to include the Gospel

of John in the Orthodox Canon so contemporary uh contemporaries who uh came from a church let's say that simply used the gospel of Matthew as their gospel and that was for their Community the main Christian scripture and they see this Gospel of John which portrays Jesus so differently than the gospel of Matthew does and then they see that these gnostics are using quotations from the Gospel of John to show a very different kind of christology than what they have you know there it's always dangerous any gospel that can be used that way um Proto Orthodox

people want to condemn it and get rid of it and make it sure that it's suppressed so that um they don't have the competition of it and so irus who uh really liked this gospel wanted to maybe rescue it from gnostics so while some ideas expressed in John Accord with gnosticism others don't and so a significant component of Gnostic writings are creation myths that explain the meaning of life and purpose and the purpose of the universe through a cosmogeny that is to say a creation myth and that that kind of cosmogeny usually includes Plato's idea

that there is a Craftsman God a demi urge as the name comes to us from the Greek is actually responsible for the material creation as opposed to um the rest and um this takes the name this Demi urge in some of the Gnostic stories uh of the um God yalo or yalo uh by contrast the Craftsman of the material world in the Gospel of John depending on how you interpret it um as it's often read anyway is Christ as God's logos so this follows the Jewish wisdom tradition that equates the word so God in the

beginning of the Genesis story says let there be light he spokes the word in Genesis with the embodied wisdom Sophia and so in the wisdom tradition in the Book of Proverbs uh embodied wisdom Sophia says that she was with God in the creation and helped God in the whole rest of creation so at the beginning of the Gospel of John we read in the beginning was the word uh and the Word was with God and the Word was God he was with God in the beginning through him all things were made and without him nothing

was made that has been made and so at first glance anyway this would seem to be a different um it odds with the uh with the Gnostic understanding in since if is since the creation is happening all of the creation is happening through the logos through Christ on the other hand as I've thought about it um it may well be that the gnostics would argue um when they say all things here they're not talking about material things because material things aren't even real so so it could be that way so it could be a contradiction

from the most elaborated Gnostic cosmogenic I think would have uh an apologetic way of recovering this text if they wanted to so the point here has not been to argue that the Gospel of John is a gnostic text but simply to illustrate that there was a great diversity of thought early on among the various christianities and some components of these earliest Traditions could be read in harmony with Gnostic theologies um the gnostics themselves had diverse different ideas and they ALS Al evolved they also became elaborated and they began to use some of these early Christian

texts to inspire their later understanding of the evolution of the Gnostic christology and cosmology so because the gnostics Lost out against their Proto Orthodox Rivals um the Christian Bishops that ultimately formed the nyine church under Constantine which later became the state Roman State religion of the Roman Empire so most of the history throughout most of History the P primary surviving description of Gnostic beliefs came from detractors and antagonists people like irenaeus who were writing books against uh gnostics in their various forms um there are some and we'll look at them there are some fragments that

survived that we had but um the bulk for the bulk of this is was true until 1945 when a library of codes was discovered near nagadi Egypt that includes numerous texts written with a gnostic perspective they're not all Gnostic but they all have maybe let's say a broad appeal to gnostics so for example one of the texts is simply a partial reworking of Plato's Republic so by no means is the Republic a gnostic Christian text but Plato as I've already mentioned him several times in this lecture Plato has ideas that um appeal to people who

were gnostics um most all of the text like I say then include themes that would be of interest to Gnostic Christians for Scholars today the most important text recovered at Nadi is the Gospel of Thomas this is a sayings gospel like the hypothetical Q saying Source but distinct from Q so Scholars some Scholars anyway have argued that um The Gospel of Thomas preserves a distinct tradition of the historical Jesus and if so that helps us with our um our multiple attestation so when we're trying to get back to um what may or may not have

happened with uh for the historical figure Jesus we would like to have um dependent Traditions all talk about uh the same thing or the more more the large larger number of them so as soon as the sayings Gospel of Thomas was recovered um Scholars immediately started to wonder about the relationship it had with q and some initially hoped that the text might actually be Q I know some of you who are listeners in the audience really want it to be q but this has proved not to be the case there is um Q has we

know about Q because Matthew and Luke are literarily dependent on Q uh and Thomas has um versions of sayings that are literarily independent witnesses to the sayings of Jesus so there are similar materials for many of the Thomas sayings there are parallel sayings in Q or in methan or Lucan material or in mark or in other uh quotations from uh the early Christian Corpus uh that have parallels with Thomas but they aren't literarily dependent on any of those so it's not like um the author of Thomas had a copy of Q or the author of

Thomas had a copy of Matthew or something like that so the version of Thomas that we have from nagadi is a Coptic Egyptian translation of a mostly lost Greek original we have a couple fragments from uh the Greek and many of the sayings in the version that we have have Gnostic themes many of them have themes that don't relate to gnosticism and are maybe even contradictory of gnosticism um I argued that that one saying about James the just doesn't seem to fit in with a gnostic worldview so some Scholars have argued that the text is

altogether late so maybe in the 2 century and doesn't have an independent witness for reconstructing the historical Jesus others who think it's important and does preserve this independent witness some of them argue that there are stages in the development and the Gnostic ideas are later additions um and so we have maybe an earlier version that has some connection to the jamesian church or something like that others though see the Gnostic ideas as fairly early like Ela pagels and would like to use this text to date gnosticism to an earlier stage and so the case can

be made for any of those um so that's the background that I wanted to give about gnosticism and the context of some of these texts and now I want to use five of them to um see what sort of picture of Jesus emerges from the texts some of the detractors of gnosticism including our friend irenaeus took all of the views um that are categorized as Gnostic lumped them together and then when they contradict each other um attacked gnosticism as self-contradictory so a less partisan assessment is that there are different differences of opinion and belief among

Gnostic authors um and it may well be that um these texts are also not fully Gnostic anyway they may preserve non- Gnostic um uh witnesses as well so let's look at the different portraits beginning with uh the Gospel of Thomas which has a bunch of Gnostic um sayings within it but is not entirely Gnostic I want to look I'm not going to look specifically just the Gnostic teachings but I want to look at the teachings that the Gospel of Thomas has about Jesus and so it's largely this gospel consists of of sayings attributed to Jesus

but uh and so sometimes Jesus is answering disciples questions or sometimes we have a little dialogue as Jesus is talking to the disciples and they answer and they have a little conversation but most often the sayings in this gospel are simply introduced with the phrase Jesus said and so the collection begins with the preface these are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke and dimus Judas Thomas wrote them down and he said whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death so uh dimus Judas Thomas Judas would be the name of this

Apostle Thomas um where because dius is Greek for twin and Thomas uh is Aramaic for twin and so the idea is it's JW the twin but it's the Apostle Thomas as opposed to the Apostle Judas so this already this for saying equates eternal life you're not going to taste death it says if you find meaning within hidden words so that's a very Central Gnostic theme the whole meaning of life and salvation finding eternal life is learning hidden meaning that exists the nosis most of the sayings reflect teachings of Jesus and like I say they include

variant of sayings found in the synoptic gospels however in some of the sayings Jesus role is described described for example in saying 13 Jesus says to his disciples compare me and tell me who I am like and Simon Peter said to him you are like a just messenger you are like an angel Matthew said to him you are like an especially wise philosopher but Thomas said to him teacher my mouth will not bear at all to say whom you are like so Jesus says I'm not your teacher for you have drunk you have become intoxicated

at the bubbling spring that I've measured out and Jesus took Thomas and withdrew and he said uh three words to him but when J Thomas came back to his companions they asked him what did Jesus say to you and Thomas said to them if I tell you one of the words he said to me you will pick up stones and throw them at me and then fire will come out of the stones and burn you up so in contrast uh to Peter and Matthew here who are serving as foils I think or standin for the

Proto Orthodox Christians um people who do not understand Jesus true role according to the author of this saying Thomas the Apostle Thomas here understands that Jesus is something more than can be spoken openly indeed after Jesus has shared TR through nosis with him in secret Thomas believes that if he then goes on to share it with Peter and Matthew like I say if you go and share this now with Proto Orthodox Christians who accept the authority um of Peter they will condemn um the Gnostic as a heretic which will lead to um the Proto Orthodox

Christians subsequent damnation so nothing good will come of that the saying tells us that Jesus identity is important and likely to be regarded as Blasphemous by other Christians if you if the nostics say it to them in in public but it's also a secret and it's told off screen so we don't know what those three words are at least explicitly in the text however elsewhere in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus is a bit less circumspect and so for example in saying 77 Jesus says I am the light that is over all I am the all

the all came forth out of me and to me the all has come split a piece of wood I am there lift the stone and you will find me there so while it's not the same saying as we have in the Gospel of John this I am all or I am the all I am the light this resonates with all of those I am statements like I am the way the truth and the light all that we find in the gospel of John's statements of Jesus Divinity the all in gnosticism is um a jargon term

or uh for the whole of reality so the idea that the all came forth out of me uh aligns with the equation of Christ and the logos through which the cosmos was created in the prologue of John that we read and it also finds parallels in Paul for example in the first letter of the Corinthians chapter 8: 6 where Paul says for us there is but one God the father from whom all things came and for whom we all live so there's that one ineffable Source but there is one but one Lord Jesus Christ through

whom all things came and through whom we live so it's expressing again the the one ineffable God and then the um God's word made manifest the Lord uh that is also present at creation the source of creation so this could again conflict with Mainline gnosticism idea of aami urge creating the sensible Cosmos but again this also could be just talking about the all As in the Gnostic sense of the the true Universe where the physical world doesn't really count as part of the all since it's simply a false shadow um the second part of the

saying split a piece of wood I am there lift the stone and you will find me there I feel also diverges from a purely Gnostic picture because um it's talking about Jesus um presence in material creation so in other words the a piece of wood is a physical object a stone is a physical object and so perhaps is representing more of a pantheistic worldview of U Jesus as the animating as the Christ the animating U presence of the the world Spirit or something like that um another observation about Jesus in Thomas is more ining with

the more traditional Gnostic view of the material world and that can be found in saying 79 where a woman in the crowd it says said to Jesus Hail to the womb that carried you and the breasts that fed you he said back to her hail to those who have heard the word of the father and have truly kept it for there will be days when you will say Hail to the womb that has not conceived and to the breasts that have not given milk so so he's kind of responding to a personal observation that Jesus's

Mo Jesus's mother is blessed so um he's born of a woman rather than rather than saying yeah that's that's true or maybe he's maybe even kind of trying to Tamp down on that as an idea so this idea of Hail Mary um which is a uh a prayer that derived from the account of the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke Jesus here indicates maybe a preference for a kind of asceticism re refraining altogether from procreation so you won't be having children if you are following uh the father and kept the word of the father

truly and so that may be consonant with the view that some gnostics have that mortal life is a prison for Immortal Sparks of life and and that when you have sex when you um which is a a work of the Flesh and when you then conceive and bear children that merely renews the cycle of imprisonment and so therefore it's not a great idea and some Gnostic uh religions um the perfect people at the center of the movement will refrain from you know having sex and procreating also in the Gospel of Thomas saying 108 equates Jesus

with the source of knowledge the source of nosis which when made known will unite the disciple with him so Jesus says whoever will drink from my mouth will become like me I myself will become he and what is hi hidden will be revealed to him so there are many other things in Thomas that align with gnosticism and many others that don't really but the portrait of Jesus that emerges from the sayings gospel is limited and have ideas ideas that may diverge from Mainline gnosticism or may require Mainline gnostics to have apologetics to explain why they

would still keep this so that's Thomas now I want to look at the secret book of John the apocryphon of John so the nagadi library actually includes three versions of this apocryphon or secret book of John which shows its popularity the text cig graphically claims to be uh written by the Apostle John the son of Ze zebede but uh no Scholars really credit that claim um it's rather it's a second century text it's one of the ones condemned by um irus so it has to have been written before 180 the secret book of John gives

a clear example of kind of the main Gnostic cosmogeny the creation myth and included within that is Christ's role so it's a good um text to look at to kind of get um the core Gnostic portrait of Christ so Christ in the secret book of John um as the cosmology is explained as the theology has explained the highest principle of the universe is the monad that is to say the ineffable God the monad is described as monarchy with nothing above it the monad is described as Supreme absolute Eternal self-sufficient holy and so on but it's

also um described in ways that are very Transcendent ineffable invisible unknowable unseeable it is very hard for humans to have a direct relationship with the highest principle and this is one of the reasons why we have all of the emanations from the monad in order for us to connect to what really matters so from its first thought the monad produces a feminine Divine principle known in the apocryphon and John and elsewhere as the Barbo and in this text that principle is also so calleded things like mother father and holy spirit the Barbo is also the

first of a class of divine principles known as aons this maybe is an equivalent or is an elaboration on the platonic idea of forms or the highest forms and the aons uh interaction between the barbello and the monad produces many other aons including mind and Light which are born from the monads reflection on the Barbo and so light is synonymous in this text with Christ and we've seen that before um and also explained why all of the sayings about light in the Gospel of John therefore had appeal to uh Gnostic Christians and so we read

about Christ in the secret Book of John this is not Christ at first but anyway the um the principal looked on the Barbo with p with the pure light which surrounds the invisible spirit and with his spark and she conceived from him and he begot a spark of light with a light resembling blessedness but it does not equal his greatness this was an only begotten child of the motherf Father which had come forth it is the only only Offspring The only begotten one of the Father the pure light so the only begotten receives a number

of additional titles in this text including Christ so we're seeing this is part of the christology and the location of Christ within this um Pantheon of emanations uh and other titles include the autogenes the self-generating one in addition to being only begotten and so on Christ's Divine Aon partner as light is mind and the interactions between light and mind result in the rest of creation of the true spiritual realm the ploma so the mind wanted to perform a deed through the word of the invisible spirit and his will became a deed and it appeared with

the mind and the light glorified it and the word followed the will for because of the word Christ the Divine autogenes created everything and the eternal life and his will and the mind and the forn knowledge attended and glorified the invisible spirit and barbello for whose sake they had come into being so um also in addition to all of the spiritual creation that comes into being through Christ the first perfect spiritual man also comes into being as a will as a result of the will of Christ the Ayes and so we read from the forn

knowledge of the perfect Mind through the revelation of the will of the invisible Spirit and the will of the autogenes the perfect man appeared the first revelation and the truth it is he whom the virginal Spirit called piger Adamas and he placed him over the first Aon with the mighty one the autogenes the Christ by the first light are mosul and with him are his powers and the invisible one gave him a spiritual Invincible power so we're starting to see if you read these Gnostic texts there are many many names um that are elaborated as

all of the many aons and their partner aons are outlined in how uh the Divine realm spiritual realm came into being however the glor glorious streak of spiritual creation is derailed when one of the other aons holy wisdom Sophia it's just called in Greek declares to uh I'm sorry desires to conceive on her own and she does this without the consent of her Aon partner so all these aons are operating in Partnership and also without consent of the spirit the result because of the incredible power she had have has was the creation of a weak

archon that happens immediately and so when she Sophia when wisdom saw the consequences of her desire it changed into the form of a lion-faced serpent and its eyes were like lightning fires which flash and she cast it away from her outside that place that not one of the immortal ones might see it for she had created it in ignorance and she called his name name yalo so yalo takes great power from his mother and then sets about attempting to mimic the spiritual creation process that the true aons have been doing and this results in a

flawed material Cosmos the universe that we can sense the sensible world yal beath in the course of this is revealed as the god of the Old Testament so for example the text mimics the first um sentence of Genesis when it says uh he yabo said to the authorities which attended him come let us create a man according to the image of God and according to our likeness that his image may become a light for us and they created by means of their respective powers in correspondence with characteristics which were given and so their plot here

seems to be that they are understanding themselves uh to be lesser than the aons and when they have this new creation they will that is made in the image of the true God that that will uh that will help Empower them and get their power back so each Authority supplied a characteristic in the form of the image which had uh which he had seen in its natural form he created a being according to the likeness of the first the perfect man that we saw created before spiritually and they said let us call him Adam man

the that uh his name might be a power of light for us so these lesser limited archons then create what become the material bodies of humanity against the desire of the spiritual aons but the aons strike back they make a plan to recover all of that power that yalo has stolen from Sophia and they trick him into blowing that light and life that he had seized into his physical creation into Adam into man and so having tricked yalo into releasing light into certain human bodies the final role of the autogenes is to come into this

flawed material creation seemingly as a human to bring knowledge to humanity so that these Sparks of life can be freed from the snares of the ignorant material world and so that reveals the autogenes as the Savior as as Christ so that's the picture that we could try to piece together from the Gospel of Thomas the more um traditional or full-blown view of Christ from uh the secret book of John let's look at another uh book that we recovered from namati the Gospel of Truth so valentinus was a brilliant Theologian in the 2 century probably lived

from around 100 to 180 who took those Gnostic ideas like the one I just read um and brought them and refined them and included now as Christianity has started to Define let's say gospel texts and also letters of Paul as being authoritative and so bringing um updating and bringing gnosticism more into line with that uh and making it more palatable for the 2 Century um Christian audience and he did a great job of doing this the popularity of valentina's teachings alarmed our friend irenaeus his contemporary uh who focused much of his time in his book

against the gnostics writing counterarguments against the valentinian conception of gnosticism so although we had all of era's quotations of Valentine um the original of the text of all his texts were lost prior to the discovery of the nagadi library um where we found a text called The Gospel of Truth and although the manuscript doesn't actually name valentineus as an author many scholars argue that this is the Gospel of Truth um that was previously a lost work of valentineus a known lost work so as opposed to a saying gos El or a narrative story about Jesus

ministry the gospel is actually a the theological Treatise um which includes a lot of explanations of um a valentinian view of christology or a gnostic view if it is valentinian the Gospel of Truth we read at the very start of this is joy to those who have received from the father of Truth The Gift of knowing him by the power of the logos who has come from the ploma and who is in the thought and mind of the father so the father again the ineffable one we now have it being called the father instead of

the monad um but is nevertheless the same source that can't be known except through the logos uh the Christ who came from the spiritual realm the ploma he it is who is called the SA avior since that is the name of the work which he must do for the Redemption of those who have not known the father so already right here in the very first sentences the logos is described as thought in the mind of the true father and is sent from the ploma the fullness spiritual heaven and is sent as the savior in order

to redeem people and what they need to be redeemed red from they need to be redeemed from ignorance they're ignorance of the father so the text goes on to say the terror and fear in the world is caused by ignorance of the father and so this is the um valentinian idea for the uh the problem of evil all all calamities fear Terror all bad things are resulting from ignorance of the Father which we can't know unless we are are experiencing through um through the logos through the word so the father though through his mercies has

prepared truth as the solution to the problem the true gospel which is the hidden Mystery Jesus the Christ so we read that through him Jesus the father enlightened those who were in darkness because of forgetfulness he enlightened them and gave them a path and that path is the truth which he taught them and for this reason error was angry with him so he it persecuted him error was distressed by him so it made him powerless he was nailed to a cross he became a fruit of the knowledge of the father he did not however destroy

them because they ate of it he rather caused those who ate of it to be joyful because of the discovery so this is not a vengeful picture of uh of Christ uh there is a reinterpretation here of what the crucifixion is for or an explanation um from this Gnostic valentinian perspective ignorance being the source of the world's problems the solution is the illumination um getting rid of ignorance the truth uh that is lived uh by Christ so we read As It Go continues for where there is envy and strife there is incompleteness but where there

is Unity there is completeness since this incompleteness came about because they did not know the father so when they know the father Inc completeness from that moment on will cease to exist so as one's ignorance disappears when he gains knowledge as and as Darkness disappears when light appears so also incompleteness is eliminated by completeness so I think that's pretty clear so ignorance of the father mother is what's causing incompleteness that's the source of all pain and suffering and everything else truth and knowledge nosis of the father brought by Christ creates completeness which creates Unity which

edges creates light it edges out Darkness until no suffering will occur so as the beloved Son of the father Christ brought knowledge of the ploma the true spiritual world to this material world he appeared informing them of the Father the illimitable one so one we can't really know of unless through um an intermediary here many received the light and turned towards him but material men were alien to him and did not discern his appearance nor recognize him for he came in the likeness of Flesh and nothing blocked his way because it was in Incorruptible or

and unrestrainable moreover while saying new things speaking about what is in the heart of the father he proclaimed the faultless word light spoke through his mouth and his voice brought forth life so we have already here when we're saying you came in the likeness of Flesh probably a continuation of a of a worldview that is going to have a very high CHR christology that is De that Christ only seems this important uh being only seems to have U Been human there are all kinds of other positive formulas though in the Gospel of Truth of how

to understand Jesus that are familiar to the New Testament reader so it says Jesus is the shepherd who left behind the 99 sheep which had not strayed and went in search of the one that was lost and he rejoiced when he had found it uh and then he those that one joins the group and becomes part of uh the number that are numbered with the ineffable Source the father so the Gospel of Truth um spences with a lot of the esoterica of the earlier agnostic cosmologies you know with all this talk of monads and aons

and emanations and so on and It ultimately ultimately when you read it it's a pretty not not a long text I think it provides a rather upbeat um take on the anti-materialist dualism of gnosticism so if it is written by valentinus it's easy to see why um second century Christians many 2 century Christians found the ideas appealing and why erus and other Proto Orthodox leaders were alarmed by how popular these might get so that's Vis what we can see of um Gnostic portrayals or portraits in the first three of these let's look now at the

Gospel of Mary so prior to the recovery of nagadi this is one of the Gnostic Gospels that had survived in fragment form the Gospel of Mary so named because a disciple of Jesus that's named Mary is the major character so we don't get a serame or a further identification in the text but most Scholars I think argue that the character is the disciple Mary Magdalene the Gnostic texts in general tend to look on um disciples like Thomas and Mary and Levi as being more authoritative and look at go text um uh disciples like Peter and

uh and Andrew as being more like foils that they used to represent the Proto Orthodox uh Christians so the text in the Gospel of Mary continually refers to Christ as the Savior and it's a fragment right and so our fragment that survives begins with some uncomfortable teachings so the disciples asked will matter be destroyed or not and the Savior answers all nature all formations All Creatures exist in and with one another and they will be resolved again into their own roots for the nature of matter is dissolved into the roots of its own nature alone

so it's not entirely clear you could interpret that a couple ways but it doesn't sound very encouraging it does sound that maybe um everything in the material world um is just grounded nature and from you know it's like ashes to ashes dust to dust kind of thing so that doesn't sound encouraging Peter next asks the Savior well what is the sin of the world and um and I'm missing a slide but I'll just say that here that um that um that the savior's response is that we're it there really isn't a sin but you make

the sin you bring the sin in with your with all of your kinds of confusions so then after the Savior has departed from Earthly life Peter goes to Mary and says sister we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of women or woman kind tell us the words of the Savior which you remember which you know but which we do not nor have we heard them um Mary answers and says what is hi hidden from you I will Proclaim to you and so this again as gnostics tend to is privileging Mary and

Mary's testimony as a disciple so Mary shares this secret a secret Vision that she says she had and nosis that the Savior gave her and the part that we have is about stages of the ascent of the spirit from the darkness of the material world into eternal life and so it is a um so considering we just had um uh Jesus more or less uh dismiss the the the continuation of matter this is a a much more encouraging response about whether or not humans have a spirit that will live on eternally unfortunately um the cosmological

portions of the text which might have explained the more detailed role of the Savior are lost in our fragment so I can't um draw a portrait of Christ so much from the Gospel of Mary but I did want to highlight it because interestingly at the end of the text the Apostle Andrew which I would say is a standin for Proto Orthodox leaders rejects Mary's testimony so after she's told the entire um gospel to them Andrew answered and said to the Brethren you know 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 and Peter answered and spoke concerning the same things he questioned them about the Savior did he really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us are we to turn about and all listen to her did he prefer her to us and then Mary wept and said to Peter my brother Peter what do you think do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart or that I'm lying about the Savior and Levi answered and said

to Peter you know Peter you have always been hot-tempered now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries but if the Savior made her Worthy who are you indeed to reject her surely the Savior knows her very well this is why he loved her more than us rather let us be ashamed rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect man and separate as he commanded us and preach the gospel so let's um become again focused on the true Spirit as the testimony that um that Mary has given us about what Christ's

teachings were so Andrew response that Mary's teachings represent strange ideas I think was likely a very common reception that many gnostics received from their Proto Orthodox Christian Neighbors when they might have come up to them in church or after church and tried to share their understanding the secret nosis that they had learned from one of these gospels these Christians Mainline U Proto Orthodox folks might say that's weird that's strange I'm not sure if I believe that that that Mary actually was taught that by Jesus and so the Gnostic um complaint that Proto Orthodox Christians um

had begun devaluing the testimony of women in the church was also present in Thomas and so that I think is also an interesting component that we get out of the Gnostic worldview here and so that's kind of portraits that we can see in these first four books Thomas apocryphon of John the Gospel of Truth The Gospel of Mary let's look at one last text uh discovered more recently the go Gospel of Judas so in addition to the nagami text another letter leatherbound Coptic codex dating from the 2 century was discovered in the 1970s it's also

damaged so fragments of it have been deciphered and translated and it's now known as The Gospel of Judas which may be the same Gospel of Judas that was known to irenaeus but had been lost for all of the intervening centuries the text uh as it's now uh refound consists of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciple Judas es scariot the the traitor the betrayer which the canonical gospels portray as just a black and white villain judas's role in this Gospel of Judas emerges as much more complex on the one hand Jesus Does tell Judas you

shall be cursed for generations for what you're going to have to do but he adds that eventually uh Judas will exceed all others of the Apostles and man because you are going to perform this important act which is to sacrifice the man that clothes me so this body um this physical body is nothing is not the real Christ so Jesus shares then with Judas alone uh secrets of the Kingdom in this gospel the gospel is set when Jesus appeared on the earth so once again understanding Jesus as a Divine being that comes to the physical

world in the first vignette of the Gospel the disciples are offering a prayer of Thanksgiving over bread other words it seems to be the um Sacrament or the ritual of the Eucharist um as Central as it is becoming Central to the Proto Orthodox Christians and Christians generally and this causes Jesus to laugh so the disciples say master why are you laughing at our prayer of Thanksgiving we have done what is right and he answered and said to them I'm not laughing at you but you're not doing this of your own will but because it is

through this that your God will be praised and they're thinking well wait a second you the son of our God and they're like he's like yeah I don't think you know what God you're praying to so the text here sees the Eucharist ritual as honoring a false material God because it's making use of physical material it is being modeled on um the ancient um I'm sure the previous uh Jewish practice of of sacrifice um and sacrificial offerings which are being made not to the true ineffable God but to the material uh demiurge the creator of

this world the disciples are confused and they're troubled in spirit and as the narrative continues only Judas has the courage to ask for clarification and part of this is that he already has a testimony and realizes that Jesus has come he says from The Immortal Realm of barbalo and as we saw in U previous text that barbello is usually seen as the first emanation of of God the female principal the mother uh the mother father in uh Gnostic cosmogeny so Jesus then reveals a whole bunch of Gnostic secrets to Judas Jesus says come that I

may teach you about secrets that no person has ever seen for there exists a great and boundless realm whose extent no generation of angels has seen in which there is a great invisible spirit the Gospel of Judas then refers to a number of different ideas about Gnostic cosmology and pictures Christ as the Divine self-generated one as we've seen in other texts and Jesus next explains to Jud Judas a luminous cloud appeared there and said let an angel come into being as my attendant a great Angel the enlightened Divine self-generated One emerged from the cloud and

because of him four other Angels came into being from another cloud and they became attendance for the Angelic self-generated and the self-generated said let and we the text is lost here come into being and then it did come into being whatever this kind of um spiritual creation that the autogenes that Christ um is performing in theet telling of Genesis this puts Christ in the role of creator but probably here Creator only of the true spiritual Realm of the Baro his mother father and so it is only after the spiritual creation that a material creation occurs

beginning again with a fragment of the text something about an Aon and after that that Aon said let 12 angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld and look from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood and his name was nebro which means Rebel and others called him yalo so in addition to nebro or yalo another Rebel Angel appears in this text called sacas and um they then create six more Rebel angels and then saas and the rebel Angels create Humanity sakas

says zakas says to his angels let us create a human being after the likeness and after the image and they fashioned Adam and his wife Eve who was called in the cloud or in the spiritual realm Zoe and so Jesus further reveals that interactions Humanity has had with the so-called god of the Old Testament are actually with nebro yalo which is why Jesus laughs at things like uh the Proto Orthodox understanding of Eucharist so concerned that humans are simply material Judas asks Jesus if there's no afterlife are we just going to die with death to

which Jesus explains that humans have within them eternal spirit the true God it turns out ordered Michael one of the angels of light to give spirits of PE give the spirits of people as alone into yabas flawed creation but this loan will come due is coming due so Jesus as the self-generated son of the barbala has come from the imperishable realm to save entrapped Spirits from the material world by sharing this true cosm cosmological knowledge with them and so ultimately we find then that Jesus I'm sorry Judas role his role as the betrayer will actually

Aid in the sacrifice of Jesus material form which brings all of this about and so um from that we can kind of see there's a bunch of common theme and within Gnostic gnosticism about the Gnostic image or the Gnostic portrait of Jesus um but they just because there are differences and and it doesn't mean that um that they are self-contradictory it just means that there again is a diversity of views among the different authors uh of this interesting early tradition and so I'm going to get a glass of water while Leandro is looking for your

comments and questions excuse me have to use the other arm for drinking oh yeah I'm sorry that affects my microphone apologize so first off I want to thank uh uh you guys who are donating and for your support here in the in the chats so thanks to JM to dartha Rama uh to Phil to Daryl Scott to Dave Anderson to Fred Patton um uh Fred writes uh this is the first donation since we left the LDS church many years ago John's lectures are worth it cheers from California thanks so much Fred um Mike R uh

says just donated thank you Mike uh Mike says James the younger and James the Elder were named as Apostles in Mark given the bias of the author is it more likely that James the brother of Jesus was a follower and that these jameses were constructed that would be my thinking Mark Mike actually um so uh so the thing that happens in Mark is there so there's this um Apostle Triad that we have from the letters of Paul which are U Peter James and John and James according to Paul in that Triad is James the brother

of Jesus Mark however includes a p Triad called Peter James and John but he makes it very clear that um James is not James the brother of Jesus and in fact Mark portrays um uh Jesus's family as being hostile to him to try to essentially make sure that we don't think that it's that James um and my my view on that is that that's probably um bias anti- James brother of Jesus bias uh from the community that produced the gospel of Mark or the author that produced The Gospel of Mark um thanks uh for your

support also Mark long and Al also Matthew rowski um Matthew asks are you going to do a lecture on the anglo-norman conquest of Ireland or how the English came into Ireland um possibly that's an interesting idea um people have also asked um just even more generally about um for example the character of of St Patrick and the conversion of Ireland also um the preservation of some of the earlier Traditions with Celtic Traditions within Ireland and also then um the important role that the Irish had in um the unlikely role as well of maintaining U much

of uh classical culture when um at the kind of low point on the continent when uh lots of Tex and Latin were lost so all of these I think would be interesting topic so thanks for bringing that up we'll put that on the list um and I also want to thank uh J uh for your support let's look some at some other questions so uh Julie bosi uh says the gospel of Mark includes many miracles by Jesus as well as the more human Jesus um but prophets were also said to perform Miracles um is there

a comment yes so I agree with you so you it doesn't um it doesn't preclude uh um it doesn't make that Jesus have to be God or a son of God or a Divine man in order to um bring about miracles and biblical texts because like you say many of these um are even modeled on on on Miracles that are performed for example by the Prophet Elijah uh in the book of kings and so on which are direct models and so you can definitely have um so the Miracles don't necessarily point to a um a

high christology rain Weber says in what way are uh Gnostic ideas still thought of as heresy by various Christian denominations today um so if you have a gnostic um so if you have a high let's say like a a very elaborated Gnostic uh Pantheon and cosmology that wouldn't that would be probably heresy so so if you're thinking of um Christ as no matter how important an emanation you know we talked about how essentially we had this this whole elaborate um theology where you have a ineffable Source the monad or the father that that from which

then emanates uh uh Barb o the mother father and then there's all of the other aons including uh the autogenes Christ but then also going down to uh um Sophia wisdom and those are all essentially different aons they are all different Divine beings um that kind of um a complicated theology is um heresy in in Christian denominations today mostly which are are mon theist Al with a monotheism understood through the prism for the most cases of of Trinity so you wouldn't have all of those emanations um uh that would be heresy um some of the

other ideas too uh um certainly I think the I the the complete idea that um that the material world is a is a mistake certainly the idea that the um that the god of the Old Testament is is actually an evil God or a flawed uh God those are all those would all be considered heresy so there's a lot actually considered heresy today okay so darama says since gnosticism seems like to be a big grab bag um our Scholars able to map and better Define sects through the centuries so so yeah there there are and

so um and so this is why I probably should have done or at some point or other I wanted to do a um let's say how did gnosticism emerge so there are multiple different competing theories about where gnosticism came from and what are its main sources but then there are also um there also attempts to map out strata of Gnostic development and map out you know you know early gnosticism valentinianism later gnosticism uh surviving gnosticism through mandm and through bogam Mills and the cathars and so forth and so and neotic ISM so um so yeah

I wouldn't say it in terms of a grab bag it's just it's difficult to when we only have a couple of the pictures or a couple of the snapshots to um to get a complete sense there's a whole bunch of um pretty contradictory things and materials and ideas within the entire panoply of uh uh Orthodoxy that we would you know C Catholic Orthodoxy ncy and Christianity if we only had little little Snippets you know which they might seem from the different points in the centuries and so that would be an interesting lecture to do in

the future which I'm sure we will on gnosticism is kind of theories about its origin and also uh different developments so thanks um we have now got 150 likes if you like the lecture right now if you liked this lecture and you press like right now that'll get us to 200 and that will cause the algorithm to reward us and we love that so thank you for your help Winston Barz says um why is Jesus portrayed differently in um I presume you're meaning in different Gnostic Gospels and so um that's why I wanted to just

take each one discreetly because there are different communities here in some cases gospels like the Gospel of Thomas may not have been composed osed might you know originally or might have an earlier source that is not Gnostic at all or it could be um composed by a group like the Jan community that has some overlap with Gnostic ideas without having the full Gnostic theology that exists in the apocryphon of John um and so and so and then also there are so there are different communities that we were looking at and there are also geographically and

also through time and that's why I wanted to look at each individual text rather than kind of lumping them all together like some of the critics of gnosticism do and then say see how see how contradictory gnostics are I just wanted to say different individual Gnostic authors and communities um had different beliefs that have similar themes but are not um they don't all agree with each other and one of the reasons why they don't all agree is that they never had one authoritative Source they never became the state religion of an Empire that could enforce

you know uh could enforce uh Orthodoxy and to belief in the one true kind of gnosticism and maybe gnostics didn't want to ever have anything like that and certainly they never had anything like that so K Tempest Bradford says since Gnostic is a broad term that we moderns have applied to some groups in the past do we know what they called themselves um aronas calls them gnostics but was he talking about a specific group um so I'm trying to think if we have in any of these texts a um a use where the people are

calling themselves nostics they use the word knowledge and they like that you know the same way you know it's a kind of a question did the jamesian church call themselves the poor we have um all kinds of statements where they say remember the poor or where Paul is saying we're going to in order to in order to make nice with James we're going to take up a collection for the poor of Jerusalem but we don't have a um a clear sense where the church itself calls itself the poor although we have a later group that

um that enemies call the ebionites and the Hebrew word for poor uh is related to Eon and so um and so we make that surmise right and so I guess we don't what they probably are calling themselves is Christians you know or true Christians and they're the Christians that have the special nosis that all of the other uh Christians lack and therefore the other Christians really don't get it the other Christians are like Andrew and Peter in these gospels who were you know Blockheads whereas the gnostics are the true Christians who have uh the vision

and knowledge that Mary and Thomas and Levi have given them and so on um Nathan Gail says I've started to read about hermeticism uh could you compare and contrast hermeticism with gnosticism platonism also seems similar um so I think platonism is certainly very similar uh I think that the uh we go with platonism first that uh Plato is very much um concerned with this uh dichotomy that presocratic philosophy had been worried about uh between a um a world that is in constant flux the material world or a world in which no change is at all

possible because some ideas and uh the reality of things seem to be unchangeable so um things like mathematical constants and so on and so how can those two things uh exist and Plato's um great answer to that is the the theory of the forms that is described in the allegory of the cave where um the material world and living in the material world is essentially a prison and a reflection that's what we can sense but the True Light the world of light and spirit and the world of Eternal forms is um is like getting out

of the cave and seeing sunlight for the very first time and so nastic ISM I think is has that same under under Ling shares that same underlying understanding of cosmology and simply um um is more willing to decide well what you know Plato maybe says the highest form is the form of goodness itself um the gnostics go on to name the next 24 um aons and so on um in terms of hermeticism U I think that the my I guess the way would contrast it is that there would be a more of a um more

of a uh an emphasis on things that that you are doing although gnostics also um have to become en enlightened and so but rather than performing certain acts like you would have to do with hermetics it's it's more still spiritual since what you're doing is um eliminating ignorance um and tropicali tutoring says doesn't Gnostic understanding contradict the belief of Jesus as the word and the personification of holy wisdom when in the Gnostic belief the imperfect world has come forth from an error by wisdom so it does contradict the equivalence of the word and holy wisdom

and so um so you're right to point that out um so when we talked about um the prologue to the Gospel of John which is a rewriting of the Genesis creation story in Genesis 1 so in the beginning was the word the word was with God the Word was God so that doesn't necessarily have to contradict um uh gnosticism because it's not saying there that the word is Holy wisdom is H Sophia so there is a bunch of early christologies where're trying to decide how is Jesus relate to wisdom and there's even a um a

phrase from the sayings gospel from q that we have in Luke um that wisdom is Vindicated by her sons and her sons are John the Baptist and Jesus so there are other traditions in early Christianity that for example Jesus is the son of holy wisdom on top of what your point though is that there is a a passage in Proverbs which is also a rework of the Genesis creation myth which equates holy wisdom with the logos and so so when you equate all three that does contradict the um the traditional Gnostic U elaborated creation story

because wisdom is a different Aon distinct from um the autogenes distinct from Christ and it's actually the last one Aon usually and the one that is the screw up you know in terms of creating the false material creation and so that would be a contradiction from um you know the idea that traditional Christianity nine Christianity has by which usually equates wisdom with Christ although even there there are some modern Christian denominations that equate uh wisdom with the Holy Spirit instead of with Christ JH says is there any tradition as to what happened to Joseph uh

Mary's husband he seems to have disappeared after the first chis uh Christmas um so yeah it's not in the he not in the actual Source texts and so it's the in later tradition as you say and so the idea of it is in later Christian tradition is that um that the Elders of Israel had picked um so they had been raising Mary um in in the temple from being a child she was an oblate that was given and living in a perfect pure form in the temple itself and was being even fed food by the

Angels so she was you know had no sin in her and then she is coming of age and um they are looking for um a husband to marry her to but one that will live a celibate life with her and so they look all around um Israel and they find the oldest guy they can find Joseph and so Joseph has already um you know had a previous previous wife he's a widower and he has maybe some other kids but um he Mary and his marriage continues to be unconsummated and then because he's such an old

man he dies uh after after um the Exile in Egypt so after in the methan in Matthew's gospel um they H they hide out in Egypt for a little while and they come back to Nazareth or they go to Nazareth at the end of that um and then he dies that's uh or after the Passover um in the in the uh Lucan gospel anyway so after Jesus's childhood he dies according to tradition that's all just tradition there's nothing um there's nothing about any information we have about a historical Joseph at all that is created uh

by by uh Christian tradition early Christians who wanted to know sir sodium says does the Old Testament have anything that would give Credence to Judas being the sacrificer or betrayer so um so Christians read um the Old Testament much of the Old Testament as um as being um predicting Jesus and so they read it uh allegorically and symbolically and they interpreted lots of scriptures messianically and among those are um are images of what's called like a suffering servant which Christians interpret as being a Messianic um a prediction of how Jesus's life would be and so

you know he's handed over to his enemies um he's betrayed by his own and so that gives um um Credence anyway to the idea that there would be a successor sorry a a betrayer a traitor and there's no it doesn't have to be named Judas um by any Old Testament prophecy um Sparrow the says do these texts assume creation from nothing or they do they reflect older tradition of L forming the heavens and earth out of uh existing Waters this is a um this is a creation from nothing the the the self-existent um beginning is

simply uh is simply the ineffable Source the monad so uh the Father the father exists eternally and then from the father all of these emanations occur um and they occur they're not coming from existing Waters of chaos or that earlier tradition of um that it's common to so many uh Pagan creation Miss Miguel Angel says uh did gnostics believe that each human had an individual soul trapped in the body or that we all share a single soul or that the spark of an aeon was divided and it will be United when freed that's an interesting

question um so um not all some depends they have there's different Gnostic views so I don't want to um I don't want to you know I'm just going to give a couple broad Strokes of what some of them might have believed but there is a competition of you know competing different Notions for these things so some of the descriptions are talking about um this Soul or spark pretty much being something that is taken from um sopia and so therefore it may well just be part of div the Divine thing that was divided and like you

say we're ultimately all going to be United in that sort of spiritual realm where there really isn't any division we we read in um uh in one of the texts who was talking about the whole the whole point of division is incompleteness and ignorance that's what division is being caused because of our ignorance of the one of the father of the monad and that when when all that ignorance ceases then will there will be completeness and Oneness and so so I think maybe so maybe so I think it might be a little bit of a

you know an esoteric but not they wouldn't worry about it I'm sure they do worry about it are there thousands or billions of little Souls that will all be one together but they actually technically are individual or will we just all be United together again so I think that they would probably uh argue over that my y says in your research on the gnostics did you find any Greek secular philosophy that in uh influen the gnostics besides platonism so for example is the um is stoicism figuring into that um so I think I think so

um I mean so in another I tend to focus on platonism because that's the easiest shorthand but in fact U there is a lot of like you say Greek philosophy uh that and I I know you're calling it secular I think that it's a modern interpret ation of Greek philosophy to think of it as secular I think it I think of it as being religious reform of um Pagan uh cosmologies and and uh pre philosophical religion where they're trying to now make a rational uh religion but in any event it's uh doesn't always invoke God

so it it can although it often does so anyway uh so for example stoicism also has a an interesting and elaborate cosmology um that includes say a a creation that is uh embodied by a world soul and so we had that one saying from Thomas you know uh cut a piece of wood I'm there you know it was it was talking about how um you know Christ inhabits the whole world Soul so you know that may not have been a particularly Gnostic view but in other words these early Christian ideas that are competing are also

being influenced by different um philosophical cosmologies and so they're they are all in the mix there o says were the gnostics challenging the Christian Orthodoxy or was the emergence of an Orthodox Church the result of rejecting Gnostic views and other ways of understanding who Jesus was that's a good that's a good point um um it may well be the latter as you I think are asking in this question which is to say there wasn't necessarily a centralizing principle until we get to um the church that's patronized by the Roman Emperor and so many of the

things that the Proto Orthodox Community does as it kind of emerges as a community are not proactive but are reactive and so in some ways we've seen in other lectures that the development of the Canon um is in part a reaction to um marcionite Christians uh creating their own Cannon and that this idea you know is rejected the marcite cannon is rejected by the prot Orthodox and then they start to say what their Cannon should be um in the same way um as as you are defining who you are not that is generally the first

thing you do when you're defining who you are and until somebody else is saying something that you disagree with you don't even know that we're saying that we're not that and so I agree with you that uh in this question or my the inference I think in your question that maybe a lot of this actually is reactive and it's not because of gnostics doing challenging but just them minding their own business maybe ex existing and then um others uh actively rejecting their ideas Mark painter asks when are we going to get that promised lecture on

the Holy Spirit I we are going to have to do that and so we will I keep promising but I'm going to do that so thank you all thanks for all of your questions don't forget to like and share this video subscribe to our Channel um we are going to next week do something new I think Leandra right so what we are going to we do at the end of this um q&as and so what we're going to do next week rather than have a a formal lecture we're going to have a solicit your questions

uh between now and end of the week and as you have questions like these we'll put them into a list and I will have that in the bank and then people can ask any new questions as well so we've done a question time lecture before but this time what'll be a little different is if you want to send us questions ahead of time we'll also uh take a look at those so thanks very much