Dean Anderson

I am very curious about the character of Sophia in the NT and Gnostic gospels.

While the word 'sophia' appears in the orthodox gospels, it is always translated as 'wisdom', rather than the name of 'Sophia' - the wisdom-of-God personified, even when the context would suggest that an entity of some kind is being talked about.

For example...

It would seem that this character is very similar to the character of the 'Holy Spirit'.

Do any of you learned folk here (grovel, grovel...) know more about the character of Sophia and the character of the Holy Spirit? Is one a development of the other? Are they two parallel developments of an earlier character? Has Sophia been edited/translated out of the orthodox gospels - or edited into the gnostic ones?

spin

Sophia is heavily grounded in Hebrew <grin>wisdom</> tradition. For example, Prov 2:6, "the Lord gives wisdom: out of his mouth comes knowledge and understanding", Prov 9:1ff, Wisdom built her house and invited guests to come to her. In fact wisdom was with God at creation, Prov 8:22 tells us that she was the first creation and was present for all the rest.

The Apocryphal book Wisdom of Solomon tells us that Wisdom is "the fashioner of all things" (7:22), she is "the breath of power of God" (7:25), Wisdom "protected the first-born father of the world" (10:1), etc.

Wisdom (HKMH or HKMWT), is anthropomorphized and interacts with the world in Hebrew tradition. She walks the streets and whoever hears her is blessed. As you can see she is feminine just as the Greek Sophia.

Wisdom is what comes forth from the mouth of God and is the equivalent of the word of God, so, at some stage, the metaphor jumped sex and became male and is one influence in the wisdom character of Jesus, who was the word which became flesh and lived among us -- as wisdom did.

I think therefore that Wisdom is the initial idea behind the wisdom Jesus. This of course doesn't mean that the wisdom tradition wasn't recycled as the holy spirit as well, but I think that would have been more under Greek influence and Gnosis.


spin

Amos

Sophia is Mary and the HS is just an angel send by her. Mary is the queen of angels and therefore in charge of the HS. When we arrive in heaven wisdom (sophia) is ours and she first meets us at the gates of purgatory were we are actually the groom at Cana.

Amos

Man is God and God is Man after the womb of man and this is wo-man here called Sophia. Sophia is the intelligence in which the design of man is conceived to become the corporeal body of the Christ in Christendom and Buddha in Buddhism.

Her virginity is an expression of this protection and the firstborn is protected to become the father of man = the father of the world. Closer to home, the fashioner of all things is equivalent to the RNA by which the DNA is modified.

She is negative stand in the rout of creation where the word of man is conceived ("tied down" in RNA). Of course she "walk the streets" but is much to enigmatic for the world to see.

Never jumped sex and never will. It is not until we crown her queen of heaven and earth that she is in charge of our destiny and that is when let our intuition take charge of our volition. She was the wisdom behind Jesus and this is the identity Peter saw when Jesus asked "who do you think I am." Jesus-bar-abbah was the word became flesh but not Jesus-bar-Joseph.The HS is with us while Wisdom is in seclusion (we are rational beings while wisdom is in seclusion). Religious trickery can expose her sanctity and this is how the sin against the HS is committed . . . and she is robbed of her virginity when the son of man is from her womb untimely ripped.

Adora

Is Sophia like Wyrd? (ie- an attempt of the Judaeo-Christian writers to incorporate earlier deities into the monotheistic sect)?

Amos

I don't think they cared much about ealier deities nor copyrights. They just wrote things down as they saw them and wrote them along their own insights because they were inspired and to be inspired doesn't mean much once you have this insight.

Zamjatin called Sophia O-90, I think it was, and he describes her in his own way but maintained all the qualities Sophia had. In "I, we four" Sophia came passing by on occasion and that is when I-330 was absent because we can't have inspired thoughts and rational thoughts at the same time. So "I, we four" was never "I, we five," for example, and that was for that same reason.

JERDOG

You may wan to pic up Freeke and Gandy's book, "Jesus and the Lost Goddess".

Adora

AHAHAHAhahahaha you gotta be kidding me right? The Hebrews didn't even *have* an ultimate dualist demon-figure (Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub, whatever you wish to call it) 'til they encountered the Zoroastrians. They didn't just "write things down as they saw them", they interpreted events within a complex socio-political system of belief and life which was as much a melting pot of the tribal beliefs and religions in the area at the time as it was a constant struggle for the authoritarian priest-caste to maintain control over the shifting genetic and cultural demographic of their people. And when you had a culture with a thriving slave trade as you always get in ancient societies, you get a lot of mixing and mutation as the beliefs of the lower classes mix with that of the upper classes. YHWH's dominance of the sky didn't just come out of nowhere. Ashurei was YHWH's wife in many parts as the Hebrew religion mixed with the local fertility religions, until the authorities started changing the religion into the monotheistic form we know now, and instead she was cast down and became one of the concubines of Lucifer. Every movement of a deity in a religion has a social purpose, as well as a previous incarnation in some other level, before the social was changed. There is no such thing as "divine inspiration".

Amos

Hello Adora, I think you've been reading too many books that were written by history students. I don't have much faith in such narratives and actually think that slavery was invented about 300 years ago. You can say that I am little naive in this area but I think it is better to be naive then to be wrong. Don't you think so?

You are half right in saying that there is no such thing as inspiration. To be inspired one must have noetic vision and once you have noetic vision inspiration is impossible. Inspirations can only come our way only if we are in a state of oblivion (hyletic vision is opposite to noetic vision), and the ancients who wrote these Gnostic Gospels had noetic vision. In other words, they did not have to look across the fence while waiting for inspirations to come their way.

Adora

What are you talking about? I never said anything about slavery 300 years ago. I'm talking generally about the way people "write things down". Everything has a context, and that context is the key to the text. I'm sorry if my rambling was confusing, but I was just trying to elaborate the kinds of ways this happens using other socio-religious examples. Gnosticism is bound by these same rules as any other religious phenomenon.