Chili

Pete - Pete, leave it to Harvard to pick another loser: A theologian has been thinking, but this one with more Puritan intent!


His summary statement entails: We should unite and stand together against Rome with all 20.000 strong and tell them that they were the original splitters for financial reason, because obviously: they have the money and all the fine arts.

Their claim that Christ is alive among them is lie because he has not returned yet, and is why we (Group 1 here), created the place for him to land where he will be safe to land and we will be there, in full force to make sure that they do not crucify him all over again.

And Pete, please tell them that knowledge is and cannot be explained!
And does not anybody trip over a headline like that?

Parables can be explained because knowledge is prior to us as gathered into pools to give us dry land to walk on when we as individuals arrive. So then knowledge is staring at us while we walk along the shore, or float in our boat, until we can walk on this water as if it was solid as brick. I.e "You are a brick, Mitya." You are a brick Mitya, she said, to make her shine. Beautiful line from Karamazov here.

So please let's not start parting water again to give us dry land to walk on, and just let wisdom speak: Wherein Jesus left and Christ stayed to dwell among us and Jesus has been coming back ever since the day he left, but they put a life-line on theirs so he can just reel and find one of his own.

And let's re-back that to John 6:66 for Group 1 and John 6:56 for Group 2.

Oh, and I should add that this whole puritan thing he is after is good and is needed, but only is there to make violaters known!

mountainman

At post # 20 I have listed various attributes of two distinct groups described by the author of the Coptic NHC 11.1 text (manufactured in the mid 4th century), and earlier provided a number of references why this author could have been writing after Nicaea.

I think that it is not beyond the realms of possibility that these two groups were as follows:

GROUP (1): The pagan generation that fled the "Good News" published by Constantine.
GROUP (2): The Constantinian regime who published the Bible.


Is this analysis feasible and if not why?

If not, who were these two diametrically opposed groups so described?


The academic cited in the OP believes that Group 1 were related to the Christians apostles who, in the canonical gospels and acts, fled from Jesus. This belief simply projects the Christian message onto the evidence and I don't think there is any support for it because there is little or no history at all in the canonical accounts.

The Nag Hammadi codices were not manufactured by the orthodox Christians. At that same time in the mid 4th century, orthodox Christians such as Athanasius were manufacturing bible codices for Constantius II.

mountainman

I agree.

The Gnostic resistance within Catharism exemplifies a 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th century instance of the OP. Clearly the Cathars must have had their precedents and so on back to the Council of Nicaea.

We all know that the gnostic generation has fled from the centralised monotheistic state canonical church since its inception at Nicaea.

What I really want to know is whether the text above may have been authored between 325 and 350 CE by one of the first gnostic generations to have fled the Christian church.


Since you made this comment I have furnished more data and an analysis of it about the two groups being described by the author of the text.

Save for the wild force of Nature,
nothing moves in this world
that is not Greek in its origin.

Chili

They call it hell on earth that keeps the fire going and still is needed today, except that in the Great Reformation it was set free by law to consume the world like a wild fire with torches going in all directions that removed 'peace on earth forever . . . with only 2 people gathered in his name is already good enough to light another fire and get new religion going by simply setting other souls on fire for their idea of God.



It is where the wolf nurses the lamb and later gives it solid food to chew.

Chili

The Greeks called it the 'genus' now of man in the particular and therefore the Son must be identified as primary being to whom conditions are attached.

It was their fifth interpretation wherein not the courses shine as a dish that make up the meal, but the full meal is seen telically as the full-meal-deal in what they called par-ousia.

An ousia is an insight with a shine about it like the technique of an artisan that they called shepherd in the bible, and with 12 of these it is time to look for it's own source that now becomes an inward journey to find the cause of their being in their own eidelon as their cause of being for what they are.

This creates the journey inward where the alien goes from shine-to-shine to look for the cause of them that so negates them as the riches they once where like shepherds herding sheep on a midwinter midnight . . . and there will not find yet another glow, but will encouter the very source of glow that so becomes his own that they now call Par-ousai as Final Form that we call "Christ-mass" today.

So, there is nothing special about the Greeks except that they were like the raw material to be refined and purified and so expand the truth they pointed at. Such only is the nature of truth because it will stand as a pilar to built on as leading edge for more to come.

So let me affirm here that Christmas is not a Jesus birthday party who we celebrate as slain in the foreshadow of Easter on the Seventh day, of which Epiphany is the confirmation that indeed Christ was born instead of Jesus who only becomes the protagonist as second Adam to bring Easter about.

And to follow my antagonist/protagonist distinction here let me add that the first Adam was antagonist by way of desire via Eve (Madgalene as temple tramp) as the eternal knaw to make humans restless that so caused the [12] ousia's to be, as in 'ours' personally, that here now when Christ was born as genus in the mind of the believer is converted to be protagonist, called second Adam with a mandate to negate what this 'known' in us is all about and find the source of the eternal knaw itself, and there the woman find as womb of man in him and so is the alpha to call home. Just metaphysics is all it is.

mountainman

Were the gnostic generation fleeing from the orthodox Christians before Nicaea? It is extremely doubtful since in regard to the Gospel of Peter:
Eusebius (falsely IMO) reports that an unknown Serapion walked into a Gnostic library and “borrowed” a copy of this text.

The most likely explanation is that an entire generation fled from the Nicaean agreement in which the worship of traditional pagan deities was prohibited, pagan temples were destroyed, pagan priests were executed and a new god called Jesus F. Christ, a dead Jew, was set up on a stick by the emperor who “teaches us about dead writings”.

Duvduv

MM, why would the gnostics have to bother fleeing if all they had to do was mask their teachings behind the veil of the official religion using a system of lampooning of the official religion itself? Or do you mean that the fleeing had to take place once their attempts at veiled teachings were simply deemed "heretical"?

Of course beyond authored documents we don't have actual evidence of the multitude of groups described by church officialdom such as Epiphanius whose claims may be vastly exaggerated based on a very productive imagination in terms of establishing the parameters of what was to be defined as official teachings.

mountainman

The evidence is that Constantine ordered that a search and destroy operation was be conducted for the prohibited books of the (gnostic) heretics and elsewhere we learn that possession of such books meant an instant death sentence - beheading via the sword....


I don't know about this claim since Epiphanius makes it quite clear that many of these heretical groups were just pagans trying to follow their traditional practices and beliefs ....



We do have actual evidence of the first seven of this multitude of groups.

The idea of the OP is the question whether the two groups described in the Nag Hammadi Codex text The Interpretation of Knowledge may be analysed as outlined at post # 20. It clearly described two groups. My argument is that Group One (to which the author of the text belongs) may have consisted of Hellenes, Stoics, Platonists, Pythagoreans and other so-called "pagan sects" AFTER they had been prohibited from practicing any other "ecclesia" (gathering) other than the imperial decreed Christian State Monotheism.

mountainman

In the OP you will see the reference to ARTICLE: An Exploration of Valentinian Paraenesis: Rethinking Gnostic Ethics in the Interpretation of Knowledge (NHC XI, 1) by Philip L. Tite, McGill University.

I have read this entire article. The author discusses the two groups of people in the NHC text. I have summarised all that the author mentions about these two groups at post # 20.

mountainman

In the OP you will see the reference (furnished by you) to ARTICLE: An Exploration of Valentinian Paraenesis: Rethinking Gnostic Ethics in the Interpretation of Knowledge (NHC XI, 1) by Philip L. Tite, McGill University.

I have read and analysed this entire article. The author discusses the two groups of people in the NHC text. I have summarised all that the author mentions about these two groups at post # 20.