Elijah

But demiurge is platonic which I see the evil creator god as based off. If you consider the evil creator the fundamental aspect to Gnosticism then ok, I just don’t have the confidence to make that claim because I can’t be sure how many had “evil” in their belief system. Which texts are you basing your evil creator off of specifically?

Gnosticism for me is knowledge equals reward, not any particular idea even though the dualism I would consider the most basic or common.
We can save the nature of the eternal for another conversation if you want. It would probably be a lot of misunderstanding and come down to word choices.
I think I agree with what I think you are saying. I wouldn’t argue against the Jews influencing the Greeks or them both coming up with something similar and later recognized philosophical counterparts. I don’t think the Jews were changed as much as they recognized a similar philosophy in Plato, but I don’t think I could make much of a case for that.
So you take the myth literally as expressing a supernatural reality? No interpretation at all?
No I don’t think so. I think there is plenty of ways you can interpret a myth incorrectly but to take it literally isn’t going to produce any useful information about what the writer was trying to say at all and is going to lead to assuming the writer had a nonsense supernatural view of the world.
I’m not sure what you are saying exactly here. That people didn’t believe in the supernatural back then like some still do today? I agree that Plato should be understood rationally if that’s what you are suggesting but there was plenty of confusion then and now because of supernatural assumptions.
Ok, I can see that yes most texts had guidance or informing in mind when written. If Plato isn’t a naturalist what was he?
Lost me. Is the Logos a force in the universe or an anthropomorphic entity to the Greeks and the Jews?
I don’t think the Jews adopted an alien worldview I think they merged/incorporated a similar worldview. I don’t think they heard Plato’s ideas and said “that sounds awesome, let’s go with that”, I think they said some of what you’re suggesting sounds almost like what some of us already believe.

gentleexit

I'm going on what Plotinus thought of them (Enneads III 8, V 5, V 8, II 9). Their creator's evil intent accounted for this world (made from nothing) and necessitated a savior. That's not Platonic. As DCH said, their outlook probably reflects Jewish disappointment after their failed rebellion. Plato's demiurge is good - he orders disorder. For Greeks, chaotic matter always existed and required order.

But that's such a generic definition. Under that definition all Philosophies but Skeptics would be gnostic. To discuss any groups or set of groups, we'd have to be more precise than "knowledge" vs say "faith" or "blind belief" as vehicles to God.

I think Plato was capturing his concepts in his myths. Sure, there are layers. Number choices, names usually have more than surface significance but yes, his myths are accounts of his "reality". However, when Platonists read Homer as "the Theological poet" and matched his stories to their accounts, they projected into a writer with no such intension. As you say, it gets down to the writer.

I mean the way we use "supernatural". They lived in a spirit-filled world - there was only "natural" and the "spooks" were in it (or we were in them). We made the concept of "supernatural" because spirits are "unnatural". And we split religion from philosophy and science etc. These are our divisions, not theirs. Plato was rational about what we would see as mystical or at best, psychological.

There were "philosophers" or "scientists" before him and after him (we learn about Thales etc. when we scan old Greeks) who were concerned with the world beyond them. He (like Pythagoras before him) was all about the world within. Hence getting beyond the misleading senses. His "kingdom was (definitively) not of this world".

I think the Jews mean an entity. In general, philosophy means force (emanations etc.). "Sophia" is the same way. Entity or force? But then it depends on the imagery. "Light from light"? Is light an entity or an emanation ala "Emanations of the One". And today we ask is light a wave or a particle?

I agree. Which is why I don't think Gnosticism is "Platonism for the masses". There may be overlap or reuse of words but that doesn't make it a Platonic movement.

DCHindley

Probably the former. The latter belief, I think, is a possible development within the Jewish core of Jesus party folks immediately following his death, especially when God didn't step in and smite the sinners (whether Jewish or Roman).

Yes.

It was "in the air" so to speak. Josephus speaks of "an ambiguous [Jewish] oracle that [predicted that] ... about that time, one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth." Similarly, Tacitus says "[t]he majority [of the Jews] were convinced that the ancient scriptures of their priests alluded to the present as the very time when the orient would triumph and from Judaea would go forth men destined to rule the world." But Jews weren't just preaching this message to themselves. The Sibylline Oracles were created to spread this message to the Greek and Latin world! The oracles of Jewish origin go back to the 2nd-3rd centuries BCE and extend into the Christian era!

The form of these Judaeo-Christian Sibylline oracles is the same as that of the ancient heathen ones. The Jewish and Christian authors respectively make the ancient Sibyl speak to heathen nations in Greek hexameters, and in the language of Homer. The contents subserve throughout the purposes of religious propaganda. The Sibyl prophesies the fate of the world from the beginning to the times of the author, for the purpose of then uniting with it both threats and promises for the immediate future ; she rebukes the heathen nations for the sinfulness of their idolatry and blasphemy, and exhorts them to repent while yet there is time, for that fearful judgments will fall upon the impenitent. [Emil Schurer, History of the Jewish People, Division 2, vol iii, 1896, pg 276, emphasis mine]

To marginalized gentile tenant farmers in Syria or gentile settlements in Palestine (and there were loads of them, both Greek cities and Roman colonies), maybe such a prospect seemed like "good news!" Jews were generally considered to be very generous to one another, and addicted to their brand of justice and law, which had many controls, at least in theory, to limit economic oppression of the lower classes. Also, the Jewish book 2nd Baruch predicts that in the messianic kingdom the land would be tremendously fertile!

2 Baruch 29:5-8 5 The earth also shall yield its fruit ten thousandfold and on each (?) vine there shall be a thousand branches, and each branch shall produce a thousand clusters, and each cluster produce a thousand grapes, and each grape produce a cor of wine. 6 And those who have hungered shall rejoice: moreover, also, they shall behold marvels every day. 7 For winds shall go forth from before Me to bring every morning the fragrance of aromatic fruits, and at the close of the day clouds distilling the dew of health. 8 And it shall come to pass at that self-same time that the treasury of manna shall again descend from on high, and they will eat of it in those years, because these are they who have come to the consummation of time.

"Sounds good to me!! Where do I sign up!" However, being a Jewish kingdom, to really benefit, you have to be a Jew, and hence the conversions. Oh sure, you could be a "stranger within the gate," but like Jesus said to the Syro-Phoenician woman, they'd have to be content to eat the scraps from the master's table. I would predict not a few would fully convert.

A social upheaval as destructive and hate-filled as the modern conflicts between Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, or between Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda. That is what accompanied the Jewish rebellion of 66-70 CE. Hutu extremists killed Hutu "collaborators" every bit as much as Tutsis (the whole catastrophe in Rwanda was started when Hutu extremists assassinated their own Hutu president because he was seen as a collaborator). In Bosnia, both Serbs and Muslims were compelled to go along with atrocities at the risk of sharing in the fate of the "enemy" for refusing. Josephus has many chilling accounts of Jews who even fought to defend their Greek neighbors and their city being rounded up and executed in sports arenas, and there were likely many cases of the opposite situation occurring. THAT sounds very much like the kind of thing that happened in Bosnia (when at least 7,000 Muslim men were rounded up, held in a soccer stadium, bussed away by Serbian paramilitary units, and found dead years later in mass graves in the woods, Nazi execution style).

But IMHO, the *real* pressure would have been put on Gentile converts *after* the war. I doubt that anyone, Jew or Gentile, would have entirely trusted them, regardless of whether they actually participated in the fighting or not. My contention was that this kind of mutual distrust affected a certain faction within the Jesus movement, that comprising Gentile converts to Judaism, and this was the party that created the Christian theology of the 2nd century in reaction to feelings of rejection. As messianists (as I am certain that the followers of Jesus were), other Jews might well have seen them as threats to their own security (by triggering repressive actions from the Romans that spill over and affect non-messianic Jews). Hard feelings on the part of these converts for this cold shoulder from a people that had formerly embraced them would be inevitable. It certainly did not help that their dream of establishing a just new kingdom of God on earth, the very dream that motivated them to give up everything and convert to Judaism and become messianists, was now dashed to tiny pieces.

No, this does not leave much room for pacifist Jesus people like we like to imagine today.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/10598

DCH


Wars of the Jews 6.5.4 (312-313):

312 But now, what did the most elevate them in undertaking this war, was an ambiguous oracle that was also found in their sacred writings, how, "about that time, one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth.'' 313 The Jews took this prediction to belong to themselves in particular; and many of the wise men were thereby deceived in their determination. Now, this oracle certainly denoted the government of Vespasian, who was appointed emperor in Judea.

One web page has the following summary:

To most Romans the capture of Jerusalem was no more than a small operation taken by Pompey in his stride during his conquest of the East. But to the more informed it had a wider significance. The Jews were not merely a Palestinian people, but a propagandist sect infiltrating into every corner of the Graeco-Roman world. In every great Mediterranean city there were Jews, some of them merchants seeking their fortune, but most of them slaves, freedmen or petty traders, organized in their synagogues and propagating among their neighbours the idea of a juster social order set forth in the law and the prophets.

We have samples of this propaganda in the Sibylline Oracles circulated at various dates in the centuries immediately before and after the Christian era. These writings adapted to Greek conditions the prophetic technique evolved in Palestine centuries before. Since about the sixth century B.C., for reasons no doubt similar to those which evoked prophetic literature in Palestine, there had circulated in Greek cities oracles in hexameter verse under the name of a legendary prophetess Sibylla. No priesthood sponsored them; and the ruling class despised them as irresponsible demagogy.2 The Roman senate took them more seriously. From the time of their first contact with the Greeks they made it their policy to withdraw Sibylline writings from public circulation and to lodge them in safe custody at Rome as part of the paraphernalia of official priestcraft. There they were kept from the people and invoked by the senate to justify any religious innovation which from time to time seemed expedient. But the circulation of unauthorized oracles continued, and from the second century B.C. provided a ready weapon for Jewish propaganda. The first Jewish Sibyllines were written at Alexandria under the Ptolemies. Their doggerel character shows that the writers were men of the people with no more than a nodding acquaintance with classical poetry. After the manner of Jewish apocalyptic they enumerate the empires which have ruled the East down to their own time, denounce the judgment of God on them all and foretell the coming of peace and plenty on earth under a Messianic king. The circulation of Jewish and later of Christian Sibyllines continued as late as the third century A.D.3 http://www.ditext.com/robertson/oc4.html

andrewcriddle

I should probably note that I have been reading today some recent work by Ruth Majercik about the relation of Zostrianos et al to the writings of Porphyry, and I am less convinced than I was that the Platonising Sethian Texts are pre-Plotinian in their present form.

Andrew Criddle

Elijah

I’m not sure what you are referencing in Enneads about the Gnostics and their demiurge because I’m probably screwing up the citation. (I’m a little dumb, quotes please.) I realize that Plato’s concept of the demiurge differs from others but I’m not comfortable saying that an evil intermediary is a fundamental belief of all the Gnostics. Especially based from one non-Gnostic’s interpretation of what may be a specific group of Gnostics. Now while you may be able to make a solid case for that being true of the Gnostics I just haven’t seen it personally made yet so am not comfortable agreeing with the statement.
It’s meant to be a broad basic definition. For a more specific definition I would need to know what specific group and text I should be trying to understand. It’s like the word “carpenter” means working with wood. What specific woodwork would depend on the particular carpenter or field he worked in. Gnostic for me means using knowledge or pursuit of it as a basis of a religion not the particular offering of knowledge each group presents to its followers because that varies too much.
So you’re taking mythological accounts literally? Interpreting them as literally happening in a supernatural/superstitious understanding of the world? It’s not metaphysical explanations in narrative or symbolic form, it’s just nonsense from a bygone time of understanding? Do you take Plato’s cave literally?

I’m not sure what you are saying about the poets and the dichotomy with the philosophers.
I think Plato was rational about what he saw in the world which is the same thing we see today. I think projecting a superstitious understanding on his philosophy is imposing the understanding of the uneducated of today on the educated of yesteryear. But I may be in the minority with that position.
Was his understanding beyond the “misleading senses” a metaphysical constant or a supernatural/superstitious kingdom?
So the Jews anthropomorphized Greek philosophical concepts of forces in the universe instead of using the Greeks’ already anthropomorphic concepts of forces in the universe found in their mythology? Weren’t you trying to argue that the Jews didn’t need to have borrowed Greek concepts because they already had them?

Force or entity shouldn’t depend on imagery. If you know what the subject is you should be trying your best to understand it in a rational real world way. It’s not correct to understand Light, wisdom, or Logos as anthropomorphic spiritual entities in my mind. But I do think it is correct to try to understand the philosophical argument in a more modern scientific way instead of assuming superstitious nonsense back then.
From Plontis in the against the Gnostics section.

Elijah

Do you think the story is based off any particular Jewish rebel leader from any particular rebellion? So, they repackaged a regular messiah after he gets killed trying to rebel against Rome as a messiah who sacrifices his life while never rebelling against Rome or is it something else going on?

It would seem more likely to me the dead messiah concept already existed and just gained popularity after the living messiah concept caused so many problems verses total reinvention of a messiah to me. The dead messiah concept may have looked dumb until the living concept gets your people’s butt kicked by Rome.
I can see the reason to loosen the criteria to convert someone or a group of people; I don’t see why the criteria gets loosened particularly after a failed rebellion.
You’re just suggesting your standard good king ushering in a golden age of peace and prosperity, right? No other forms or redemption like forgiveness of sins right?
So the good news was about the Jews taking control of the world and bringing a better tomorrow?
That sounds like reward in the hereafter for conversion in the present. Is the Jewish kingdom they are selling to the Gentiles a political change/prosperous age or a promise of another life after death?
If I’m following you, that’s not too bad of an idea. Rejected Gentile converts develop their own brand of messiahism. I’m not sure what you are suggesting they contributed to the development or if the events and threat brought on by standard messianists moved popularity towards an already developed ideology.

gentleexit

Enneads II 9 is enough. The argument is long (it's on google books online if you want it "Against the Gnostics"). The sentiment is captured in "These doctines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt; where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks."

I do like this one line because it applies to more than gnostics: "And when will it destroy the work? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for?"

But so broad that it includes almost every "Spiritual" movement. Nearly every Philosophy. We're talking about sect(s) of Judaism, no?

Not literally. By definition, they are not prosaic exposition. Myths can be explicitly allegorical (like Plato's) or read allegorically and this is often a push (Porphyry seeing the soul's journey in Odysseus' cave or the Church seeing itself as the lover in Solomon's songs).

Think how the "intelligent" read then. Per Origen (on being nice to the Scriptures) ...
You were part of the chorus before Nietzsche's time who derided Plato for leading Greece astray, sending it searching within (and he did send them within).

As I said "supernatural" is a "new" term. It's not an ancient concept - they had no "super" tier for their natural cake. Divinity was natural, even muddily so ("mundane gods" etc). There was no "other world" as in separate "place". All was linked. Our culture made a separation as part of a grand truce of science and religion. They had no such need.

Light, wave or particle? Higher physics is rife with mixed metaphor. Why shouldn't ancients be given the same latitude?

Finally let me say, I'm not arguing there was no reuse of Greek words by Jews, no overlap of concept either by selective barrowing or just coincidence but I do think it's important not to throw around "Platonist" so readily. There was a German who advocated vegetarianism and campaigned against smoking. Hitler was no liberal. Those attributes are superficial when it comes to being a liberal.

Easy use and we get "gnosticism is popular platonism" or the sort of summary of Platonism we talked about earlier. These reduce Platonism to isolated terms and quotes, window dressing for "more important" movements like Gnostics or Christians.

gentleexit

BTW, this is all a fascinating swurl. Whether Plotinus' gnostics were Zostrianos etc., the influence of the Chaldean Oracles on everyone (post Plotinus), was Numenius Jewish?, what was going on in Apamea (Numenius there, Iamblichus later)? For one, I only have bits and pieces in my head now but I'd like to know more.

One thing on the identity of Plotinus' gnostics - you'd need to map out his attacks. Deconstruct his treatise ala how the original opinions of Celsus were resurrected from Origen. And then, do these attacks agree with the Sethian texts. Something to do. Probably done too. Somewhere.

Elijah

I thought you were supposed to be showing that the evil demiurge is a central tenet of the Gnostics and because of that it shouldn’t be considered platonic.
No not really. I’m sure there may be certain sects off each branch that has some Gnostic practices but it’s not that common especially these days. Jews are about observing the law, for Christians it’s about belief in Christ, most others have some type of observation or mental control aspect to receive a reward or to move past suffering. And surely some sects or texts I might consider Gnostic probably didn’t put forth as much attention to the actual gnosis as I might assume they did or approached it some way I’m totally unfamiliar with.
I’m still confused on how you are interpreting the myth and allegory. Are you interpreting them rationally or interpreting them on an assumed supernatural/superstitious position?
Huh? The reality of the situation is that today we have people who believe in a nonsense supernatural spiritual side of the universe. You can label it whatever you want but we are talking about guys in the sky who watch over you and anthropomorphic spirits/angels working invisibly behind the scene. Now it’s common to take that understanding that some people have today and apply that to all of ancient man and interpret all their philosophy art and religion with the assumption that the spiritual side of the universe should be understood how the people who believe in nonsense do today and not how someone rationally tries to understand the spiritual/eternal/constant side of the world as in metaphysical philosophy.

It seems like you have a labeling issue going on. I’m simply trying to ask if you think the philosophers understood their gods as rational forces in the universe or you should take the art/poetry literally and believed in anthropomorphic spiritual agents at work.
Both are those are rational arguments. But when you are going from light/logos/wisdom being a wave/form/ideal to being a magical spiritual entity it’s a whole other ball game.

I think if someone refers to Hitler as liberal then it should try to be understood in the context of the conversation, not that Hitler should be understood exactly as a modern liberal. Like when I say that Gnostics are Platonic, it just means that the ideology should often be understood from a philosophical/platonic light not that they thought exactly like Plato.

DCHindley

Exactly. To see how differently Gnostic thought differed from Platonic thought, one could compare translations of the passage from Plato's Republic 588a-589b from the Nag Hammadi finds to modern translations of the original Greek text.

Codex VI, 5:

"Since we have come to this point in a discussion, let us again take up the first things that were said to us.


And we will find that he says, 'Good is he who has been done injustice completely. He is glorified justly.' Is not this how he was reproached?"
"This is certainly the fitting way!"

And I said, "Now then, we have spoken because he said that he who does injustice and he who does justice each has a force."

''How then?"

"He said, 'An image that has no likeness is the rationality of soul,' so that he who said these things will understand.


He [...] or not?

We [...] is for me. But all [...] who told them [...] ruler, these now have become natural creatures - even Chimaera and Cerberus and all the rest that were mentioned. They all came down and they cast off forms and images. And they all became a single image.

It was said, 'Work now!'

Certainly it is a single image that became the image of a complex beast with many heads. Some days indeed it is like the image of a wild beast. Then it is able to cast off the first image. And all these hard and difficult forms emanate from it with effort, since these are formed now with arrogance.

And also all the rest that are like them are formed now through the word. For now it is a single image.


For the image of the lion is the one thing and the image of the man is another. [...] single [...] is the [...] of [...] join. And this [...] much more complex than the first. And the second is small."


"It has been formed."

"Now then, join them to each other and make them a single one - for they are three - so that they grow together, and all are in a single image outside of the image of the man just like him who is unable to see the things inside him. But what is outside only is what he sees. And it is apparent what creature his image is in and that he was formed in a human image.



"And I spoke to him who said that there is profit in the doing of injustice for the man. He who does injustice truly does not profit nor does he benefit.

But what is profitable for him is this: that he cast down every image of the evil beast and trample them along with the images of the lion.

But the man is in weakness in this regard. And all the things that he does are weak. As a result he is drawn to the place where he spends time with them. [...]. And he [...] to him in[...]. But he brings about [...] enmity [...]. And with strife they devour each other among themselves.

Yes, all these things he said to everyone who praises the doing of injustice."

"Then is it not profitable for him who speaks justly?"

"And if he does these things and speaks in them, within the man they take hold firmly.



Therefore especially he strives to take care of them and he nourishes them just like the farmer nourishes his produce daily. And the wild beasts keep it from growing."

[Translated by James Brashler, James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, revised edition. HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1990]
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/plato.html

Plato, Republic, Book IX (588a-589b):

[588a] “And now that we have come to this point in the argument, [588b] let us take up again the statement with which we began and that has brought us to this pass.

It was, I believe, averred that injustice is profitable to the completely unjust197 man who is reputed just. Was not that the proposition?”

“Yes, that.”

“Let us, then, reason with its proponent now that we have agreed on the essential nature of injustice and just conduct.”


“How?” he said.

“By fashioning in our discourse a symbolic image of the soul, that the maintainer of that proposition may see precisely what it is that he was saying.”

[588c] “What sort of an image?” he said.

“One of those natures that the ancient fables tell of,” said I, “as that of the Chimaera or Scylla or Cerberus, and the numerous other examples that are told of many forms grown together in one.”



“Yes, they do tell of them.”

“Mould, then, a single shape of a manifold and many-headed beast that has a ring of heads of tame and wild beasts and can change them and cause to spring forth from itself all such growths.”




[588d] “It is the task of a cunning artist,” he said, “but nevertheless, since speech is more plastic than wax and other such media, assume that it has been so fashioned.”

“Then fashion one other form of a lion and one of a man and let the first be far the largest and the second second in size.” “That is easier,” he said, “and is done.” “Join the three in one, then, so as in some sort to grow together.”

“They are so united,” he said.

“Then mould about them outside the likeness of one, that of the man, so that to anyone who is unable [588e] to look within but who can see only the external sheath it appears to be one living creature, the man.”





“The sheath is made fast about him,” he said.

“Let us, then say to the speaker who avers that it pays this man to be unjust, and that to do justice is not for his advantage,


that he is affirming nothing else than that it profits him to feast and make strong the multifarious beast and the lion and all that pertains to the lion,

[589a] but to starve the man and so enfeeble him that he can be pulled about whithersoever either of the others drag him, and not to familiarize or reconcile with one another the two creatures but suffer them to bite and fight and devour one another.”


“Yes,” he said, “that is precisely what the panegyrist of injustice will be found to say.”




“And on the other hand he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us [589b] complete domination over the entire man

and make him take charge of the many-headed beast--like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild--and he will make an ally of the lion's nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and so foster their growth.”

[Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.]
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin...t.+Rep.+9.571a

Anyone so inclined can copy these two passages as they are here, and paste them one at a time into a two column table in MS word, and they individual parts of the exchange should line up side by side, perhaps with a little twinking.

DCH