mountainman

A Letter of Paul is featured in the Nag Hammadi Codices.

In the Hypostasis of the Archons (also known as "The Reality of the Rulers"), the Apostle Paul is presented as declaring that the chief ruler is blind on account of his power and arrogance, and because the chief ruler, with his power, thinks that he is God. This description of the blind chief may be directed at Constantine.

"I [Paul] have sent this (to you) because you inquire about the reality of the authorities. Their chief is blind; because of his power and his ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his power, "It is I who am God; there is none apart from me."

Was the "Ruler" Pontifex Maximus Constantine? He can certainly be portrayed as a one-eyed Christian who brought an end to the grass-roots milieu of religious cults in the Roman Empire during the centralized state monotheistic religious revolution.

Do we have here in fact a letter of Paul to Constantinople? The NHL has been C14 dated to 348 CE (+/- 60 years).


With thanks to CD

Toto

WTF?

You have arbitrarily inserted [Paul] into this section.

Here is the original:

text of Hypostasis of the ArchonsThe great apostle is Paul, and the quote is from Ephesians 6:12. The "I" who wrote this is someone of a later time. The "rulers" are a reference to demonic spirits in Paul's letter, and, it appears to me, to the demiurge or some other gnostic concept in this piece.

Hypostasis_of_the_Archons

stephan huller

So was Constantine the only Roman tyrant? I am sure if this stuff was canonical birthers here in America would apply it to Obama. Yet neither Constantine nor Obama are the intended target.

mountainman

We might suspect a later time but do we really know when "Paul" wrote? Do we even know in which century the forger called "Paul" authored the known forged epistles of "Paul"? Some claim this century was the 2nd, while OTOH everyone openly acknowledges that a forger called "Paul" fabricated his letters to Seneca (and Seneca's letters to "Paul") in the 4th century.

Minimalist

Do we really know that there was a "Paul" for that matter?

mountainman

Constantine was the first tyrant-in-chief of a centralised Roman state monotheistic religion, one that happened to be named "Chrestianity" or "Christianity". The military barbarism by which he commenced the program of the destruction of the pagan (Egypto-Graeco-Roman) temples (especially those of Asclepius) almost makes one suspect Constantine was far more Barbarian than Roman.


The intended target as the title shows is "The Reality of the Rulers". The text appears to be from the mid 4th century, perhaps almost a generation after Nicaea. From Nicaea c.324/325 CE onward, the reality was that the rulers followed what Ammianus called "the plain and simple religion of the Christians". The pagan temples and cults were being destoyed, prohibited books (such as the Greek prototypes of the Nag Hammadi Codices, etc) were being searched for and destroyed, and "the highways were covered with galloping Bishops". This was the political reality of the rulers after Nicaea. Is the text Post-Nicaean?


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