SLD

I stand corrected. Thank you.

SLD

SLD

Well, it would also be that Gnostic Christianity was in fact a very early variant of Christianity. Even if the GoT came later. I have heard argued on these boards, and others, that Gnosticism came much later to Christianity and thus justifying it's gospels from exclusion in the Bible.

Perhaps we need to invite Elaine Pagels to these boards and clear this matter up - of course, then there'd be no need to buy her book.

SLD

SLD

How do we know that? I mean did they do a gallup opinion poll on early Gnostics?

SLD

blackthorne

Ever heard of Herocleon?

CX

Umm...Heracleon was a late 2nd century Valentinian. What exactly does he add to this discussion? More telling I think is the fact that Gnostic Xianity was obviously in full swing and widely accepted as early as Polycarp. It strains credulity to think that that happened overnight. Plus the early orthodox church tries awful hard to convince us that gnosticism along with gnostic texts are some new fangled invention even going to the extent of naming their preferred texts after apostles and early followers of apostles while basically discounting all gnostic texts as recent inventions of deluded people. If the gnostic variety of Xianity had won the culture war of the early centuries how then would we view the "canonical gospels" today?

CX

your use of the term "variant" itself belies our modern bias toward what we know today as orthodox Xianity. It seems pretty clear from the evidence that there was a great diversity of opinion very early on. Xianity was defined only later when various competing theologies battled to see who would get to define orthodoxy.

Koyaanisqatsi

I just want to know what the dissenting 5 bishops said .

Bede

CX,

Careful there. You may have overstated your case. The fact that 'orthodoxy' won a political battle does not mean we can simply assume that it was not the earliest or dominant sect from square one. The trajectories hypothesis is built on much less evidence and far more theory than is usually supposed.

For instance, nowhere is there evidence (a part from Edessa, perhaps) of non-orthodox Christians arriving earlier than the orthodox. Nowhere is there evidence that non-orthodox ideas were taken into orthodoxy rather than the other way around. The evidence for really early heresy is extremely scanty and has been extrapolated a lot further than it will reasonably go.

To repeat, we cannot assume that there was equivalance between early Christian sects and we have no reason to disbelieve that the main reason orthodoxy won out was because it was by far the largest and earliest group.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

Vinnie

At least one segment of Thomas predates all the canonical Gospels. The material that Thomas shares with Q points to an earlier source (or maybe Q1 is the source!).

I think there are three fragments of Thomas or something found in the second century. For some reason it lead Helmut Koester to believe that the Gospel was very popular in the 2d.

The problem is that you are seaking of Thomas as a whole. It may have been composed in stages like Q qith layers added. I find Thomas to be independent opf the canonical Gospels and I think part of it is EXTREMELY ancient.

Thats an interesting theory though. I might want to look into that.

Vinnie

Tercel

Sheesh Vork... you've been here at least as long as I have. Do you really mean to tell me you've managed to not see all the times posters have been doing this?

I find that hard to believe, given that I myself have argued with many such posters here...

Or did my statement hit too close to home perhaps?

Names? Why bother? -As if I would want to spend all my time memorising the names of idiots! But I doubt I'll quickly forget the wackiness of people like Iasion, IronMonkey, Yuri Kuchinsky.
Neville Lindsay has also been brought to my attention recently as another one. Of course, I can't say that people Toto or Steven Carr are a great lot better either, but at least they're not quite as bad. Then we've got the awesome book writers such as Acharys S and Andrew Templeman.