steve_bnk

Western Christianity was the Roman Catholic Church which invented its own mythology and theology.

If it was not that it would have been something else, Christian or otherwise.

Consider we could have ended up worshipping fire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

mountainman

I agree entirely with Toto's first statement. If we did a Venn Diagram showing the Gnostics and the Platonists how big would the overlap area be? The Gnostics is a term yet to be precisely defined and agreed upon. At the moment everyone has different definitions. My definition for the "gnostics" are those historical people who are the authors of the Gnostic Gospels and Acts and in fact the entire body of NT and OT Apocryphal (Non Canonical) literature.

I don't agree with Toto's statement - This is probably why Constantine did not pick one of the gnostic heresies as the basis for his rule. Constantine may have already had the "inside information" that the Canonical Books were inspired by the Holy Spirit whereas the Non Canonical books of the gnostics were inspired by the son of the devil. Had Constantine read Eusebius's church history he would have known all this, and the history of the conflict between the orthodox canonical book preservers and the heretical non canonical book preservers.

Sources like Eusebius, Irenaeus, Justin, Hippolytus, Clement, Ignatius, etc may be corrupt and/or forged (well) after Constantine's revolution. And the archaeological and literary evidence suggests there may have been an intermediate step in the revolution, from Chrestian to Christian. A great deal of evidence was deliberately burnt and destroyed by the victorious Constantinian party, down through the 4th century. We lack the obituary to Constantine in the books of Ammianus Marcellinus. We don't really know what happened in a political sense between 325-355 CE.

If Platonism (Gnosticism - see Venn Diagram) had won over the Biblical Canonical Christianity, the Greek intellectual tradition would not have been suppressed for over a thousand years, and then slowly rediscovered (it's still not fully recovered) and we'd be out past Alpha Centauri by now.

mountainman

The Marcionites don't have a great deal of evidence outside of various "READ THIS!!: Official Reports on All Heretics" written by the orthodoxy... They may even have been a literary invention of the victorious heresiologists.

But it should be clearly understood that both Constantine and Eusebius were anti-Semitic as revealed in the scholarship on the subject.

mountainman

And history.

mountainman

In regard to YHWH as an inferior demiurge there was some discussion of sources in the thread, relegated (without much explanation) to ~elsewhere, Was the Gnostic response to YHWH as an evil Demiurge a satire of YHWH?

Horatio Parker

There's a simpler way to characterize this problem ie internal vs external. The Gnostics believed, consistent with Plato, that the key to salvation lay within, that god was seen with the eye of the mind.

The orthodox preached another salvation, an external one, that Jesus was a separate discrete being, son of anther external, discrete being. Only those appointed by the human/Divine Jesus or his Authorized Representatives could determine or not a person was saved.