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To: TaraP
You were saying ...

I am just saying that Gnosis from the Dead Sea Scrolls goes into the Cosmological Divine Realm of GOD and I actually read all of it, and don’t see where it contradicts the Holy Scriptures.....

I think you have a misunderstanding here. These are not from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These are from Egypt and they represent the Gnostism, which was eradicated from Christianity as heretical.

In other words, it's like you heard about some "cult group" from history and knew they had false and heretical teachings, but you didn't have any original materials from them. All you were able to do is read some history about them.

All of a sudden, someone finds the "cult group's writings" that had been hidden away somewhere for a long time. Now, you can actually "read the cult group's writings" yourself.

That's great for understanding what a "cult group" teaches. No problem there. The problem is that you don't want to "incorporate" the "teachings of a cult group" into Christianity -- just because you happen to have found the cult group's writings.

That's what these are -- the writings of a "cult group" that Christianity eradicated as heretical.

If you're studying cult groups -- that's fine for academic work. But, if you're trying to "understand the Bible" from a "cult group's writings" -- that's "way bad" ...

Here is the information about where this came from and how Christianity eradicated it from its books and teachings, because it was false and heretical.



An Introduction to Gnosticism and The Nag Hammadi Library

What is Gnosticism?

“Gnosis” and “Gnosticism” are still rather arcane terms, though in the last two decades they have been increasingly encountered in the vocabulary of contemporary society. The word Gnosis derives from Greek and connotes "knowledge" or the "act of knowing". On first hearing, it is sometimes confused with another more common term of the same root but opposite sense: agnostic, literally "not knowing”. The Greek language differentiates between rational, propositional knowledge, and a distinct form of knowing obtained by experience or perception. It is this latter knowledge gained from interior comprehension and personal experience that constitutes gnosis.1

In the first century of the Christian era the term “Gnostic” came to denote a heterodox segment of the diverse new Christian community. Among early followers of Christ it appears there were groups who delineated themselves from the greater household of the Church by claiming not simply a belief in Christ and his message, but a "special witness" or revelatory experience of the divine. It was this experience or gnosis that set the true follower of Christ apart, so they asserted. Stephan Hoeller explains that these Christians held a "conviction that direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings, and, moreover, that the attainment of such knowledge must always constitute the supreme achievement of human life."2

What the "authentic truths of existence" affirmed by the Gnostics were will be briefly reviewed below, but first a historical overview of the early Church might be useful. In the initial century and a half of Christianity -- the period when we find first mention of "Gnostic" Christians -- no single acceptable format of Christian thought had yet been defined. During this formative period Gnosticism was one of many currents moving within the deep waters of the new religion. The ultimate course Christianity, and Western culture with it, would take was undecided at this early moment. Gnosticism was one of the seminal influences shaping that destiny.

That Gnosticism was, at least briefly, in the mainstream of Christianity is witnessed by the fact that one of its most influential teachers, Valentinus, may have been in consideration during the mid-second century for election as the Bishop of Rome.3 Born in Alexandria around 100 C.E., Valentinus distinguished himself at an early age as an extraordinary teacher and leader in the highly educated and diverse Alexandrian Christian community. In mid-life he migrated from Alexandria to the Church's evolving capital, Rome, where he played an active role in the public affairs of the Church. A prime characteristic of Gnostics was their claim to be keepers of sacred traditions, gospels, rituals, and successions – esoteric matters for which many Christians were either not properly prepared or simply not inclined. Valentinus, true to this Gnostic predilection, apparently professed to have received a special apostolic sanction through Theudas, a disciple and initiate of the Apostle Paul, and to be a custodian of doctrines and rituals neglected by what would become Christian orthodoxy.4 Though an influential member of the Roman church in the mid-second century, by the end of his life Valentinus had been forced from the public eye and branded a heretic by the developing orthodoxy Church.

While the historical and theological details are far too complex for proper explication here, the tide of history can be said to have turned against Gnosticism in the middle of the second century. No Gnostic after Valentinus would ever come so near prominence in the greater Church. Gnosticism's emphasis on personal experience, its continuing revelations and production of new scripture, its asceticism and paradoxically contrasting libertine postures, were all met with increasing suspicion. By 180 C.E. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, was publishing his first attacks on Gnosticism as heresy, a labor that would be continued with increasing vehemence by the church Fathers throughout the next century.

Orthodoxy Christianity was deeply and profoundly influenced by its struggles with Gnosticism in the second and third centuries. Formulations of many central traditions in Christian theology came as reflections and shadows of this confrontation with the Gnosis.5 But by the end of the fourth century the struggle was essentially over: the evolving ecclesia had added the force of political correctness to dogmatic denunciation, and with this sword so-called "heresy" was painfully cut from the Christian body. Gnosticism as a Christian tradition was largely eradicated, its remaining teachers ostracized, and its sacred books destroyed. All that remained for students seeking to understand Gnosticism in later centuries were the denunciations and fragments preserved in the patristic heresiologies. Or at least so it seemed until the mid-twentieth century.

Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

It was on a December day in the year of 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, that the course of Gnostic studies was radically renewed and forever changed. An Arab peasant, digging around a boulder in search of fertilizer for his fields, happened upon an old, rather large red earthenware jar. Hoping to have found a buried treasure, and with due hesitation and apprehension about the jinn who might attend such a hoard, he smashed the jar open. Inside he discovered no treasure and no genie, but instead books: more than a dozen old codices bound in golden brown leather.6 Little did he realize that he had found an extraordinary collection of ancient texts, manuscripts hidden a millennium and a half before -- probably by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius seeking to preserve them from a destruction ordered by the church as part of its violent expunging of heterodoxy and heresy.

How the Nag Hammadi manuscripts eventually passed into scholarly hands is a fascinating story too lengthy to relate here. But today, now over fifty years since being unearthed and more than two decades after final translation and publication in English as The Nag Hammadi Library,7 their importance has become astoundingly clear: These thirteen papyrus codices containing fifty-two sacred texts are representatives of the long lost "Gnostic Gospels", a last extant testament of what orthodox Christianity perceived to be its most dangerous and insidious challenge, the feared opponent that the Church Fathers had reviled under many different names, but most commonly as Gnosticism. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts has fundamentally revised our understanding of both Gnosticism and the early Christian church.

271 posted on 06/02/2010 7:06:19 PM PDT by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: TaraP
I think one of the things that you and any others (who look into this) need to understand is that this material "is Gnosticism" -- the very stuff that was determined to be heretical in Christianity and that the early church fought against to root out of what people understood (of Christianity from the Bible, God's authoritative Word).

What you're talking about are the actual cult materials here... the very writings of the cult group itself. That's important to understand that one is dealing with cult group materials here...

This is also the stuff of which Dan Brown and his Da Vinci Code, uses to weave into his "false history" that so many people seem to want to believe ... LOL ... LOL ...



Gnostic Christianity - What does the Bible say?

Let us look at what Gnosticism Christianity is before we figure out what the Bible has to say about the topic. First of all, Gnosticism is NOT Christianity. Gnostics proclaim God is both man and woman; Mary Magdalene is elevated to the status of the first and greatest Apostle, and is Jesus' wife and divine companion.

Gnosticism goes back centuries before the Christian era, possibly as early as the fifth Century, B.C. A belief system developed in ancient Syria and Persia that held salvation of the soul could be achieved by attaining a deep, mystic, and divine knowledge. According to their beliefs, humans are divided into a three-tiered hierarchy. Those possessing this knowledge, or gnosis, were a superior form of human being whose present and future destiny were not intertwined with those humans, that, for whatever reason, did not "know." Those humans too influenced by matter were doomed, and somewhere in between were those who did not yet possess the gnosis, but could yet be saved.

Rather than believe in the good of creation, Gnostics regarded matter and, in fact, the whole universe, to be a defilement of the deity -- the god of light/spirit. They taught that the ultimate end would be to overcome matter and be reunited with the parent spirit and realm of light/energy. This would not be achieved by submission to God's laws or through grace (God's forgiveness of man's sins) by acceptance of the living Christ -- the Son of God and Redeemer. Redemption or salvation would occur by awakening the sleeping gnosis (knowledge/wisdom) or "God within" -- through deep thoughts, reflection, and meditation thereby freeing the good spirit imprisoned within the evil physical body.

Gnosticism spread to Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, A.D. They presented a major challenge to orthodox Christianity. Can we say Gnostic Christianity is claimed within the pages of the Bible? Most Gnostic sects professed Christianity, but their belief sharply diverged from those of the majority of Christians in the early church. Those who did not believe the virgin birth, Jesus was the Son of God, Jesus was resurrected to Heaven, Jesus was the Creator, or that Jesus made atonement for our sins. I would say no, we couldn't, because the Bible clearly lays claim to the above statements.

Gnostics also believed that mankind was wholly evil and some sects even renounced marriage and procreation. They also believed in two gods, one evil god and one good god. Their teachings are believed to have influenced Saint Augustine in the development of his theology of "total depravity" of mankind and concept of God. For nine years St. Augustine adhered to Manichaeism, a Persian philosophy proclaimed in southern Babylonia (Iraq) that taught a doctrine of "total depravity" and the claim that they were the "elect." He then turned to skepticism.

Next, Augustine was attracted to the philosophy of Neoplatonism. He blended these beliefs with his later Gnostic Christian teachings. His teachings were in turn passed on to John Calvin in his extensive study of Augustine's writings. It is very easy to follow the trail of John Calvin's theology from the pagan religion of Mani in Babylonia to his writings in France and Geneva.

In 1945 an Egyptian peasant found 12 codices containing more than 50 Coptic Gnostic writings near Naj'Hammadi, Egypt. It has been determined that these codices were copied in the 4th century in the monasteries of the region. It is not known whether the monks were Gnostics, or were attracted by the nature of the writings, or had assembled the writings as a study in heresy. The evidence is clear that the Gnostics had a major influence in writing the Alexandrian manuscripts of the Egyptian region.

By the 2nd century, Christian Gnostic teachers mixed their mythology with Platonic metaphysical speculation and certain heretical Christian traditions. The most prominent Christian Gnostics were Valentinus and his disciple Ptolemaeus, who, during the 2nd century were influential members in the Roman Church. By the end of the 3rd century Gnosticism as a distinct movement seems to have largely disappeared.

273 posted on 06/02/2010 7:22:28 PM PDT by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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