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To: Right Wing Professor
I just checked and found the list of gnostic writings. They are not part of the Pseudepigraphas (which are essentially Jewish) - thus I have not read them.

Based on these two summaries of the theology, they would run counter to my faith:

Gnostics, Gnostic Gospels, & Gnosticism

A one-sentence description of Gnosticism: a religion that differentiates the evil god of this world (who is identified with the god of the Old Testament) from a higher more abstract God revealed by Jesus Christ, a religion that regards this world as the creation of a series of evil archons/powers who wish to keep the human soul trapped in an evil physical body, a religion that preaches a hidden wisdom or knowledge only to a select group as necessary for salvation or escape from this world.

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Gnosticism

A collective name for a large number of greatly-varying and pantheistic-idealistic sects, which flourished from some time before the Christian Era down to the fifth century, and which, while borrowing the phraseology and some of the tenets of the chief religions of the day, and especially of Christianity, held matter to be a deterioration of spirit, and the whole universe a depravation of the Deity, and taught the ultimate end of all being to be the overcoming of the grossness of matter and the return to the Parent-Spirit, which return they held to be inaugurated and facilitated by the appearance of some God-sent Saviour.

I should explain my point about the Fall a little further.

When Genesis speaks of Adam being specially made, the word neshama is used to describe the breath of God which made Adam a living soul. The soul of the animals in Genesis 1 (including homo sapiens on earth in my view) was called the nephesh. We have both of these and also the ruach which I think of as the pivot, deciding whether to be God-centered (neshamah) or carnally-centered (nephesh.) The differences are more thoroughly discussed on this thread.

So when Adam, in the Garden of Eden paradise in eternity, disobeyed - he was banished to the physical realm so that he would die. (Genesis 3:22-24)

The essence of Adam was his neshamah, and thus death entered the world through Adam. And so creation anxiously waits for the manifestation of the sons of God (Romans 8:19-22)

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

(For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law.

Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come. – Romans 5:12-14


2,185 posted on 08/22/2003 2:14:02 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
I wasn't suggesting they were consistent with orthodox Christianity; on the other hand, it would be unwise to go on what's said in the Catholic Encyclopedia, for example. It was written in 1912, and we knew nothing about the gnostics, except what their enemies wrote about them, until 1947, when a library of their writings was found at Nag Hammadi. The theology is obviously un-Christian; but the pre-fall human as spiritual, locked into a physical body by the fall, struck me as a very Gnostic idea. The Gnostics took it a step further by making the godhead itself dualist.

There is still a living gnostic sect, curiously enough - the Mandaeans of southern Iran. They've been heavily persecuted by the Islamic government, with little attention from the rest of the world.

2,188 posted on 08/22/2003 2:35:36 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor
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