Ehrman on Gnosticism
Bart Ehrman's 7 points of Gnosticism
--From After the New Testament, pp.144-145
1.The World
--matter=evil, spirit=good
2.The Divine Realm.
--The True God did not create this world but rather created divine offspring (aeons). One of these aeons. A catastrophe occurred whereby one of the aeons (Sophia---Shekinah in Kabbalah) becomes lost and one of her offspring--the Demiurge--created the evil world.
3.Humans
--Aeons trapped in this evil material world. The divine spark within must be released from this body.
4.Salvation
--Spark can only be released through knowing where it came from and its true nature (gnosis).
5.The Divine Redeemer
--Christ must come from outside (inside is evil). In many Docetist leanings--Christ only appeared to be human.
6.The Church
--"Normal" Christians who do good and have faith will enjoy some sort of heaven. Only the Gnostics, the true realizers will ever perfectly be free. [2 Churches, 2 layers of faith].
7.Ethics
--Many Gnostics were particularly harsh on the body. [But also a stronger sense of egalitarianism (in the spirit) between male and female--my addition to Ehrman].
Pure Causal Realm. Christianity needed (and failed) to incorporate this relative perspective. The orthodox and gnostic churches need not have gone the way it did, with both fighting one another.
The Gospel of Judas, I believe, has Judas be the awakener in order to fight the orthodox church, to really stick it to them in a very wounded and cruel way. Judas was the poster boy of in the orthodox gospels for evil and the kind of salvation that went with that interpretation. A salvation of the Cross. There is no Cross in Judas Gospel. So Judas becomes the Gnostic to overturn the orthodox order.
The orthodox--by this line--are so evil that their conception of evil is actually enlightened.
The orthodox would have given to a Nonduality, the true flesh, the world of becoming, the kingdom, the poor, freedom from religiosity (even Gnostic variety).
On this Good Friday here is the crucifixion of my faith. What I mourn almost as much as the murdered Nazarene.
Were you their when they crucified my Lord?
posted by CJ Smith @ 8:44 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Erhman's ham-fisted definition of Gnosticism is nowhere supported by Gnostic texts themselves; only by centuries-later propagandists whom he elsewhere refutes.
1.The World
--matter=evil, spirit=good
Gnosticism says; SYSTEM problematic, spirit perfect
2.The Divine Realm.
--The True God did not create this world
Gnosticism says; God does in fact create everything in the universe, but this is later organized by self-interested forces, allowing evil to enter into the world.
3.Humans
--Aeons trapped in this evil material world. The divine spark within must be released from this body.
Gnosticism says; not released from the body, but released from ignorance .
4 is fine, btw
5.The Divine Redeemer
--Christ must come from outside (inside is evil).
Gnosticism says: Christ is within. Immanent Pneumatology is one of THE defining characteristics of Gnosticism (cf Thomas, "split a piece of wood and you will find me there")
6. More or less, but this is a snotty way to put it.
7.Ethics
--Many Gnostics were particularly harsh on the body.
Yet others were condemned by the SAME propagandists as being libertines.
Ehrman knows better, but he keeps repeating this erroneous claptrap and tries to pass it off as scholarship. We're all getting bored of it.
Jordan,
Thanks for the response.
Certainly any summary is in the end too simplistic.
I think it is true to say there is a strain of not only everything is formed by self-interested forces and ignorance is the problem to these forces are evil.
Thomas: The world is a carcass.
But I agree with you it is ambiguous: i.e. the degree to which it is ignorance, being conditioned that is evil or the locus of such ignorance (matter) itself is evil, or at least making the ignorance far more difficult to overcome.
I actually don't consider Thomas Gnostic but rather Nondual. As in the line the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth but they realize it not.
In other words, using Eastern terminology, I still see (most forms of) Gnosticism as relative truth. Very much akin to Theravadin Buddhism, for example. One can awaken out of the flux-hell and be peaceful and free of the trauma of this all, but the desire to be in it seems lacking.
Gnosticism (as in Gospel of Judas say) even after Gnosis tends to see the manifest as just conditions being manipulated.
A Nondual perspective would say the conditions are, borrowing a Tibetan Buddhist line, the radiances.
Peace bro.
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