What has ended up in our hands today has been a Roman edited version of the Letters of the original Gnostic Paul with the Roman forgeries and the Roman edited Gnostic forgeries written by Paul’s spiritual descendants.
Besides these groups there were also flourishing Gnostic Jesus-movements. Within Judaism there had been a trend towards Gnosticism in the pre-Christian period and it took many forms. Generally, Gnostics held that there was a Great Invisible Spirit, also known as The Father. From the Father there had emanated a divine being, The Mother. She had other names too. From The Mother came The Child or the Son or the Only-Begotten. However, The Mother had made a cosmic error. Without permission from the Great Invisible Spirit, she had given rise to a deformed divinity, known as Yaldaba’oth (as well as other names).
This warped divinity had then created the world and its inhabitants, and creation was stranded in a morass of evil. Humans still retained a spark of divinity, but they were impotent. They needed to be redeemed.
For the Christian Gnostics, Jesus was the Only-Begotten Son, who came into the world to teach gnosis or the fullest experience of knowledge of the divinity.
After all, someone believed in a Mother and a Demiurge, even if not named polemically as "Mary" and "Carpenter"!.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
..We can conjecture that, after the death of Jesus ... small Jesus-movement groups formed in Palestine. For them Jesus had been a holy man, a Zaddik, or Just One in Jewish tradition...
These Palestinian groups had their separate leaders. There was the blood-brother of Jesus, James, who was also known as James the Zaddik. His Jesus-movement resided in Jerusalem and its surrounds and he attempted to revive the Temple worship. Then there was Peter, probably ruling a centre up in Antioch, who led a Jesus movement that saw Jesus specifically as a New Moses, come to deliver his people. Another leader was Stephen (mentioned only in the Acts of the Apostles), over on the Palestinian coast. His Jesus movement was less accommodating to the Jews and announced that, with the coming of Jesus, the need for Temple worship was over1. (Crotty, 1996) ...
Gnostic Jesus-movement groups
Besides these groups there were also flourishing Gnostic Jesus-movements. Within Judaism there had been a trend towards Gnosticism in the pre-Christian period2 and it took many forms. Generally, Gnostics held that there was a Great Invisible Spirit, also known as The Father. From the Father there had emanated a divine being, The Mother. She had other names too. From The Mother came The Child or the Son or the Only-Begotten. However, The Mother had made a cosmic error. Without permission from the Great Invisible Spirit, she had given rise to a deformed divinity, known as Yaldaba’oth (as well as other names).
This warped divinity had then created the world and its inhabitants, and creation was stranded in a morass of evil. Humans still retained a spark of divinity, but they were impotent. They needed to be redeemed.
For the Christian Gnostics, Jesus was the Only-Begotten Son, who came into the world to teach gnosis or the fullest experience of knowledge of the divinity. Humans needed to submit to this gnosis and realise their part in the Gnostic history. The Gnostic Jesus was a Divine Teacher, completely divine. He might have taken on the trappings of Flesh and looked like a human, but he was never human. He could not be born and he could not die. (Franzman, 2001, 2011)
The Christian Gnostics produced a library of complex Discourses, Treatises and Poems based on their portrayal of the coming of the divine Jesus to redeem needy humanity from the forces of Yaldaba’oth. They had a number of leaders. Later, we know of Marcion and Valentinus in the second century. But these looked back to yet earlier nominated successors of the Divine Jesus. They were numerous: Mary Magdalene, Thomas, John, Philip, James.
These particular Jesus movements from Palestine began to stretch around the Mediterranean. But there was another most important Jesus-movement. It would become historically the dominant one. It was Roman Christianity.
1 That seems to be either 'putting the cart before the horse', or a 'prophecy' inserted retrospectively.
2 That would seem likely, and the pre-christian period may extend well into the 2nd century or beyond (even up to and into the time of Constantine).
Who established Christianity in Rome? We may never know; it was not Peter nor Paul...
During the time of the emperor Claudius (ruled 41 to 54 CE), the Jesus-movement groups were accused of causing dissension among the Jews3. They were exiled. When they returned to Rome after the death of Claudius in 54 CE, they would have found that the Roman Jesus-movement people they had left behind3 had become mainly gentile. They had cut their moorings with the synagogues and moved into house-churches or ekklesiae...
What is important is that the Jesus tradition that was originally brought back to Rome and established in the synagogues was the Peter tradition4. Peter was adamantly portrayed as the successor to Jesus. In the latter part of the second century Christians would erect a memorial (tropaion, in Greek) to Peter4 in a cemetery on the Vatican Hill. The tropaion would eventually become part of the foundation of Constantine’s first St Peter’s.
An extensive necropolis was uncovered in 1939 under St Peter’s. It had been established on the Vatican Hill in the mid-second CE and survived to the early fourth century CE. Today, the main street of the excavated necropolis runs under the length of the nave of St Peter’s, with the tropaion under the High Altar. It is a rather insignificant shrine, set into a wall, with two small pillars and a niche, in that part of the necropolis used for the burial of the poor.
In the fourth century CE, Constantine would have gone to extraordinary lengths to incorporate this tropaion as the focus of St Peter’s ...
3 That is pure speculation. There is no reference to Jesus-movement groups then, anywhere. There is only the Seutonius and Tacitus early 2nd-C references to Chrestus, Christians, and Chrestians.
4 These are bare assertions
.. Gradually Roman thinking had developed: Peter was believed by some in Palestine to be the successor of Jesus; this belief had taken root in Rome; the Roman Christians could not imagine that, if Peter was the successor of Jesus, he would not have founded the Church in Rome, the centre of the world. Therefore, he must have come to Rome, died there and was buried there.
Yes, Roman thinking had developed, but when?? After 'Rome' had been re-established in the east? First in Nicomeida, and then Constantinople?
Slowly the Jesus-Traditions were reworked with [an] ideology of Isaac... Nine treatises were constructed dealing with sections of the Jesus-Tradition, one of which was very long and lived its own life; the others were short.
The Context of the gospel of Mark 1:2-13
Jesus, the New Isaac, is revealed as the Messiah of Israel and the Gentiles 1:14-10:52
Jesus in Jerusalem 11:1-12:44
The Eschatological Sermon 13:1-37
The Messiah is anointed and the New Isaac celebrates his Last Meal: 14:1-31
The Prayer in Gethsemane 14:32-42
The Trials of Jesus 14:43-15:15
The Crucifixion, Death and Burial of Jesus 15:16-47
he Finding of the Empty Tomb 16:1-8
At some time in the second century CE a Christian editor put these expanding Traditions into good Greek, worked out a credible chronology and topography and edited out discrepancies and doublets. The end result was the Gospel of Mark, the Roman Christian Gospel.
Rome moves to the East
< . . snip . . >
In the north of the Mediterranean there were drastic changes. In a Roman world, Matthew’s gospel intended to translate the Roman Tradition for the use of those around Antioch, where the Peter Tradition had originally arisen. The Gospel of Mark, the official gospel of the Roman Christians, was expanded by Sayings from the Jesus Tradition, well known in Palestinian circles. This became the Gospel of Matthew.
In the northern Mediterranean, Luke’s gospel took its rise for Roman Christian usage in that area. It combined the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew’s Sayings section (and Luke had access to the more original Jesus Tradition too).
Both Matthew and Luke, like their predecessor Mark, acclaimed Peter as the successor of Jesus. (By this time, it is clear that we know little of any ‘authors’.) Luke’s revitalised story of Peter’s succession did not go unchallenged. Some of the northern Mediterranean churches had been established by Paul.
Particularly this -
Paul in fact was a Gnostic, who had undergone his own revelation of the divine Jesus [or maybe just a revelation of a more nebulous divine Christ], and he founded his churches along the south of Greece and Western Asia Minor and kept contact with his followers by Gnostic Letters. The Gnostic- Jesus movement communities. ...
... Paul’s Letters thereupon became a minefield. An official collection of Letters had large Roman insertions or corrections made in them, sometimes making Paul’s logic untenable. Titus and 1-2 Timothy were forgeries by later Roman Christians to enforce Roman Christian practice; Ephesians and Colossians were forgeries written by obstinate Gnostics trying to uphold the thought of the now deceased Paul. What has ended up in our hands today has been a Roman edited version of the Letters of the original Gnostic Paul with the Roman forgeries and the Roman edited Gnostic forgeries written by Paul’s spiritual descendants.
There is more. An author, trying to extend the narrative thread of Luke’s Gospel, wrote the Acts of the Apostles. It admitted the part played by the Apostles Peter, James and John as in Mark, Matthew and Luke. But the eventual successor of Jesus and the one who travelled to Rome was said to be Paul (Peter simply went to ‘another place’). Luke and Acts were subsequently artificially combined as two volumes of the one work and long attributed to ‘Luke’, despite the dissonance between them. .
< . snip . > [Re-asserts Peter and James the Zaddik]
The third founder is more complex. He was ‘John’, but early Christianity knew many Johns. Significantly, there was John of Patmos who went from his island home as a charismatic Christian announcing the End of Times in apocalyptic terms. In Western Asia Minor, now western Turkey, he discovered largely Gnostic communities, some founded by Paul and his emissaries, and some who had migrated from the Palestinian area because of opposition from the Jews and other Jesus movements. John was acclaimed by these communities.
Focussing now on Western Asia Minor, we conjecture that these early Gnostic communities in Western Asia Minor had brought with them from Palestine complex Gnostic Christian writings. There was the Gnostic 'Book of Seven Signs', a number of Gnostic-Jesus Treatises and sometimes extensive Gnostic-Jesus Discourses. Slowly these were amalgamated and the name of ‘John’ was superimposed in honour of the great leader from Patmos. This would have been the first edition of the Gospel of John. There was also an apocalyptic book, the Book of Revelation, which gathered apocalyptic Discourses under the name of the same John. (Crotty, 2012)
.. Roman Christianity then seriously re-edited the Gospel of John and the Divine Gnostic-Jesus became a human who was also divine; Peter was reinstated as the successor of Jesus. They re-edited the Book of Revelation and made sure that it pointed to a Last Day whose coming could be measured. The author of the gospel and the Book of Revelation was therefore named after John of Patmos, the revered one of the area, now long deceased. ‘John’ was responsible for founding Christianity in the vast area.
But within the Roman Jesus Tradition an accommodation was made regarding the founders: Peter, James of Jerusalem and John of Patmos. Gnostic followers claimed that he was the real successor to Jesus and there were Gnostic communities in Rome itself. The Roman Tradition as in Mark claimed that there had been Twelve Apostles nominated by Jesus in his lifetime. The leader was Peter. Two other Apostles were of a higher status than the others: the two brothers, James of Zebedee and John of Zebedee. Thus the final Roman Tradition denied James the Zaddik and John of Patmos a place in the Twelve and created two brothers of the same names in their place. Zebedee was invented as a father of the two.
So it was that the Roman gospel was Mark. It had been reapplied to Roman Christian communities beyond the Roman aegis. Paul’s Letters were Gnostic in their teaching and practice. They were rewritten and defused by the Romans. John’s Gospel was Gnostic; it was edited to become a Roman gospel. The Acts of the Apostles was added to Luke and its message about the priority of Paul languished. Paul had become a loyal Roman Christian apostle. The Book of Revelation was Romanised and lost its spiritual immediacy.
The text of the Acts of the Apostles had at one time showed that indeed Peter, James and John had ruled the Church but they had acknowledged Paul as the new visionary and handed over their authority to him. Later, the Roman Church would accept the Acts but tone down the position of Peter, James the Zaddik and John; they had not handed over leadership in the Church to Paul, they had simply recognised Paul’s ministry as valid.
