Hermann Detering: Gnostic Interpretation of the Exodus and the Beginnings of the Joshua/Jesus Cult
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2017 2:39 pm
Investigating the roots of western civilization (ye olde BC&H forum of IIDB lives on...)
https://earlywritings.com/forum/
summary in painful and over-oversimplified shortnessneilgodfrey wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2017 2:39 pm I returned here expecting to catch up on some discussion on Hermann Detering's new essay on what looks like a newish thesis on Christian origins but am surprised to see nothing. Surely I'm not the only one to have noticed....
Starting with the Gnostic interpretation of the Exodus motive and the question of its religio-historical origin, we arrived at the pivotal importance of the image of the „the further shore“ as a metaphor for transcendence, that plays an significant part in Indian/Buddhist spirituality. The question of where the two lines – Jewish tradition and Hebrew Bible on one hand, Buddhist or Indian spirituality on the other – converge, led us to the Therapeutae, about whom Philo of Alexandria writes in his work De Vita Contemplativa.
Having made to look plausible [Having looked at the plausibility of(?)] a Buddhist origin of the Therapeutae, it was possible to show that their main mystery is based on an interpretation of the Exodus motive that goes back to Buddhist sources. At the same time, that interpretation contains the germ of the Christian sacrament of baptism. Early Christian gnostics like Perates and Naassenes transferred onto Moses‘ successor Josua what the Therapeutae, more deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, preserved for Moses himself. The old Mosaism was meant to be surpassed by the new, Gnostic-Christian Josuanism. Jesus/Josua became the counterpart of Moses.
In this light, the Christian redeemer Josua/Jesus is nothing more than – a result of Jewish-Buddhist exegesis of the Old Testament! The „historical“ jesus, i.e. Jesus of Nazareth, was hypostasized from the Josua of the Old Testament in the course of the second century.
http://vridar.org/2017/10/17/the-gnosti ... ment-82959