Chrestians/Christians?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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mlinssen
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by mlinssen »

dbz wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 11:07 am
GakuseiDon wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 12:52 am [T]he GoP author would have called the "orthodox" Christians of his time as "Chrestians"?
  • There are multiple GoP authors over multiple periods!
  • True Paul is related to *Ev.
mlinssen wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 9:42 pm Plutarch certainly is a source of inspiration and text for the Churchians, but not Thomas or *Ev.
Is *Ev. oriented in a monistic direction? Is True Paul monistic and or Plutarchian?
[04:50] What Middle-Platonism does decisively .. is to push from dualism in a monistic direction...
Lecture #18 by Arthur Holmes per the course, "A History of Philosophy" at Wheaton College, Illinois.
"A History of Philosophy | 18 Middle and Neo-Platonism". YouTube. @time:00:04:50.
dbz wrote: Sat May 20, 2023 5:40 am
mlinssen wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 11:49 pm Thomas isn't concerned with anything else but Us, We, You: what is our essence, who are we, what makes us, what drives us? (Radical non duality) is a fine fit as it also doesn't care about anything but ouselves
[Thomas] teaches what today is known as radical non-duality, only 2 millennia earlier.
--"Martijn Linssen | Leiden University". Academia.edu.
Nonduality and interconnectedness (monism)

According to Espín and Nickoloff, referring to monism, "nondualism" is the thought in some Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist schools, which, generally speaking, "teaches that the multiplicity of the universe is reducible to one essential reality." The idea of nondualism as monism is typically contrasted with dualism, with dualism defined as the view that the universe and the nature of existence consists of two realities, such as the God and the world, or as God and Devil, or as mind and matter, and so on. In Advaita Vedanta, nonduality refers to monism, the nonduality of Atman and Brahman.

In a more general sense, nonduality refers to "the interconnectedness of everything which is dependent upon the nondual One, Transcendent Reality," "the singular wholeness of existence that suggests that the personal self is an illusion."
"Nondualism § Nonduality and interconnectedness (monism)". Wikipedia. retrieved 26 April 2023.
That

Or,

Separation is the root of all seeking. As tiny children there is simply being. There is no one. Life happens. Regardless of whether a child cries or seems hungry, there is just pure being. And then a moment comes when that tiny being identifies itself and becomes a separate person. At that moment of separation, there is a contraction back into the sense of being limited in the body. “My boundary is this skin, and everything else is separate”. From that moment on there is seeking, and a sense of something lost. ‘Being everything’ is lost in that moment. And being a separate person, an entity looking for everything, begins. From that moment on there is only seeking — until there isn’t.

And that seeking is endless. People we see in the world — wanting to be rich, to have lots of lovers, to have power or whatever they want — all desire is the longing to come home. And home is wholeness, home is being everything, which is our origin.

https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2016/04/22 ... s-is-this/
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by dbz »

[A]ll desire is the longing to come home. And home is wholeness, home is being everything, which is our origin.
"tony parsons ~ bottomless bowl of separation". YouTube. @time:00:01:43
Cf. Dave Pollard (22 April 2016). "All There Is, Is This". how to save the world. a chronicle of civilization's collapse, creative works and essays on our culture. A trail of crumbs, runes and exclamations along my path in search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.
Fish are born in water; man is born in Tao.

If fish, born in water, seek the deep shadow of pond and pool—all their needs are satisfied. If man, born in Tao, sinks into the deep shadow of non-action—to forget aggression and concern—he lacks nothing; his life is secure.

All the fish needs is to get lost in water. All a man needs is to get lost in Tao.
--Merton, Thomas (1965). The way of Chuang Tzu. Allen & Unwin, London. ISBN 0-04-299004-1
[The] article inspired me to write him a note about radical non-duality, just because… well, I don’t really know. Perhaps just to get clear about the distinction between his way of seeing not-self and mine.

After I wrote it, I realized it was probably the most succinct and, in a way, the most personal and least bloodless summarizing of the admittedly rather bloodless message of radical non-duality that I’d come up with.
--Pollard, Dave (6 May 2023). "Radical Non-Duality: In a Nutshell". how to save the world.
LOL, my ribs hurt.
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by mlinssen »

Check. There's no need for anything, all is perfect. No reason to think, judge, act, do - there is only bliss...

...in enlightenment.
To get there, a lot of toiling is needed. If the right kind, mind you ;-)
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by dbz »

mlinssen wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 1:44 pm There's no need for anything, all is perfect. No reason to think, judge, act, do - there is only bliss...

...in enlightenment.
  • I assume this thought was replicated in *Ev.
How well do the reconstructions of *Ev. maintain the fidelity of this thought as it originally occurred, or is it lost?
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Re: From Thomas to the Patristics

Post by mlinssen »

dbz wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 7:23 pm
mlinssen wrote: Tue May 23, 2023 1:44 pm There's no need for anything, all is perfect. No reason to think, judge, act, do - there is only bliss...

...in enlightenment.
  • I assume this thought was replicated in *Ev.
How well do the reconstructions of *Ev. maintain the fidelity of this thought as it originally occurred, or is it lost?
No, that's where the catch is
I am really not making any of this up, it is where the text leads me - but it is a story filled with dramatic irony as every single story that got written from Thomas up to the Patristics had the opposite effect of what it was intended to convey

A. The Patristics with all their refutations and apologetics evidently make clear that - under the rule of good wine needs no bush - everything they claim is a lie:
1. their rejection of Gnostics for centuries makes abundantly clear that it was the Patristics who were the heretics to the original movement of the "Gnostics" which now have a proper name: Chrestians.
2. All their arguing for pseudo-prophecies being fulfilled make clear that they in fact are pseudo-prophecies;
3. Their silly arguing for the cross ad nauseam makes clear that there never was a cross, only a stake (stauros); there was no piercing of hands and feet at all, let alone that such is the proper Tanakh translation: Justin even uses the depiction of a "staurogram" in order to make a case for it, with his "the nose protruding"

B. The letters and gospels evidently are placed in the wrong order:
1. The gospels never speak of a dead IS yet the letters speak of a living one next to their dead XS
2. They explain all of the gospels yet the gospels explain none of the letters - and all the material that they share is either present in Thomas or triggered via it
3. The Christology, theology and all of the crooked Christian thought only gets mansplained in the letters

C. *Ev contained no Judaism at all, only anti-Judaism; hence the forced fusion of Chrestianity with Judaism in the gospels, in order to undo the damage - and thence the dramatic outcome of that as every single Judaic on the face of this earth either rejects or ignores all of Christianity. And then there are Matthew 2:18 and the real Jeremiah behind it, and so on.
*Ev was the gospel of Chrestianity, a spiritual movement without a god, let alone God, where the Father was the highest possible entity - although I do suspect that the Egyptian Amun gets mentioned in the two masters. It wasn't about worship primarily, it was also in itself opposed to Judaism that indeed was visible on the outside - as it still is today - via noticeable signs of belonging to Judaism. I am pretty sure that Chrestians wore no signs at all, save for the Ixthus, the fish: it was a very modest movement on the outlook, a bit of a secret society in that aspect only.
Baptism in the name of the father, son and spirit-that-is-pure was their main ritual during which people could receive said spirit - and whether that was a controlled or spontaneous exercise is jard to tell, although Philip does state that those who falsely claim the name Chrestian as they did not receive the spirit were "cut", and the verb gets mainly if not solely used in the context of animal sacrifice in the Tanakh. And please do realise that almost all Coptic texts that we have are of a religious nature

D. John - the real and unredacted John - preceded that, and was the first to take Thomas into a narrative. But he also doesn't understand Thomas in its psychological self-salvation context, he turns the Father into a kind of deity, a being of light from where a person named IS was issued. Whereas IS is merely a concept, literally implying that via logion 28 where:

28 IS said: I stood to my feet in the middle of the World and I revealed outward to them in Flesh. I fell to them all being drunk; I did not fall to anyone in them who was thirsting, and my Soul gave pain upon the children of the humans; blind persons they are in their heart/mind, and they see not: they have come to the World they empty, they seek also to cause them come forth in the World they empty. Anyway now they are being drunk; Whenever if they should cast off their wine Then they will make be Conceive afterwards.

The World is an Image only, a concept of how we view the real world: it is our pleasant little dollhouse with just enough "bad news" in it so we can assume that it is a proper projection of it - and likewise for the house, the collection of mental models of ourself - and it must be destroyed, burned, and most certainly not recreated. How does IS stand in the World? I don't know, but the next logion opposes flesh to Spirit so it is evident that IS is Spirit, and we see an echo of that thought in John and Mark where the Spirit in the form of a dove descends INTO IS:

John 1:12 ὅσοι (As many as) δὲ (however) ἔλαβον (received) αὐτόν (Him), ἔδωκεν (He gave) αὐτοῖς (to them) ἐξουσίαν (authority) τέκνα (children) Θεοῦ (of God) γενέσθαι (to be), τοῖς (to those) πιστεύουσιν (believing) εἰς (in) τὸ (the) ὄνομα (name) αὐτοῦ (of Him), 13 οἳ (who) οὐκ (not) ἐξ (of) αἱμάτων (blood), οὐδὲ (nor) ἐκ (of) θελήματος (will) σαρκὸς (of flesh), οὐδὲ (nor) ἐκ (of) θελήματος (will) ἀνδρὸς (of man), ἀλλ’ (but) ἐκ (of) Θεοῦ (God) ἐγεννήθησαν (were born).

γεννάω

1.11), of the father, to beget, engender, Aesch., Soph.; rarely of the mother, to bring forth, Aesch.; οἱ γεννήσαντες the parents, Xen.; τὸ γεννώμενον the child, Hdt.:—like φύω 1. 2, as κἂν σῶμα γεννήσηι μέγα even if he grow, get a large body, i. e. if he be of giant frame, Soph.
2.metaph. to produce, Plat.

Naturally, evidently and blatantly obviously this said not God in *Ev, but father - but the dumb Romans only used their Plutarch and weren't very apt at Greek

E. And then in the end we have Thomas, completely misunderstood by most if not all, who nonetheless explicitly points inwards for salavation, for the "location" of the kingdom, and who fiercely rejects any and all Judaism - and as such gets rejected as Quelle even though he is exactly as predicted by the Germans of the 19th century. He also contains none of the Double Tradition material which LukeMatthew shares and made up from scratch, yet bovine biblical academic is determined to find a Q that contains it all and Kloppenborg is the worst advocate ever as he takes everything literally, writing tons of pages on agriculture in Palestine and all that nonsense

- So Thomas writes a text that aims to push the reader to enlightenment, free from his Ego and Self - and it rejects religion, authority and leadership outright. It is fiercely anti-Judaic and rejects and ridicules it in fantastic ways
- Then along comes John and turns the text straight into a text that revers the father and makes IS into a medium of some kind. He preserves the anti-Judaism and anti-Judeanism but for some strange reason leaves out all of the logia themselves - and I do have very important homework to do there, as *Ev contains 57 of them and the logical order would be John, Thomas, *Ev. Which perhaps is the case, but then Thomas drops the entire narrative, miracles and whatnot. And gone is the self-reflection and self-salvation
- *Ev takes John and puts back in the logia, and adds even more anti-Judaism with his Transfiguration (where Moses - the Law - and Elijah - the Prophets - get superseded) and his wineskin and patch (where the fresh movement insists on remaining separate from the old Judaism, something that the gospels, letters and Patristics all agree to). Is it he who introduces the miracles, or John? John seems to have modest ones only such as turning water into wine which is very Hellenistic - yet gone is the medium to self-salvation and what we find in *Ev is an idol, something of a god. His gospel ends with the brutal death of IS at the instigation of the Judaics and carried out by the Roman rulers, leaving an outraged audience - hellbent on revenge on both
- Mark turns everything around and mitigates the anti-Judaism as much as he can (which ain't much really) and introduces Judaism as very roots to Chrestianity, thereby creating Christianity. He resurrects IS so one of his pseudo-prophecies can come true, and neglects to turn any of that into any other advantage. And gone is the anti-Judaism, and a true religion gets created
- Matthew takes *Ev and redacts it into Luke while writing his own on the side, making up from scratch what needs to be added, likewise also incorporating stories that had evolved since *Ev / Mark. Luke gets sent an entirely different message and its audience if poverised, told to turn the other cheeck, and so on: what we see there is an enemy of the state that gets fed the right and proper propaganda according to that very same state.
- The Patristics make propaganda for Mark ff as best as they can, and while the gospels are blissfully unaware of any Judaics following IS or Christianity we already find the later letters arguing against that, and the Patristics have no other choice than to talk their way out of the mess that Mark put them in: Christianity is entirely different from Judaism, and as a result it is nothing but presenting a pseudo-Messiah predicted via and fullfiling pseudo-prophecies, thereby having created a forn of pseudo-Judaism that has never attracted any Judaic at all whatsoever - so they turn to the initial anti-Judaism of Thomas and reject Judaism, even supersede it. And while Thomas gets his anti-Judaism that was just a minor part of his main story, which was all about anti-establishment / anti-authority / anti-religion and all in favour of thinking for oneself, via oneself, by oneself: seeking the kingdom within and certainly not OUTSIDE
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The backdoors to the Commentary

Post by mlinssen »

And surely I could make life easy on me and howl along with the mundane and mediocre wolves of biblical academic, asserting that Thomas really is about any Jesus, and any xtianity - but it's not, and the evidence leads me there, the text dictates it

Go through the way too long Commentary, 600+ pages for only half of Thomas, but do read ONLY the chapters 'Meaning' and 'Relation to previous logia' and on average it's half a page per logion alone, 25+ in total - and a fairly consistent picture arises of being split / separated at infancy, struggling with two of you at the same time. You may miss out on vital explanations such as ⲕⲟⲥⲙⲟⲥ having 'world' as only very last translation, and the primary one of it being 'order' with the secondary being 'decoration'.
I'm at logion 68 as we speak, and I aim to finalise in 2025, preferably 2024. It is the single most important thing that needs to be done and the full Commentary will unleash a giant backlash of new Thomas research, unparalleled even by what we've seen in the previous decades. Most importantly, it will reveal "the true Jesus" although it is an elite text meant for the top of Maslow's pyramid alone, and certainly not a mundane mainstream mass-product like Christianity

Go through the way too long Commentary, 600+ pages for only half of Thomas, but do search for 'word on the Greek' and you'll locate ALL the Greek copies for Thomas, which abundantly shed light on the mistranslation and misinterpretation of the Attridges, Gathercoles and Plisches - and demonstrate that besides the bad knowledge of Coptic that April has, she doesn't have a clue about Greek, translating her unemended Greek as if it were fully emended. On the upside, her book does contain incredible amounts of useful parallels and references, and naturally it is the analysis there that counts and the conclusion that is to be discsrded - although much of her text automatically leads to the latter

Go through the way too long Translation, 260+ pages for all of Thomas with less than half a page in total on its interpretation, but do work your way through the English-Coptic Concordance and observe the juxtapostion of Coptic and Greek loanwords, the perfect synchrony between verbs and nouns in Coptic and their English translation, the majestic completeness of the Concordance that contains every single word in the text - unprecedented and unparalleled, and unsurpassable as that is

It is not like my material is hard to come by - it's free for everyone.
It is not like my material is unsubstantiated - there is hardly anything in it that is an opinion, and if so I actually admit it.
It is not like my substantiation leads you to footnotes that lead to other writings by other people, forcing you down dark alleys in order to chase the evidence - everything is named and linked and leads to publicly and freely accesible sources at the click of a mouse.
It is not like my material is scant or lightly touches the topics - there is over 3,500 pages of it, neatly catalogued and commented via my Publication List, and the vast majority of that is my own.
It is not like my material is protected in any way - all PDF's contain full-blown Unicode for everything and none is copy-protected

Do I need to ram it down your throasts? No, because anyone who is interested will take a look at it, and tens of thousands already have done so - and it is obvious that almost all among this forum's regulars are interested in their own solution alone, which is fine.
I only wish that more people would produce quality research the way that I do - but I understand that everyone, like me, acts according to the best of their (cap)abilities
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by davidmartin »

John - the real and unredacted John - preceded that, and was the first to take Thomas into a narrative. But he also doesn't understand Thomas in its psychological self-salvation context, he turns the Father into a kind of deity, a being of light from where a person named IS was issued.
depends how John is read!!
is possible to read 'the Father' as a kind of dual symbol
in 1 aspect the Father is the male form of the spirit, in other words God is spiritualised
in 2 aspect the son becomes the Father in a localised sense, the offspring returning to oneness becoming the image of it's source
So the deity of unredacted John could be the same as the divinity in Thomas and the Odes (and even the Great Revelation knows this riddle)
All this stuff is the mystic symbolism of the phase 1 movement, what you call Chrestians

It's the redacted John that equates the Father with a religious God concept and the son with the logos
The original mystery got taken out of context, but it's still there. Maybe some Christians get it to this day. I sure like to think so but the sweaty bulk of bible lunatics certainly don't

Obviously I'm trying to draw together Thomas, unredacted John and the Odes together to try to piece together an original group.. maybe that attempt will flunk. I'm seeing the Gnostics proper coming along later and being a distinct group and they introduce innovations, just like Paul and orthodoxy introduced innovations
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by mlinssen »

davidmartin wrote: Wed May 24, 2023 1:18 am
John - the real and unredacted John - preceded that, and was the first to take Thomas into a narrative. But he also doesn't understand Thomas in its psychological self-salvation context, he turns the Father into a kind of deity, a being of light from where a person named IS was issued.
depends how John is read!!
is possible to read 'the Father' as a kind of dual symbol
in 1 aspect the Father is the male form of the spirit, in other words God is spiritualised
in 2 aspect the son becomes the Father in a localised sense, the offspring returning to oneness becoming the image of it's source
So the deity of unredacted John could be the same as the divinity in Thomas and the Odes (and even the Great Revelation knows this riddle)
All this stuff is the mystic symbolism of the phase 1 movement, what you call Chrestians

It's the redacted John that equates the Father with a religious God concept and the son with the logos
The original mystery got taken out of context, but it's still there. Maybe some Christians get it to this day. I sure like to think so but the sweaty bulk of bible lunatics certainly don't

Obviously I'm trying to draw together Thomas, unredacted John and the Odes together to try to piece together an original group.. maybe that attempt will flunk. I'm seeing the Gnostics proper coming along later and being a distinct group and they introduce innovations, just like Paul and orthodoxy introduced innovations
Granted, tnx david. Yes, John really does have two Fathers that way

What kind of innovations do the "Gnostics proper" introduce?
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by dbz »

davidmartin wrote: Wed May 24, 2023 1:18 am All this stuff is the mystic symbolism of the phase 1 movement, what you call Chrestians

[...]

Obviously I'm trying to draw together Thomas, unredacted John and the Odes together to try to piece together an original group..
What kind of innovations do the "Gnostics proper" introduce?

Who becomes a martyr while labeled a Christian?
[47:10] The gnostics [i.e. Chrestian proto-orthodox Christians] were dying in that amphitheater as bravely as members of his own congregation . . . Irenaeus believed that true Christianity was his Christianity [i.e. pseudo-orthodox Christianity]—he thought that the Gnostics were holy anarchists. He wanted to show the world an organized and universal Church, not a secret sect. [47:51]
"TESTAMENT with John Romer. Part 4 - Gospel Truth?". YouTube.
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Re: Chrestians/Christians?

Post by dbz »

StephenGoranson wrote: Fri May 05, 2023 10:23 am [D]o these "two" [i.e. Chrestians/Christians] have distinct
beliefs
practices
myths
rituals
scriptures
histories...?
  • beliefs == yes
  • practices == yes
  • myths == yes
  • rituals == yes
  • scriptures == yes
  • histories == yes
I propose the following terminology:
  • inferior gnosis Chrestian == water "baptism" ritual == colloquially labelled Chrestian
  • superior gnosis Chrestian == scented-oil anointing "chrism/myróchristos" ritual [n.b. predicated on prior baptism ritual] == colloquially labelled Christian
  • spiritual enlightenment gnosis Chrestian == to be reborn in the flesh with the old flesh but with a new spirit state of being. Symbolized by marriage/unification, i.e. the ultimate gnosis results in inπνευματική διαφώτιση [pnevmatikí diafótisi] spiritual enlightenment
  1. proto-orthodox Christian == fl. early first century C.E. or possibly even B.C.E. A Chrestian with any gnosis level/rank.
  2. pseudo-orthodox Christian == fl. first century C.E. or possibly second century C.E. Seen as heretical by proto-orthodox Christians because they award the title of "Christian" to those not worthy of that title. They do not evidence the original look and feel of the actual first 'Christians', i.e. a Chrestian with any gnosis level/rank.
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