Secret Alias wrote: ↑Sat Sep 04, 2021 7:06 am
Is there an argument in print that Marcion thought the Demiurge was Pilate?
Freke and Gandy are more explicit, indeed.
They have realized, from the following text in Irenaeus 1.25.6 :
Others of them employ outward marks, branding their disciples inside the lobe of the right ear. From among these also arose Marcellina, who came to Rome under [the episcopate of] Anicetus, and, holding these doctrines, she led multitudes astray. They style themselves Gnostics. They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles.
...the following logical inference:
n the Jesus myth, the figure of Pontius Pilate also represents the Demiurge.
Some Christians taught that Pilate made an image of Jesus which was crucified instead of Jesus himself. This myth encodes the teachings that it is the Demiurge, the craftsman, who creates Jesus' body, the eidolon or image, which is what is actually crucified on the cross.
Through the death of the eidolon, Jesus defeats the Demiurge and his forces, which have temporarily imprisoned him within the cave of the cosmos. Pauf teaches:
'On that cross he discarded the cosmic powers and authorities like a garment.'
Paul also reminds initiates who have symbolically died and resurrected with the figure of Jesus:
'Did you not die with Christ and pass beyond the reach of the elemental powers of the cosmos?
(
Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians, p. 154, my bold)