“Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples”

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Giuseppe
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“Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples”

Post by Giuseppe »

The French Mythicist Jean Magne has a good solution about why the name of John had to be made when the question was put to Jesus:
“Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

In Acts of Thomas there is this prayer:
Come, elder of the five members, mind, thought, reflection, consideration, reason; communicate with these young men.

Come, holy spirit, and cleanse their reins and their heart, and give them the added seal, in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost.

http://gnosis.org/library/actthom.htm

The action of cleansing is connected to water. Hence the DNA of the Prayer of the Lord is the invocation of purifying water (=the Spirit). Who is praying becomes ipso facto a potential recipient of the spirit coming on him. Note that in Acts of Thomas the spirit has to purify by the "mind", voûs, also.

The Greek word voûs, or intellect, the intuitive faculty of knowing divine things, has in common with the equivalent Hebrew term, the charismatic spirit, the property of not to be given to all men. The voûs is indeed presented as follows in the Corpus Hermeticum:

3. Reason (Logos) indeed, O Tat, among all men hath He distributed, but Mind not yet; not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not from Him, 3 but hath its place below, within the souls of men who have no Mind.

Tat. Why then did God, O father, not on all bestow a share of Mind?

Her. He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls, just as it were a prize.

4. Tat. And where hath He had it set up?

Her. 4 He tilled a mighty Krater 5 with it, and sent it down, joining a Herald [to it], to whom He gave command to make this proclamation to the hearts of men:

Baptize 1 thyself with this Krater’s baptism, what heart can do so, thou that hast faith thou canst ascend to Him that hath sent down the Krater, thou that dost know for what thou didst come into being!

So who wants to receive the "voûs" has to be "baptized" in a "Krater" shown by a divine "Herald".

So Magne:

The myth of Hermes appointed by the Father to proclaim to the Gentiles a baptism symbolic of intellect was, on the one hand, judaised in the myth of John the Baptist sent by God (John 1:6) to proclaim to the Jews a baptism of μετάνοια (Mark 1:4), not of "repentance for the remission of sins" as one would like to understand later, but of change of religion, of "conversion" to the true God, to the Father that they do not know and do not want to know (John 7:28, 8:19, Acts 20:21), and on the other hand, put into action, "sacramentalised" in the rite of baptism of water by which Jesus himself received the anointing of the spirit consecrating him "Messiah" or "Christ" (Luke 4:18, Isaiah 61:6). And just as those who have not heard to the proclamation of Hermes are remained only endowed with reason, having acquired neither the intellect nor the gnosis/knowledge of the Father, likewise "unless born with water and spirit, no one can enter in the kingdom of God" (John 3,5) - and that is why it was impossible that the Jews who had refused the baptism of John, could believe.

(my translation from:
https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ltp/19 ... 0401ar.pdf )

Hence, the prayer that served to invoke the voûs or Spirit was connected with the invented figure of John the Baptist, in a first moment. It was extremely expected, therefore, the question:

“Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

...if the goal was to christianize (i.e. connect it more and more with Jesus) what was in a first moment connected not coincidentially with the name of John.



This explains better what I knew already about the same view of this great scholar:

Whereas Jesus is a divine person first sent to Paradise and again under Tiberius to teach the path of salvation and institute the eucharist, the sacrement of gnosis, John, according to the hermetist myth of baptism in the crater (C.H. IV,4-6, see Logique des sacrements, p. 105-140) is simply a man chosen by the Father to proclaim baptism, the sacrament of noûs, the "intellect" or "spirit", a faculty of supernatural knowledge, the faculty of acquiring gnosis.
In accordance, therefore, with the logical precedence of the faculty of knowing over the acquisition of knowledge, baptism will precede the eucharist and John will be the forerunner of Jesus. It was easy to find biblical passages applicable to this situation: "Behold, I send a messenger before you" (Ex 23.20); "He will prepare the way before you" (Mal 3:1); "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the Way of the Lord" (Is 40.3), quoted in Mk 1.2-3 and plls, the bad break in the last quotation gives it the meaning sought, which resulted in making John preach in the wilderness of Judaea.
As the Jews believed that Elijah who was taken to heaven (2 Kings 2.1) would one day return (Mal 4.5), John was invested with his coat of hair and leather belt (2 Kings 1.8; Mk 1.6).
In the infancy gospels John will be Jesus' cousin and necessarily his elder. He will die before him to leave him a clear field, and will be decapitated to symbolize, according to the Fathers, the cessation of the prophecy.
The first person of the new religion has thus become the last person of the ancient Law.

(Jean Magne, From Christianity to Gnosis and From Gnosis to Christianity, p. 203-204)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
schillingklaus
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Re: “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples”

Post by schillingklaus »

Note that this involves the rare reading variant of the Pater Noster, found with Gregory of Nyssa and some medieval copyist/commenters; and Tertullian's allusion to a Marcionite gospel hint into a similar direction. Instead of a request for the kingdom to come, it asks for the granting of the Holy Spirit.

That variant must be considered more original as it links to the end to the pericope, where it is confirmed that The Father will grant his spirit to whoever implores.

The Roman Catholic Church never uses epicleses, requests for the Holy Spirit, in its sacramental liturgy. All sacramentalism in Rome is originally derived from Genesis 4.4, Abel's sacrifice as the prototype of Roman Catholic sacramental action: The Roman priests implore God to look approvingly upon the offerings and the offerers as he did to Abel and his sacrifice. The Roman Canon Missae specifically uses this formula in the prayer Supra Quae, originally used for the consecration of the offerings of the community members.

The Eastern churches partly shifted to the usage of epicleses. This was certainly already the case for one of the contributors of Acts, who wrote that Saint Peter punished two believers for an offense against the Holy Spirit, as they had not offered all of their belongings.
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