Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
User avatar
mlinssen
Posts: 3431
Joined: Tue Aug 06, 2019 11:01 am
Location: The Netherlands
Contact:

Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by mlinssen »

Jagd wrote: Mon Dec 06, 2021 6:56 am
MrMacSon wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:30 pm
mlinssen wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 11:13 am
63. If one goes down into the water and comes back up without having received anything, saying ‘I’m a XRηSTIANOS’, he has taken the name on loan. Yet if he receives the Sacred Spirit, he has the gift of the name ...


101. The Chrism is made lord over the Baptism. For from the Chrism we are called XRISTIANOS not because of the Baptism. And was called the XS because of the Chrism.

The Chrism is the Greek word xrisma, 'anointing'
Oil is more substantial than water, huh ?

"The Chrism is made lord over the Baptism" makes me wonder if John the Baptism is a personfication / anthropomorphization of baptism 9and if this could be a stage in the process of Jesus beginning to be portrayed as usurping John)
That would certainly make sense. A lot of the gospel material appears to have clear instructional purpose, like some of the healings in Mark that are basically step-by-step guides, or the mission to the twelve, which reads like “this is how you’re supposed to live as a wandering Christian.”

I’d guess there may have been a baptism story that was then combined with the Elijah-Elisha stuff about the spirit acting like a dove.
If we assume Thomas to be the first to mention (only!) Johannes the Immerser, we can see the evolution in Philip, who uses a verb, a noun: the person came first and the stories about him later.
Mark was the first to add the Tanakh material, that is pretty much guaranteed

Thomas has a dove in his serpents / dove saying belonging to logion 39, the keys to the kingdom, which got dislocated: Logion 39 has its doves and serpents moved to Matthew 10:16 whereas he has the other parts in chapter 23; he is the only one who has it so Thomas must have combined those two parts into one logion, because?

Philip has no dove but he does have the holy spirit, and it would be very useful to peruse the NHL looking for texts where the dove and Baptism meet - or where either of the two occurs, period

It's a soup guys, and ingredients get slowly added over a lengthy period of time and in diverse texts - trace those moments and you have a chronology of how it all came together, it's really not that hard

THE TEACHINGS OF SILVANUS 94,29-95,23 307 (NHL Codex VII)

in mind!

My son, do not swim in any water, and do not allow yourself to be defiled by strange kinds of knowledge. Certainly you know that the schemes of the Adversary are not few, and (that) the tricks which he has are varied? Especially has the noetic man been robbed of the intelligence of the snake. For it is fitting for you to be in agreement with the intelligence of (these) two: with the intelligence of the snake and with the innocence of the dove - lest he (the Adversary) come into you in the guise of a flatterer, as a true friend, saying, "I advise good things for you."

But you did not recognize the deceitfulness of this one when you received him as a true friend. For he casts into your heart evil thoughts as good ones, and hypocrisy in the guise of

THE TESTIMONY OF TRUTH 39,3-39,31 (NHL Codex IX)

God created members for our use, for us to grow in defilement, in order that we might enjoy ourselves." And they cause God to participate with them in deeds of this sort; and they are not steadfast upon the earth. Nor will they reach heaven, but [...] place will [...] four ...
... (3 lines unrecoverable)
... unquenchable ...
... (3 lines unrecoverable)
... word [...] upon the Jordan river, when he came to John at the time he was baptized. The Holy Spirit came down upon him as a dove [...] accept for ourselves that he was born of a virgin and he took flesh; he

Took me 5 minutes guys: all occurrences of dove in all of the NHL (save for Thomas'). All of the stuff is online

Many NHL texts have baptise/baptism, not all of them in a positive way (Paraphrase of Shem for example). Yet Silvanus nor Truth do - and we suffer from the same "translation" issues, as "take dip" also gets translated with baptism, whereas the Greek loanword should be the primary source
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by MrMacSon »

fwiw. This is a bit of an aside, but it highlights a number of possible meanings in concepts such as baptism and in entities involved in -or even just associated with baptism, including the Jordan River, when Christianity was starting.

.
In Silvanus and in the Authoritative Teaching there is no disparagement of the God of the Old Testament. On the other hand, the Testimony of Truth (NHC IX,3) not only includes a vigorous attack on the envy, ignorance, and slanderous character of the God portrayed in Genesis, but even argues that, by commanding man to reproduce himself, the Mosaic law is ipso facto discredited as a way of ethical purification. Here the Baptism of Jesus in Jordan signifies the end of carnal begetting: the water of Jordan (presumably because it means the river that 'goes down') is the very symbol of sexual desire; hence John the Baptist's feeling that it would be inappropriate for Jesus to be baptized in it.

The interpretation of Jordan in this text is worth a brief digression.

Hippolytus says that the Naassenes taught the Jordan to symbolise that downward torrent which prevents the children of Israel making their exodus from Egypt; that is, sexual intercourse imprisons mankind in the body. This is the river which Joshua/Jesus made to run upstream (Haer. 5.7.41). This exegesis of Jordan as sexual desire is partly paralleled in Origen's commentary on St John (6.42.217ff.) where Jordan means 'their descent', cognate with Enoch's father fared, which means descending, and is symbolic of the lust of the Giants for the daughters of men which in tum (according to certain exegetes) signifies the descent of souls into bodies. The reference is no doubt to Philo, Gig. 13, who expounds Genesis 6 to say that the falling souls descend into the body 'as into a river', this last phrase being a reminiscence of Plato's Timaeus 43A. In Leg. All. 2.89, Philo interprets the Jordan, which Jacob crossed, as 'the inferior, earthy, corruptible nature to which belongs all that is done in vice and passion.'

Accordingly, the gnostic exegesis of Jesus' baptism in Jordan as signifying the overthrow of the reproductive cycle for all elect and spiritual persons is only pushing a little a symbolism already found in Philo with the encouragement of a Platonic tag.

Henry Chadwick, 'The Domestication of Gnosis', in The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, 1978

eta: lol, I didn't even know Martijn's post references Silvanus and Testimony of Truth ie. my post is about perceptions about baptism, not a response to his
schillingklaus
Posts: 645
Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2021 11:17 pm

Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by schillingklaus »

Tacitus is a blatant and late forgery, as best explained by Stuart Waugh on his site ( sgwau2cbeginnings.blogspot.com ); so there is absolutely no need for a genuine Pliny or Flavius Josephus. They are all obvious drivel from front to back.

The case of Tacitus has first been treated by Polydore Hochart, who realized the dependence on Sulpicius Severus' description of the Neronic persecution.
Post Reply