Why did the Gnostics use Paul and Gospels?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
User avatar
maryhelena
Posts: 2878
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2013 11:22 pm
Location: England

Re: Why did the Gnostics use Paul and Gospels?

Post by maryhelena »

mlinssen wrote: Wed Nov 24, 2021 2:41 am
maryhelena wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 1:02 am
mlinssen wrote: Thu Oct 14, 2021 2:26 pm
maryhelena wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 12:49 am The spirit does not exist in a vacuum - body and spirit go together like a horse and carriage...you can't have one without the other. That is of course, if one wants to be rational and leave aside notions of spirits wandering around in the invisible heavens. The word became flesh (gJohn) is not about an invisible spirit from the invisible heavens taking on human flesh. In our modern 21st century speak - 'flesh it out' relates to an idea, an argument, given some substance. For instance; an architect might imagine how his design will look - but only when the brick and mortar are used to build that design will his idea become 'flesh', become a physical reality.

We really need to get away from the archaic idea that invisible heavenly spirits come down to earth, from outer space, and put on human flesh....Carrier notwithstanding....

Marcion has his Jesus decent in the 15th year of Tiberius - Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea. His Jesus descends into Jewish history. The heavenly spirit Jesus and the earthly Jewish Jesus are one and the same Jesus - in other words - the body and spirit of human reality. The flesh is Jewish but the spirit is free. However far Marcion was going with his non-Jewish Jesus - he did not, he could not, get away from the very Jewish Jesus of the gospel story. Downplay the Jewish Jesus, side-step the Jewish Jesus - and Marcion's non-Jewish Jesus would have faded away.......In effect, Marcion has combined the bodily Jewish Jesus with the spiritual, the intellectual or philosophical, Jesus. He has combined body and spirit - mind and matter.

A simple concept really - but one which the early church 'father's failed to grasp in their condemnation of Marcion.
Emphasis mine.
Of course Marcion didn't, why would he be interested in predating his story?
The Church Fathers naturally abused Marcion to insert some of their own inventions, such as this one. Brilliant hey, just claim that Marcion had the same material as they did but different so you can name and refute it, while its core is left intact

To Marcion, I am sure, IS was a concept: he comes 'from above', and John knows that and uses that.
Marcion highly likely did not have Coptic Thomas but only Greek copies that interpreted logion 28 in the wrong way:

28. said IS : did I stand to foot in the(F) middle of the World and did I reveal outward to they in Flesh ...

The Coptic is clear, IS "reveals" to "them in Flesh". How else could it be, the World in Thomas is everyone's own perceived Decoration (KOSMOS) of the world indeed.
Macrion didn't mention either body or spirit or flesh of IS, he just left it all like it is in Thomas: utterly unspecified. Which was a great problem for those who wanted to turn him into a man
Martin - my thinking about the whole body and spirit scenario is to try and understand what is at the root of what it was that the ancients were trying to articulate. After all, we do not live in the world of their imagination. Our 21st century world strives for logic and rationality. We can use science and psychology etc in attempting to understand our human nature. Yes, unfortunately, there are many today who choose to add a 'spiritual' component to their lives and deaths.

( a recent comment on Twitter, quoting I understand a Catholic hymn) regarding the stabbing to death of a UK politician: ''May the angels lead him into paradise; may the martyrs receive him at his arrival and lead him to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive him and may he have eternal rest.'')

The ancients had two options when looking around the world they lived in. The material world and the 'spiritual' world - the unknown world. Animals die, men die - but - vegetation dies but is reborn in the spring. Thus, went the thinking, man being part of nature, reflects not only nature's material aspect but also it's rebirth in the spring spiritual aspect. (Man being a higher animal than other animals...) Since no material/physical rebirth was observed for man - a spiritual rebirth, an unseen rebirth, was man's destiny. Gods and an unknown heaven became man's rebirth reward. A spiritual rebirth in the unknown heaven became the goal of man - hence Gnostics and all those who seek spiritual enlightenment - often at the expense of overlooking the material needs of themselves or the natural environment.

Logic and rationality lead us to question the ideas of the ancients; belief in the existence of spiritual beings in some spiritual world is simply imagination not scientific knowledge nor rational thought. But if god does not exist in the way attributed to such beings by the ancients - what is the god idea all about? If god is that North Star that leads the way to safety - then god is nothing more, or nothing less, than our human intellectual capacity. God then becomes the driving force, the spirit, that drives forward our intellectual evolution. Ideas come, they die, and they are reborn in the spring. Knowledge grows on what went before. Intellectual evolution reflects the natural cycles of the vegetation we see all around us. In contrast, our material bodies simply decay back into the natural environment. Our 'spiritual' aspect, our evolving evolutional intellect, dies with our material body. Man only lives forever in the 'body' of knowledge he has contributed to while living.

Plain, simple, facts of 21st century knowledge.

The intricacies of ancient thought might be interesting, in and of themselves - however, it's the underlying concepts that provide a way forward. Ancient concepts of body and spirit - concepts of human nature - need to be expressed in 21st century language. The intellectual framework in which the ancients lived is not our world. It is, in effect, a dead world. Our job today is not to attempt it's rebirth but to seek that new intellectual world that the ancients perhaps sensed in their musings but were unable to grasp and hence to articulate.

My thought for the day... :)
Hi maryhelena, I'm back for just a few minutes

People have longed for whatever is out of their reach for as long as they have existed.
In order to justify (the seemingly experienced as embarassing fact of) not having what they want, they have come up with excuses; and storytelling / fantasising is what people are great at, hence all the different mythologies, creation stories, and so on.
There is no limit to them as there is no limit to our imagination, and every story needs a make-over every now and then because they get old - and they do get old exactly because they were created at a specific moment in time, thus responding to and using contemporary notions, concepts, words, and so on. The term "anachronistic"
As interesting as it may seem to try to make sense of myths, that is a circular movement and motion in itself because myths exist by virtue of them trying to make sense of what is not had - or, as Thomas would say: 'held in hand'

End of story

- on topic: I reacted because you made claims about Marcion. I trust that your absence of reactions to my reaction implies that you concur with the latter
I did reply to your reply to my post - you have my reply in the post quoted above....
Post Reply