ABuddhist wrote: ↑Mon Apr 25, 2022 4:18 am
... Christians (originally a Jewish sect) ...
Not necessarily, and, with increasing commentary about evidence of influence of both Greco-Roman literature and Roman imperial tropes in the NT literature, it's less likely Christianity arose directly out of Judaism or directly via a Jewish sect.
There's evidence of both para-Jewish influences (such as via so-called 'gnostic' sects and their literature) and so-called Judaizing of them. Scholarship is only just beginning the deep dive into this (although the excerpts below show it began with some scholars at least 14 years ago).
One example is the fairly-broad Valentinian, early Christian literature: from it's slightly different creation myths, each with different key aeons and other entities eg.
Sophia/Wisdom
or Logos, to it's alignment with Marcionism
Wisdom is introduced in the Valentinian myths of origin as one of the eternal beings (aeons) issuing from the Father of All. As the youngest member of the divine family, dwelling at the greatest distance from the Father, she disrupts the peace of the divine household acting by herself, without having due permission from her consort, Desired, or from the Father. In this way, Wisdom generates imperfection that needs to be removed from the perfect realm of Fullness. From this point on, two stories are intertwined in the Valentinian myth of Wisdom. One is an account of the cosmic consequences of her action. The most important of them is the emergence of the imperfect Creator-God (demiurge), who creates a defective world outside the divine realm. The other story is that of Wisdom herself. The flawed part of her is expelled from the perfect realm; an account of the repentance, conversion, and restitution of this part follows [in the myth]
... similar stories of Wisdom’s failure can be found in other early Christian sources ...
The clearest indication of the pragmatic value of the Wisdom myth is its recapitulation in a Valentinian deathbed ritual called “redemption” (apolutrōsis). For those Valentinians who performed this ritual, the Wisdom myth was salvific knowledge. However, the practice of the redemption ritual...was not common to all Valentinians ...
... this myth contains other features connected to issues that were of vital importance to ancient schools of thought ... the Valentinian myth emphasizes Wisdom’s conversion, which corresponds to the demand for conversion in philosophical schools ...
... the most noteworthy feature in the Valentinian myth of Wisdom is the keen interest shown toward the emotions she experiences during her temporary exile from the divine realm. Her feelings of love, joy, loneliness, and sadness are connected with the key moments of the story. Emotions account for Wisdom’s action in the divine realm, they characterize her sojourn outside the divine realm [elsewhere: hē ektos plērōmatos Sophia], and they are presented as forming the basic material from which the world was created ...
... emotions were discussed with great intensity in ancient schools of philosophy, since the therapy of emotions was perhaps the most important advantage the teachers in these schools promised to their students ...
... Valentinian teachers were engaged in the broader discussion about the healing of harmful emotions and that this engagement becomes visible in their interpretations of the myth of Wisdom. What Valentinians had to offer in the intellectual marketplace of their time was a distinctly Christian theory of how desire can be cured. For them, Christ was the healer who “came to restore the emotions of the soul.” Or, seen from another perspective, Valentinians contextualized their faith in Christ by expressing it in terms that made it seem more understandable, and more readily acceptable, to those having received a philosophical education.
Ismo Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle and Society in the School of Valentinus, Columbia University Press, 2008: pp.95-7.
On origins and/or sources:
The tale of Wisdom’s fall was no innovation of the Valentinians. They took it over from an earlier tradition and expanded certain elements that were already present in previous versions of this myth. The background of the myth of Wisdom’s fall has been approached from several perspectives. First, scholars have traced very ancient traditions in it, such as Egyptian stories of Isis, the Sumerian myth of the descent and ascent of Inanna, and the related Assyrian myth of Ishtar’s descent to the netherworld. It usually remains unclear whether one should understand these analyses as indicating direct borrowing from Egyptian or Assyrian traditions by those who invented the myth of Wisdom’s fall or only as denoting the original source in terms of the history of ideas ...
... Valentinus’s relationship to the Wisdom myth, however, remains unclear, since Wisdom is not mentioned in any of the fragments of his own works. If he was familiar with a Sethian teaching of Adam’s creation, it seems possible to assume that he knew the Wisdom myth that also belongs to the Sethian cosmogonic tradition. Nevertheless, there is no positive evidence that Valentinus himself subscribed to this explanation, and it is possible that he, like some other early Christians of the second century, explained the origin of the world as a result of the good God working with dubious hulē.
Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, pp. 103-4.
(Dunderberg's commentary on Ptolemy/Ptolemaeus's version of Valentinianism are fascinating and I will likely post them in a new thread)
