The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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mlinssen
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Baptism came from Coptic

Post by mlinssen »

Leucius Charinus wrote: Sat May 21, 2022 3:08 am The term "baptism" or "baptise" occurs 19 times in the text Zostrianos, yet we have since understood that the Coptic word should be translated as "immersed" and the Coptic term for "baptism" / "baptise" does not appear in the text. It appears to have been used in order to reinforce a Christian confirmation bias.
Leucius Charinus wrote: Fri May 20, 2022 6:01 pm Did the Graeco-Roman world have any ritual akin to baptism and/or immersion in water? I'd be inclined to suggest they certainly did.

Chrism at WIKI does not mention anything other than the Christian ritual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrism

Baptism: A Pre-Christian History

... the act of baptism itself has a history beyond the Scriptures.

The Greek World

"The Greek word "baptizo" as used in Mark 1:4 ( "And so John came, baptizing in the desert region . . ." ) was very common among Greek-speaking people; it is used in every period of Greek literature and was applied to a great variety of matters, including the most familiar acts of everyday life. Greek speakers and hearers understood the word at the time John was preaching; it had no doubtful meaning. It meant what we express by the Latin word 'immerse' and kindred terms; no one could then have thought of attributing to it a different meaning, such as 'sprinkle' or 'pour.'" (Boles, H. Leo Commentary on Matthew. Gospel Advocate Pub. Pg 74).

The Encyclopedia of Religion (McMillan. 1987. Pg. 59) continues by pointing out that the word baptism means to plunge, to immerse, or to wash; it also signifies, from the Homeric period onward, any rite of immersion in water. The baptismal rite is similar to many other ablution (the washing of one's body or part of it as a religious rite) rituals found in a number of religions..."

Pre-Christian Religions

The practice of baptism in pagan religions seems to have been based on a belief in the purifying properties of water. In ancient Babylon, according to the Tablets of Maklu, water was important as a spiritual cleansing agent in the cult of Enke, lord of Eridu. In Egypt, the Book of Going Forth by Day contains a treatise on the baptism of newborn children, which is performed to purify them of blemishes acquired in the womb. Water, especially the Nile's cold water, which was believed to have regenerative powers, is used to baptize the dead in a ritual based on the Osiris myth. Egyptian cults also developed the idea of regeneration through water. The bath preceding initiation into the cult of Isis seems to have been more than a simple ritual purification; it was probably intended to represent symbolically the initiate's death to the life of this world by recalling Osiris' drowning in the Nile.

In the cult of Cybele, a baptism of blood was practiced in the rite of the Taurobolium: where one was covered with the blood of a bull. At first this rite seems to have been to provide the initiate with greater physical vitality, but later it acquired more of a spiritual importance. A well-known inscription attests that he who has received baptism of blood has received a new birth in eternity. However, the fact that this baptism was repeated periodically shows that the idea of complete spiritual regeneration was not associated with it.

The property of immortality was also associated with baptism in the ancient Greek world. A bath in the sanctuary of Trophonion procured for the initiate a blessed immortality even while in this world. The mystery religions of that period often included ablution rites of either immersion or a washing of the body for the purposes of purification or initiation. Other concepts said to have been associated with these forms of cultic baptisms included the transformation of one's life, the removal of sins, symbolic representation, the attainment of greater physical vitality, a new beginning, spiritual regeneration. It is believed that all ancient religions recognized some form of spiritual cleansing, renewal or initiation that was accomplished through a washing or immersion in water.

https://www.bible.ca/ef/topical-baptism ... istory.htm

Technically it's all a non-discussion as the Greek then and now has the same verb with the same meaning: to immerse

It's only in all other languages that a new word has been introduced, which is a literal copy of the Greek - which meant immerse then and still does now

In Coptic we think we can see traces because Coptic includes the Greek loanword, but Coptic overflows with Greek loanwords by default.
If anything, baptism points to Coptic as a source for its practice - why else was the word copied as a loanword into other languages?
Not even the stauros is imported into other languages as a loanword - so why was baptism?

Because Thomas introduced the character ⲓ̈ⲱϩⲁⲛⲛⲏⲥ ⲡ ⲃⲁⲡⲧⲓⲥⲧⲏⲥ.
Among others
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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

Post by MrMacSon »

Leucius Charinus wrote: Fri May 20, 2022 4:11 pm
Another question arises from your quote from Litwa. The claim that "early Christian perceptions of Platonic daimones as demons". People may recall that this term also caused a small controversy in the translations of the Sethian text "the Gospel of Judas". Here Judas is referred to as the "Thirteenth Daimon". The Platonists and the Stoic philosophers used this term "daimon" as a neutral guardian spirit - a personal deity allocated to all living embodied souls at birth. There is little doubt that the NT authors demonised this Graeco-Roman philosophical / metaphysical term by treating it negatively.

How does Zostrianos use this term?

I agree that "the NT authors demonised th[e] Graeco-Roman metaphysical term [daimones] by treating it negatively", but I'm not presently interested in delving deeper into Zostrianos. If, however, you research this, I'd appreciate hearing about it. I'll be looking at earlier Sethian stuff eg. The Gospel of Judas.
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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

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In an article, 'Apostles as Archons: The Fight for Authority and the Emergence of Gnosticism in the Tchacos Codex and Other Early Christian Literature', pp.243ff, in The Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13–16, 2008, April DeConick, ed., Brill, 2009, ...

... April DeConick has a subsection titled, Thirteen Realms and their Archon


... it appears that the author of the Gospel of Judas knows a version of the Sethian myth in which Nebro-Ialdabaoth and his lieutenant Saklas live in a cloud in Chaos. The Gospel of Judas eventually drops references to Nebro-Ialdabaoth and consolidates these archons into one demiurge who emerges in the text by the name Saklas.


She says she refers to "this many-named demiurge by his well-known name, Ialdabaoth, although [she] could have chosen to call him Saklas or Nebro just as easily."



... it appears that the Gospel of Judas is based on a system in which there are twelve cosmic realms with twelve apportioned rulers, seven of them planetary, five of them sublunar in the abyss.

Above these twelve archons and realms is the thirteenth cosmic realm, the abode of the “apostate” Archon, Nebro-Ialdabaoth, and Saklas. In astrological terms, it is to be identified with the realm of the fixed stars, called the eighth sphere since the seven planetary spheres were immediately below it. It may not be coincidental that this sphere, also known as aplanes, is where some Middle Platonic philosophers placed the Elysian fields. This afterlife isle traditionally was ruled by Kronos, the baby-devouring Titan who had been imprisoned in Tartarus at the beginning of time. Eventually Zeus released him to take up the throne at Elysium.46 When the afterlife fields were moved from Hades to the realm of the fixed stars in the Hellenistic period, it is quite possible that, in the popular imagination, Kronos was moved there as well. This may account for his confusion with Chronos who had been identified with the planet Saturn which resided in the seventh sphere immediately below the fixed stars.



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argued?
Or is something else going on? However this came to be, in John’s system as in Judas’, we now have twelve Archons below the demiurge, seven which are aligned with the planets, and five which rule Hades. These five likely correspond to the five gods traditionally found in the underworld palace both in the Greek tradition (Hades, Persephone, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus) and in the Egyptian (Osiris, Isis, Horus, Thoth, and Anubis). This means that the demiurge resides in a thirteenth realm, which astrologically corresponds to the realm of the fixed stars just beyond the planets.



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DeConick then talks about


"the other Sethian text aware of the importance of the number thirteen, the early fourth century non-Christian text Marsanes ... in the first half of [which] we find the author reappropriating the number thirteen in a ritual sequence of thirteen seals ... likely was the result of the fact that, in earlier Sethian texts, salvation and admittance to the Pleroma depended on the soul’s ability to overcome thirteen archons."


She notes, "The thirteen sealings in Marsanes do not correspond to thirteen cosmic realms, and so are not equivalent to the thirteen cosmic realms in the Gospel of Judas."

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[continues in the next post]
Last edited by MrMacSon on Mon May 23, 2022 9:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

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pp.263-4:

man and lies.”

But it is only from the Gospel of Judas that we can puzzle out their reasoning. The Gnostics who wrote Judas take on the Apostolic Christians on their own turf, agreeing with them that Judas
is a demon and that he is responsible for bringing about Jesus’ sacrificial death. But then they ask the obvious. If Judas was a demon, and he brought about Jesus’ sacrifice, was his sacrifice something that the demons desired? If so, sacrifice must be evil, and so must the doctrine of atonement. In fact, they concluded, this is all a trick by the demon who rules this world, Judas’ celestial correspondence, Nebro-Ialdabaoth.

It was brought about in order to deceive Christians and lead them astray. Whenever Christians perform a Eucharist ceremony in which the sacrifice of Jesus is reenacted, they are unwittingly worshiping Nebro-Ialdabaoth.

Can Judas break this correspondence? Can he overcome his destiny as Ialdabaoth’s servant? Some ancient people thought that it was possible to break these types of negative correspondences, and one of the ways in which they tried to do so was through the use of magical spells. The magical technique for changing an undesirable destiny involved invoking the aid of a powerful god by chanting his name according to a certain prescription. When the god appeared, the petitioner was instructed not to stare at the god’s face, but look down and
beseech him, “Master, what is fated for me?” The god then was supposed to tell the petitioner about his “star” and “what kind of daimon” he had. If the petitioner heard some terrible fate or correspondence, he was commanded not to cry or weep, but ask the god to “wash it off or circumvent it, for this god can do everything.”

As Grant Adamson argues in his contribution to this volume, this particular spell resonates on many levels with the story about Judas Iscariot in his gospel, and may be an echo of shared popular knowledge in antiquity about ways in which fate could be conquered. When Judas approaches Jesus for teaching, like the suppliant in the spell, Judas turns away his face. Throughout the gospel, Jesus provides Judas with the information about Judas’ destiny, none of which Judas likes—neither his star, nor its movement in the skies, nor his identification with Ialdabaoth the thirteenth demon, nor his future reign as the archon in the thirteenth cosmic sphere. But when Judas tells Jesus that he does not want any of this, Jesus does not take it away. The god does not grant his request probably because the Sethians understood Judas to be an apostate, and as such his damnation was sure. So instead of granting Judas freedom from his cursed destiny, Jesus repeats the information as evident, even in process, and Judas is left to weep.


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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

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WHEN THE SETHIANS WERE YOUNG
The Gospel of Judas in the Second Century
Marvin Meyer
p.58
The place of the Gospel of Judas as a datable mid-second-century text in the Sethian tradition has obvious implications for our reconstruction and understanding of the history of Sethian gnosis, especially in the earlier period of the Sethian school of thought. The dating of ancient texts is an imperfect science at best, and firm dates for Sethian texts are not easy to determine. In his essay on “The Sethian School of Gnostic Thought,” John Turner indicates four textual linkages with four suggestions of dates for Sethian texts, the first two quite certain and the last two more conjectural:
  1. in about 175–180 Irenaeus discusses the Gospel of Judas and cosmogonic materials reminiscent of the opening of the Apocryphon of John;
  2. in about 260 Porphyry recalls in his Life of Plotinus that versions of the texts Zostrianos and Allogenes were employed by members of Plotinus’s philosophical seminar in Rome in the middle of the third century, and around the same time Plotinus seems to cite the ideas and perhaps the text of Zostrianos in his Enneads;
  3. the author of Zostrianos and Marius Victorinus, in his work Against Arius, both make use of a Middle Platonic source that may well date from the time before Plotinus; and
  4. the Nag Hammadi text Trimorphic Protennoia may echo Johannine discussions that are similar to what is reflected in 1 John, which may have been composed in the first half of the second century (ca. 125–150).
Turner’s discussion is helpful, but we may wish to qualify the presumed connection between Adversus haereses 1.29.1–4 and the Apocryphon of John, since the parallels in Irenaeus, close as they are, apply only to the cosmogonic section of the Apocryphon of John and hardly to the entire text as transmitted in the extant versions. That being noted, the place of the second-century Gospel of Judas becomes even more crucial as we attempt to understand the early development of Sethian thought. In the balance of this paper I propose how the Gospel of Judas may be read as a mid-second-century text and how Judas Iscariot may be interpreted within a mid-second-century gnostic context—when, as we might put it, the Sethians were young.

. . . . .< . . snip . . >
p.60
... Like other Christian Sethian texts, the Gospel of Judas incorporates Jewish and Greek themes—most likely in Hellenistic Jewish form—in the context of Christian gnostic proclamation, but in the Gospel of Judas this appears to be accomplished in a fairly simple and unadorned fashion that may suggest a rather early stage of development. The specifically Jewish materials include one apparent instance in the Coptic text of the Hebrew title rabbi, several names of divine and demiurgic figures derived from Hebrew and Aramaic, a cosmological revelation that is representative of Jewish mystical gnosis (though it comes from the mouth of Jesus in the Gospel of Judas), and numerous examples of the authoritative declaration of Jesus, “I tell you the truth,” with the word of Semitic derivation, ϩⲁⲙⲏⲛ.

The reference to El, where we might anticipate Eleleth, as in the Gospel of the Egyptians and Trimorphic Protennoia, may reflect the preference in the codex in general to use proper names without honorific or other suffixes, or the seemingly abbreviated reference may simply be due to uninscribed papyrus, so that the reference may conceivably be read as ⲏⲗ[ⲏⲗⲏⲑ]. Greek motifs emerge in the familiar Platonic concern for the world above as the pattern for the world below, perhaps in the use of the Greek word δαίμων addressed to Judas, and in a preoccupation with the role of the stars that reflects ancient astronomical and astrological interests, in general, as well as Platonic lore concerning people and their stars as found in the Timaeus. If anything, the Gospel of Judas presents a Sethian message with a more overtly astronomical and astrological perspective than we typically see in Sethian texts, and this perspective gives a special astral emphasis to the message of the text.

All of this Hellenistic Jewish material in the Gospel of Judas is set in the framework of a Christian gnostic spirituality that proclaims the primacy of the exalted generation of Seth—“that generation” (ⲧⲅⲉⲛⲉⲁ ⲉⲧⲙⲁⲩ)—and is harshly critical of anything that smacks of sacrifice, whether that is the death of Jesus understood as sacrifice, or the celebration of the eucharist as a sacrificial meal, or, Elaine Pagels and Karen King suggest, participation in Christian martyrdom as an emulation of the sacrificial death of Jesus. The death of Jesus, while only alluded to in the Gospel of Judas, is to be a sacrifice, to be sure, but only a sacrifice of the mortal body that the true, spiritual Jesus has been using—“the man who bears me,” Jesus is made to declare in the gospel. This is presented in the Gospel of Judas in a tone much more reminiscent of the account of the death of the wise man Socrates at the conclusion of the Phaedo, Dennis MacDonald has suggested in a [2007] panel discussion, than anything like a violent sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world. As in the Gospel of Judas, there is also laughter in the Phaedo, in the middle of the dialogue about the soul separating from the body. In the end, the message of the Gospel of Judas is not darkness and death but light and life. This is the good news of the Gospel of Judas.


in The Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13–16, 2008, April DeConick, ed., Brill, 2009, pp.57ff
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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

Post by davidmartin »

excellent article
suprised she didn't point out the similarities between Judas and Paul here

Paul as the 13th apostle who also has a vision and in a different sense 'sacrifices' Jesus by preaching the atonement that the gospel of Judas rejects (and why Judas remains rejected in the gospel). Compelling?

If the connnection to Paul here holds the fascinating thing is the ambiguity over Paul's marcionite connection as the G. Judas represents a marcionite Paul who rejects the Hebrew God and alone of the apostles gets that right. But surely the g. Judas can't be marcionite with it's ultimately low view of Paul

That the apostle could have been mythologised as Judas or an aeon like Sabaoth or the Demiurge is quite possible in the gnosticising myth and part of their original formulation I think, imagined thus - when the church fathers did their revisionism, they produced the Acts of the apostles when the gnostics did it they produced cosmological myth

I think the gnostic myths shouldn't be dated prior to the 2nd century, any 1st century information gleaned from them has to be by demythologising the myth. An aeon becomes Paul another becomes Jesus, Sophia becomes Mary etc
What the gnostic initiates would have been told, especially if converting from orthadoxy was who was who and how it related to what they knew already, varying for each gnostic school

I'm not saying Plato and astrology or whatever else didn't influence gnostic myth but it also was based on a historical element, that is, on humans from the familiar story elevated into the myth
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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

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MrMacSon wrote: Sun May 22, 2022 8:17 pmIn an article, 'Apostles as Archons: The Fight for Authority and the Emergence of Gnosticism in the Tchacos Codex and Other Early Christian Literature', pp.243ff, in The Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13–16, 2008, April DeConick, ed., Brill, 2009, ...

... April DeConick has a subsection titled, Thirteen Realms and their Archon
To be located on p.259/260

The epithet of this Archon [Athoth] is "excellent" ("Chrestos") identified
by the standard abbreviation XC or XPC which is often confused with ("Christos")

In the Apocryphon of John, Athoth is the first Power, "Excellence" (XPC).

So according to the modern scholarship we have the chronology of the Gospel of Judas in the mid 2nd century and the Apocryphon of John in the early 2nd century. Here we see these two texts employing "nomina sacra". How is this to be explained?

Were the nomina sacra available and used from the early 2nd century by both the proto-orthodox preservers of the NT canonical manuscripts and the proto-heretical preservers of the NT apocryphal manuscripts? Or were the nomina sacra added by scribes in later centuries given that both of these Sethian manuscripts are more or less physically dated to the mid 4th century.

Are there two groups (proto-orthodox and proto-heretical) or one group (proto-Christian)? If two groups then did one group borrow stuff (including the nomina sacra) from the other? I see these as important questions to answer.
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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

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I'm not going down your rabbit hole.

But given -


it appears that the author of the Gospel of Judas knows a version of the Sethian myth in which Nebro-Ialdabaoth and his lieutenant Saklas live in a cloud in Chaos. The Gospel of Judas eventually drops references to Nebro-Ialdabaoth and consolidates these archons into one demiurge who emerges in the text by the name Saklas ... [p.255]

... [its] this cosmic structure is held in common with one of our earliest Sethian texts, the Apocryphon of John (ca. 100–125 CE) ...


- it's pretty clear the Gospel of Judas is Sethian. And, as in other Sethian documents, Jesus is equated with Seth: "The first is Seth, who is called Christ". The Apocryphon of John is also considered Sethian.

It's likely that that 2008 article by Deconick (at the latest) misses some points about nomina sacra

I'd say that that part should read


So there is no reason for us to think that the first archon in these lists [of lists of archons in five codices: NHC II 10.28–34, BG 40.5–10, NHC III 16.20–25, NHC III 58.6–15, TC 52.4–1] is any other than Athoth. In fact, the epithet of this archon, χρηστός,” and its placement in the list corresponds to Athoth elsewhere in Sethian literature. This archon is identified by the standard abbreviation ⲭⲥ [& overline] or ⲭⲣⲥ [& overline], which is often extrapolated as “χριστός.”

In the Apocryphon of John, Athoth is the first Power, “ⲣⲥ”. Thus, in the same text, II.10–29–30 should be reconstructed: “the name of the first one is Athoth, whom the generations call ([ⲟⲩ]].”

The same can be said for the reference to him in the Gospel of the Egyptians. It should read: “The first angel is Ath[oth. He is the one] whom [the great] generations of people call [“ⲡⲟⲩⲭⲣⲥ”].


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Re: The Sethian School of 'Gnostic' Thought

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fwiw, albeit modified


The Gospel of Judas...is a unique depiction of Judas...as the favourite disciple of Jesus. [It] records how Jesus revealed to him secret knowledge that was withheld from the other apostles; this special revelation concerns the nature of the cosmos and the transcendent God, the creation of angels and other celestial beings, and the creation of humankind. The gospel also includes an account of conversations between Jesus and Judas that took place, according to the opening passage, “during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover.” In these dialogues, Judas emerges as the close confidant of Jesus, who tells him: “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” In this way, Jesus appears to ask Judas to help him liberate his spiritual self from his material body. Thus, the Judas of th[is] gospel is...Jesus'...most important collaborator.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gospel-of-Judas


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