Gnostic Gospels Quotes

If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.

If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you. —THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS

And so Jesus continued to preach in those lands and one day, when he was in the city of Pataliputra or modern-day Patna, close to the River Ganges, Jesus met a beautiful young woman whose name was Mari, better known today as Mary Magdalene: an attractive woman who was some ten-years younger than Jesus was.

Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering.

Then it happened that whenever he began to see Mari's [Mary Magdalene] passionate enthusiasm, her eyes emanating a light that amply showed how contended she was aiding so many people, Jesus could not help but be proud of his most-beloved disciple. Mari, likewise, felt indebted and grateful to Jesus as she saw her fellow sisters gradually being saved on all counts, some even going on to become some of Jesus's staunchest disciples...

It is a surprise to me to like myself; among all the elaborate possibilities I contemplated for my future, that never figured. My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

One of the main reasons Jesus wanted Mari [Mary Magdalene] to start her own following of female disciples was because in those times, Jewish women had no probative value in society and were therefore not even given a basic education. Their intellect was considered decidedly inferior to men's and apart from this, women's far superior intuition was interpreted as a characteristic that associated them to the devil since the men could not quite understand this inner knowledge or find a plausible explanation for it...

This is why Jesus would urge Mari [Mary Magdalene] to look after the women noting, ''Cultivate their regard for you because those women who are naturally drawn to you are exceptional people, sensitive women who are very close to spiritual freedom. However, before they can achieve this ultimate goal, you must first tend to their psychological wounds, the visible and the invisible lesions they have experienced at the hands of men, just as we once did in your homeland. It is only if these existential traumas are healed properly that these women can finally reach equanimity of spirit and heart.

At the time that she came to live with Jesus's mother, Mari [Mary Magdalene] had no inkling about how she would be greeted by her since their cultures were radically different from each other. The pleasure of her surprise was therefore boundless when Jesus's mother heartily welcomed her with open arms, despite the cultural difference in their religious beliefs. In all fairness, Mari did not make it difficult for Mary to accept her; if anything, she invited Mary to teach her the social habits and local traditions of her people down to the most minor detail especially since she would find them very useful later on in her public life with Jesus.

The Emperor Constantine the Great (272 - 337) and his Pauline bishops decided that all the Gospels that went against the politics of the emperor and the Hellenistic Christianity that was created by St Paul, were to be excluded from the New Testament. Proof of this can be found in the fact that the 27 books of The New Testament are but a very small fraction of the Christian literature that was produced in the first three centuries after Jesus lived. These documents are known as the Apocryphal Gospels (Greek, Apocrypha: ' hidden' or 'secret writings') and some of them retained quite a following and were highly respected in the communities of the earliest times...

Contrary to orthodox sources, which interpret Christ’s death as a sacrifice redeeming humanity from guilt and sin, this gnostic gospel sees the crucifixion as the occasion for discovering the divine self within.

Mari [Mary Magdalene] possessed a remarkably coherent understanding of what following The Way [Rahasya] meant. She believed that this spiritual philosophy taught that the world represented Man's mystic school from whence each person ultimately graduated by reaching the Enlightened State. Therefore, according to this spiritual discipline, human suffering is very subjective and manifested itself according to every person's personal karma or attitude to life. This meant that every life a person experienced imparted a certain number of spiritual lessons that may not have been experienced before in other lives. Ultimately, every experience could be relived and bring about spiritual growth, assisting the individual to move continually closer to the Enlightened State.

What happened to Jesus after he was crucified? A historical reconstruction It is an undeniable fact that the New Testament Gospels present the crucifixion and the resurrection as the pivot upon which Christianity is based. However, this notion is most surprising when we take into consideration that this postulation was never part of Jesus's teaching. Certainly the evangelists 'Mark' and 'Matthew' do hint at these strange happenings, but it is a noted fact amongst the majority of the biblical scholars that these sequences were added several centuries after the original Gospels were written, and this was done so that the political editors of these Gospels could adapt the writings according to their political and theological needs...

In its mythology, Mithra, the Persian god of light and wisdom, was born of a virgin in a cave on the 25th December and later, as an adult, undertook long voyages for the purposes of illuminating mankind. His disciples were twelve; he was betrayed, sentenced to death, and after his death, he was buried in a tomb from which he rose from the dead. The Mithrian religion also states that at the end of all time, Mithra will come again to judge the living and the dead. In this religious cult, Mithra was called the Saviour and he was sometimes illustrated as a lamb. Its doctrine included baptism, the sacramental meal (the Eucharist), and the belief in a saviour god that died and rose from the dead to be the mediator between God and mankind. The adherents of this religion believed in the resurrection of the body, universal judgement, and therefore in heaven and hell.

Once the caravan reached the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range, in the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent, Jesus continued the journey with a small group of locals until he completed the last leg on his own, guided from one place to another by the local people. Some weeks later, he made it to the Indian Himalayan region where Jesus was greeted by some Buddhist monks and with whom he sojourned for some time. From that location, he then went to live in the city of Rishikesh, in India's northern state of Uttarakhand, spending most of his time meditating in a cave known as Vashishta Gufa, on the banks of the River Ganga. Jesus lived in those lands for many months before he continued traveling to the northeast, until he arrived in the Kingdom of Magadha, in what is presently West-central Bihar. It so happened that it was here, in Magadha, that Jesus met Mari for the first time, the woman better known today as Mary Magdalene...

This medicinal potion was additionally consumed as part of a sacred ritual known as Sōmayajña where the Yogis that Jesus himself had taught were helped to reach an enlightened trance. In effect, Jesus had developed the Nirvanalaksanayoga Tantra specifically for women, to heal them from the psychological damage and abuse they had to endure at the hands of men. He wanted to enable them to rise above patriarchal dominance, realise their highest potential, and then he would guide them towards an enlightened state. The first person to benefit from this privilege was Mari [Mary Magdalene] herself. Jesus began teaching this discipline in every place that he visited: from Kashmir in the northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent, to Uttar Pradesh, and Mari would accompany him on every journey he embarked on, from east of the Indus to Nepal.

At this crucial point, for the Roman Church to reach a compromise between this myth of Mithra and the Hellenistic Christianity of St. Paul, it was necessary to have a sudden change of events or an altered version of Jesus's life, and it was here that the Roman Church began to implement a psychological process known today as Cognitive Dissonance. In a few words, this happens when a group of people produce a false reconstruction of an event they want to continue to believe in, a literary strategy also known as the Reconstructive Hypothesis. This theological notion is equally known as Apotheosis or the glorification of a subject to divine level such as a human becoming a god. In the case of Jesus, this process was copied in its entirety from the religion of Mithra where their 'divinisations' were practically the same.

What happened to the Divine Feminine? Why has She apparently disappeared from Judaism, Christianity and Islam? In the Gnostic Gospels, we learn that Mary Magdalene was probably the closest disciple of the Christos, the one whom the Master taught the most arcane esoteric wisdom. She was and is the representation of all wisdom. The male apostles of the Christos demonstrated both their jealousy and respect for the wisdom and position of Mary Magdalene.

Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis.

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate . . .’73

In American religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God’s difference from us—in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence, and holiness. God is my buddy, my inmost experience, or the power source for my living my best life now.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. —Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas

The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich recently drew a similar distinction between the God we imagine when we hear the term, and the “God beyond God,” that is, the “ground of being” that underlies all our concepts and images.

If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.

The Bible is a work of art. Were it not art, were it simply an instruction manual, it would not satisfy or convince, and very likely would not have survived. So, to be faithful to the original work, which in Greek is normally chanted in churches, as the Torah is chanted in the temple and the Qu’ran is melismatically chanted in the mosque… the Bible here must resonate.

Yet their metaphor indicates that the gnostics were neither relativists nor skeptics. Like the orthodox, they sought the “one sole truth.” But gnostics tended to regard all doctrines, speculations, and myths—their own as well as others’—only as approaches to truth.

Your mythology can and will change as you grow older and you learn more about life and the spiritual worlds. You are free to abrogate as many verses of your gospel as you wish, and even to be your own heretic.

Thunder, Perfect Mind 'I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore, and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am (the mother) and the daughter... I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband... I am knowing, and ignorance... I am shameless; I am ashamed. I am strength, and I am fear... I am foolish, and I am wise... I am godless, and I am one whose God is great.

The Savior answered, 'Man does not see through the soul, nor through the spirit, but the mind which is between the two—that is (what) sees a vision...

Jesus said: Wretched is the body which depends upon another body, and wretched is the soul which depends upon their being together.

Become more human, and humans will love you; become more spiritual, and the Spirit will unite with you. Become more intelligent, adn the Logos will unite with you. Gospel of Philip, Logicon 113:7-9

Paul suggests that gentiles can practice a law written in their hearts, which will be seen as not only equal to but also above the written Torah…It should be remembered that in Paul’s day the only religious law for Paul was that of the Jewish Bible, in Hebrew… Though Torah and the New Testament, including Paul’s letters, will eventually shape church law, the New Testament’s books are not in themselves composed as law. They are not a self-consciously composed constitution. They contain no Ten Commandments in form or statement.

In the 'Gospel According to the Egyptians,' Jesus proclaims: 'Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.' And he specifies: 'I am come to destroy the works of woman.' When we frequent the extreme truths of the Gnostics, we should like to go, if possible, still further, to say something never said, which petrifies or pulverizes history, something out of a cosmic Neronianism, out of a madness on the scale of matter.

If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you. from the Gnostic Gospels[1]

The gnostic understands Christ’s message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching: “seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this.”48 The rational soul longs to see with her mind, and perceive her kinsmen, and learn about her root … in order that she might receive what is hers …49 What is the result? The author declares that she attains fulfillment:  … the rational soul who wearied herself in seeking—she learned about God. She labored with inquiring, enduring distress in the body, wearing out her feet after the evangelists, learning about the Inscrutable One.… She came to rest in him who is at rest. She reclined in the bride-chamber. She ate of the banquet for which she had hungered.… She found what she had sought.50

Self-ignorance is also a form of self-destruction. According to the Dialogue of the Savior, whoever does not understand the elements of the universe, and of himself, is bound for annihilation:  … If one does not [understand] how the fire came to be, he will burn in it, because he does not know his root. If one does not first understand the water, he does not know anything.… If one does not understand how the wind that blows came to be, he will run with it. If one does not understand how the body that he wears came to be, he will perish with it.… Whoever does not understand how he came will not understand how he will go …

Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.

Speak of truth with those who seek it and of knowledge with those who have sinned in their error. [33]

People cannot see anything that really is without becoming like it.

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

What can never be proven or verified in the present, Tertullian says, “must be believed, because it is absurd.

Jesus said, "Seek and you will find. In the past, however, I did not tell you the things about which you asked me then. Now I am willing to tell them, but you are not seeking them

But if subjective pietism is not the real crux of this all-important Gospel, if it is instead belief in the plan of salvation, how are we not dealing with "salvation by (cognitive) works" and Gnosticism (salvation by special knowledge)? Fundamentalists hotly deny it, but isn't it finally a matter of believers in the right religion being saved and everyone else being disqualified?

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical. Second, the “living Jesus” of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal—even identical.

The gnostic understands Christ’s message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching: “seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this.

But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis.

In addition to the eternal, mystical Silence and the Holy Spirit, certain gnostics suggest a third characterization of the divine Mother: as Wisdom. Here the Greek feminine term for “wisdom,” sophia, translates a Hebrew feminine term, hokhmah.

The Gospel of Philip takes up the same theme: Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not reveal himself in the manner [in which] he was, but in the manner in which [they would] be able to see him. He revealed himself to [them all. He revealed himself] to the great as great … (and) to the small as small.69 To the immature disciple, Jesus appears as a child; to the mature, as an old man, symbol of wisdom. As the gnostic teacher Theodotus says, “each person recognizes the Lord in his own way, not all alike.

Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.

These gnostics recognized that their theory, like the orthodox one, bore political implications. It suggests that whoever “sees the Lord” through inner vision can claim that his or her own authority equals, or surpasses, that of the Twelve—and of their successors.

The One is the invisible spirit. We should not think of it as a god or like a god. For it is greater than a god, because it has nothing over it and no [3] lord above it. It does not [exist] within anything inferior [to it, since everything] exists within it, [for it established] itself.9

To speak of Jesus’s divinity without speaking of his kingdom coming on earth as in heaven is to take a large step toward the detached spirituality—almost a form of Gnosticism—that the first two centuries of the church firmly rejected. Only recently did the awful realization dawn on me that a certain stance was not only possible, but actually occurring: people were affirming the divinity of Jesus—which I also fully and gladly affirm—and then using it as a shelter behind which to hide from the radical story the gospels were telling about what this embodied God was actually up to.

Religious language, on the other hand, is a language of internal transformation; whoever perceives divine reality “becomes what he sees”:  … You saw the spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw [the Father, you] shall become Father.… you see yourself, and what you see you shall [become].68

To those who do not accept miracles it seems more likely that the Koran is almost certainly a compilation of old texts, not a new document in the seventh century. It is like a lake into which many streams flowed, a work of art that emerged from centuries of monotheistic fusions and debates, before taking its final form in the hands of a prophet in an expanding empire of newly unified Arabs pushing aside the ancient powers of Rome and Sassanid Persia. It is, in Tom Holland’s vivid words, a bloom from the seedbed of antiquity, not a guillotine dropped on the neck of antiquity. It contains bits of Roman imperial propaganda, stories of Christian saints, remnants of Gnostic gospels and parts of ancient Jewish tracts. Holland

Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy?

The triad, being the fundamental principle of the whole Kabalah, or Sacred Tradition of our fathers, was necessarily the fundamental dogma of Christianity, the apparent dualism of which it explains by the intervention of a harmonious and all-powerful unity. Christ did not put His teaching into writing, and only revealed it in secret to His favored disciple, the one Kabalist, and he a great Kabalist, among the apostles. So is the Apocalypse the book of the Gnosis or Secret Doctrine of the first Christians, and the key of this doctrine is indicated by an occult versicle of the Lord's Prayer, which the Vulgate leaves untranslated, while in the Greek Rite, the priests only are permitted to pronounce it. This versicle, completely kabalistic, is found in the Greek text of the Gospel according to St Matthew, and in several Hebrew copies, as follows: Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εις τοὺς αἰῶνας. ἀμήν. The sacred word MALKUTH substituted for KETHER, which is its kabalistic correspondent, and the equipoise of GEBURAH and CHESED, repeating itself in the circles of heavens called eons by the Gnostics, provided the keystone of the whole Christian Temple in the occult versicle. It has been retained by Protestants in their New Testament, but they have failed to discern its lofty and wonderful meaning, which would have unveiled to them all the Mysteries of the Apocalypse. There is, however, a tradition in the Church that the manifestation of this mysteries is reserved till the last times.

Such unity and completeness of humankind was lost, the Gospel of Philip declares, in the separation of Adam and Eve. Originally Adam was androgynous, but the fall from primordial oneness allowed humankind to slip into mortality and death. The Gospel of Philip states, “If the female had not separated from the male, the female and the male would not have died. The separation of male and female was the beginning of death.

But in terms of the social order, as we have seen, the orthodox teaching on resurrection had a different effect: it legitimized a hierarchy of persons through whose authority all others must approach God. Gnostic teaching, as Irenaeus and Tertullian realized, was potentially subversive of this order: it claimed to offer to every initiate direct access to God of which the priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant.102

Using the alternative angelic sons of god or gods translation in Deuteronomy 32:8 brings logic and definition to the passage; otherwise, the passage would make no sense whatsoever: Israel was not yet a nation in the days of long ago (before the flood), when in generations long past the nations were assigned to angels. Moreover, this alternative Deuteromic translation is supported in the Gnostic gospel Basilides Teachings, which states the earth was divided, along with its various nations, among the angels who helped create the earth, and chief among these angels was the God of the Jews, who wished to subject all nations unto Himself but was repelled by other rulers/ angels that resisted him.4 This redefined Deuteromic passage will become indispensable when set alongside the disparate antediluvian myths from the pantheistic cultures defining the antediluvian order.

The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself—or God—can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the “living One.” They argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition—even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open.

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, a fierce opponent of the Gnostics, attacked them for their spiritual and literary creativity, accusing them of producing a new gospel every day. Implicit in his statements was the view that where such a wealth of diverse imagery, myth, and teaching exists there can be no coherent doctrine equivalent to the dogma and canon of the mainstream Christian church. What critics from Irenaeus to contemporary scholars lose sight of is that Gnostic teaching is the direct result of the experience of gnosis.

form of a child. He points it out to John, who thinks he’s nuts, because the person on the shore isn’t a child but a handsome young man. They go to investigate, and although one sees an old, bald man, the other sees a young guy with a beard.” Reverend Justus frowned. “I can quote the Gospel of John forward and backward,” he said, “and that’s not in there.” Fletcher smiled. “I never said it was from the Gospel of John. I said it was from a gospel. A Gnostic one, called the Acts of John.” “There’s no Acts of John in the Bible,

Both Jew and Gentile enjoyed complexities, especially the Greeks with their philosophical systems. They loved mental gymnastics and intellectual labyrinths. They believed the truth was knowable, but only to those with elevated minds. This system later became known as gnosticism, a belief that certain people, by virtue of their enhanced reasoning powers, could move beyond the hoi polloi and ascend to the level of enlightenment. At the time of Paul, we can trace at least fifty different philosophies rattling around in the Roman and Greek world. And the gospel came along and said, “None of it matters. We’ll destroy it all. Take all the wisdom of the wise, get the best, get the elite, the most educated, the most capable, the smartest, the most clever, the best at rhetoric, oratory, logic; get all the wise, all the scribes, the legal experts, the great debaters, and they’re all going to be designated fools.” The gospel says they are all foolish. Paul’s quotation of Isaiah 29:14 in verse 19, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” had to be an offensive statement to his audience.

Now for the Gnostics—and this is their real secret—the psyche existed as a source of knowledge just as much as it did for the alchemists. Aside from the psychology of the unconscious, contemporary science and philosophy know only of what is outside, while faith knows only of the inside, and then only in the Christian form imparted to it by the passage of the centuries, beginning with St. Paul and the gospel of St. John. Faith, quite as much as science with its traditional objectivity, is absolute, which is why faith and knowledge can no more agree than Christians can with one another.

Like Baptists, Quakers, and many others, the gnostic is convinced that whoever receives the spirit communicates directly with the divine. One of Valentinus’ students, the gnostic teacher Heracleon (c. 160), says that “at first, people believe because of the testimony of others …” but then “they come to believe from the truth itself.”77 So his own teacher, Valentinus, claimed to have first learned Paul’s secret teaching; then he experienced a vision which became the source of his own gnosis: He saw a newborn infant, and when he asked who he might be, the child answered, “I am the Logos.”78

What interested these gnostics far more than past events attributed to the “historical Jesus” was the possibility of encountering the risen Christ in the present.49 The Gospel of Mary illustrates the contrast between orthodox and gnostic viewpoints. The account recalls what Mark relates: Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene … She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.50 As the Gospel of Mary opens, the disciples are mourning Jesus’ death and terrified for their own lives. Then Mary Magdalene stands up to encourage them, recalling Christ’s continual presence with them: “Do not weep, and do not grieve, and do not doubt; for his grace will be with you completely, and will protect you.”51 Peter invites Mary to “tell us the words of the Savior which you remember.”52 But to Peter’s surprise, Mary does not tell anecdotes from the past; instead, she explains that she has just seen the Lord in a vision received through the mind, and she goes on to tell what he revealed to her. When Mary finishes, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, “Say what you will about what she has said. I, at least, do not believe that the Savior has said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas!”53 Peter agrees with Andrew, ridiculing the idea that Mary actually saw the Lord in her vision. Then, the story continues, Mary wept and said to Peter, “My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart? Do you think I am lying about the Savior?” Levi answered and said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered … If the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her?”54 Finally Mary, vindicated, joins the other apostles as they go out to preach. Peter, apparently representing the orthodox position, looks to past events, suspicious of those who “see the Lord” in visions: Mary, representing the gnostic, claims to experience his continuing presence.55 These gnostics recognized that their theory, like the orthodox one, bore political implications. It suggests that whoever “sees the Lord” through inner vision can claim that his or her own authority equals, or surpasses, that of the Twelve—and of their successors. Consider the political implications of the Gospel of Mary: Peter and Andrew, here representing the leaders of the orthodox group, accuse Mary—the gnostic—of pretending to have seen the Lord in order to justify the strange ideas, fictions, and lies she invents and attributes to divine inspiration. Mary lacks the proper credentials for leadership, from the orthodox viewpoint: she is not one of the “twelve.” But as Mary stands up to Peter, so the gnostics who take her as their prototype challenge the authority of those priests and bishops who claim to be Peter’s successors.

The Christos (from the Greek, meaning 'anointed') spent a lot of His time, while on Earth, healing people. I refer specifically to the fact that He spent a lot of time casting out what the Bible calls unclean spirits. These unclean spirits were Alien Parasites. Mark's Gospel is replete with examples of this aspect of the Christos' healing ministry. In Christianity, there is talk about good angels and evil angels; in Islam, the pious and evil jinn, in Buddhism and other religions, beneficent spirits and malevolent spirits. Alien Parasites have been attacking humanity since humans first walked on this Planet.

Here Bart and I find almost no common ground because he, with the huge majority of scholars, considers at least the “lucky seven” (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) to be authentically Pauline and thus earlier than the earliest gospel, while I think the whole lot of them are late-first, early-second-century patchworks of Paulinist (Marcionite and Gnostic) and Catholicizing fragments. Thus, in my eyes, the relation between the Pauline epistles and a historical Paul is exactly analogous to that obtaining between the gospels and a historical Jesus. The documents may be as

The contrast between the biblical and Gnostic Jesus is stark when the gospels of John and Thomas are compared. “John says that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus,” said Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels. “But certain passages in Thomas’ gospel draw a quite different conclusion: that the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made in the image of God.”3 While John stresses the resurrection as evidence of Jesus’ divinity, “Gnostic writers tend to view . . . the resurrection and other elements of the Jesus story not as literal, historical events but as symbolic keys to a ‘higher’ understanding,” said religion writer Jay Tolson.4

Heresy, in these remote days, always springs from a Jewish or Mosaic root. The false teachers are always teachers of the Law, advocating the Sabbath, circumcision, and other rites. But they do not teach only the Law, and are not to be confounded with the good scribes of Jerusalem, and their Pharisee disciples, absorbed in the canonical Law and its commentaries. They are real theologians, who taking advantage of the comparative indifference of their co-religionists to all but the worship of the Law, devote themselves to doctrinal speculation. And they did not stop there. To the already sufficiently minute observances of the Mosaic Law they added a very definite asceticism, celibacy, vegetarianism, and abstinence from wine. Those amongst them who accepted Christianity, combined with the new doctrines of the Gospel their "Jewish fables," and tried to impose them, together with their austere rule of life, upon new converts. They were, in fact, Judaizing gnostics, who in the primitive churches heralded the inroads of philosophic Gnosticism.

The publication of the Gospel of Judas within Codex Tchacos represents a significant moment for the study of religion and culture. It is a rare occurrence that a previously unknown gospel manuscript is discovered, particularly one that was mentioned in early Christian sources, and that is precisely what is the case with the Gospel of Judas. The Gospel of Judas can be dated, with some certainty, to around the middle of the second century, or perhaps even a bit before, and the materials included within it are even older. The gospel is thus an early source for our knowledge of an important mystical movement within early Christianity and Judaism, namely the Sethian gnostic school of religious thought. Further, the text provides the opportunity to evaluate, and perhaps reevaluate, the historical role of a figure—Judas Iscariot—who has been much maligned within Christianity and has been a prominent figure in the development of anti-Semitism. All in all, the Gospel of Judas sheds important light on the character of developing Christianity, and reminds us again of the rich diversity of the early church.

In addition, Christ Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic. While He was born Jewish and could read the Hebrew sacred texts, it is probable that He did not speak Hebrew with his Apostles or with those people who came to hear Him speak. For, it was not common during the time of Christ Jesus for the Jewish people to speak in Hebrew. Extremely few people in ancient times could read or write. The Jewish people of the time of Christ Jesus spoke Aramaic. The New Testament Gospels, on the other hand, were written in Greek. Thus, before even beginning to speak about all the errors created by innumerable scribes re-copying the Gospels over and over again, we must confront the fact that when Christ Jesus spoke, he spoke in Aramaic. We know that the authors of the Gospels in the New Testament were not the persons traditionally named as the authors of these Gospels: Saint Mark did not write the Gospel of Mark; Saint Matthew did not write the Gospel of Matthew and so on. In order to create each one of the New Testament Gospels, some author who spoke and wrote in Greek had to have read a document already written in Aramaic (or possibly Hebrew, although this is unlikely), or possibly sat and listened as one of the Apostles or followers of Christ Jesus related the stories to him in Aramaic and then the author who spoke and wrote in Greek, translated the Aramaic tales into Greek. So, straightaway, we realize that it is impossible that we are reading the exact words of Christ Jesus; the best that we can hope for is that we are reading the best translation of Christ Jesus’ words from Aramaic, into Greek and finally into English.

The dead man, Hippolytus continues, will rise again by passing through the “door of heaven.” Jacob saw the gate of heaven on his way to Mesopotamia, “but they say Mesopotamia is the stream of the great ocean that flows from the midst of the perfect man.” This is the gate of heaven of which Jacob said: “How terrible is this place! This is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven.”120 The stream that flows out of the Original Man (the gate of heaven) is interpreted here as the flood-tide of Oceanus, which, as we have seen, generates the gods. The passage quoted by Hippolytus probably refers to John 7 : 38 or to an apocryphal source common to both. The passage in John—“He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water”—refers to a nonbiblical source, which, however, seemed scriptural to the author. Whoever drinks of this water, in him it shall be a fountain of water springing up into eternal life, says Origen.121 This water is the “higher” water, the aqua doctrinae, the rivers from the belly of Christ, and the divine life as contrasted with the “lower” water, the aqua abyssi, where the darknesses are, and where dwell the Prince of this world and the deceiving dragon and his angels.122 The river of water is the “Saviour” himself.123 Christ is the river that pours into the world through the four gospels,124 like the rivers of Paradise. I have purposely cited the ecclesiastical allegories in greater detail here, so that the reader can see how saturated Gnostic symbolism is in the language of the Church, and how, on the other hand, particularly in Origen, the liveliness of his amplifications and interpretations has much in common with Gnostic views. Thus, to him as to many of his contemporaries and successors, the idea of the cosmic correspondence of the “spiritual inner man” was something quite familiar: in his first Homily on Genesis he says that God first created heaven, the whole spiritual substance, and that the counterpart of this is “our mind, which is itself a spirit, that is, it is our spiritual inner man which sees and knows God.”125

gnostics celebrated as proof of spiritual maturity, the orthodox denounced as “deviation

In the hymn the savior uses aretalogical self-predications (“I am” statements) to describe his—or her—multiple appearances in the world.

I disturbed and frightened the whole multitude of the angels and their ruler, and I placed a small thought in the world. I examined all with flame and fire through my thought, and all they did they did through me.

Elaine Pagels, in Beyond Belief, emphasizes the centrality of such insight and creative thinking in gnostic texts by discussing the role of epinoia, which may be translated “insight,” “afterthought,” “creativity,” or the like, in the Secret Book of John.

If they ask you, ‘What is the evidence of your father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is motion and rest.’”93

Matter gave birth to passion that is without form, because it comes from what is contrary to nature, and then confusion arose in the whole body. That is why I told you, Be of good courage.7 And if you are discouraged, be encouraged in the presence of the diversity of forms of nature.8

The names of worldly things are utterly deceptive, for they turn the heart from what is real to what is unreal. Whoever hears the word god thinks not of what is real but rather of what is unreal. So also with the words father, son, holy spirit, life, light, resurrection, church, and all the rest, people do not think of what is real but of what is unreal, [though] the words refer to what is real. The words [that are] heard belong to this world. [Do not be] [54] deceived. If words belonged to the eternal realm, they would never be pronounced in this world, nor would they designate worldly things. They would refer to what is in the eternal realm.

The rulers wanted to fool people, since they saw that people have a kinship with what is truly good. They took the names of the good and assigned them to what is not good, to fool people with names and link the names to what is not good. So, as if they were doing people a favor, they took names from what is not good and transferred them to the good, in their own way of thinking.

It is not Docetism (in the strict sense) which is the characteristic of gnostic Christology, but the two-nature doctrine, i.e. the distinction between Jesus and Christ, or the doctrine that the redeemer as redeemer did not become man” (162).

But ignorance of the father brought terror and fear, and terror grew dense like a fog, so that no one could see.

Since she did not know the truth, she assumed a fashioned figure and prepared, with power and in beauty, a substitute for truth.

Rather, they are letters of truth; they speak and know themselves. Each letter is a perfect truth13 like a perfect book, for they are letters written in unity, written by the father for the eternal realms, so that by means of his letters they might come to know the father.

I am not saying that those who have not yet come to be are nothing.18 They are [28] within one who may wish that they come into being if at some future point he so wishes.

On the one hand, he knows, before anything appears, what he will produce. On the other hand, the fruit that has not yet appeared knows nothing and does nothing.

For whatever has no root has no fruit, and although thinking, “I have come into being,” it will perish by itself. So whatever does not exist will never exist.

Deficiency of matter is not from the infinity of the father, who came to give time to deficiency. In fact, it is not right to say that the incorruptible would actually come in this manner. The father’s depth is profound, and the thought of error is not with him. It is something that has fallen, and something that can readily be set upright through the discovery of the one who has come to what he would restore.

The father is at rest in will. Nothing happens without the father’s pleasure, nothing happens without the father’s will. And his will is incomprehensible. His will is his footprint, but none can understand him, nor does he exist so that they might study him32 in order to grasp him.

But what remains is astonishing: some fifty-two texts from the early centuries of the Christian era—including a collection of early Christian gospels, previously unknown. Besides the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip, the find included the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel to the Egyptians, which identifies itself as “the [sacred book] of the Great Invisible [Spirit].

But every one of these—the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure—emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.

They point out that the Scriptures sometimes depict God as a mere craftsman, or as an avenging judge, as a king who rules in heaven, or even as a jealous master. But these images, they say, cannot compare with Jesus’ teaching that “God is spirit” or the “Father of Truth.”22

Specifically, by the latter part of the second century, when the orthodox insisted upon “one God,” they simultaneously validated the system of governance in which the church is ruled by “one bishop.

According to Valentinus, what Clement and Ignatius mistakenly ascribe to God actually applies only to the creator.42 Valentinus, following Plato, uses the Greek term for “creator” (demiurgos),43 suggesting that he is a lesser divine being who serves as the instrument of the higher powers.

Gnosis offers nothing less than a theological justification for refusing to obey the bishops and priests! The initiate now sees them as the “rulers and powers” who rule on earth in the demiurge’s name.

Other texts indicate that their authors had wondered to whom a single, masculine God proposed, “Let us make man [adam] in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Since the Genesis account goes on to say that humanity was created “male and female” (1:27), some concluded that the God in whose image we are made must also be both masculine and feminine—both Father and Mother.

Another newly discovered text from Nag Hammadi, Trimorphic Protennoia (literally, the “Triple-formed Primal Thought”), celebrates the feminine powers of Thought, Intelligence, and Foresight.

For, they argued, this creator was a derivative, merely instrumental power whom the Mother had created to administer the universe, but his own self-conception was far more grandiose.

the Word of the Father goes forth into the all … purifying it, bringing it back into the Father, into the Mother, Jesus of the infiniteness of gentleness.