Elaine Pagels posted:

Many New Testament scholars who have analyzed the account of Jesus’ appearance before the Sanhedrin agree that Mark (or his predecessors) probably wrote the first version to emphasize his primary point: that Pilate merely ratified a previous Jewish verdict, and carried out a death sentence that he himself neither ordered nor approved—but a sentence unanimously pronounced by the entire leadership of the Jewish people.33 This does not mean, however, that Mark is motivated by malice toward the Jewish leaders. Indeed, Mark stops far short of the extent to which Matthew, Luke, and John will go to blame the Jewish leaders for the crucifixion, although the tendency to blame them had already begun before Mark’s time and had its effect on his narrative. Nevertheless, Mark and his fellow believers, as followers of a convicted criminal, knew that such allegiance would arouse suspicion and invite reprisals. Roman magistrates had already arrested and executed several prominent members of the movement, including Peter and Paul. It is no wonder, then, that, as one historian says, Mark wanted

quote:

to emphasize the culpability of the Jewish nation for the death of Jesus, particularly of its leaders.… [Mark’s] tendency was defensive rather than aggressive. He was concerned to avoid mentioning anything that would provoke Roman antagonism towards, or even suspicion of, the ideals for which he stood.… The evangelist therefore contrived to conceal that Jesus had been condemned and executed on a charge of sedition.34

NomChompsky posted:

I didn't expect a Maundy Thursday service to be as gripping as it was toward the end. Maybe it's just because I'm very new to Christian faith and practice being presented in this way but the end where the lights go out and everyone just sits in darkness really brought a feeling of dreadful trepidation that only sort of comes across in the reading of the Gospels.

That was intense! Church is cool.

Valiantman posted:

Psalm 22?
Stripping the altar and other parts of the church of all extra decorations?
Quenching the candles of the apostles?
Organ music stops and the last hymn is just sung?
No send-away words and people just silently get up and leave from the dark and barren church at the end of the hymn?

Yeah, extremely cool.

Nessus posted:

I thought divination was ungodly and forboden

NomChompsky posted:

I said to someone after that I could, for the first time, feel what it must have been like to feel the terror that the disciples felt that evening. The rector wiping down the altar after everyone had already moved off from the main area, the silence of the moment. The trepidation of knowing that you've been told something is going to happen, something you will suffer through.

It's the only time in a church I've felt the feeling of what it is like to feel, for lack of a better other description, the feeling of waiting in a hospital to hear from the doctors what has become of someone you love very much. It's that same foreboding.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Finished "The Origin of Satan" and started reading "The Gnostic Gospels." Pagels repeatedly pointing out orthodox Christianity developed the way it did to serve the interests of the governing institutions isn't new information to me, but pointing out how many of the titular gospels emphasize personal spiritual development and finding truths within yourself as the path to becoming "like Christ" (that is to say, becoming spiritually/Divinely awakened just as the Christ was; much more literal than "Christlike" is generally taken to mean) in combination with pointing out Tertullian etc's insistence that Christians should not be investigating their own faith too deeply or questioning their leaders makes me wonder if Christianity started out on the right path and then promptly went wrong.

Like, if Gnostic Christianity had triumphed over orthodox Christianity, and the dominant western religion emphasized a search for gnosis and developing the personal connection to the Divine as opposed to "obey the church" would we all have achieved reconciliation by now

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Like, if Gnostic Christianity had triumphed over orthodox Christianity, and the dominant western religion emphasized a search for gnosis and developing the personal connection to the Divine as opposed to "obey the church" would we all have achieved reconciliation by now

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Also hey ABK! Zuzu was reading Pagels with me yesterday.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Finished "The Origin of Satan" and started reading "The Gnostic Gospels." Pagels repeatedly pointing out orthodox Christianity developed the way it did to serve the interests of the governing institutions isn't new information to me, but pointing out how many of the titular gospels emphasize personal spiritual development and finding truths within yourself as the path to becoming "like Christ" (that is to say, becoming spiritually/Divinely awakened just as the Christ was; much more literal than "Christlike" is generally taken to mean) in combination with pointing out Tertullian etc's insistence that Christians should not be investigating their own faith too deeply or questioning their leaders makes me wonder if Christianity started out on the right path for human spiritual evolution and then promptly went wrong.

Like, if Gnostic Christianity had triumphed over orthodox Christianity, and the dominant western religion emphasized a search for gnosis and developing the personal connection to the Divine as opposed to "obey the church" would we all have achieved reconciliation by now

Orbs posted:

I've thought about this a lot too. Instead of making the society Christ wanted to see, they got distracted trying to be more personally like him, but always in ways that the Church said to. Giving all your money to your local Church? That's good and 'Christlike.' Giving it all to start a local commune and refusing to pay taxes? Not so much to the Roman Empire.

Keromaru5 posted:

Pagels thinks if Gnosticism triumphed, then the Church would have become more like Eastern Orthodoxy, which kind of tells me a lot about her understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Nessus posted:

How would you distinguish between your local church and your local commune, assuming we are starting from scratch and before Church got its various complex associations?

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Finished "The Origin of Satan" and started reading "The Gnostic Gospels." Pagels repeatedly pointing out orthodox Christianity developed the way it did to serve the interests of the governing institutions isn't new information to me, but pointing out how many of the titular gospels emphasize personal spiritual development and finding truths within yourself as the path to becoming "like Christ" (that is to say, becoming spiritually/Divinely awakened just as the Christ was; much more literal than "Christlike" is generally taken to mean) in combination with pointing out Tertullian etc's insistence that Christians should not be investigating their own faith too deeply or questioning their leaders makes me wonder if Christianity started out on the right path for human spiritual evolution and then promptly went wrong.

Like, if Gnostic Christianity had triumphed over orthodox Christianity, and the dominant western religion emphasized a search for gnosis and developing the personal connection to the Divine as opposed to "obey the church" would we all have achieved reconciliation by now

Orbs posted:

Whichever one doesn't tell you to obey the state, I guess.

Nessus posted:

But they both precede the existence of the modern concept of the state!

Deteriorata posted:

Pagels is a bit over-enthusiastic on that point. Gnosticism was the first big heresy of the 2nd century. The primary objection to it was not that it was inconvenient, it was "This isn't what the Apostles taught us." There were still people alive at that point who had learned from the Apostles directly, and sticking to what they had been taught was the prime motivation.

Gnosticism was a dead end. Christianity would have become like Zoroastrianism had it prevailed.

quote:

Whatever we think of the historicity of the orthodox account, we can admire its ingenuity. For this theory—that all authority derives from certain apostles’ experience of the resurrected Christ, an experience now closed forever—bears enormous implications for the political structure of the community. First, as the German scholar Karl Holl has pointed out, it restricts the circle of leadership to a small band of persons whose members stand in a position of incontestable authority.33 Second, it suggests that only the apostles had the right to ordain future leaders as their successors.34 Christians in the second century used Luke’s account to set the groundwork for establishing specific, restricted chains of command for all future generations of Christians. Any potential leader of the community would have to derive, or claim to derive, authority from the same apostles. Yet, according to the orthodox view, none can ever claim to equal their authority—much less challenge it. What the apostles experienced and attested their successors cannot verify for themselves; instead, they must only believe, protect, and hand down to future generations the apostles’ testimony.35

This theory gained extraordinary success: for nearly 2,000 years, orthodox Christians have accepted the view that the apostles alone held definitive religious authority, and that their only legitimate heirs are priests and bishops, who trace their ordination back to that same apostolic succession. Even today the pope traces his—and the primacy he claims over the rest—to Peter himself, “first of the apostles,” since he was “first witness of the resurrection.”

Neon Noodle posted:

!!!!!!! THE HOLY SPIRIT

Orbs posted:

The Romans still had a state that you had to pay taxes to on pain of imprisonment or worse, whether it looked like the modern version or not.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Right, but I think she is communicating that sticking to apostolic tradition is of itself enormously beneficial to what becomes the Church establishment.

Deteriorata posted:

Yeah, but Apostolic succession was the only legitimacy of the faith. The authority of the Apostles was all there was. They were not about to tolerate people just making poo poo up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as something valid.

There had not yet been any systematic theology or attempts at expanding on the Apostolic message. That's all there was and it was completely reasonable to stick to that.

She tries to portray it as a negative thing, but there really wasn't any other path.

Nessus posted:

Do you get the same holiness quotient if you just refuse to pay taxes?

It WOULD assist with martyrdom...

Deteriorata posted:

Yeah, but Apostolic succession was the only legitimacy of the faith. The authority of the Apostles was all there was. They were not about to tolerate people just making poo poo up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as something valid.

There had not yet been any systematic theology or attempts at expanding on the Apostolic message. That's all there was and it was completely reasonable to stick to that.

She tries to portray it as a negative thing, but there really wasn't any other path.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Yeah, it makes sense and is completely reasonable that the Gnostics going, for example, "mmmm y'all are wrong about the resurrection" was deeply objectionable to contemporaneous Christians. However that doesn't mean the orthodoxy wasn't also offended by Gnosticism encouraging people to look within themselves to understand and interpret Christ's truths for institutional reasons.

My point -- which was just me musing, to be clear, not something I have encountered Pagel saying thus far -- was that the Gnostic gospels (I have read some of these, but this is the first book I have begun to read on them) have a much stronger emphasis on nurturing the Divine within than exists in the Christian gospels as-is, which focus instead on the Divine as an external force. I was making the observation that I, personally, think that a Christianity that embraced some of the gospels which encouraged personal journeys in search of truth and understanding, alongside the ones that did become canonical, might have delivered us to a very different place as a species than the version we have now.

Deteriorata posted:

I have read a lot of Pagels' work and admire her a lot. My main complaint with her is that she is a bit too protective of her subject matter and gets kind of Dan Brownish in seeing conspiracies and bad faith where none existed. As I said before, the apostolic witness was the only reason the faith existed, and anybody contradicting that was not going to be welcome. The Arians of the next century were treated the same way, for the same reasons.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

My point -- which was just me musing, to be clear, not something I have encountered Pagel saying thus far -- was that the Gnostic gospels (I have read some of these, but this is the first book I have begun to read on them) have a much stronger emphasis on nurturing the Divine within than exists in the Christian gospels as-is, which focus instead on the Divine as an external force. I was making the observation that I, personally, think that a Christianity that embraced some of the gospels which encouraged personal journeys in search of truth and understanding, alongside the ones that did become canonical, might have delivered us to a very different place as a species than the version we have now.

Keromaru5 posted:

I checked some Pagels interviews for my last post, and you more or less captured her view. But then, that's why I brought up her statement about Eastern Orthodoxy. We managed to get of what you described, more or less (depending on how you understand "personal journeys"), while completely rejecting Gnosticism and its gospels. Our entire iconographic tradition is at least in part a rejection of some specific Gnostic beliefs. So I don't know where she gets that.

Deteriorata posted:

Gnosticism was a dead end. Christianity would have become like Zoroastrianism had it prevailed.

Keromaru5 posted:

So I don't know where she gets that.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Also hey ABK! Zuzu was reading Pagels with me yesterday.

Neon Noodle posted:

!!!!!!! THE HOLY SPIRIT

Bar Ran Dun posted:

In Church history, we always have Marcionism, or radical Paulinism, and we have it today in the Barthian school whenever they try to put the God of revelation against the God of natural law. In natural law, and accordingly in history, man is by himself, they say. They don't speak of a second God: such a fantastic mythology would not be possible today. But they speak of a radical tension between the natural world – including natural reason, natural morals – and the religious realm, which stands against all the other realms. This was Marcion's problem, and he solved it by a radical separation. The problem is: Gnostic dualism. For the Gnostics, the created world is bad, and therefore the world must have been created by a God who is bad. And who is this God? It is the God of the Old Testament. Salvation ,therefore; is liberation from the world, and .this must be done in ascetic terms. There is no place for eschatology on the basis of this dualism because the end of the world would be always seen in the light of this dualism, and a dualistic fulfillment is not a fulfillment: it is a split in God himself. The saviour is one of the heavenly powers, called aeons, eternities – the word "eternity" does not have the connotation of timelessness here, but has the connotation of cosmic powers, and as such it is always used. This higher aeon, the saviour aeon, the saviour power of being, descends to earth and takes on human flesh. But now it becomes obvious that the aeon, a Divine power, cannot suffer. So he takes on either a strange body or a body which only seems to be a body, but he does not become flesh. This of course was a very sensitive point for the early Christians and their conformity, and so they rejected the gnostics on this point. The saviour descends to the different realms in which the different astrological powers rule. This concerns especially the planets, which are considered as astrological powers even long after the Renaissance, even in Protestantism.. He reveals the hidden weapons of these demonic powers by trespassing their realm and overcoming them on his descent. He brings down the seals of their power, their names and their characters, and if you have the name of a demonic power, you are superior to it: you call it by name and then it falls down. One of the Gnostic texts says~ "Having the seals, I shall descend, going through all aeons. I shall recognize all mysteries. I shall show the shape of the gods. And the hidden things of the holy path, called gnosis, I shall deliver." Here you have a claim of the good God, of the mystery power which comes down to earth. The demonic powers are the representatives of fate. The human soul which has fallen into their hands is liberated by the saviour and by the knowledge he gives. One could say: What the saviour does in gnosticism is somehow to use white magic against the black magic of the planetary powers, the same powers of whom Paul speaks in Romans 8 that they are subdued to Christ. Therefore the magic power of the sacraments as mysterious practices is acknowledged. In them the highest Divine power comes to earth. But besides these sacramental and speculative tendencies, the Gnostics had ethical values of community and asceticism. What is demanded is the ascent of the soul, following the saviour who also ascended, but then descended. The souls have descended; now they shall ascend. The savior liberates from demonic powers for the sake of union with the highest itself, with the fullness, the pleroma, the Spiritual Word. On the upward way, the human soul meets these rulers, and then the soul tells the rulers what it knows about them. He knows their name, i. e., their mysterious power, the structure of evil they represent. When he tells them their name, they fall down and tremble and cannot stop the soul any more. Now what really is meant in these poetic images is a religion of salvation from the demonic powers, which was the problem of the whole period, inside and outside Christianity. Man is somehow better .than his creator. Man can be saved from the powers of the demiurge, of him who creates the world. But not all men are able to be saved. There are three classes of human beings: the pneumatikoi, i. e. , the Spirituals; the psychikoi, those who follow the soul; and the sarkikoi, those who follow the flesh. The sarkikoi are lost; the Spiritual ones are saved; but the middle group, the psychikoi, can go this way or that way. In order to reach the elevation, man must participate in the mysteries. These mysteries are mostly mysteries of purification, therefore mostly connected with baptism. The Spirit in baptism enters the matter of the sacrament (water) and dwells in it. After the Spirit has been brought down by a special formula, namely the formula of the initiation of the sacraments., – it is the magic idea of the sacraments which was accepted by these Stoics... All these ideas were a great temptation to Christians. Christ remained in the center of history. He is he who brings salvation. But He is put into the frame of the dualistic world-view of Hellenism. He is put into the context of the great syncretism. The religious mood of this whole time is beautifully expressed in the Acts of Andreas , one of those apocryphal writings. He says: "Blessed is our generation. We are not thrown down, for we have been recognized by the light. We do not belong to time, which would dissolve us. We are not a product of motion, which would destroy us again. We belong to the greatness towards which we are striving. We belong to Him who has mercy towards us, to the light which has expelled the darkness, to the One from whom we have turned away, to the Manifold, to the Super-heavenly, by whom we have understood the earthly. If we praise Him, it is because we are recognized by Him." Now this is piety. It is not only speculation, as the critics of Gnosticism have said. This is really religion. And there are many people today who would like to renew gnostic religion as their own daily expression of their religious experience; and not because of the fantastic speculation, but because of the real piety in it, Gnosticism was a very great danger for Christianity, because if Christian theology had succumbed to this temptation, the individual character of Christianity would have been lost. The unique ground of the person Jesus would have become meaningless. The Old Testament would have disappeared, and with it the historical picture of the Christ. All this has been avoided by those men whom we call the anti-gnostic Fathers, the Fathers who were fighting against Gnosticism and who threw it out of the Church.   Now there are a few minutes and I would like to see how difficult, especially the first part of the lectures, were. Perhaps you have questions. Q. I think the Logos doctrine greatly resembles the gnostic doctrine of the aeons. They are both emanations from God. Is there any real distinction between them? A. That is a very good question. The distinction is the following: In the Logos Christology, as it was developed further on, we have the emphasis on the absoluteness of this aeon, which is Christ. Perhaps I can give you a great help for the understanding of the struggle between Arius and Athanasius, to which we come later on. What Arius actually did was to make the Christ, the heavenly Logos, into one of the aeons; while the Church decided that whatever one may think about aeons, or transcendent powers of being, the Logos is above them. .. If we did not have one of the Divine principles in which the innermost heart of God is expressed, then our salvation would not be a complete salvation. But what you said is very well said: these powers of being are like the Logos, hypostasized, hypostasized in the bathos, the abyss, the depth of the Divine Life. There, everything is in and is born out of it. It is the birthplace of all aeons. But now the Church limited the aeons to two: the Logos and the Spirit. And everything else, whether it was called an aeon or not, was not of equal rank. This was the development of the Trinitarian doctrine of God.

Azathoth posted:

Even talking about "gnosticism" as a single coherent set of beliefs is fraught. Aside from the teachings being secret or otherwise reserved for the initiated, it's really hard (and maybe impossible) to come up with a single definition of gnosticism that covers the range of groups labeled gnostic that doesn't also just straight up include early Christianity. A focus on an inner spiritual life isn't exactly a feature unique to gnostic groups.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

Keromaru5 posted:

Okay, but since Nicea impacted East and West, this doesn't really address a specific Gnostic influence on the East.