Exposing Myths about Christianity by Russell Jeffrey Burton;
Author:Russell, Jeffrey Burton; [Russell, Jeffrey Burton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8308-6687-8
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2012-05-15T00:00:00+00:00
75. Gnostics are Christians.
Gnostic ideas derived from a combination of Persian Zoroastrianism and Greek Orphism. Each of these two traditions was dualistic in its own way. The Zoroastrians believed in a duality of two independent, warring gods: the god of light and goodness versus the god of evil and darkness. The Orphics believed in a duality of spirit, which is good, and matter, which is evil. The Gnostics interwove the two ideas, tying spirit to the god of light and matter to the god of darkness. Gnosticism is the gnosis (secret knowledge) of doctrines claimed to come either from a secret tradition of the apostles or from personal revelation. Whereas the open tradition of the apostles existed by at least A.D. 50, the alleged secret tradition did not appear until about A.D. 100. Gnostics were originally part of the Christian community, but they were extruded from it around A.D. 150-200, either by coercion (as modern gnostics say), or by the communityâs general recognition that Gnostic doctrines were incompatible with the real Jesusâor by the choice of the Gnostics themselves.
âChristianâ Gnosticism was a movement that flourished from about A.D. 150 to about A.D. 250. Its basic belief was that the material world was created by the evil Old Testament God for the purpose of imprisoning human spirits inside flesh. The spiritâs job was to liberate itself from its loathsome body by means of secret gnosis. Sex was bad, and the worst sex was procreative, since the conception of each new child entombed yet another human spirit. Jews, who worshiped the evil Creator deity of the Old Testament, were particularly wicked. Jesus did not have a real body, since bodies were disgusting; he had only the appearance of a body. As he had no body, he did not die on the cross, did not rise from the dead, and did not suffer in order to free people from sin. The point of Jesus was to teach people how to free themselves from matter through gnosis.
Over the past couple of decades, some writers have been promoting the view that original Christianity was actually Gnostic. They argue that what we now think of as Christianity is false and that Gnosticism is real Christianity. Some have been beguiled by this idea because it ties vague versions of Gnosticism together with pop spirituality. The characteristics of modern gnosticism fit contemporary âme-nessâ and New Age, adding a pinch of Jesus so as to attract Christians. The characteristics include seeking the divine within, rejection of the past and a break with tradition, conspiracy theory, freedom of spirit against rules of conduct, womenâs leadership against patriarchy, sexual permissiveness, self-centeredness instead of community, intellectual elitism, secret knowledge, and exclusion of the âignorantâ from the circle of the âenlightened.â Modern gnostics fail to confront the unpleasant characteristics of Gnosticism: it was dualistic, anti-material, anti-sexual, anti-woman, anti-child, anti-nature and antiÂsemitic.63 The myth of neo-gnostics is that the Gnostics were âspiritual egalitarians, environmentalists, feminists, mystical pantheistsâindeed, practically anything but what they actually were.â64
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