*Glo* ~ Gnostic Gospel site for you :-)

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Glo~Light, Antoine and anyone else interested,

 

This is a very beautiful compilation of writings which reads in part like

Kabbalah and in part like Christianity, beautiful:

 

Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the Gospel of Thomas,

suggested the date of c. A.D. 140 for the original. Some reasoned that since

these gospels were heretical, they must have been written later than the

gospels of the New Testament, which are dated c. 60-l l0. But recently

Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University has suggested that the

collection of sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, although compiled c. 140, may

include some traditions even older than the gospels of the New Testament,

"possibly as early as the second half of the first century" (50-100)--as

early as, or earlier, than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

 

Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts

tell the origin of the human race in terms very different from the usual

reading of Genesis: the Testimony of Truth, for example, tells the story of

the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the serpent, long

known to appear in Gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom,

convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while "the Lord" threatens

them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge,

and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it. Another text,

mysteriously entitled The Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an extraordinary poem

spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

 

 

For 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 barren one, and many are her sons....

I am the silence that is incomprehensible....

I am the utterance of my name.

These diverse texts range, then, from secret gospels, poems, and

quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origin of the universe, to myths,

magic, and instructions for mystical practice.

 

Why were these texts buried-and why have they remained virtually unknown for

nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial

on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle

critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and

others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era,

were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second

century. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were

condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them

came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. Bishop Irenaeus, who

supervised the church in Lyons, c. 180, wrote five volumes, entitled The

Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge, which begin with

his promise to set forth the views of those who are now teaching heresy . . .

to show how absurd and inconsistent with the truth are their statements . . .

I do this so that . . . you may urge all those with whom you are connected to

avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ.

 

<A

HREF="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/pagels.html

">from jesus to christ: the story of the storytellers: the gnostic gospels</A>

 

 

Love*Light*Laughter,

Rainbow Lily Anna Maria and so on LOL