Irenaeus and the Fall of the Gnostics, Transcript

Transcript:

(00:00) hello everyone Welcome to our history theology philosophy lecture series we are trying something very new this month I am not in Centerplace or in Toronto instead I am in the historic city of Leon which has been part of France for many centuries and so we're doing something different from our normal series we are visiting historic locations and we are taking the opportunity to talk about people and events in history that have some relationship to the place in the Middle Ages Leon was one of the chief cities of the kingdom of

(00:50) burgundy which was located in the middle of Western Europe between the kingdoms of France Germany and Italy next week I'm going to talk about the history of the Lost Middle Kingdom in Europe provant arlay burgundy loing and how this Lost Kingdom helped shape today's Europe and the following week we will talk about popular religious reform movements so we'll look at one that began here in Leon at the end of the 12th century there was a rich Merchant here named Peter Waldo who wanted to access the Bible directly and

(01:36) he commissioned a translation of the New Testament from Latin into the local language spoken by the people here medieval arpetan so arpetan is the vernacular or common language that descended originally from Latin and is related to and exists between French the language that uh developed around Paris and provansal that developed further south in provance and so this was the very first time in the west that the Bible had been translated into a vernacular language and reading the gospels himself apparently inspired Waldo to follow

(02:24) Jesus counsel to the rich young man and so Waldo decided to sell all of his possessions and give to the poor and he followed Jesus and so many were inspired to follow Waldo leading to the foundation of a movement called the poor of Leon or the waldensians and so although um Waldo's story shares some themes with his later contemporary Francis of a CeCe the waldensians did not find a home within the established church the way the franciscans did and we'll talk about this in our lecture two weeks from today our topic today takes us back many

(03:13) centuries earlier in history to classical Antiquity as we look at the context life and thought of one of our earliest important Christian writers IRAs of Leon and we're also uh talking about Ira's contemporaries who viewed Christian Essentials in a very different way uh the gnostics and the valentinians so my goal in this presentation is one to explain gnosticism generally two to look at the way gnosticism was adapted by a brilliant 2 century Christian thinker named valentineus who synthesized uh the Gnostic system and H and created had a great

(04:11) deal of popular appeel and then finally I want to look at araus and his arguments against the gnostics and the valentinians specifically I want to look very closely at arus book adversus erases which is to say against heresies which was one of the few detailed sources on gnosticism prior to the discovery of the nag hamadi library in Egypt in the 20th century which Still Remains an important source for understanding uh gnosticism so let's begin with a primer on gnosticism our word Gnostic comes from gnosticos which means having knowledge

(05:03) in Greek and so this emphasizes one of the movements core focuses knowledge or nosis we do not have a definitive historical explanation of gnosticism origin because it seems to have existed side by side within many different competing uh religions in the first century ad and so while there were many Christian gnostics there were ALS there's also evidence that there were Jewish gnostics who were not Christian there were also likely zor asrian gnostics and gnostics generally were influenc by some aspects of zor asianism

(05:50) which is the world religion uh of the Contemporary parthan Persian Empire at the time in the 3D century uh after this time the parthan prophet Manny would bring much of gnosticism into his new religious synthesis that became the world religion of manism and in the ne Eastern world religion of mandm which is unrelated to manism it traces its origin to the movement founded by John the Baptist mandm is itself Gnostic also thrown into the mix were the gnostics who practiced uh the traditional Greco Roman religion

(06:36) of the old gods what we call paganism in short gnosticism was a widespread phenomenon in Antiquity which causes some Scholars to question uh whether this is really a thing at all or whether we're drawing a category around multiple different things that share some ideas and are simply being given the label Gnostic some of the ideas of gnosticism are rooted in a key debate that took place among the earliest Greek philosophers philosophers questioned the inherited myths and practices the religious myths of the ancient world and

(07:22) they developed tools like logic reason and argument in order to come to more rational explanations for for How the Universe came into being how it operates and to explain the role of humans within it among the great thinkers before Socrates heraclitus and Parmenides composed opposite Arguments for the nature of existence heraclitus is famous for saying it's not possible to step into the same river twice because the water is ever flowing and changing it may look the same but it isn't therefore nothing is permanent

(08:07) everything is in a constant state of flux parities by contrast argued the opposite things everything he said seems to change but it doesn't really because things either exist or they don't Parmenides focuses his ideas on the what it means to be what it means to exist this is the origin of ontology one of the central um ideas in philosophy the study of being ontology and so parity's ideas about being and change directly influenced Socrates and Plato So Plato's theories of the forms is a powerful response to this

(08:56) challenge agreeing with Parmenides Plato sees unchanging ideals as being or as existing in a very real sense and so these Eternal ideals or forms are everything from mathematical principles to more abstract virtues like love courage and um wisdom but Plato also has uh an explanation for heraclitus's flux this River that is not the same one minute to the next the river and indeed all sensible matter sensible in the sense that we can sense it not uh in the sense that it makes sense the river and sensible matter are part of the

(09:41) perishable world everything that we can sense everything that we can touch and feel is material and subject to Decay and is therefore temporary and perishable all of this is is in direct contrast with the imperishable world which Plato says can only be perceived using our intellect rather than our senses and thus it's called the intellectual world as opposed to the sensible world and for Plato the relationship with these two worlds is very Stark indeed even though it can't be sensed the imperishable world of the forms is

(10:28) actually the true reality and the perishable material world that we sense is by contrast of just a mere faint shadow of that real world Plato was among the most influential thinkers of all times and his ideas are foundational to gnosticism which similarly divides the world into two privileging the imperishable the immaterial realm of light and spirit while denigrating the physical perishable world that we inhabit not simply as a shadow as Plato would have it but as a prison and even as a cosmic mistake so in his own Works

(11:17) Plato understood the value of myth or narrative as a teaching tool for example in addition to teaching through allegories allegories like the cave by which Plato attempted to contrast this material world as a dim shadow of the real imperishable world of the forms that exist outside the cave or in his idealized Republic Which is less a blueprint for a practical Utopia and is more an allegory for human thought so in addition to these allegorical teachings Plato also created myths these include the myth of the Ring

(12:03) of GES which is a precursor of tolkin Lord of the Rings where you can put the ring on and turn invisible and also the very famous myth of Atlantis uh which people are still trying to find and as if there's an AAL Atlantis even though Atlantis is a myth that Plato created out of nothing in order to teach a lesson so understood the value of myths as a teaching tool the gnostics took myth making a great deal further they actually agreed with plonus that the true world is a spiritual realm with an eternal form the one that is the

(12:53) source of all of the other forms and ultimately by aminations their material sh Shadows how did this state of affairs come to be the gnostics give their answer in the form of elaborate cosmogonies that is to say creation myths you know like the myths at the beginning of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible uh but Genesis is much simpler um because of the diversity in gnosticism there never was anything like um a single Gnostic Church there are multiple creation Stories That Vary significantly in their details so one Christian version of the

(13:43) Gnostic cosmogony is found in the apocryphon of John apocryphon means secret book or secret Revelation and the John in question here is meant to be the apostle John the disciple of Jesus in previous lectures we've looked at the reason why biblical Scholars reject the idea that the Apostle John wrote the Gospel attributed to him in the New Testament or any of the other Janan literature and we can also say that the secret book of John is pseudepigraphic and so it's likely a midc century text as we'll see araneus of Leon had a copy

(14:32) of this book and he quotes from it in his reputation of nosism but since his time the bulk of the text was lost until a copy was discovered in the nagadi library in 1945 so at the beginning of the text we read that quote one day John the brother of James the sons of Zebedee was going up up to the temple in Jerusalem a Pharisee by the name of aminos came to him and challenged him asking where is that teacher you used to follow John replied he has gone back to the place from which he came the Pharisees said the Nazarene misled you

(15:21) all he told you lies and closed your hearts and turned you away from your ancestral traditions this challenge caused John in this text discomfort retiring to a deserted Mountain Retreat he asked himself quote how was the Savior designated why did his father send him into the world who is his father what kind of Realm will we go to in short the Apostle realizes he still has many unsettled meaning of life kind of questions because although he remembers that Jesus had Jesus had taught his disciples quote this realm is modeled on

(16:10) the perishable realm Jesus didn't give any of the details so the idea that the material world is modeled on the imperishable realm you know that's not actually a quotation of any of Jesus sayings in the canonical gospels but it is perfectly align with Plato's teachings about the forms so these questions in the Apocrypha result in John receiving a vision the heaven opened before him the world Quakes he looks and he sees quote a little child appearing before him in light and I continued looking at him as he became an old man and he changed

(16:59) again becoming like a young man essentially this is a precursor of the vision of the star child in 2001 of Space Odyssey so this being identifies themsel I am the father the mother I am the son I Am The Incorruptible Purity this Divine messenger shares with John the secret origin of reality which begins with the one so in Greek this word is the monad the one he explains quote rules all nothing has authority over it it is the god it is the father of everything moreover we are told quote the one is the invisible Spirit it is

(17:47) not right to think of it as a God or as like God it is more than just God so many of the monads qualities are similar to the more Mainline Christian understanding of God the one is perfect and is quote life producing light knowledge producing knowledge good producing goodness Mercy producing mercy and so forth but in contrast to the mainline view all of reality is within the monat for we read in this book that the one is without boundaries nothing exists outside of its borders and since everything exists within it the one does not exist within

(18:37) anything at all so in traditional Christianity um God the Creator exists outside of creation so creation is an inside God so in the text uh all reality true reality emanates from the one at the beginning the monad thought and thus thought his self-aware thought Providence came into being this first emanation or Aon uh kind of divine being is named the Barbo and it is called in the text quote she who is before everything the mother father the universal womb and after this first Aon a whole series of aons are put forth in

(19:34) different phases and Realms filling out Divine reality these include the aons of God's word which is Christ and is here given the epithet of the autogenes or the self-born one and then the final emanations occur within the quote fourth light that is called elth and it stands over the fourth realm with and within elth are the aons of perfection Grace and and wisdom and so wisdom Sophia holy wisdom in Greek is the final Aon there are many more details than that and you can study that for years if you like if that's the kind of thing you

(20:29) like to do uh certainly the gnostics seem to have loved uh that kind of thing but the shorthand here is that we have uh immaterial ideals like peace and Grace and wisdom that are understood in the Gnostic myth uh as aons but very much resembling Plato's forms but we have added here a narrative how the forms came to be as long along as along with all of this elaborate cosmography uh a Divine realm known as the ploma or fullness of the power of the one the Apocrypha of John also explains how this material world came into being

(21:16) so we read that quote it happened that the Aon Sophia holy wisdom began to think for herself she intended to reveal an image from herself and to do so without the consent of the spirit which did not approve and without the thoughtful assistance of her masculine counterpart who did not approve and so the aons up until this point have been operating in gendered pairs in a COS kind of cosmic androgyny but wisdom desire her desire to act alone creates Division and so that brings forth forth a new being all on her own which is

(22:02) described as misshapen and unlike herself and wisdom names this being yalo yalo takes great power from his mother and then thinking of himself like a god he begins to mimic the creation process as had been enacted by the superior Aon and so he creates for himself a whole series of subordinate demons Yo's work results in the creation of a material world that is fundamentally inferior to the true spiritual realm but is nevertheless animated by light light that yalo has stolen from his mother Sophia so after all of this Sophia

(22:55) repents her mistake and she and the other aons make plans to try to thwart yalo and to recover the lost Sparks of Life Light that are inhabiting his flawed creation they trick him for example into creating Adam and to putting some of that light essence into Adam and so we read that quote yalo said to his supporting demons let's create man according to the image of God and in our own likeness so that his image will illuminate us us so you can sort of hear in there that this is a reworking of the Genesis creation myth and from this point on in

(23:38) the text it becomes very clear that the god of the Old Testament in this retelling is it's not God at all the god of the Old Testament is yalo the flawed misbegotten being uh descended of Sophia in another traditional or reversal of the traditional text Christ reveals to the Apostle John that it was actually he himself the Aon of God's word that caused Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of course that's not how the story goes in Genesis and when John hears this admission he he's confused he asks the Savior Lord

(24:21) wasn't it the serpent that caused Adam to eat but knowledge for the gnostics cannot be the problem the tree the forbidden fruit in Eden the tree of knowledge is actually now shown to be the penetration of Christ and the spiritual aons into Yabo's flawed material creation for gnostics sin is equated with ignorance and so Christ's salvific role is to bring true knowledge as soon as you understand that this material IAL world is an illusion and that your true spiritual being is about isn't about division it's ultimately

(25:06) about Oneness with the one true Source the monad the sooner you will have treed achieved Enlightenment which is true salvation [Music] from the time of the Apostle Paul onwards that is almost from the outset itself early Christianity rapidly spread to the greek-speaking Pagan Roman world two factors aided in winning converts first Paul and his school of Apostles successfully argued that Christians should not observe Jewish law dietary restrictions and the requirement that men be circumcised were significant barriers to entry that Pauline

(26:09) Christians eliminated but a second factor is equally relevant Christian theology from the start was a synthesis of second temple Judaism along with Greek philosophy second temple Judaism had in fact already been affected by helenismo Christians and churches that look to the authority of James Jesus's brother continued to observe Jewish law insisting that the scale be weighed heavily against Greek ideas and in favor of the religious religions Jewish foundations Gnostic Christians pushed hard in the other direction as we've seen in the

(27:07) apocryphon of John the Gnostic creation myth owes a lot to Plato who is revered while it simultaneously denigrates and subverts The Narrative of the Hebrew Bible whose God is exposed as an Unfaithful narrator the low God yalo purging Christianity of its Jewish roots was also the program of marcian of copee an influential Christian Theologian who lived at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second in crafting what is sometimes credited as as the first proposed Cannon of the Christian Bible marcian deleted

(27:55) the entire Old Testament and more than half of the books that eventually made it into the New Testament for him only Paul's letters and an edited version of Luke's gospel should be considered scriptures like the gnostics marcian uh denounced the god of the Hebrew Bible as false and uh but he did not adopt the rest of the Gnostic cosmology so in other words there's no elaborate series of aons for him the problem with excising the Hebrew Bible from Christianity is that Jesus himself is fully rooted in the tradition if a successful variant of

(28:39) Christianity had simply launched from Paul's Foundation you know this might have been a possibility Paul's faith is focused on the Risen Christ and he spends little time uh quoting Jesus teachings but even if the foundation were just Paul it's difficult to escape the religion's Jewish roots Paul was himself Jewish and he does quote the Hebrew Bible a great deal however once the gospels were written uh long after Paul the the gospels with their focus on Jesus and his teachings it just seems less realistic to imagine that the religion

(29:21) could follow marcian in his total rejection of its Jewish roots indeed by the end of the first century most Christians followed a middle path that synthesized the religion's Greek and Jewish roots this is the context in which valentinus came on the scene valentinus was a brilliant 2 century Christian Theologian who lived around the year 100 born from born around 100 and lived till about 180 he received education in Greek at the Great cosm mopolitan Center of Alexandria which was also the center of gnosticism Clement of

(30:06) Alexandria says that valentinus was a student of the Gnostic Christian teacher thus who in turn was supposedly a disciple of Paul valentinus moved to Rome around the year 136 and became a candidate considered for the role of Bishop of Rome passed over he nevertheless founded an influential theological school and he where he elaborated his theological ideas by his day the gospels and other early Christian texts were becoming more Central and authoritative within the religion it was going to be much less easy to ignore and exclude them from

(30:56) consideration so if we think of Christianity as a spectrum between its twin foundations of Judaism on the right and Greek philosophy on the left gnosticism was originally way out in left field valentina's great project was to redefine the Gnostic myth and bring gnosticism more into harmony with the scriptures and with Christian practice so Valentina work slimmed down the previous Gnostic myths made them more relatable and he frequently replaced weird technical terms and Greek philosophical jargon with more immediately accessible ideas and imagery

(31:42) drawn from the scriptures he also made gnosticism less confrontational with Christian tradition and practice so whereas gnostics previously had decried the Christian sacri or the right of the Eucharist as a false sacrifice of dark material to a false god Valentina said no no no this is a practice we can justify as an important symbolic teaching consuming symbols representing the savior's body and blood here are an allegory to consuming true knowledge which is necessary for salvation and so although Valentina failed in his bid to become Pope uh to

(32:32) the extent that there were Popes in the 2 Century his Works became very influential making uh valentinian nasm a more acceptable middle path option for his Christian audience it was just the success that irked irenaeus of Leon irus was a contemporary of valentinus B born a generation later around the year 130 and living until around 202 ad arus was born in the Greek speaking city of Smur on the west coast of Asia Minor a region where Paul had been active planting churches in the previous Century Smyrna is listed among the seven

(33:35) churches of Asia referenced by John the Baptist in the Book of Revelation polycarp who was an early Bishop of Smyrna is among our earliest Christian writers polycarp for example penned an epistle to the Philippians which survived and additionally another early Christian writer ignacius of Antioch wrote an epistle to polycarp that survives along with another General epistle to the smans so early on irus immigrated here to Gaul following in the foot footsteps of another leader named paus who also came from Smyrna so in the first and 2 centuries

(34:25) Leon then called lugdunum was the the capital of Roman Gaul the empire was focused on the Mediterranean and the ran river is one of the few navigable rivers that reach into the north making Leon a perfect site for administration and con Commerce the city was wealthy and relatively Cosmopolitan with a mixed population of Gauls and Latins Greeks syrians and Jews paus helped organize an early Christian Community here which became one of the first in the Latin West outside of Rome itself and he became the city's first Bishop irenaeus followed

(35:10) him West and became a priest serving under paus leadership later when paus was killed by the Roman government during a significant persecution held locally in which 48 Christians were executed in total irus eded paus as the second Bishop of lunam Leon so Ignatius polycarp paus and irenaeus were all Bishops and they all represented this transition from early Christianity with its earliest Beginnings when mendicant Apostles and Prophets traveled between cities preaching by the spirit planting Church communities and now decades

(35:55) later it had developed a more settled Christianity focused on Bishops who oversaw established churches the Bishops were all effectively autonomous uh effective Church hierarchy would not uh really exist until after the conversion of Constantine but some of the diversity of the earliest christianities was already on the way as uh Bishops wrote each other letters and tried to have some consens over issues of Orthodoxy and orthopraxy that is to say what are the proper teachings and the proper practices of the church on the Spectrum Proto Orthodox

(36:42) leaders staked out a position uh that against the ebionites other words to say a group uh that would have preferred that Christianity remain a sect of Judaism and uh the gnostics and the marcionites who would have preferred to reject this the religion's Jewish Jewish roots the early Orthodox leaders also rejected gnosticism but they lacked the tools that were later available to them to attack ideas that were considered heretical so it's not until Constantine called The First acumenical Council in the year 325 and gathered a whole host

(37:26) of Bishops together to uh Define what Orthodoxy is and to craft a statement of belief the nyine Creed that Council became a forum that defined ideas like aryanism to be a heresy and it also condemned its proponent Aras as a heretic but araneus here in Leon uh couple centuries before NAA um at that point each Bishop's direct Authority really only covered his own church and beyond that it was largely necessary to persuade others through writing and part of the trouble to AR is thinking anyway was that valentinus had

(38:08) been too persuasive he had converted large numbers of Christians to his kind of reformed Gnostic perspective irus therefore set out to counter these arguments in a text that is formerly uh titled quote detection and overthrow of of the so-called nosis but it's more generally known by its Latin title adversus hesis which is to say against heresies in his preface irenaeus complains that quote certain men have set the truth aside and have drawn away the minds of the inexperience by means of their craftily constructed

(38:53) plausibilities this is kind of a a backhand Ed compliment he's admitting that the arguments put forward by valentinus and his disciples are well constructed and sound plausible at the heart of irus complaints is quote they gather their views from other sources than the scriptures in other words the core ideas of the Gnostic myth have non-biblical Origins they're coming from or uh Plato or other Gnostic sources but then valentinus anyway and his disciples quote Endeavor to adapt with an air of probability to their own

(39:42) peculiar assertions The Parables of the Lord the sayings of the prophets and the words of the Apostles in order that their scheme may not seem alog together without support unquote so in his attempt to bring gnosticism into greater alignment with the scriptures valentinus has replaced earlier Gnostic terms with words drawn from the scriptures and he's also cited scriptures to back up his uh Gnostic ideas irus argues however that this deliberately distorts the original intent of the scriptures which were not written with gnosticism in mind

(40:28) and he may have a strong point here while Scholars of gnosticism like Elaine pagels have argued that some canonical texts including parts of Paul and the Gospel of John for example can be read as protog notic much of the rest of the New Testament Canon is not pronostic um and so of course irenaeus and the other Proto Orthodox leaders were intentionally stacking that deck we're still centuries away from a finalized list of which text would become canonical as the New Testament valentinus was likely drawing on texts like the Gospel of

(41:10) Thomas a gospel that includes many prognostic teachings but irus and his fellow Bishops excluded Thomas from the Canon for that reason in other words because the text has uh ideas and so that's enough of a reason to leave it out of the canon in fact in basing his argument on the idea of consistency with scripture irenaeus himself is one of the first early Christians who is actively assembling and quoting from the bulk of what became the New Testament Canon he is among the first Christians to insist that all four gospels that eventually

(41:55) made it into the New Testament should should be seen as canonical but all the other ones should not be seen as canonical and indeed he's one of the first who argues you need to use all four and not just your favorite gospel the way earlier Christian communities had traditionally done it beyond the gospels irenaeus quotes from at least 17 and maybe 20 of the other 24 texts that eventually made it into the New Testament he is thus also one of the earliest Christian writers to GR found his theology in a synthesis of

(42:32) [Music] [Music] scriptures if persuasion was all that araus had in his tool bag he was actually pretty good at deploying it although with uh rhetorical humility he claims that quote as someone living among the Kelts here in Gaul and accustom as he is to uh using a barbarous dialogue he says thus you should not expect from me any display of rhetoric which I have never learned nor any Excellence of composition which I have never practiced nor any beauty or persuasiveness of style to which I make no pretention so in other words he uses

(43:28) this incredible rhetoric and his his skill in order to claim that he's not rhetorically trained nevertheless uh he's able to use rhetoric in the course of his long book in order to point out problems with narcissism that end up being persuasive so for example he sees that the that seeing the god of the Old Testament and the material Creator as being separate from the god of the New Testament uh the god of the imperishable realm that's a problem so marcian he says by dividing God into two by maintaining one God to be good

(44:06) and the other God to be judicial in other words one is concerned with goodness the other is concerned with Justice marcian in fact on both sides puts an end to True deity that is deity with a capital D or God with a capital G there's more than one God here we've abandoned monotheism okay so arus continues for that God that is the judicial one if he be not good is not God because He Who from goodness is absent is no God so this God of the Old Testament is merely judicial he's no God at all and again he says he who is good

(44:52) if he have no judicial power suffers the same loss as the former God that being deprived of his character of deity so in other words this good God who doesn't really rule over our world also doesn't qualify as God since there's a different God who has power over this world so Inus points out quote Plato has proved to be more religious than these guys for he allows that the same God is both just and good having power over all things and self-executing in his judgment so he quotes Plato to show U that the world's Creator is good and not

(45:32) evil as is uh true in the Gnostic and valentinian conception so irenaeus viewed the world as imperfect but good something that needs to be redeemed and of course that seems more optimistic than the Gnostic Vision which is that the world is something that needs to be escaped another strong argument against valentinus is his view of humanity uh and that it's elitist so drawing on ideas about the nature of existence that are found in Paul so in other words valentineus lays out that there's a hierarchy of existence so at the base is matter the

(46:14) flesh above that is the soul and the highest of all is the spirit but valentinus goes on to teach that humans also fall into these three categories so some humans are simply composed of Base matter alone and are thus irredeemable a higher group are the insold who can be strengthened through faith and works but it's really only the highest group who are the spirituals who can themselves not Decay or be desecrated by uh this material world and it's this last group who possess the spiritual nosis shared by valentinus and

(46:58) his discipled in other words these are those who are going to obtain salvation and escape from this horrible Material World so gnosticism among Christians went into decline after IRAs unlike with later alternate takes on Christianity um that were condemned as heresies and were rooted out by official persecution persuasion seems to have had uh what been one of the major tools as irenaeus and his allies made a pretty good case perhaps even more importantly Valentina school did not survive and gnosticism failed to keep

(47:56) attracting great intellects like his or of his caliber to keep the argument going ultimately after the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of a state sponsored Church gnosticism did become officially persecuted but not too much was left and so there were some Christian monks in Egypt who may have still been interested in Gnostic ideas and then acting in response to a letter from their patriarch that condemned the use of non-canonical books these monks took their library of Gnostic related texts and they buried them in the desert

(48:34) at nag hamadi they might have intended to retrieve them when the um official oversight kind of relented instead they were buried and preserved until our own time meanwhile although gnosticism effectively died out in ancient Christianity it did continue in other world religions like mandis and manism and even resurfaced in the medieval West in the alternative Christian theologies of the bogams and the caths and of course the ideas continue today in neotic revivals and thus while uh the topic of our lecture has been

(49:15) irus and the fall of gnosticism there has neveress been a large Legacy and also some revivals thank [Music] you hello good evening um um hi from Leon very excited that we were able to debut this uh new format hopefully everyone's hearing me just fine um very happy to join you all we'll start uh as always by thanking everybody who gave support so thanks to JM thanks to Dave Anderson Rowan Wagner JH and Daryl squat darl

(50:19) Scott um we had uh a lot of love for this format that we're debuting uh a lot of love for Mike's incredibly steady H cam hand as he's walking backwards and as we're seeing the old city of Leon um we do have a few questions uh Gnostic informant is on great to see you Gnostic informant loved being on your podcast before uh Gnostic informant asks I wonder if Antiochus of ascalon could be considered pronostic or a gnostic early Gnostic so Antiochus is a philosopher and a middle platonist and so and is existing before

(51:06) a little bit before uh we start having a lot of uh evidence of you know fullon Gnostic myth and Gnostic writings but I think I think anyway that platonism middle platonism is very clearly a precursor it's part of the foundation of gnosticism so I think that you know it's very possible that we people like uh Antiochus people who are popularizing um platonism could have helped bring that to a broader audience that the gnostics then brought to a bigger audience even Nathan Gail uh writes what do you think are the

(51:45) teachings of Gnostic Christians that could be reintroduced into modern Christianity without getting excommunicated uh do you have a teaching that you really like much um so you know in terms of getting excommunicated it depends on what uh what church you belong to so uh you could get excommunicated I think easier in in a bunch of churches than uh others um ours is pretty hard to get excommunicated from especially over over topics of of heresy and I know that we have lots of people who uh are very interested in gnosticism as a kind of uh

(52:30) especially gnosticism as a as an approach to mysticism and how you are um becoming one with God through the mystical path and so I think that uh within our tradition my church that there's plenty of people that are um maintaining or who have you know done reading into nstic ISM and find things that they are attuned to um I think that um I think it makes a lot of sense personally to recover more of Christianity's ancient texts so I've said before that I think that um Christianity should really bring anyway a lot more into when we do

(53:14) actually in my church again uh the Gospel of Thomas is such an important um uh early text and the version that we have from nagadi is uh definitely included includes lots of prognostic teachings and there are other more full-on Gnostic Gospels uh that have been recovered that are also really interesting and so I think more of that could be brought into you know contemporary Christianity without uh too much danger um you know as I said I I sort of u i i imp partial to Plato and platonism and so that component of it I I really

(53:57) like when I was um I think when I was younger I was much more interested in elaborate uh angelology learning all the different uh names of all the angels that different apocryphal cical books made uh so these kind of elaborate myths and stories allegories were more um interesting to me than they are at present so I I'm not as excited about the the Gnostic myth nowadays you know why I gave it to you in a nutshell instead of doing even deeper dive um but I think that again there is a lot uh to be revived and to to go back and look at

(54:36) uh in the present uh tan uh Anderson um thank you so much for your support uh Dolly Lama thank you for your support uh the dolly Lama says that this is just groovy and loves it thank you uh Josh Bedford asks do you think there is a IC element to our internet age that is to say that we have online communities we work from home we replace physical incarnate gathering with these um online uh ways of meeting everybody and so I am connecting to all of you in this very um virtual way even though we're doing this in real time and so Mike and Lander and

(55:20) I have stayed up late since we're here in in France and who knows what time it is where all of you are in I mean tan uh Anderson tan who's um uh in Singapore it's you know in other words we're on all kinds of time zones here um I don't know o o wrote a counterargument that the internet age is actually opposite of Gnostic because so much sifting has to be done through the information so I think that uh Josh bedford's point is is that you know this um that making the non-physical more real so these kind of ethereal virtual connections are more

(55:57) important to us than um doing things in person anymore we have maybe more friends um that are not living locally that we're getting together with we're getting together with them um maybe people getting together playing video games or other ways where they're connecting online or virtually as opposed to in person um O's point though is that so so in other words the virtual aspect I think O's point is that if we think of gnosticism instead as um a focus on wisdom the the the glut of information on the internet so much of

(56:31) which has no wisdom to it is the opposite of Gnostic so I guess it depends on how you're what you're taking as the as the emphasis or what's the core idea of gnosticism so you could make a couple arguments there um shun M asks a bit off topic is Mark 13 a fail failed prophecy so Mark 13 is where uh the author of that gospel is uh is talking about apocalyptically and is predicting an immediate apocalypse and part of that is um a part of that is a um uh a revision of of the go of Daniel where Daniel had predicted that uh a cosmic figure called

(57:22) the son of man would appear in the clouds and that would be heralding uh a literal apocalypse literal end to the world um and the um uh as a literal prophecy uh in Daniel that failed because it should have happened in the 100s BCE so the author of Mark who loved that book and who was living a century or so later uh updated the prophecy and thought it was going to take place in the 70s ad the 70s of the Common Era um and and so to your question um Shan it is uh it failed in the sense of of any in any kind of literal interpretation

(58:08) that generation uh did pass away very literally and the son of man did not cosmically come in the clouds and so with all of kind of uh failed literal prophecy people have to uh reassess their uh commitment to scriptural literalism literalism it turns out is a flawed way of looking at scripture o says is the end times when God runs out of souls well so if um if we're going to take the Bible literally here again you know God has said that or Jesus has said that nobody nobody but the father knows when the end times are exactly going to

(58:56) happen um and so let me put my the microphone here so that people can hear me better can you hear that a little bit better um so have to tell me yes or no if that is working so um anyway and God says or Jesus says anyway that only the father knows so if there is some kind of a whole uh literal Bank of souls up there that is uh being drawn down and and a reservoir that is being emptied anybody who is up looking at the reservoir would know when the end times would happen and so it can't be happening literally anyway that's my um uh impression of

(59:35) that ear comment I think which is a little tongue and cheek as well so fastball flake says besides this lecture what has been the highlight of this trip so far well um so in addition to the lecture we um we filmed a bunch of our Sunday service um uh and I filmed that all around the um the Roman ruins of the old city of leunam and so old Le own has uh two large theaters that are uh in Ruins that we went to and Mike and I got there really early on a Saturday morning and essentially no one was there and so we walked all the way around and it was

(1:00:20) just it was amazing to be in you know just an incredible tourist location but having the whole place to ourselves and so that was even better than uh walking around the old city I was in The Old City here we were dodging a lot of delivery trucks and cars uh and you know a couple there were more people there than there were uh when we filmed for the Sunday uh sermon um Ted uh gamberling says so do you belong to the paretic school giving lectures on walks I think I was breathing heavily enough that I'm not a perfect uh

(1:01:05) parapatics very partial to Aristotle and his school and his school of uh uh walking around and so yeah I'm going to continue to do this people have mentioned that in addition to um doing a lecture in this format uh like when when when I happened to be in Europe that there's actually lots of wonderful venues in the city of Toronto where I could also be walking around and and doing this format so we'll we'll get a sense from people how much they prefer this or the other way that we do the lectures and we'll shake it up even when

(1:01:37) we're in Toronto so I'll continue to be parapatics Hermanson says uh what would arenus think about Mormons well if there had been a lot of Mormons then uh erinus would also have included him in his in his book against heresies he he doesn't like all of the different groups that are not Proto Orthodox so he um is interested in uh or he is he thinks that the um the way to understand Christianity that is uh in consonance with tradition so he thinks that all of the different Bishop Ricks have all preserved more or less the same

(1:02:22) tradition which he believes goes back to the early Church in the apostles he also um has the scriptures that he considers to be canonical and he wants it to be consonant with that and so he has an idea for example about the um the nature of God uh the father and God the father's relationship with with Christ the logos that would be um very different from the Mormon Doctrine um of about how God God the godhead works and so I think erus would have you know written a couple paragraphs in there condemning Mormons James Ferguson uh

(1:03:06) thank you for your support uh William says with the Dem urge controlling almost all Christian Souls no wonder most of them merely uh think of us gnostics are merely Heretics yes so so yeah from the Gnostic perspectives um uh you can easily understand why all the other Ires and all the other Christians uh identify gnosticism as a heresy and that can be justified like you say for you who are gnostics uh within your worldview also so both sides can can use that term so heresy is uh a matter of perspective so From aras's perspective

(1:03:51) valentinus is a heretic From valentinus perspective araus is a heretic from the Mormon perspective in on Salt Lake the everybody's a heretic other than them and so on so Daryl Scott says um aside from his anti-os work did araus write or do anything else especially interesting so he is um uh very interesting kind of like I mentioned in this uh lecture in that he uh is a very early proponent of kind of bringing a new testament together so using lots of books that will ultimately become the New Testament uh arguing on behalf of

(1:04:34) having four canonical gospels and then yes he also was a theologian and he wrote his own um theology his own his own understanding of uh Christianity that is getting us towards uh uh understanding the Trinity and the way it is developing um but unfortunately uh his other works don't all survive so what we have is his his uh his five books against the heresies but we don't have all the rest and apparently it it might be because he has a a a different sort of literalistic view of a uh of an apocalypse of an end

(1:05:20) times he still may be expecting that and so because that uh is out of keeping with a couple centuries later Christianity they don't preserve his other his other books and so yeah unfortunately we don't have the rest of it because he's a really good writer I I I found I hadn't read through uh uh his against heresies all the way before but I found it to be very interesting Josh Bedford says um wasn't gnosticism also a pre-christian tradition that integrated with Christianity or was nosism a creature of the Christian tradition tradtion no yeah

(1:05:57) Josh like I said uh at the beginning of this it's not simply Christian so um it's a phenomenon that exists outside of Christianity so we have um um Jewish gnostics who were not Christian we have zor asrian gnostics we have uh gnosticism that exists in other world religions like Mand ISM and manism later and also um and also there were were Greco Roman Pagan gnostics and so it isn't uh a Christian tradition only or a creature of Christianity and actually as I kind of go through it I I I kind of also feel like it

(1:06:40) um I I feel like that I was sort of persuaded by erinus that U that some of the tradition doesn't fit you know as easily with Christianity so I think that it actually is kind of um attempting to take Christian on a on a little bit of a detour um in the sense that it was already doing its own thing it became connected with Christianity and said hey well this is sort of compatible why don't you guys all understand uh your religion in the light of how we understand the cosmos um but it's in some in a sense it's also its own thing not just a

(1:07:17) Christian thing uh normative says there's some debate about whether various pseudepigraphic early Christian TXS both canical and extra knotical are directed against gnostics anywhere you find that plausible um so yeah that's completely it's it's plausible one of the things that um one of the things we might say is if we have that uh really earliest Christian writing the stuff that um you know becomes scripture uh if we have that uh actually kind of referencing if some of the references that it has there are to

(1:08:03) gnosticism um then that is actually making the argument that gnosticism within Christianity was present very very early and so that's an interesting um argument so I know that uh L pagels would like to have like the the Gnostic component within Christianity to be you know there in a much more formative stage uh than some Christian biblical Scholars other other Christian biblical Scholars think and so I think that if that exists um in Christian texts that made it into the Bible if what they're actually when they're talking about

(1:08:40) enemies if some of those enemies are are Gnostic then that would imply that the gnostics are there early Mary uh Magnuson says shouldn't we just all be looking for Truth where whatever ever it is for me it involves correlating documentable history with our faith well very interesting yeah um so yeah I think that uh so in my particular um Church in my tradition we have a an unofficial motto that is called Truth we say truth wherever it is found that is to say we uphold truth wherever we find it um and so that would be totally in

(1:09:24) keeping with what you're saying um so in terms of um a focus on documentable History um with our faith so I think that that's one one approach certainly I think that part another place that you find Truth uh is within um was it would be within a theological framework or a philosophical framework an ethical framework a moral framework so history and historicity isn't the only framework it's certainly um a framework that I um approach a lot of Knowledge from since my training is as a historian but I would say that that's not the only uh

(1:10:04) place where truth is found in some ways truth is I'm sorry history is only a a discipline that tells us what might have happened and just because something happened doesn't mean it make it meaningfully true it might mean that it you know it's true in the sense that it happened but that doesn't necessarily mean anything and so so I think in religion we're also looking for uh meaning Barry Burton says so are teachings that some would call speculative basically grounds they would use for declaring a teacher agnostic

(1:10:48) um I don't know about that I I so in terms of speculative I I actually think that the the Declaration of when you're calling somebody a gnostic uh certainly an Antiquity the gnostics had a very particular um you know set of texts they had a a very particular cosmology cosmogony they have um an idea of how the universe uh works and so um so maybe you're saying that that's a speculative uh idea but it's not the only kind of speculative idea you would have so you wouldn't just use use the word uh Gnostic to call somebody you know when

(1:11:29) you're actually attacking somebody for being speculative if you're going to accuse someone of gnosticism they probably have you know a very particular set of um of a worldview Imran McAn says was Marian's christology influenced by gnosticism so marcian marcian rejects all of that all of the elaborate um Gnostic myth the Gnostic creation all of the emanations all the aons but um there are a couple things that do overlap and so on the one hand like I say marcian I think is trying to um push the balance over to being a more

(1:12:16) Greek and more philosophical Christianity and a definitely a less Jewish Christianity uh marcian is uh on the dossus side so he is um more interested in saying that uh uh you know in in a kind of a there's a a good spiritual God and there is an evil physical God and Christ is the son of the god of the New Testament who is the is the true uh spiritual God and so therefore he only seemed uh to be physical um and so I think that that is is similar to the Gnostic and so they might have had some overlapping arguments but he also but

(1:12:59) it's also it's also you know significantly different um and so it's interesting all of the the variety of uh early christianities I mean there are also very Sim there are similarities on the other side there are um nuances within the Proto Orthodox Community like I say irus uh ultimately has a little bit of nuance that he gets in trouble for in the same way that we saw the origin um in retrospect people got upset with him for some nuance and so you could get uh cancelled for those kind of things so in the same way you know marcian you know

(1:13:36) and valentinus don't agree on lots of things but they agree on some things well all right this was a lot of fun I'm excited uh Mike and landro and I are excited to be here in France we're going to have another couple lectures from Leon in the upcoming weeks so you'll have to tell us what you think of this format thank you to everybody who hit the like button we did pass 100 likes while we were live that always boosts our visibility uh and YouTube suggests it to more viewers so thank you so much for helping our our channel to

(1:14:11) grow don't forget to like and share and subscribe to the video and we will uh I'll wave and say goodbye and thanks again