Valentinus and Gnostics?

(00:00) Our topic this evening I think is going to be an interesting one, and I'm talking about a second-century Christian thinker, a very important early thinker, Valentinus, and his relationship with the larger category of early Christian religious thought known as Gnosticism. So we have done a bunch of different lectures where I feel like we just dip our toe into Gnosticism and what we mean by that. Generally speaking, I've done surveys of Gnosticism, especially, for example, we've gone and looked at different gnostic gospels from the Nag Hammadi library.

(00:49) This is a library of texts that are in some cases gnostic, in other cases of topics that are of interest to early Christians that were interested in Gnosticism, that had been buried outside of a monastery in upper Egypt in the late antiquity, and then were unearthed and found in the 20th century and translated. That gave us really our first real glimpse at so many Gnostic texts that had otherwise been lost, hearing the Gnostics in their own words, their contemporaries. So, we've done some surveys, but we haven't been able to do a lot of deep (01:32) dives.

More recently, Leah Andro has been doing a whole series of lectures on Christian mysticism. And one that he did, I invite you to go back and watch if you haven't seen, was on Christian Gnostic mysticism. And for that, Leandro purchased a bunch of book resources. We'll put this one in the lecture chat, but essentially, this is a book called The Gnostic Scriptures, Translated with annotations by Bentley Layton. (02:00) And once this book came into the library and I started looking through it, I realized, wow, we have a wonderful resource here. It was so interesting, allowing us to do, you know, some deep dives and looking at particular thinkers. And so that's what we're doing tonight. We're going to talk about Valentinus and his thought.

Etymology and Meaning of Gnostic

(02:18) So, just by way of summary, the word gnostic comes from the Greek gnostikos, meaning "having knowledge." And so, a particular kind of knowledge and experience of knowledge was very important to this group. The name comes from an actual group within early Christianity who understood themselves to have had acquaintance with God, gnosis of the divine, a true knowledge of the real God, of the true God.

(02:51) However, in addition to that particular group of the Gnostics proper, the term has also been applied a lot more broadly by scholars and others to thinkers and schools that have similar ideas to the Gnostics proper. So, for example, an emphasis on having knowledge, especially maybe esoteric, secret knowledge, even if they have very different details of what that knowledge is. And so there's a question: is that really a category? Is that an actual group, the broader group of Gnosticism? Or is it simply an artificial (03:31) category where people are all lumped together? And it's probably more the latter, but they also presumably cross-pollinate. And in addition to Christian Gnostics, there are also Gnostics outside the Christian tradition: Jewish Gnostics and non-Christian Gnostics who were interested in, let's say, drawing from the old traditions. (03:59) And there's crossover between that and several of the Greek philosophical traditions, especially Platonism.

So tonight we want to look at Valentinus, who is a brilliant early second-century Christian theologian and writer. He is not to be confused with the third-century, very famous because of the Valentine's Day, St. (04:26) Valentine, who was, you know, less important as a figure but has been commemorated because of the idea of, you know, writing Valentines and Hallmark cards and so forth.

Valentinus and Classic Gnosticism

The Valentinus we're talking about tonight was deeply influenced by the sort of classic Gnosticism, and so he gets lumped into the broader category of Gnostics, but his individual focus, his own formulation of the important Gnostic cosmogony, the Gnostic creation myth, just for example, is significantly different from the way that cosmogony is told in its most classic form and its kind of clearest (05:08) form, like for example, in a text like the Apocryphon of John, one of the other Gnostic texts that has been recovered because of the Nag Hammadi find.

Diversity in Early Christian Movements

So as we're looking at this, it shouldn't surprise us maybe that within this category, this broader category of Gnostics, there's a lot of diversity there. As we always see whenever we dig, just not even deeply, just on the surface, there's an incredible amount of diversity in the proto-Christian movements, you know, the movement that becomes Christianity once the name is coined. And so even (05:49) before the word Christian is applied to any of these groups, this movement, the Jesus movement, or the movement led by John the Baptist and Jesus and James, the brother of Jesus, was spread around by mendicant apostles, traveling in pairs, preaching in the spirit. So that is, people who are committed to their calling, who have sold all they have and given to the poor, who travel from town to town without purse or script. (06:22) In other words, bringing not possessions and so forth, but instead when they find and come to a new place, they live on the generosity of the people that they are preaching to. In some of the same way that we might think of, let's say, the medieval Christian friars, like the Franciscans, or the way we think of maybe Buddhist monks who are living by that kind of, you know, have vows of poverty and living by that kind of charity.

(06:57) And so given that there was no central structure, there wasn't like a hierarchy. Peter is not immediately, he does not go by the title pope. He's not sitting in Rome on the top of some kind of administrative structure where he's got an org chart and is in charge of anything. There's no evidence for that at all. (07:20) There is also no organizing texts. There's no handbook of how this would work. There are some attempts that Paul talks about of having essentially letters of recommendation from other apostles in the very earliest times, but Paul is very contemptuous of that in his own descriptions of it. So, in any event, there is almost immediately a recipe for crazy diversity since, again, the whole spread of this thing is by individual apostles, individual essentially begging monks who are specifically preaching by the spirit. (08:00) That is, they are they're trying to ecstatically say by sort of revelation what they're feeling and what they understand the gospel to be, as opposed to somebody who's just coming and reading an actual text or a letter from somebody in authority. So it's a kind of a thing that is very energetic and spread as a result pretty rapidly, but is also spread into wild diversity.

(08:25) Paul, for example, understood himself to have been called as an apostle by God directly, not by any human person who gave him that authority. And indeed, Paul publicly expressed, I'd say, contempt for the authority of the historical Jesus's disciples, who he says are the acknowledged leaders of the church in Jerusalem. (08:52) So these are James, Jesus's brother, and his historic disciples, Peter or Cephas, and John. And Paul says, you know, whether, you know, they're the acknowledged leaders, but who they actually are makes no difference to me in his letter to the Galatians. And in the face of their interpretation of what the gospel to be, he stuck to his own interpretation. (09:16) Paul boasts that for the first three years of his church planting activity as an apostle, he did not even confer with anyone who had already been an apostle before him. And so, you know, this isn't probably the norm. Probably in fact, most of the early apostles will have had contact with the other apostles and are operating as, you know, modeling on that, those original examples. (09:41) Nevertheless, the fact that the movement's most effective apostle, missionary, early church planter, Paul, that he felt no need to coordinate with pre-existing leaders, it pretty much illustrates the lack of any real central control in this movement. And so that very quickly became, like I say, a recipe for factual factionalism.

(10:05) And Paul himself kind of laments this as he observes it, and he observes the different church groups that he's founded actually starting to have division because they look to different leaders with different ideas. So he writes to the Christian community that he planted in Corinth in Achaea in ancient Greece in his first letter to them, he says, "It has been made clear to me that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. (10:38) What I mean is that each of you says, 'I belong to Paul,' or 'I belong to Apollos,' or 'I belong to Cephas to Peter,' or 'I belong to Christ.'" And so as the different members of the Corinthian church are deciding that they're disciples of these different leaders, Paul asks them, "Has Christ, has the body of Christ that we all should be in unity together in, has that been divided?"

So, like I say, Paul planted himself this church in Corinth, but then he'd left the city to go on planting congregations elsewhere. And he's had reports now that (11:17) there have been new leaders who have arrived. And this has been a cause for division. So other traveling mendicant apostles, people, for example, like this Apollos who he mentions, have come to Corinth and have started being leaders of the Corinthian Christian community. And there must have been some other apostles who came who considered themselves to be followers or disciples, associates of Cephas, of Peter. (11:49) And so they've come to Corinth and they've started teaching their understanding of the gospel. And so because the ideas of Apollos, the ideas of Peter's associates, the ideas of Paul differ, the other two differ from Paul's and they differ from each other. (12:11) The Corinthians have apparently divided into factions: a Pauline faction, an Apollo faction, a Petrine faction, etc.

And this is another one of these texts or examples where as Paul is talking about factionalism, he is identifying Peter as having a different faction. So as it's later told in Christian tradition or even in the book of Acts, Peter and Paul are always kind of aligned and they want to paper over any division, but Paul here is kind of saying, well, people who think that they're in a Pauline faction are not in the same faction as a Petrine faction (12:43) and so forth. So despite the fact that there is all of this potential for division and Paul, nevertheless, and probably the other leaders too, still emphasize the need for Christian unity. So that ideal that Christians should stay unified helped keep the groups together despite, you know, a really strong or remarkable diversity of beliefs in early Christianity.

(13:13) So, as we talked about in our lecture, for example, on the historical Paul and also in a previous lecture on the Jamesian church and on why Paul's churches and interpretation went out in the very first decades, there was this practical question over observance of Mosaic law, whether people who were converted into this new movement who did not have a Judean background, whether they first had to convert to be Judean and start following Mosaic law, including being circumcised, keeping certain dietary (13:54) restrictions and so forth, if they had to do that and then they get become Christian, or as Paul had it, that no, that's all been fulfilled and swept away in Christ and no one has to observe Mosaic law anymore. That was the kind of the very big practical point because it affected everything down to whether you could have meals together, where you could share the Christian meal of communion together. (14:22) If you were having observant Judean Christians, they couldn't share meals with non-observant Gentile Christians if that was going to be the case.

Divisive Questions in the First Decades

But there were other questions that were just as potentially divisive in the first decades as well. So, for example, the question, why had Jesus been executed? That had not been the expectation of the disciples prior to when it happened. (14:56) Another question is as Christians, as their central principle, were declaring that they understood Jesus to have been and to be the Messiah, the expected Messiah, the living Christ. So if he is a divine living Christ, the son of God, what then is the relationship between this divine figure of Christ and the unknowable Father God? (15:40) So in other words, we have been in a sect of a religion, the Judean religion, that is very focused on proclaiming monotheism, that there is only one God. And yet now we have a second divine being or person. And how is that, how does that work?

So why do these questions have—why won't we just hear, you know, why didn't they just go back and listen to what Jesus had taught about this? What did Jesus taught about why he was going to be, why he needed to be executed? Why he was going to be crucified? What, what that was about? What is his relationship as the son of God to God? Well, even though if we now go back to the canonical gospels and we can see the Jesus of scripture answering those (16:18) questions, the canonical gospels are all written much later, and these answers are in fact put into the mouths, the mouth of the Jesus of scripture based on answers that different Christian groups have come to understand in the decades after the historical Jesus's death. So these are not contingencies that the historical Jesus imagined or talked about. (16:45) He had his own mission and he was doing what he was working on. These are concerns that Christians had as they were trying and coming to understand these questions: Why had Jesus been executed? What is the divine Christ's relationship to God the Father?

So the disciples of the historical Jesus along with Paul, almost all the earliest apostles—Peter, James the brother of Jesus, John, and so forth—and indeed almost all of the people in the earliest generation of the movement, they're all Judeans, that is, ethno-religiously of the Jewish first-second temple Jewish broadly movement, ethno-ethnicity, a sect of that group. (17:28) And so while they all understood their religion to be universal, in other words, it didn't only apply to ethnic Judeans in the Christian understanding (and indeed, lots of Second Temple Jews who are not Christian, like Philo of Alexandria, felt the same way), (17:53) this Christian understanding of it was very much rooted in Second Temple Judaism, and it was incredibly committed to the Hebrew Bible as it had been translated into Koine Greek in the Septuagint version of the Bible.

So Paul was not, in terms of telling people, if you continue to practice Mosaic law, if you continue to keep kosher and and circumcise your children and all the other things, follow the Ten Commandments and so forth, (18:31) that's not, you know, as a result of it being Jewish law. "If you do all of those things and think you're gaining anything, then Christ died for nothing," Paul says. So he is very much opposed, you know, when he gets out into the full conflict with the faction of the early church that felt, "No, we all have to continue to obey and observe Mosaic law until the end of time." (18:59) Paul is, you know, argues very strongly against that, but he absolutely still believes that Hebrew scripture is absolutely important because, as he and other early Christians of his share his attitude on terms of observance of Mosaic law, all of the text of the Hebrew scripture, what becomes the Christian Old Testament, all of that speaks of Christ and can be read as essentially a typology of Christ, as allowing us to understand Christ. (19:34) So there's nothing, no reason to get rid of any of it. We just simply don't observe it, obey it, or, you know, read it literally anymore. Now we read it meaningfully as a way to understand the truths of the universe and Christ that it anticipates.

However, you know, so Paul, that's easy for him to say because he is so committed to this text. That was his whole background. But later Christians, people who had converted without any Judean background. Now, there was people who had been Greek speakers living in Anatolia and Macedonia and Achaea, anywhere else they might have come from, who had previously, you know, worshiped the old gods of Greece or Canaan or Rome, and who were part of Christian communities that were predominantly non-Jewish. (20:25) So they didn't have a lot of people that were that had that ethno-religious background. Inherently, they had far less commitment to the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish inheritance. And indeed, when some of them then started, let's say, pouring into it and studying it, they thought, well, many of these stories are sort of alienating.

Marcion of Sinope and the Rejection of the Hebrew Bible

(20:48) And one such figure is a fellow named Marcion of Sinope. Sinope is a city on the northern coast of Anatolia, we now think of as Turkey. And he is the son of a bishop up there, and Marcion is one of the second-century leaders who decided, hey, we really need to scrap the Hebrew Bible altogether. Marcion considered himself to be a spiritual disciple of Paul, but he took Paul's rejection, you know, of Jewish law one step further. (21:24) So, he started reading the Hebrew Bible. He's reading Genesis. He's seeing a God who decides to repent of creating everything that, you know, creepeth on the earth. And, you know, with the exception of Noah, his family, and all of the animals that are preserved in one little boat in the ark, every other living creature, every person is destroyed in a calamitous flood. You know, that it's just probably the most, you know, mythically here, the most horrible thing that could have could have ever happened. (22:05) It's always a little staggering that this is a children's Sunday school story with pictures of lots of happy animals in a boat and a big rainbow when in fact it's talking about a, you know, a cataclysm where almost everyone is is drowned and destroyed. (22:31) So a lot of Christians look at that and said, "Hey, this Old Testament God is actually kind of a malevolent entity. This isn't something, this isn't the God that I have experienced through Christ, that I understand through the teachings of Christ and so forth." And so this caused Marcion and others like him to reject the Old Testament altogether as being a true revelation that is talking about the true God.

The Gnostic View of the Old Testament God

(22:56) In addition to rejecting the Hebrew Bible, Marcion looked around at a lot of the other Christian writings, things written in the first century that had begun to be circulating as authoritative. (23:09) So presumably, the gospels attributed to John, to Matthew, to Mark, and lots of these other letters, other early Christian books. And so Marcion instead said, "Look, I'm going to take, I like this part of the Gospel of Luke, not the whole thing, the nativity story, definitely not, but the rest of it mostly. And ten of Paul's letters that tells the real gospel as we should understand it." And so he proposed that as a canon. (23:41) This is what the writings that we'll consider to be authoritative. So from a place that I was mentioning at the very beginning in Paul's time, when there is no authoritative text, now Marcion is introducing this idea that, yeah, these are going to be considered authoritative. This creates then this idea of a canon, even if in Marcion's case it's a very, very limited canon that in fact rejects the entire Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible from that as non-authoritative.

(24:10) So as a theologian, Marcion also has an answer to that question of who Jesus was in terms of his divinity. So Marcion taught that Jesus was in fact fully divine and only seemed to be human. And so detractors labeled this position Docetism from the Greek word dokein, "seem." (24:34) So he they only seemed human. So he's a Docetist. As his career started getting underway, Rome, which was the big cultural, political center of the empire, all roads lead to Rome, and Marcion decided to move to Rome, which had a very important early Christian community. So he went there in the second century in the 130s and according to his detractors, hoped to become the bishop of Rome. And then when his bid to become bishop, become what we now think of as pope, failed, he then left. (25:11) He was excommunicated ultimately, and he began organizing a rival church network where, again, the church hadn't really had an organized network, and in the same way that Marcion is starting a canon, he also starts to create his own kind of network of bishops who agree with him. And then that church network, the Marcionites, then ended up surviving for many centuries until the time period when when the emperors started patronizing Christianity and started imposing uniformity on the church, which caused most of these early groups to be (25:50) eventually stamped out.

So Marcion was not alone among early Christians who had the same problem when they read the Old Testament. They looked at the Old Testament God and all the things he did and said, "I'm not sure. I think that this is not a God that is good. This is a potentially evil entity." So, a contemporary group, this group that we're talking about tonight, the Gnostics, likewise saw the God of the Old Testament as incompatible with their understanding as God revealed through Jesus Christ. (26:26) And so, for example, the creation story, everything that is taking place in Genesis, the flood, all those things, they reject, and instead they crafted their own creation story, their own very elaborate cosmogony that includes an explanation for Genesis as a as a false creation story, as a as a fraud of a lesser evil god that is involved in creation. (26:59) So the Gnostic creation story then includes then an explanation of why Moses, who was understood to be the author of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. So why was Moses fooled by this false god to tell a false creation story?

So it definitely has that explanation, but the Gnostic cosmogony included loftier goals. (27:29) So they attempts to explain, you know, the ultimate truth of how the universe operates. It tries to explain how different eternal ideas, Platonic Forms we might think of them as, how they came into being and then how they exist within the mind of the true spiritual God. And in doing all of that, they also attempted to reconcile then traditions, you know, found in Genesis. (28:00) In other words, part of the Judean inheritance. Reconciling that with the philosophy of Greek thinkers and especially Plato, whose own creation myth in the dialogue, the Timaeus, was incredibly influential on what the Gnostics ended up doing and many others, other mainline Christians as well.

The Secret Book of John and Gnostic Cosmogony

(28:29) And so, the classic example of how this myth works, how this cosmogony works, one of them is found in a book that we call the Secret Book of John, the Apocryphon or Secret Book. And it gives a really clear example of the Gnostic cosmogony. So, although it's, you know, supposedly written by John the apostle, John the beloved, historical John, who is then not equated with John the beloved, John the son of Zebedee he's sometimes called, it is in fact pseudepigraphal. So in other words, John didn't write it. (29:11) Nevertheless, the popularity of the text is illustrated by the fact that that Nag Hammadi library that I said was discovered in the middle 20th century in Egypt, it actually contains three different copies of this Apocryphon of John.

So I just created this little diagram of this classic Gnostic cosmogony. (29:34) We've talked about it several different times, but just go through it a little bit if you can maybe see it. Some of the writing might be small on your screen depending on where you are. But essentially, the universe here is divided into two realms: a realm of light, which is the realm of the eternal, the spiritual realm, the permanent, and then the realm of darkness, which is the material realm, the impermanent. (30:02) And this aligns, you know, with essentially Plato's two ideas of everything that exists here in the material world. The sensible world is impermanent and it will eventually decay and fall into ruins. Whereas there is a much higher realm, a realm of perfection where ideas are eternal and they don't decay. (30:26) And so this is a similar kind of formulation of that kind of material-immaterial dualism where the immaterial is seen as more real, Platonic realism.

And so within that realm of light, there's the source of everything, the parent of the entirety. (30:52) And that is the first principle of all creation through which everything emanates. Emanating from the parent is the Barbelo, the second principle, and from this then a series of Aeons, which is to say divine beings that emanate from the parent, exist. So these are grouped often into pairs. (31:20) The Aeons are can potentially be roughly equivalent to like the ideas that and and forms that exist in Plato. So ideas like justice, ideas like beauty and so forth. And they're given, you know, kind of names which of these ideas are or Aeons are important in the Gnostic cosmology.

Among these is then Christ, or the eternal Christ, not Christ on earth, who is understood as the divine self-originate. (31:45) And then this goes through another 12 smaller lesser Aeons that are divided into four archetypes. And the last of these then is Wisdom. And Wisdom is important because it is her self-focus and desire to create on the model of the parent but without the light of the parent that leads to the creation in terms of the smith of the realm of darkness, the material realm, and specifically brings forth the chief ruler, the chief Archon of that realm, the Craftsman, as it would be called in the Platonic worldview, Yaldabaoth.

Yaldabaoth then produces Archons, 365 Archons, and a mimic of essentially the true creation but is instead a shadow of that, the material world being a shadow of the true light. This then in the third act brings forth, you know, actual people into whom sparks of the divine light are are attracted and trapped, beginning with the two first archetypal people, the man Adam and the woman Eve, the story that's told in Genesis, although for the Gnostics, you know, it's mistold because the person that is telling Moses this (33:18) story and properly is Yaldabaoth, this flawed Archon, this flawed Craftsman, as opposed to the true parent, the God of the spirit world.

Within that story, we have the the first two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel, who is murdered by Cain, who's then replaced by Seth. So this leads to the main two dualistic posterities in within the human race: (33:52) the descendants or the heirs of Cain, who are the non-Gnostics, people who don't have a divine spark in them, and the descendants of Seth, who are the potential Gnostics, people with a divine spark, of whom of Seth posterity is the human Jesus, who is united with the divine Christ through the divine self-originate and who is bringing, who is sent from the realm of light by the parent in order to bring this message of salvation. (34:28) This Gnosis, this knowledge or the ability for all of the Gnostics, all of the people that have the divine spark in order to have a knowledge of a relationship with the true God and thus return to the realm of light.

So very complicated, [laughter] but nevertheless, attempting to not just tell a bunch of myths for the sake of being complicated, but rather in order to try to explain things like, you know, why is there suffering in the world? Why, why does it seem like, you know, the righteous are never, (35:12) you know, the righteous are often punished and and the and the wicked are are doing very well. How is that functioning within the world? Is why are things impermanent? Why does everything decay? And so forth.

Proto-Orthodox Reactions and the Gospel of Mary

So nevertheless that does seem a little crazy. And so in contrast to the idea of Marcion's limited canon and common sense arguments against the Old Testament God, you know, this elaborate Gnostic cosmogyny, you know, that might seem really alien to you. (35:43) I went through it as a chart. It's kind of cool in a chart, but you may think, okay, well, where did that come from? So, when first exposed to these kind of Gnostic ideas, you know, many other early Christians might have agreed with you. They may never have heard of any such thing. It may be a little less alien to them because they're existing in an ancient world where some of these ideas of Greek philosophy might be more a little more commonplace than they are today. (36:11) But some of them clearly didn't, you know, think that this is probably, you know, true Christianity. And that is expressed in apologetic dialogue that's set in a story of Jesus's apostles as told in the Gnostic Gospel of Mary, one of those texts that we recovered from Nag Hammadi. (36:38) And this I think reads like, so as a Gnostic person is writing this dialogue, they may have had experience sharing with a non-Gnostic Christian, you know, this sort of secret Gnosis with that person for the first time and gotten some negative reactions and so they might have read a little like this.

(36:59) So Andrew the apostle said to the brethren, "Say what you wish about what she, Mary Magdalene, has said." You know, so she's just gone through and told what the secret teachings of Jesus were. This Gnostic gospel, this Gnostic creation story. Andrew says, "I at least do not believe that the Savior said this, for certainly these teachings are strange ideas." (37:22) And so Peter answered and spoke concerning the same things. He questioned them about the Savior. So, "Did Jesus really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did Jesus prefer her to us?"

And so, when Andrew and Peter who were stand-ins here for, let's say, the average everyday Christians who were proto-orthodox or maybe proto-orthodox authorities who are condemning Gnostic ideas. (37:54) Mary then, who's a Gnostic apostle in this telling, wept and said to Peter, "My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart or that I'm lying about the Savior?" And so like I say in this text, Andrew and Peter represent, you know, proto-orthodox Christian authorities who reject this kind of Gnostic cosmogony, whereas Mary Magdalene in the text and then others in that text, Levi is another one who's very sympathetic to Mary Magdalene and says, you know, Peter, you're a hothead, you you don't, you don't over (38:29) listen to anybody, that kind of thing.

And then there's other texts where the Gnostics look to people like Thomas Didymus, Judas Thomas, the twin, the apostle Thomas, and others as their kind of authorities. So that allowed Gnostics to identify their own competing apostolic authorities. So the authority of folks like Peter, James, John, and so forth, become very important by the end of the first century, (39:00) the beginning of the second century, as as we're starting to get these texts, which is why people are writing texts in the name of those authorities and so forth. The letters attributed to James and Peter that made their way into and John that made their way into the New Testament because in part they have the names of those authorities assigned to them in order to in order to make them, you know, to give them a stamp of legitimacy.

(39:33) So the apologetic strategy that we have here, you know, that may have under overcome some objections that some early Christians had to Gnosticism's peculiarities. So, if you read that whole cosmogony and the Apocryphon of John and you said, "These are strange ideas," and then you read the Gospel of Mary and you found out, "Well, actually, the early apostles thought that too, but then Mary and Levi testified that this really did come from the Savior." (40:03) Okay, well, maybe that does kind of be a way to overcome my objections. So that's a strategy for sure. But Valentinus, I think, arguably employed a different strategy to convince early Christians of these ideas. So he himself, I think, clearly was intrigued and influenced by the classic Gnostic myth, but he wasn't, he didn't look at it as authoritative and in all of its details. (40:30) In other words, he couldn't change it. He was a flexible and kind of brilliant enough thinker that he felt quite competent to reformulate it and bring it into greater alignment with ideas and especially writings that Christians were beginning to come into a consensus about as of the early first century.

Valentinus’s Strategy and the Emerging Canon

(40:56) So, like I was saying at the beginning, this proto-Christianity's first generations, when Paul and his contemporaries are fighting it out over adherence to Mosaic law, you know, no Christian canon yet existed. We don't have, you know, these definitive sayings of Jesus that are later put into Jesus's mouth in the Gospel of Matthew that say, you know, not, you know, one jot or one tittle of the law, you know, is going to pass away, or put into or the writings that are attributed to James in the Epistle to James where he says, "If you, if you (41:32) break one of these little commandments, you know, you've broken it all and you won't you'll you can't be saved." You know, in other words, these authoritative statements that are in favor of that, those didn't exist. You couldn't appeal to that because the canon wasn't there.

But by contrast, now the time, now that we're getting to the time Valentinus is operating, (41:57) Paul's letters, for example, have been compiled. They are circulating. So now you would have every single thing that he said if you were going to fight over this question, you would be able to say, "Well, Paul says, you know, if you if you put your faith in in in works and the works of the law, then Christ died for nothing." You know, so you would be able to have that and cite that as a source. (42:16) And other letters and and different gospels had also begun to circulate and and Christians were starting to think of these as essential to who we are as Christians. And so, like I say, the fact that these kind of a wider collection of these had been circulating and there's a bunch of competing ideas in wider collection than what made it into the New Testament. (42:39) This enabled Marcion to introduce the idea of a very narrow canon because this was so important to people in his time frame. And so this is also important to Valentinus and who's a immediate contemporary of Marcion.

So, you know, just like Marcion who, you know, is later seen as a heretic by the Christian community, he's the one that actually though introduced the idea of having a New Testament canon. (43:08) You know, interestingly, Valentinus who is also, you know, by later Christians anyway, understood to be a heretic, he's actually one of our earliest Christian writers who in his writings makes extensive use of texts that will come to be the New Testament. So, in other words, as an he's a source that shows us that early Christians were starting to really think of themselves in terms of these texts. (43:37) The the first Christian that that really does this and demonstrates this fully is going to be a generation later Valentinus's main critic who really takes him down, which is, you know, our old friend Irenaeus of Lyon, who is working from almost the entire New Testament canon and is also quoting from it and not from too many other books that are outside of it.

(44:03) So it is coming into being. It's coming important. And so one of the things that Valentinus does is reformulate the Gnostic myth. These earlier texts like the Apocryphon of John or contemporary texts but are with that are based on the earlier classic Gnostic myth. He reformulates it in ways that are now consonant with Christian scripture. (44:29) And this seems to have made Valentinus's teaching especially palatable to his audience. In other words, this is now going down very smooth instead of having to get the reaction after you tell somebody, get their reaction, "Boy, these are really strange ideas." And you show them, you show them in the Gospel of Mary, "Well, lots of people thought they were strange, but but they are the true ideas." (44:56) Valentinus is able to take these ideas and make them, you know, build them off of the scriptures and have them have them sound completely consonant with the scriptures and be maybe in completely consonant with the scriptures.

The Life and Education of Valentinus

(45:20) And we can only, in a lot of cases with all of these figures, we only know in a lot of cases what their what their critics said about them unfortunately. But what we can piece together is this. He was born around year 100 at Phraunos in a town in the Egyptian delta. So you can see on the map here it's a little east of Alexandria. (45:43) And then he was educated and trained in writing at Alexandria. So Alexandria had continued to be the great metropolis center of Hellenistic culture that it had been ever since the Ptolemaic era. And so there's centers of schools here, philosophical schools, thinkers. And here Valentinus becomes acquainted with Greek philosophy, including especially Platonism, but presumably also Stoicism based on some of the things he writes.

(46:17) So Alexandria had of course been home to huge the largest diaspora Judean community and the important Hellenistic thinkers like Philo of Alexandria for whom we've had lectures on. It was also a very important early center of sophisticated Christian thought. (46:44) Several of the earliest traditions seem to have come from Alexandria. Valentinus therefore was likely exposed here to allegorical interpretation of scripture, which is his mode of doing that. Certainly we know that whether or not he read Philo, we know that that was what Philo specialized in and lots of other more sophisticated Christian thinkers there also feel that way.

He may have also come into contact in Alexandria with the Gnostic Christian philosopher Basilides. (47:11) So, Basilides was a contemporary in Alexandria in the early 2nd century. He's another prolific, or he's a prolific Gnostic writer. Another person who's a prolific writer who has in this broader category of Gnostic thought and he is also sort of at the heart of a school. (47:31) So his disciples could also be traced and remained active down to that 4th century when when the church starts becoming organized under imperial patronage and people who are seen as having divergent views are starting to be stamped out.

So according to the later followers of Valentinus, it was in Alexandria that Valentinus became the student of a certain Christian apostle or disciple named Theudas, and that Theudas was in turn said to have been a disciple directly of Paul. (48:06) And so this gave in their view Valentinus, you know, a line of apostolic authority that would be a way to be competitive with with the bishops who started had started claiming things like that the bishops had, I'm sorry, that the apostles, the historic apostles had appointed bishops who had in turn appointed other bishops bringing down to this day that becomes it becomes the tradition in Rome for example that Peter was the first bishop there. (48:38) It had appointed the bishops down. It's not historically very likely but that's the tradition that starts to emerge or in the case of Alexandria that the evangelist Mark is the first bishop there and and everybody descends from there since.

So after initially teaching in Alexandria in the 120s, the 130s, Valentinus moved to Rome and set up a school there. (49:04) So he's arriving a little about maybe a decade after Marcion had been trying to become the bishop of Rome. Like Marcion, according to his detractors, anyway, Valentinus seems to have hoped to have been made the bishop of Rome as maybe one of the greatest thinkers and writers and preachers and teachers in Rome. (49:26) And like Marcion, was rebuffed, and instead according to tradition anyway, in terms of the dates, the person who was made bishop was a guy called Pius who was from Aquileia, the area around where Venice is later. And so Pius is chosen instead. It's the Pope Pius I as he later is understood traditionally at the middle of the 2nd century who is then looked back on as a person who is fighting heretics, you know, like Marcion and Valentinus.

Although Valentinus isn't chosen bishop, however, there's no indication that he was seen as a heretic in his lifetime (50:05) the way Marcion was or that he ever had to leave Rome, so he might have just continued to have his school there. And it's only then in the the next generation after his death that proto-orthodox opponents like Irenaeus of Lyon started to really condemn him and that his his disciples, the big schools of thought, the Valentinians, ended up being, you know, opponents, you know, more open opponents of proto-orthodox leaders like Irenaeus. (50:38) So even so though, Irenaeus admitted that Valentinus was an eloquent writer and a brilliant thinker, and the fragments that we have, we don't have much in the way of Valentinus's text, but the fragments that we have do testify of this.

Irenaeus’s Summary of Valentinus’s Myth

So we don't have Valentinus's reformulation of the Gnostic myth that I drew that diagram of that we had from the Apocryphon of John, but we have Irenaeus's summary of it. (51:15) And so Irenaeus, who first summarizes what the what the Gnostics tell in their cosmogony, then he goes so on and says, "Well, here's what Valentinus says and how what Valentinus says is different from what the classic Gnostics had said." And in part, Irenaeus's analysis is that Valentinus in his reformulation makes all of these ideas more understandable in part by avoiding some of these unfamiliar terms like the Barbelo, the second principle of creation after the ineffable parent, or the Archon Yaldabaoth. (51:48) You know, these are are terms that are mostly known within Gnostic jargon as opposed to, you know, something that you're finding in Christian scripture or something like that.

So, here's what Irenaeus had to say. "Valentinus adapted the fundamental principles of the so-called Gnostic school of thought to his own kind of system. (52:08) So, here's what he laid down. There was a duality instead of beginning with a monad. There's a duality of which one member is called the Ineffable and the other is called Silence. And from this duality a second duality was admitted, of which one member he calls the Parent and the other he calls Truth. (52:32) This quartet yielded the Word, Life, the Human Being, the Church, and this created the first Octet. And Valentinus says, 'From the Word and Life, ten powers were emitted,' as Irenaeus has already said it in an earlier section of this text. 'And from the Human Being and the Church.'"

So these are spiritual beings called the Human Being, called the Church, not an actual physical human being or the physical church. These are the ineffable or the eternal concepts of those things. "From them 12 powers were emitted." (52:58) So there's all of these Aeons, which are named 10 and 12 different ones. One of these at the very end, you know, the Wisdom, revolted and became lacking, and this one is responsible for the rest of the affair. (53:24) Irenaeus says, "Furthermore, the Anointed Christ was not emitted from the Aeons with the fullness as is in the classical Gnostic myth. Rather, Christ and a material shadow were engendered by the mother by Sophia according to her memory of the superior realm." (53:48) So there's a reformulation essentially from the classic Gnostic myth according to Irenaeus in Valentinus's system.

Valentinus’s Own Writings and Fragments

All right. Well, you know, since Irenaeus is a detractor, you know, his brief summary of Valentinus's changes from the classic Gnostic myth, you know, it really fails to explain why this reformulation was part of something that was clearly so very compelling that Irenaeus had to write this huge book trying to stomp it out. (54:17) So to understand why it's compelling, I think instead of looking at the detractors, we have to try to look at Valentinus's own writings. Unfortunately, like I say, up until the middle of the 20th century, these had only survived in a handful of fragments, but since then, we have one full sermon that is really important, as we'll see.

(54:39) So ancients frequently quoted the works of their antagonists, and then when those books of their antagonists are lost, cease to be copied or are deliberately destroyed, the quotes that the the people who are condemning them have, they may be our only glimpse into the otherwise lost works. (55:02) And that's mostly true or had been true for Valentinus until like I say last century. So a lost work of Valentinus quoted by the proto-orthodox leader Clement of Alexandria talks about the heart, our heart's prerequisites for Gnosis. So how, what do we have to have to prepare our hearts in order to become acquainted with God, in order to have Gnosis, in order to see God according to Valentinus. (55:33) And so this is quot Clement quoting from Valentinus's text, though an actual snippet of Valentinus. "And one there is who is good, that is to say, God the Father. There's one who is good. His free act of speaking is the manifestation of the Son. So by by the Father speaking, that's where the Word, that is the manifestation of the Son. And through him alone, through the Word alone, can a heart become pure when every evil evil spirit has been put out of the heart. (56:10) For the many spirits dwelling in the heart do not permit it to become pure. Rather, each of them performs its own acts, violating it in various ways with improper desires. And in my opinion, the heart experiences something like what happens in a caravanserai."

So we don't we don't have this is an analogy that would have made a lot more sense, I guess, to people in the first century to us. (56:35) You probably don't have a lot of experience with caravanserais, but essentially this is in the Eastern Roman Empire and and east of that there would be these caravan routes, you know, where people are are merchants are coming with camels or whatever pack animals and they are bringing their goods along a road and then there would be an inn that you'd stop in that has an enclosed courtyard for animals so that you would have a place as a way station to stay overnight. (57:04) As you, you know, are keeping safe from brigands and bandits on the road and so forth. But apparently these were because the merchants who were traveling through these, they didn't own them. They didn't keep keep them up or anything and they didn't treat them well and so they were not great places. (57:22) And so what Valentinus says is, "Caravanserais are so full of holes and dug up and often filled with dung because while people are there, the people are living in an utterly vulgar way and they take no forethought for the property since it belongs to somebody else. So they don't care what how they treat it. (57:42) They just leave all of their animal droppings all over it and so forth. Just so a heart too is impure by being the habitation of many demons until it experiences forethought. But when the Father who alone is good visits the heart, he makes it holy and fills it with light. And so a person who has such a heart is called blessed, for that person will see God." (58:12) Ah, so blessed, you know, are the pure in heart for they shall see God is where we get to at the end.

So in other words, by the end of that fragment, we see that Valentinus is illustrating his idea that seeing God, that Gnosis, requires a person to banish all the distractions, all of the desires from their heart. (58:34) And he does this then also by building on a saying of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, this emerging canon that we now have in the second century, from the Gospel of Matthew: "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." So seeing God is central to the idea of Gnosis, and the saying here can be illustrated with this teaching and analogy that Valentinus has in this one fragment that Clement of Alexandria preserves. (59:04) And so, and so this is a pattern for all of Valentinus's writings where he is taking texts from or taking passages from all of the these emerging books of the canon, especially books like the books of John and the letters of John and so forth that are in Paul's letters, and he's taking words out of them or teachings out of them and using them in order to prove or to convey his Valentinian version of the the Gnostic viewpoint. (59:36) And so this connects Gnosis to this emerging canon that is becoming important to what second-century Christians are understanding Christianity to be.

Another fragment of Valentinus also embedded in a text by Clement of Alexandria concerns Jesus's digestive system. (1:00:04) Valentinus says, "He Jesus was continent, enduring all things. Jesus digested divinity and so he ate and drank in a very special way without excreting his solids. He had a great capacity for continence. That nourishment within him was not corrupted, for he did not experience corruption."

So this is kind of a, you know, kind of a bizarre teaching, or it seems anyway, not a maybe something that we find a little bit funny or strange here, but corruption is part of the idea of this impermanent and flawed nature of the material world that for centuries, you know, going back to Plato and Plato's predecessors, (1:00:47) they were worrying about this problem of of impermanence and decay and everything about this was also, you know, if everything decays and goes into ruin, then is there anything that's eternal? Is there any possibility of, for example, of the immortality of the soul, which was something that Plato was also very concerned with? So everything that exists materially is mortal, impermanent, and corrupt, and yet, you know, again, we have this idea, a Jesus who is a divine being in some way is participating in the material world and (1:01:27) the material realm. So is he experiencing corruption? And so Valentinus says no, he's not experiencing corruption.

So like I say, while the particular biological idea here seems odd, I think it's expressing a kind of compromise between a divine Jesus who only seems human, in other words, the Docetism that Marcion was promoting, and a Jesus who, you know, is human but divine, but does not experience the corruption of the mortal shadow physical world. (1:01:59) And and part of this is not completely out of out of the keeping of what other Christians are thinking. And so, so in in the these centuries around here, the early antiquity, Christians are practicing asceticism. Many early Christians are valuing asceticism. So that is to say, when you are denying the body, you're showing, you know, kind of you're not participating as much in this flawed material realm, you are connecting yourself to the divine spiritual realm. (1:02:32) And so, for example, in later times when when the desert fathers are going off into the into the desert in order to prove that spiritual prowess, they'll eat very little to prove that, you know, that they don't need this material stuff and and so on. And so you can see there's an explanation here. (1:02:54) Well, Jesus didn't need to eat very much because he's not experiencing corruption at all. So, he's not wasting any of the little bit of food he'd had. You know, there's the idea that, you know, some of the saints by the middle ages are are eating only communion wafers and water. That's how they're living. (1:03:12) So and so this is demonstrating spiritual power perhaps as well.

Another fragment that we have is a brief personal visionary cosmological poem by Valentinus that's known as Summer Harvest, and it's preserved in a third-century orthodox book known as the Refutation of All Heresies. (1:03:45) So again, it's compiled because we have the the proto-orthodox enemies or antagonists of of these thinkers, but they sometimes give us a quote. And so this poem says, "I see in spirit that all are hanging. I know in spirit that all are being carried. Flesh hanging from soul, air hanging from upper atmosphere, crops rushing forth from the deep, a babe rushing forth from the womb."

(1:04:19) So this is a personal vision. So he's saying, "I see. I know." He's seeing the material world as a structure that is contingent. It's hanging on the spiritual. So there's a chain that descends from, you know, the ineffable down to the upper atmosphere to the air. In other words, everything from the higher to the lower. And there's also kind of this symbolic imagery. There's the deep from which crops are emanating, the divine source, the cosmic womb, a babe, possibly it possibly meaning the Word or Christ is rushing forth, or simply everything is being created from it. (1:04:49) Whereas we have another fragment where Valentinus has a vision where he sees a babe and he asks the babe who it is and the babe says, "I'm the Word. I'm the Logos." So it may well be that that's what the imagery there is.

So very spiritual, very symbolic, very mystical. I think sometimes when we've done summaries of Gnosticism in the past and we go through all of the, you know, real technical definitions and talk about which Aeons are which and who's paired with what and, you know, who emanates forth from which thing and so on, that it becomes, you know, very abstract, esoteric, but also (1:05:26) kind of just a a detail-oriented kind of memorizing thing. But I think in Valentinus's use, we're definitely seeing, and it may well have been true for other Gnostics too, but that we're definitely seeing a focus on on on personal spiritual practice, on mysticism, as getting you to this truth as opposed to, let's say, memorizing a very complicated Gnostic myth.

The Discovery of the Gospel of Truth

(1:05:56) So the fragments like the ones that I was just quoting from, that's previously all that we'd had preserved of Valentinus's writing, that is, his detractors quoting from him in order to refute him. But that changed with the discovery of the library at Nag Hammadi, which included a complete translation of a Coptic sermon that's usually called, was originally written in Greek, Coptic translation of a sermon that is called the Gospel of Truth. (1:06:27) While, and there's also fragments of another copy of it in there. While scholars, I mean, while the text itself, while the manuscript here in Nag Hammadi does not identify or say that the author is Valentinus, there's a general scholarly consensus that he's the writer because we don't have any other good candidates for who might have written it. (1:06:50) Irenaeus knows of a text that was written that he says was written by Valentinus called the Gospel of Truth, and the text itself is very, very sophisticated, incredibly well-written, so you need a kind of a brilliant writer, but it also corresponds with what the other fragments we have of Valentinus are. So very likely it's the Gospel of Truth written by Valentinus that we have in Coptic translation.

So it's also one of the very few sermons that we have from a Gnostic group in the broader sense. (1:07:20) So if we consider Valentinians to be Gnostics, and it also then gives us a rare glimpse of what what does a Gnostic meeting look like? What would it have been like? So when you get together in your group, it's a Valentinian inner circle, what would they have done? And so one of the things might be that an authoritative leader like Valentinus could stand up and give a sermon like this that is, you know, amazingly artful and powerful. (1:07:53) And so the Gospel of Truth is also the earliest surviving sermon that's within the field of Christian mysticism. So it's important to identify anyway, as we're looking at the mystic tradition within Christianity that Leandro is doing in his series. This is an important document for that.

(1:08:16) So the purpose of the Gospel of Truth is given in its prologue the very beginning, and it says, "The gospel of truth is joy to those who have received from the Father of Truth the grace of knowing him by the power of the Word." So again, we're trying to know God, you have a Gnosis of God. And that is being accomplished through the power of the Word, the Logos, (1:08:42) the Logos Christ who has come from the fullness, that is to say from the spiritual realm that is in the thought and mind of the Father, the Logos who is called the Savior, since that is the name of the work that he must do for the redemption of those who had fallen ignorant of the Father. (1:09:14) So ending ignorance, giving people knowledge of the Father. The name Gospel here or proclamation is another way to translate this word. The name Gospel here refers to the manifestation of hope, a discovery for those who are searching for the Father, the ultimate source, truth in the of you, truth in the universe.

So, so that prologue here while consonant with, you know, that same underlying Gnostic theme that those who are ignorant of the true God come to a Gnosis of him, (1:09:47) you know, the Gospel of Truth kind of replaces Gnostic jargon terms. I mean, we still are saying here we still have things like the fullness, but rather than put it into jargon term of saying Pleroma, we know we're having it translated, and so anyway, so we're we're having trying to take these terms and make them less of a barrier to entry for people hearing it. (1:10:16) And instead, again, it's going to be it is peppered with allusions to the writings of Paul, other quotations out of the the Gospels and so forth, in order to make it all go down a lot easier for Valentinus's Christian audience.

The Gospel of Truth situates itself within a variation of the Gnostic cosmogony, you know, where that last Aeon, Wisdom, is ultimately responsible for the flawed material world, but without, you know, specifically telling the story the way it's told in the Apocryphon of John. (1:10:49) So we read in the Gospel of Truth: "In as much as the entirety, the spiritual realm, had searched for the one from whom they had emanated." So we're all searching for the unknowable Father, and the entirety was inside of him. So we're searching for him but we don't realize we're actually inside of him, the inconceivable, uncontained, who is superior to all thought. (1:11:15) So we're all searching for the Father. Nevertheless, not finding him, ignorance of the Father caused agitation and fear. And the agitation grew dense like fog so that no one could see. And thus Error found strength and labored at her matter. Rebuilding matter in emptiness. Without having learned to know the truth, she took up residence in a modeled form, preparing by means of power and beauty a substitute for truth. (1:11:47) So the material creation then came into being as a modeled form. For example, as Adam is modeled from the dust, from clay on the on the true form of the human that is one of the original Aeons. This is all happening because of being unable to return to and see the the true source, the true spiritual source.

So the summary gives us the same kind of explanation about why we're finding ourselves in this corrupt impermanent material world without all the complexity and all the kind of unfamiliar names that are found in sort of the classic Gnostic (1:12:24) cosmogony. And so this moves us quickly to the solution, which is coming to know the Father through Jesus. So we read in the Gospel of Truth: "It is to the elect that this, the gospel of the one they search for, has made itself known through the mercies of the Father by this, the hidden mystery, Jesus Christ shed light upon those who were because of forgetfulness and darkness." So we've all been in darkness and forgetfulness. (1:13:05) "But Jesus Christ is bringing us light and they're still telling us the hidden mystery. He enlightened them and gave them a way, and the way is the truth about which he instructed them." So you can kind of hear in that, you know, Jesus's teaching from the Gospel of John: "I'm the way, the truth, I'm the light." So there's all kind of building on that. (1:13:30) "For this reason, Error became angry at him and persecuted him. She was constrained by him and became inactive. He was nailed to a tree and became fruit of the Father's acquaintance." So being acquainted with the Father is having Gnosis. (1:13:56) "Yet it did not cause ruin because it was eaten. Rather, those who ate it, you know, just Jesus when he eats does not not cause corruption. So in the same way this is true fruit that doesn't cause ruin when we eat it. Rather to those who ate it, it gave the possibility that whoever he discovered within himself might be joyful in the discovery of him. And as for him, they discovered him within them, the unconceivable, uncontained, the Father who is perfect, who created the entirety." (1:14:22) And this is also kind of building on some of the things that Jesus says in the Gospel of John where he talks about being in the disciples. The disciples are him and he's in the Father and so forth.

So Christ's mission and teachings return the elect, you know, those whom the Father has predestined for salvation, that posterity of Seth, the human beings that have a divine spark in them and are destined for predestined for the salvation. (1:14:51) It returns gives them a way to transcend the forgetful ignorance that we're all laboring under here in this shadow material world and ultimately to see and be enlightened and realize that we're actually within the true spiritual Father who transcends everything.

So elsewhere we're told that since ignorance is the problem, eliminating it will eliminate the problem, allowing us to transcend from the material to the spiritual. (1:15:18) "So for where there is envy and strife, there is a lack. But where unity is, there is completion. So in as much as the lack came into being because the Father was not own known, from the moment the Father is known, the lack will not exist." So all of this stuff is coming from lack and lack of knowledge. Having the knowledge will allow it to will make that not exist and allow for completeness.

(1:15:49) So in keeping with its mystical outlook, the Gospel of Truth concludes with its goal, which is to achieve knowledge, to achieve completeness, to achieve oneness, and it's ultimately about achieving Gnosis of the Father and repose in the Father. (1:16:22) So we read: "All individually will speak concerning the place from which they have emanated and the lot according to which they have received their establishment in the state of rest. They will hasten to return and to receive from that place in which they once stood at rest, tasting of it and being nourished." (1:16:43) "The Father's own realm of repose is his fullness. Thus all the Father's emanations are fullnesses and he is the root of all his emanations and within that place where he caused all to sprout and gave them their destinies. And so when everybody's retrieved that repose, they will find out it is precisely they who are the truth. (1:17:08) And it is in them that the Father dwells. And in the Father that they are perfect, undivided in what is truly good and imparting no defect to anything, but rather imparting repose and being fresh in the spirit. This is the place of the blessed. This is their place." So that is how we understand salvation and true eternal life.

(1:17:34) And so the speaker in ending this sermon concludes and proclaims or testifies, "I have been in the place of repose. It is there that I shall dwell continually occupied with the Father. I have been in the place of repose. It is there that I shall dwell continually occupied with the Father of the entirety, and the true siblings upon whom the Father's love is poured out and in whose myths there is no lack of him who truly and obviously dwell in true and eternal life. (1:18:09) Speaking of the light that is perfect and in this his spirit rejoices in it, glorifies what it dwells in. For he is good and his children are perfect and worthy of his name. Truly it is children of this kind that the Father loves."

So this is a personal testimony that we kind of maybe even see, I don't know, I think may be similar to the Buddha having achieved enlightenment is then able to tell everybody else how that they can find enlightenment and being in repose and one and completeness and fullness in that sort of way. (1:18:50) And so, you know, if Valentinus had become pope, you know, obviously they didn't quite have Popes back then yet, but if, you know, this really important thinker had been the leader of the church and had been able to put this kind of a stamp on it, there may well have been, as opposed to the next generation when when Irenaeus, you know, is what the major leader who is very much opposed to all of these kind of ideas, that that could have taken Christianity on a little bit of a different turn. (1:19:23) Although we can also see some of these ideas continue to be, you know, inform, you know, some of what happened in Christianity. Some of the again, playing or drawing upon the canon, doing allegorical interpretation, and indeed the tradition of mysticism does continue.

(1:19:46) And so that's the deep dive look I had at Valentinus.

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