Basic Gnosticism

According to the tradition, according to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus had a twin brother and his name was Didymus Judas Thomas. Now Didymus is simply the Greek word for "twin," it's also used as the Greek word for "testicles" for obvious reasons; there are usually two of them. Didymus is the Greek word for "twin" and Thomas is from a Semitic word, either Hebrew or Aramaic, or Syriac, which are all three similar languages, "Thomas" would look like in "twin" in those. The guy's name is Judas, the Hebrew version would be Judah, the Greek word would be Judas, and the English version is Jude, so you sometimes see it in English translations Didymus Jude Thomas but it's the same word, Judah or Judas. His real name is Judah or Judas and Didymus, and Thomas are his nicknames, one Greek and one Semitic or Aramaic. He was the twin brother of Jesus, according to early Christian tradition, now just one strand of early Christian tradition that is Thomasine Christianity, the forms of Christianity, popular especially in Syria and the east which traced their existence back to the Apostle Thomas. There really was an Apostle Thomas among the 12 of Jesus' disciples and having the nickname "twin." Traditional orthodox Christians don't believe he was Jesus' twin brother, they just believe that he had the nickname twin because he was somebody else's twin brother. 

But in Thomasine Christianity he was connected to Jesus himself as Jesus' twin.

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... 

Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... 

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies.

SYBILL TRELAWNEY'S PROPHECY

What scholars will call Basic Gnosticism includes some basic themes that they hold in common.

First, The World itself which is material is Evil. 

Salvation, therefore, from The World, must be escaped from This Physical World into 

Something Else.

Salvation will come by Knowledge and that Knowledge is a Secret, not everybody knows it, so only a few people know it. 

The content of this Knowledge is related to Human Origins and Destination. 

Now What Happened was at some point, either Sophia or some other beings, they got sorry for all us claylike mud people and somehow a little spark of The Divine itself either fell down, or got cut up or put in our bodies, or God placed in our bodies, or blew it into our bodies, but at least some human beings, not all human beings, in fact human beings are in different categories. 

There's The Really Low Human Beings like undergraduates, then there are beings who are a little bit higher like graduate students, and then you have 

The Supreme Beings, Gnostics, like Professors.

The True Gnostics, it's not really like undergraduates and graduates, because some of you could be Gnostics. 

You would be the ones who really have a real spark in you, a Spark of The Divine. 

Wall Street Journal

May 12, 2019 12:04 pm ET

OPINION | LETTERS

The Legacy of Eugenics Still

Echoes in America

Rather than a “renunciation” of eugenics in the 1930s, forced-sterilization laws persisted for 40 more years at some of the best medical institutions.

Stephen Budiansky’s review of Daniel Okrent’s “The Guarded Gate” (Books, May 4) about eugenics in America fails to mention the pervasive forced-sterilization laws which persisted in the U.S. into the 1970s in places like North Carolina. Eugenics in America is important because the best medical journals and medical minds endorsed it.Rather than a “renunciation” of eugenics in the 1930s, forced-sterilization laws persisted for 40 more years at some of the best medical institutions.

And it was used as “evidence” for not just forced sterilization, but also euthanasia programs in Germany. Dr. Peter Breggin has documented that German psychiatrists practiced euthanasia both before and after the Third Reich.

Patience is The Reward paid due to he would  learn the skill to endure The Quiet.

The importance of eugenics for today’s health policy is important but ignored by both the medical community and mainstream media. The best medical journals advocate managed care to protect scarce resources and make America globally competitive. Harsh rationing of medical care to the poor, people of color and the very sick elderly are a reality of modern managed care. 

The mainstream media and academic medicine do nothing.

We are on the verge of another “evidenced based” purge of “undesirables” in America. A reading of Stanley Milgram’s classic work, “Obedience to Authority,” shows how scientific authority can cause ordinary people to commit murderous acts against innocents. Mr. Budiansky should have taken notice and warned readers that the legacy of eugenics is at work in America today.

Brant S. Mittler, M.D., J.D.

"What scholars will call basic Gnosticism includes some basic themes that they hold in common.

First, The World itself which is material is Evil. Salvation, therefore, from The World, must be escaped from this physical world into something else. Gross materiality is not only temporary in some texts but even bad, it's evil. Salvation, therefore, must be the knowledge of how you, that is the real you, your brain--not your brain, your mind or your soul, or your spirit, not your body, that real you is this thing in this material body but salvation will be if it can learn how to escape the body and escape materiality. 

Salvation will come by knowledge and that knowledge is a secret, not everybody knows it, so only a few people know it. 

The content of this knowledge is related to human origins and destination. 

So sometimes you get these elaborate myths developed in some of these texts. Let's say that the supreme, supreme, supreme, Supreme God is in fact has no name, is not a particular thing, it's this thought, it's just thinking, it's just abstract thinking. 

That thinking thinks, "Well what does a thinking thing think?" 

The thinking thinks thoughts. Those thoughts start becoming emanations out of the thinking, and then those emanations think and emanate, and those become Lesser Beings still. 

The different divine beings, there are lots of divine beings in the existing universe, and by thinking and being they emanate inferior forms of being after themselves. Eventually what happened is those inferior forms of being get less good and less like the most ultimate being.

One of them, according to one myth, Sophia which means Wisdom, it's a female name but it also means "wisdom." Sophia decides she wants to emanate, and she supposed to do that with a male consort because by this these beings have male and female versions of themselves, she's supposed to only emanate or procreate by doing so with her male consort. 

She decides she wants to be like the supreme god and be able to emanate on her own, so she puts out a being on her own. In other words, she sort of gives birth without needing a man, just to be on principle. Well, of course when you do that you end up with a monster. 

The being that came out of Sophia ended up being a clumsy, maybe evil god, all of these are divine beings, that god decided at some point he wanted to create things and so he didn't really do it very well, so he made our earth, he made the world as we know it.

He made little human beings like you just out of dirt and clay, and that's why -- we were all creation, not of the supreme God who would do nothing imperfect, but of some stumbling or evil, at least clumsy god, who made us. 

That explains why things go wrong. 

Why is it that my arthritis acts up all the time? 

Couldn't God have made a human body that didn't have arthritis? 

Well, that's because the supreme God didn't make this body, the evil clumsy god made the body. 

This happened -- and so The World that we created, when you read in Genesis, it says God created the world, that's not the highest God, that's some clumsy god down further on the hierarchy of divine beings in the universe. 

That god created what we are. 

Now what happened was at some point, either Sophia or some other beings, they got sorry for all us claylike mud people and somehow a little spark of the divine itself either fell down, or got cut up or put in our bodies, or God placed in our bodies, or blew it into our bodies, but at least some human beings, not all human beings, in fact human beings are in different categories. 

There's the really low human beings like undergraduates, then there are beings who are a little bit higher like graduate students, and then you have the supreme beings, Gnostics, like professors.

The True Gnostics, it's not really like undergraduates and graduates, because some of you could be Gnostics. 

You would be the ones who really have a real spark in you, a spark of the divine. 

That spark of the divine wants to escape the mud body that it's trapped in, but you probably don't even know that you're really a spark trapped in a mud body until somebody comes along and tells you, and that's the job of the redeemer. 

That's what Jesus did: Jesus was a redeemer from the supreme God who comes in to find those people who have a spark of the divine in them, to blow on that spark, to get it going, and to get you to remember where you came from. 

You're not a mud body after all. The Real You came from Godself, God's very self, the Supreme God. 

The True Message of Christianity, according to these guys, is to learn who you are, where you came from, to see if you're going to escape the body and get back to your true origin, that is, you will become one with God again. 

This was expressed in a poem by Theodotus, it went like this:

Who we were, 

What we have become, 

Where we were, 

Whither we were thrown, 

Whither we are hastening, 

From What we are redeemed, 

What birth is, 

What rebirth is.

You answer the riddle, the poem riddle. "Who we were?" If you're a Gnostic who were you? Answer?

Student: Divine being.

Professor Dale Martin: Divine being, thank you. See, it's not hard. I'm not asking questions--I'm just trying--you will remember this better if you answer. What have you become? Mud, entrapped in a dead body, trapped in materiality. Where were you? Heaven, with the divine Father, with God?

Professor Dale Martin: "Whither we were thrown," where have you been thrown?

Student: Into The Earth.

Professor Dale Martin: Into the earth, into the world, into materiality. Where are you hastening, where are you going in a hurry--in such a hurry?

Student: Back to The Divine.

Professor Dale Martin: Back to The Divine God. 

What are you redeemed from?

Student: [Inaudible]

Professor Dale Martin: You're redeemed from Jesus?

Student: [Inaudible]

Professor Dale Martin: The material world. 

You're redeemed from being embodied. 

"What is birth?" 

In this system what is birth?

Student: [Inaudible]

Professor Dale Martin: Damnation, death. 

When you're born, your spark is entrapped in your body, that's not a good thing. 

You shouldn't be celebrating your birthday for crying out loud, that's like celebrating when you were thrown in prison. 

"What is rebirth?"

Student: [Inaudible]

Professor Dale Martin: Death or learning your true self, learning that the true self won't die at all, so this learning is your rebirth. So the little poem is a riddle that contains these doctrines within itself. Here's a true self, the spark of life is trapped in an alien body with all its sensual passions. 

Sex, therefore, sensual desire, erotic desire is a bad thing; it's an evil thing because that--you're just trying to trap more sparks into more mud bodies. 

You're just creating more sparks trapped in mud bodies when you have sex. 

Evil powers exist--all the different gods that were emanated, a bunch of those are evil, and they fly around the sky in the heavens and they try to keep the true self asleep or drunk in order to keep the evil world together. 

In other words, they don't want you to learn and they don't want your spark to be able to fly through. 

But really wise guys like me, we have the secrets and I can give you words, clues, secrets that if you know those things you can use these secrets to unlock the gates that lead back to God.

This is kind of a common storyline or myth, there's the Hymn of the Pearl, that I mentioned before, which basically tells this--that 

A King of The East sends a royal prince, by way of the region of Mycenae, to Egypt in order to get a precious pearl, which is being guarded by a fierce dragon, it's like a videogame. 

The Prince is poisoned, or actually drugged would be a better accurate translation, and made intoxicated by the Egyptians. 

But he, The Prince, is awakened by a message from The King. 

He, the prince, takes the pearl by defeating the dragon with the name of his father and returns to the east where he puts on a robe of knowledge, gnosis, and ascends to the king's palace, entering the realm of peace and living happily forever after. 

It's a nice little fable about a Prince who goes to a foreign land, finds the thing of value, defeats the evil purposes and goes back. 

So some people, therefore, have read the Gospel of Thomas as being precisely this kind of--that some of the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas makes sense if you presuppose these mythological structures and ideas.

Again, some scholars would say, “Well you're just putting together as a modern scholar a bunch of disparate kind of text and ideas, and putting them in a system.”

Well, yes, that's where I disagree with some people because I want to say I believe that there's enough commonalities between enough documents that we can say that there were people who had these kinds of common ideas, and this basic structure that I've called the Gnostic structure, the Gnostic myth, certainly influenced ancient writings of some sort and there was some kinds of Christianity that were heavily influenced by this.

For example, look at--back to Thomas for our last closing minutes and let's read some of these sayings that sound puzzling to us, and if we assume this myth maybe we'll read them differently. 

Look at 21:

Mary said to Jesus, "What do your disciples resemble? 

He said, "What they resemble is children living in a plot of land that is not theirs. 

When the owners of the land come they will say, 'Surrender our land to us.' 

They, for their part stripped naked in their presence, in order to give it back to them, and they give them back their land."

It could be an allegory. 

Who are the owners of the land? 

The evil powers that rule The Earth. 

Who are the children, who are the real disciples of Jesus? 

Those people who know enough to say, “When The Earth is demanded of you, when your body is demanded of you by these evil powers, give it up, just give it up, it's not valuable anyway. “

Look at 24:

His disciples said, "Show us the place where you are, for we must seek it." 

He said to them, "Whoever has ears should listen! 

There is a light existing within a person of light, that it enlightens the whole world. 

If it does not enlighten, that person is darkness."

Remember how I said some people are just dark people, they're just mud people, but some people have a light in them, and what it means to become a true Gnostic is to learn that you are one who has that light.

Look at 37:

His disciples said, "When will you be shown forth to us, and when shall we behold you?" 

Jesus said, "When you strip naked without being ashamed and take your garments and put them under your feet like little children and tread upon them. 

Then you will see the child of the living and you will not be afraid."

What's the Gnostic interpretation of that?

Student: [Inaudible]

Professor Dale Martin: Stripping the material world off yourself. When you strip your soul, your spark of the body, when you realize that it's not The Real You and you come to know The Real You  that's what's going to happen. 

Look at 56:

Jesus said, "Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse."

The world is just a dead body, so several of these sayings, if you go back through the Gospel of Thomas with some of this background information I've given you of these ancient myths and ideas, some of these sayings seem to fit that myth and fit that notion.

There are other things though about what I've just told you that you don't find in the Gospel of Thomas, and those are the things emphasized by people who say the Gospel of Thomas shouldn't called Gnostic. For example, there's no mention in here of an evil god that creates the world, like you find in some of these Nag Hammadi texts. You have the Father, you have apparently the good guy, you have Jesus, but tthere's no emphasis on creation here as being a bad thing. Some people said that's one of the fundamental things about the Gnostic myths and it's not in the Gospel of Thomas, therefore the Gospel of Thomas is not Gnostic. There are also simply no string of myths and evil gods' names which you often find in the texts of Nag Hammadi. Some scholars would say the Gospel of Thomas may have some things in common with Platonism of the time, maybe something in common with certain Gnostics, but that it itself is not. If you take the Gospel of Thomas as representing those ideas, then Jesus comes across--the Christology of the Gospel of Thomas becomes something different from the Christology of the other texts, or least Matthew, Mark and Luke.

As we'll see, the Gospel of John looks a lot more like this than the Synoptic Gospels did. 

Jesus becomes this redeemer figure, this Gnostic redeemer figure who comes into the world of materiality in order to find those who have sparks of life, to blow on their sparks of live, to transmit hidden knowledge to them, so they can get back. If you'll stay with me the rest of the semester, maybe I can give you those secrets and you can escape your mud bodies too. "

“ Nowhere was this thinning more apparent than in our lack of rules about what the anthropologists call “purity” and “pollution.” 

Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that govern what men and women may eat. In order for their boys to become men, they have to avoid foods that in any way resemble vaginas, including anything that is red, wet, slimy, comes from a hole, or has hair. 

It sounds at first like arbitrary superstition mixed with the predictable Sexism of a Patriarchal Society. Turiel would call these rules social conventions, because the Hua don’t believe that men in other tribes have to follow these rules. 

But the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called “a religion of the body.”

But it’s not just hunter-gatherers in rain forests who believe that bodily practices can be moral practices. When I read the Hebrew Bible, I was shocked to discover how much of the book—one of the sources of Western morality—was taken up with rules about food, menstruation, sex, skin, and the handling of corpses. 

Some of these rules were clear attempts to avoid disease, such as the long sections of Leviticus on leprosy. 

But many of the rules seemed to follow a more emotional logic about avoiding disgust. 

For example, the Bible prohibits Jews from eating or even touching “the swarming things that swarm upon the earth” (and just think how much more disgusting a swarm of mice is than a single mouse).

Other rules seemed to follow a conceptual logic involving keeping categories pure or not mixing things together (such as clothing made from two different fibers).

So what’s going on here? If Turiel was right that morality is really about harm, then why do most non-Western cultures moralize so many practices that seem to have nothing to do with harm? Why do many Christians and Jews believe that “cleanliness is next to godliness”?

And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. 

But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically. 

Even if Turiel was right that children lock onto harmfulness as a method for identifying immoral actions, I couldn’t see how kids in the West—let alone among the Azande, the Ilongot, and the Hua—could have come to all this purity and pollution stuff on their own. 

There must be more to moral development than kids constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their pain. 

There must be something beyond rationalism.”

And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over against Galilee.

27 And when he went forth to land, there met him out of the city a certain man, which had devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs.

28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high? I beseech thee, torment me not.

29 (For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For oftentimes it had caught him: and he was kept bound with chains and in fetters; and he brake the bands, and was driven of the devil into the wilderness.)

30 And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him.

31 And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep.

32 And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them.

33 Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked.

34 When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country.

35 Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.

36 They also which saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed.

37 Then the whole multitude of the country of the Gadarenes round about besought him to depart from them; for they were taken with great fear: and he went up into the ship, and returned back again.

38 Now the man out of whom the devils were departed besought him that he might be with him: but Jesus sent him away, saying,

39 Return to thine own house, and shew how great things God hath done unto thee. And he went his way, and published throughout the whole city how great things Jesus had done unto him.