Episodios

  • Gnosis or Not Gnosis?
    Mar 2 2024
    We Gnostic Christians are in a very funny position as far as Gnostics and Christians go, because we fall into neither camp and we fall into both camps. And this is what I mean. I realize that the last couple of episodes have been very, what people would call, Christian, except the Christians don’t call it Christian. It’s a funny, funny position to be in. Those of us who call ourselves Gnostics believe in the Father. We believe in the Aeons of the Fullness. We believe that one of the Aeons “fell” out of the Fullness and, for most Gnostics, they call that Aeon Sophia, and Sophia is considered to be a female character. For those of us who are interested in the Tripartite Tractate we call that fallen Aeon Logos. And, Logos is neither female nor male, because in the Gnosticism according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there are no females and males. Or, there may be females and males, but their gender is not important. Gender is irrelevant. The folks who follow what is called Sethian Gnosticism, as I understand it—who prefer to follow Sophia rather than Logos—believe in a system of male-female bonding. They’re called syzygies, and for every male Aeon there’s a female Aeon and they are like a married couple. And that between the two of them there is balance. Well, now that’s kind of a funny thing at this point in our social development, don’t you think? All of this idea that genders are unimportant or that you can change the gender you were born with—this transgenderism that’s going on in society. Now, I am a female. I was born a female. I remain a female. And yet I have always felt within myself that gender was unimportant. It’s irrelevant other than our reproductive functions. But as far as my actions on the social stage, as far as my actions on the academic stage, as far as the way I read and interpret material, gender has nothing to do with that. I’m a Libertarian. I believe in freedom and personal responsibility and liberty to be able to make the decisions we want to make. I don’t believe in power and control. I think that power and control, particularly centralized authority, is demiurgic because that’s the way the Demiurge operates. The Demiurge is the puppet master. It has always been said, even in conventional Christianity, that every person must come to God for themselves. Every person must make their own decisions regarding whom they will follow, and I don’t think that has anything to do with gender. I think it has to do with the Demiurge versus the Father, or the Son, or the Fullness, or Logos. Bob Dylan had a song—remember back in his evangelical phase? The lyrics had to do with you have to choose somebody. “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to choose somebody.” That is a black and white decision that is a bilateral decision. You’re either going this way or you’re going that way, you’re going in or you’re going out, you’re going up or you’re going down. The Demiurge controls through strings of power. Now, the culture that we’re living in, it’s mostly demiurgic. It’s mostly being controlled by centralized authority. And whether that is political, corporate, media led, or religion led, it is centralized authority that takes away your freedom of choice. It says, No. You have to believe this. You have to believe the way we believe. And if you don’t, you’re an outsider. You’re bad. That isn’t the way true choice works. That’s not the way liberty works. Liberty says, Here are all the facts of all the matter, and you can choose this or choose that, or choose that. That is up to each and every person. And indeed, we all are responsible for our own karma, for our own lives. We can’t shuffle that responsibility onto another person or onto a religion or onto a corporation, or onto a political system. We have to make our own decision for ourselves, because it’s only us that’s going up or down. So, the past couple of episodes have been very Christian. If you’re not familiar with Christ and Jesus, you’re gonna think it’s very Christian. Here, I’ll read you a letter that I got off of Substack this week from one of my paid supporters. He has unsubscribed. He is no longer paying to listen to the Gnostic Reformation. And here’s what he says: “I’ve really enjoyed getting your take on gnosticism. What I’ve enjoyed most is just how different your perspective is from my own—mine, alas, being increasingly un-Christianized and more focused on Sophia. Of course, to paraphrase Shaw’s quote about economists, If you laid 1000 gnostics end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. Such is the nature of heretics, I think. Gnosis is, imo, different for each of us. It was my honor to help support your work for a time. Best wishes!” So that was very kind of him. He said it in as kind a manner as he could say. And yet it points out the divide within Gnosticism of those who consider ...
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    20 m
  • The 23rd Psalm
    Mar 9 2024
    I’m going to read you some excerpts this morning from one of the listeners. She says a lot of people look at her as if she’s speaking Chinese when she talks about the things she’s learned. She says, “I don’t think the point is who is right versus wrong. But if we can come to a universal understanding that is about love, particularly the Father’s love, the Son’s love, and the Pleroma, the ALL and the Totalities—it’s all love.” And, indeed, it’s about rising above the memes, the particularities, to find the essence that is being conveyed, no matter what people are talking about. Is it love or is it anger and hate? That is a dichotomy. Is it life or is it ignorance and death? Those are dichotomies that cannot be overcome, because they are either/or. But as far as the particularities, those are not as important as where your heart lies. She says, “I see so many people who have podcasts, YouTube channels, and two week $300.00 classes that promise spiritual enlightening,” and it causes her to shake her head. “Other people seem to want to focus on things that don’t have much substance and then try to fill in the lines.” She asks me if there are any, “specific prayers that I would suggest to give glory to the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Are there specific prayers for that?” Well, I don’t have a particular litany of prayers. There are really only two prayers that I repeat pretty much daily. [Those two prayers are “The Lord’s Prayer,” and the 23rd Psalm.] Usually when I go to bed, or in the middle of the night if I wake up, if I say the 23rd Psalm, I immediately feel peaceful. It causes me to have a deep and relaxing breath when I’m beginning the very first stanza, and then I’m able to relax. I picture all of the events taking place in the 23rd Psalm, and then I often fall asleep before I even reach the end. So let me go ahead and recite the 23rd Psalm for you. And it’s a good one to memorize, because it’s pretty much all there and it’s very comforting. Here’s how it goes: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever. That’s the 23rd Psalm. And it’s not a ritualistic thing. It’s not a thing like repeat this 20 times in a certain cadence and all will be well with you. It’s more a matter of putting yourself into the place that’s being discussed. Picture yourself. So, when I say the 23rd Psalm to myself, I do think of myself as a sheep because it’s talking about the Good Shepherd. “The Lord is my shepherd.” So I picture Jesus looking like a shepherd and I’m one of the sheep lying down in the pastures. And it’s a beautiful pasture. I picture it in my mind. And I can stay there for a long time if I want to and look around the pasture at how beautiful it is. There’s a park near here that I call up in my mind because there’s a river that runs through it. And so the green pasture is at that park. And, “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” It’s peaceful water. It’s not a raging storm going on so that river is not flowing fast, but it’s very calm and wonderful. A good, safe place to bathe or to drink. And, symbolically, still waters represent calm. Calm emotions, not being in turmoil, but peaceful and calm. And it says, “He restoreth my soul.” So, whatever is bothering me or troubling me that happened during the day or that caused me to wake up in the night, there’s no need to lie there and to play it over in my mind. That is never helpful. That’s backward and down. You don’t want to replay bad things in the backward direction, which is history, and down, which is the demiurgic direction that stirs you up and makes you feel bad. So, “He restoreth my soul.” “He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” The paths of righteousness—another black and white choice is virtue or vice. We don’t dwell in the gray areas. Those cause turmoil. Those cause confusion. There isn’t any gray area between evil and righteousness. Evil is evil. Evil is a lack of knowledge, a lack of life and love. Evil is rooting for death and division. That is not a gray area. That is a bad area to wander through, so my Good Shepherd leads me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Now, that sometimes used to throw me. What does this mean? Why am I going down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake and not for my sake? Because when we go down paths of righteousness...
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    28 m
  • The Gnostic Lord’s Prayer
    Mar 16 2024
    Last week I started reading a letter from a podcast listener and I didn’t get very far. I got as far as the 23rd Psalm basically, and that was it, right? So last week I said there were two prayers that I pray. She asked what prayers do I engage in and how can I give honor to the Father, the Son, and the Fullness in those prayers. So, the other prayer that I say daily or nightly, if I’m going to bed or if I wake up in the middle of the night, is what’s called the Lord’s Prayer. And technically that’s from chapter six of the book of Matthew. I prefer reciting the Lord’s Prayer in King James language because I think it’s beautiful. So I’ll first let you hear what it sounds like in King James, and then we’ll look at a more modern translation and talk about the energy and the flow and whatnot of the prayer. This prayer was suggested by Jesus as he was talking to his disciples and they asked him, how should we pray? Same question as the listener’s. And he said this: “After this manner therefore, pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen. That’s the way I learned it as a kid, and I really like the poetic nature of the Ye’s and the Thou’s and whatnot, so that’s why I speak that way in prayer. But it isn’t necessary, and it’s not even necessary to use these exact words. There are many New Testament translations now, and they all have slightly different takes on exactly which words to use, but the meaning is always the same. And remember, it’s not the particular words that we use with each other. It’s the meaning behind them that’s important. The meta level means to step up and see what is being communicated. It’s not the particularities of memes themselves. Here’s the most modern translation that I know of, and that is David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament. And his is a fresh translation of the New Testament, not reworking old translations like most Bibles are, but he actually went to the original Greek and retranslated it in the most precise manner he could. And this is what David Bentley Hart’s version sounds like. Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy; Let your Kingdom come; Let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth; Give us today bread for the day ahead; And excuses our debts, just as we have excused our debtors; And do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from him who is wicked. [For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the ages.] Now again, I’ve noticed that the word ages in these translations can also be translated as Aeons, and I think of Aeons as units of consciousness, not as units of time. So when it says, For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the ages, in my own mind, I think For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the Aeons. And finally, we’re pulling the Aeons and the Fullness of God into the prayers, because they’re usually left out. Note, in this Gnostic Christianity, the Fullness is an actual entity. It’s a location where the Aeons live. And the Aeons are infinite in number because they are expressions of the Son of God, and the Son is infinite in scope, power, and size. So it stands to reason that the particularities of the Son of God would also be infinite. So, the Fullness of God is where they live. That’s what it means to be the Fullness of God—the place where the Aeons dwell. And the Fullness and the Son and the what’s called the Totalities of the ALL, which are like the parents of the Aeons, they are coexistent; they’re equal in scope and power with the Son. Normally in Christianity, the Fullness of God is just used as a an adverbial expression of how great and big and grand God is. But it’s actually quite a bit more than that. It’s a description of all the individual traits of the Son of God. OK, let’s go back for a minute and talk about prayer. Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” And that’s what makes them hypocrites, because they’re actually looking for recognition and brownie points from other people. He goes on to say, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.” That is, from the other people, the brownie points. “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” And I think of the Father not as this big eye in the sky who watches everything that everybody does. The Father is within us because we all carry the Fullness of God inside of us. So ...
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    26 m
  • Is the Gnostic Son of God the same as the Biblical Son of God
    Mar 23 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I would like to compare the Son from the Bible to the Son of the Tripartite Tractate. A couple of days ago, I was listening to a radio preacher who was railing against people like me and you who are trying to understand Christianity in its most fundamental sense—the original Christianity of the first 300 years after Jesus talked about himself and the Father and Heaven. I want you to realize that the last thing I want to be is a “false prophet” or a “false teacher.” And, of course, that’s what he was railing against. And he said that the only way you can be sure that you’re not falling into heresy and going to hell is if you follow Orthodox Christianity as presented in the Bible. So, I thought it would be interesting to look at a very important passage in the New Testament that talks about the Son of God, and to compare the Son of God of the New Testament to the Son of God of ancient Christian, what we could call, Gnosticism. But I think it was actual Christianity before the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed it to become a means of wielding power and keeping the people under their control. Well, if you’ve listened to many of the episodes here at Gnostic Insights or to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, you will see that some of the terms that we use, although they sound like the same exact terms, have different meanings. And this was something else that the radio preacher pointed out—Oh, don’t believe them when they talk about the Son or the Christ or God the Father, because that isn’t the God, the Christ, and the Son that we know, he said. And that’s the tragedy of the situation, because there is only one originating source. There is only one Father by definition, and I often talk about that. The Son in this Gnostic Christianity that I’m presenting is the first encapsulation or the first breakout. It’s the first emanation of the Father. The Father, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, stretched himself out, and it was this stretching out that is the Son that made a space for the heavens and the cosmos and the Earth and all of creation to unfold. Here’s what it says in the Tripartite Tractate, part one, verse 64. It says, “The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities”… let’s stop here a minute before we go further. The Totalities are also called the Aeons of the Aeons. The Totalities, what I generally call the ALL, and I use capital letters to show that this is a particular type of entity; it’s not just a word like the totality of God. No, the Totality, the Totalities, the ALL, is the Son’s complete Self. He wears them like a cloak and they wear him like a cloak. They are, in other words, coexistent. Just like yourself, if someone sees you and they say, Oh, there’s Mary, right? Well, Mary’s not just a big giant thing. Just like the Son isn’t just the Son. When you see Mary, you see she has brown hair and she is a 5 feet tall and she it looks like this, she has two arms, two legs. She’s got all of this within her. That’s the Totality of Mary. So, Mary’s right foot would be one of the Totalities of Mary. You see what I’m trying to say? So, the Totalities of the Son is a place and it’s an entity, and they all are together in one unity. As the Son is a unity, the Totalities are the Son’s unity, although they’re all broken out and distinguished. But they don’t realize themselves because they sit in perfect coexistence with the Son, who is a unity. So, back to reading from the Tripartite Tractate. It says, “The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities, being an unknown and incomprehensible one, has such greatness and magnitude, that, if he had revealed himself suddenly, quickly, to all the exalted ones among the Aeons who had come forth from him, they would have perished.” So, the Father couldn’t reveal himself in all of his greatness, because they would just burst. They would explode because they can’t fit him in. So the Father always held back his true incomprehensibility. He held it back because the Totalities and Aeons could not comprehend it. He held it back in order to protect them. It says, “if he had revealed himself suddenly, quickly, to all the exalted ones among the Aeons and those of the Totalities who had come forth from him, they would have perished. Therefore, he withheld his power and his inexhaustibility within that in which he is.” And we’re talking about the Father. What is, that in which the Father is? because the Father is everything. He’s the ground state, so he can’t reside in something else. Nothing came before him. He doesn’t exist within something. But what has all the Father in it? That’s the Son. That’s the encapsulation. That’s the monad. That’s the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. The bucket is the Son. Inside the bucket it’s the same exact character of God the Father, but it...
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    25 m
  • Gnostic Easter—He and We Are Risen!
    Mar 29 2024
    The Son, The Christ, and Jesus Explained Welcome back to Gnostic Insights, and Happy Easter! Last week, we spoke about the characteristics of the Son of God and whether the Son of the Gnostic faith is the same as the Son of the Christian faith. And my answer was, Yes, definitely it is, and Well, there are some differences. You may wish to back up to last week’s episode to listen to that in-depth discussion of the Gnostic Son compared to the Christian Son. Today, we’re going to look at some of those differences. And then, stay tuned until the end of this episode for an Easter message from me to you. Now, when the scriptures say that the Son is “the only begotten Son of the Father,” this means that the Son is the only consciousness to have emerged directly from the Father. All other units of consciousness emanate from the Son. The Tripartite Tractate says, “Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no one else and the one apart from whom there is no other unbegotten one, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore, he is a first born and an only one. First born because no one exists before him, and only Son because no one is after him.” That’s from verse 57 of the Tripartite Tractate. And, because he carries all of the characteristics of the Father, as soon as the Son emanated from within the Father, the Son began to generate offspring of his own. And so the Son became a Father. And the immediate generation of the Son is called the Totalities of the ALL, which are coexistent with the Son. And then the Totalities gave glory to the Father and the Son, and in their giving of glory they generated their own emanations. And those are called the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And these Aeons of the Fullness became self aware, and they sorted themselves into a hierarchy based upon position, rank, duties, or jobs. They all had names, so therefore they had an ego. Each Aeons has an ego, whereas the Totalities have no ego—their consciousness is entirely subsumed to the Son. And the Aeons continued to generate more emanations of the Spirit of God. When the Aeons look upon each other with love and devotion, and the Father and the glory reflected through them, their union produces another Aeon, and that’s how Aeons procreate—have babies, so to speak. The Third Glory that is the offspring of the Aeons, “was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison, while at the same time independently of one another according to the will of each.” That’s verse 69 of the Tripartite. So the Fullness of God is not just a one and done thing. They continue to emanate units of consciousness called the Third Glory. Now, in the cosmogeny or cosmology of Gnostic Christianity, the original Christianity, the Aeons continued to produce their own generation of offspring until all combinations, all possible, infinite combinations, of Aeons were produced. The final Aeon was named Logos, and he carried fractal images of all the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. He was a package, a fractal package, of the entire Fullness. And here is when we have the Fall. When Logos tried to reunite with the Father and produce the world—produce the Paradise that they had all been dreaming of—all by himself, without the Fullness because he could do it. He had all of the characteristics. But instead, he fell because it was unauthorized. The other Fullnesses were not joined in giving glory with him, and so the Fall produces our material existence here, down below. And then, once he fell, Logos split into two and what’s called the best part of Logos—that would be his one true Self that reflects the Fullness—fled back up into the Fullness and his ego stayed behind. The ego of the fallen Aeon did not remember the Fullness, did not remember the Father, or the Son. Didn’t remember anything that came before. That’s why the Demiurge is called the amnesiac God. He did, however, still contain all of the patterns and blueprints for Paradise, but without the life and love flowing down through the Son, through the Father, into him. That is why the material is dense and heavy. It’s not ethereal anymore. It has heft and weight to it, and we can’t pass through objects because we are no longer ethereal. I say we, but we haven’t been created yet. We are called the Second Order of Powers. The Fullnesses are the First Order of Powers. The Aeons and Logos together prayed for a solution for this dense and heavy Paradise down below that was being formed and run by the Demiurge without any life or love. And so, we were created. All living creatures and all of our soft, squishy, meaty parts were created in order to be carriers of the consciousness of the Father, because the Demiurge had forgotten about it. The ultimate aim at that point was to bring love ...
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    23 m
  • Spirit, Mind, Body: Spirit down, mud up
    Apr 6 2024
    Earlier this week I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio and was interviewed by Miguel Conner about my new book—A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. The interview was about an hour and a half—very extensive. So, I hope that you will catch it. It’s on YouTube, but he’s also posted it to audio-only podcast platforms. The name of the episode on Aeon Byte was The Gnostic Myth Simplified. So that’s what you would look for. This week we’re going to look at the three-part nature of humankind, as presented by the Tripartite Tractate. We humans and all other creatures are called the second order of powers. The first order of powers are the Aeons of the Fullness, and we are their fruit. We have a three-part nature. This is why it’s called the Tripartite Tractate: tripartite, meaning three parts, tractate, book. It’s not just because this book is divided into three sections, which it happens to be, but it is because it describes the three-part nature of God, the three-in-one, and we humans are fractals of that tripartite system. And, by the way, I talk a lot about fractals in that Aeon Byte interview. The first part of our nature is our version of the monad of the Father, the Son, what is called our Self, with the big S. Self is what we call it here at Gnostic Insights; other people often refer to that as your spiritual aspect. The second part of the 3-part structure is called the psychical, our association with the Aeons of the Fullness, because we are representations of the Aeons of the Fullness; we are fractals of them. The psychical part is our psychological nature. It’s the part of us that thinks. Our third part is associated with the ego of Logos after the Fall. And our third part is the material level—the hylic. So, reading from the Tripartite Tractate, “To those who belong to the remembrance…” and those are the second order powers, because we are of the good thought, the remembrance, whereas the material world is of the presumptuous thought—the Fall. The material world is based upon egoic strivings of Logos in particular, and we all carry that ego forward through our material aspect, and so that’s why it’s called “those of the presumptuous thought,” because it was presumptuous of Logos to think that he could reach the Father and reunite without the Fullness. So, the presumptuous thought is the material level, whereas “those of the remembrance” is the psychical, or psychological level—our thinking, our thoughts and the fact that we can remember that there is a Father above. We remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we are all of the remembrance. But, of course, we forget it. We get all tangled up with the material and we forget our higher nature. Again, “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.” So let’s think about that sentence. We second order powers, we humans in particular, we belong to the remembrance, and all of the second order powers belong to the remembrance. The flowers remember the Father, the dogs and cats remember the Father. All the creatures on Earth, even the cells of your body, remember that we come from the Fullness and from the Father, because we all have to remember in order to instantiate the Golden Rule of cooperation, and it is cooperation that builds our bodies up from single celled, fertilized eggs, all the way up to whatever creatures we become. That’s the remembrance of the Father. So, we second order powers belong to the Father, but we also belong to Logos because we’re fractals of Logos himself. And, remember, Logos himself was a fractal of the Fullness of God, so he was already one iteration down from the entire Fullness. And we are a second iteration down because we’re fractals of Logos and the Fullness down here below. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. “He revealed the thought of that which he had stripped from himself…” And what is that thought that he had stripped from himself? It’s his ego, it’s his presumptuous thought. Logos, after the Fall, finds himself down here below in another dimension and he goes, what the heck did I do? He then stripped himself of the imitations of the likenesses. And the imitations of the likeness are imitations of the Fullness; imitations of the broken open fractals that Logos carried within him when he Fell into this dimension. That’s why they’re called imitations; they’re not true fractals. They’re the shadows, the imitations, the phantoms of those fractals that Logos carried along with him. He stripped himself of the presumptuous thought. That presumptuous thought was his over-reaching ego. He left that behind and Logos, “the best part of him,” that would be ...
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    25 m
  • In the Origin, there was Logos
    Apr 13 2024
    Greetings, and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I imagine that some people who tune into this broadcast or read my writing, when they see the word Gnostic, they’re hoping it’s going to be more exotic than it turns out to be, because there are many ancient myths and stories that are labeled as Gnostic and Gnostic scriptures that don’t much resemble what is taught in the Judeo-Christian line of religions. But when you read the New Testament afresh with this new translation by David Bentley Hart, you see that many of the phrases and concepts that we’ve become accustomed to in the standard translations of the Bible are not entirely accurate to the original ancient Greek writing. The New Testament as recently translated by David Bentley Hart sounds very much like the Tripartite Tractate in its speech and in its allegories. Hart has translated the New Testament afresh from the ancient Greek without reference to what we have come to believe the words mean—doctrinal expectations, you could say. Quoting from his preface, he says, “The relation between Christian theology and scriptural translation has a long and complicated history; theology has not only influenced translation, but particular translations have had enormous consequences for the development of theology (it would be almost impossible, for instance, to exaggerate how consequential the Latin Vulgate’s inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 5:12, proved for the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin).” He says that, “In the end, even the most conscientious translations tend at certain crucial junctures to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the plain meaning of the words on the page.” He says that what happens as a consequence often verges on a kind of “pious fraudulence.” So, in this translation, he has elected to produce an “almost pitilessly literal translation.” Many of his departures from received practices are Hart’s efforts to “make the original text as visible as possible, through the palimpsest of its translation.” Palimpsest? I paused a moment to look up palimpsest, and it means something reused or altered, but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. This morning I want to share with you some important passages out of the New Testament from Hart’s translation, which demonstrates the compatibility between this Gnostic Christianity that I talk about, and more conventional Christianity, although few people have noticed or care to draw these similarities. So let’s begin with a passage from John, chapter one, verses 1-6. And, it’s a very familiar passage for us. It usually reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Well, the actual Word is Logos, and we talk about Logos a lot here. And so it reads like this: “In the origin, there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD.” And, by the way, when Hart is referring to the highest character of God—The God Above All Gods, as we would say—he uses GOD in all capital letters. And when he refers to God in the more usual way that we refer to God—the God that is involving itself in our human existence—it’s god or God. And those differences are all indicated in the original Greek, but they don’t ever translate through into our modern Bibles. So, “In the origin there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) and the Logos was god.” God meaning, then, that the Logos incorporated all of the attributes of the God Above All Gods, but in a place in a particularity. Going on, “This one was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) in the origin. All things came to be through him (Logos) and without him came not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life and this life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.” Carrying on, “It was the true light which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos. He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be. And the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. But as many as did accept him, to them, he gave the power to become GOD’s children (the God Above All Gods’ children)—to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD. And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:9-14.) Now, of course, this is usually meant to refer to Jesus Christ coming to Earth in fleshly form. And that “he came to those who were his own” is usually thought to mean to the Jews, but the Jews did not recognize him as the Messiah and did not accept him. And, in conventional Christianity, “but as many of the Jews that did accept him, he gave the power to ...
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