Biblical Archaeology 2023-2024

[Oldcynic]

I'm really getting deep into Gnostic studies, the Demiurge, Yahweh and all the different "gods."

However, one stands out from the crowd, Our Savior Christ, Jesus.

I still can recite the Nicene Creed but now question it.

The Gnostics were in agreement with the “proto-orthodox” Christians of their time – the group of Christians that would eventually give rise to the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant churches – about many things concerning Jesus Christ. They saw him as an extension of God that had existed before the world was made, and who came to earth on a divine mission to bring salvation to humankind. That mission began in earnest with Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, involved delivering many oral teachings about the mysteries of the world and heaven, and culminated in a dramatic, meaning-soaked death by crucifixion and subsequent wondrous resurrection.
But the Gnostics and the proto-orthodox vehemently disagreed with each other on several other points about Christ that they considered indispensable for their theology and identity. These disagreements fell into four broad categories: the contents of Christ’s message, the nature of his being, the meaning of his death and resurrection, and the degree to which he was a unique being rather than a model for others to follow.

Typically included in the various formulations of the regula was belief in only one God, the creator of the world, who created everything out of nothing; belief in his Son, Jesus Christ, predicted by the prophets and born of the Virgin Mary; belief in his miraculous life, death, resurrection, and ascension; and belief in the Holy Spirit, who is present on earth until the end, when there will be a final judgment in which the righteous will be rewarded and the unrighteous condemned to eternal torment.[11]

The Gnostics didn’t disagree with all of that, but they did disagree with parts of it, and they would have taken issue with its emphases and ultimately found it too superficial to do much good. In their own writings on Christ and his teachings, they countered that Christ had taught that the true God who sent him to earth didn’t create the earth. Creation had instead been the work of a lesser, foolish, and largely evil being. That being, the demiurge, had inadvertently mixed some bits of divinity in with his otherwise absurd creation. God the Father had sent Christ the Son into the world to remedy the catastrophe that creation had caused. The world and its demonic rulers crucified Jesus, but the Son of God came back to life and thereby overcame the world. Christ’s work was carried forward whenever someone achieved gnosis, not whenever someone recited a list of merely verbal beliefs or performed a set of merely physical actions.

https://gnosticismexplained.org/jesus-ch...nosticism/