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Reader Post | By A Fellow Patriot
RE: Bendleruschka: The Bloodlines of Maria of the Elchasaites and King Athaulf of the Visigoths
Let us go back to the first century of the Church to understand the Gnostic errors of this bloodline accounting.
- “The earliest challenge to apostolic teaching came from Gnosticism. The name comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis; Gnostics were knowers, or those who believed that knowledge, not grace, was necessary for salvation.”
- “With all these they constructed what may have been the “myths and endless genealogies” (1 Tim. 1:4) that Paul warned Timothy to reject.”
- “Paul seems to have been acquainted with some form of Gnosticism, since he admonishes his protégé to “avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge [ gnosis]” (1 Tim. 6:20).“
Knowing the Gnostics
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/knowing-the-gnostics
The earliest challenge to apostolic teaching came from Gnosticism. The name comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis; Gnostics were knowers, or those who believed that knowledge, not grace, was necessary for salvation. Gnostic teachers elaborated immensely arcane and detailed explanations of the spiritual realm.
They imagined anthropomorphic beings by the bushel: Word, Grace, Life, and First Beginning took their places alongside others with names like Profundity, Silence, Mingling, Pleasure, Happiness, and even Metrical and Immovable. Irenaeus of Lyons, [ A Refutation and Subversion of Knowledge Falsely So-Called (Against Heresies), Alexander Roberts, trans. Book 1 chap. 1. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, reprint 1985.] With all these they constructed what may have been the “myths and endless genealogies” (1 Tim. 1:4) that Paul warned Timothy to reject. Paul seems to have been acquainted with some form of Gnosticism, since he admonishes his protégé to “avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge [ gnosis]” (1 Tim. 6:20).
The great apostle criticizes “Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth by holding that the resurrection is past already” (2 Tim. 2:17-18). James M. Robinson, a scholar of Gnosticism, observes that “this view, that the Christian’s resurrection has already taken place as a spiritual reality, is found in the Treatise on Resurrection, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Gospel of Philip: Gnostic texts all.[ James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, introduction. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978, 5.]
These and other passages in the New Testament make it certain that Gnosticism existed in some form as early as the apostolic age. Actually, many elements of Gnosticism predate the Incarnation; but throughout its life Gnosticism showed a parasitical tendency to attach itself to other religious systems, reinterpret them in a “mystical” way, and draw away their members to the new “spiritual” form of the system. When it attacked Christianity in this way it proved a formidable opponent for the early Church.
Beyond the New Testament, anti-Gnostic polemics were penned in the second century by such notable figures as Ignatius of Antioch (in the year 107) and Irenaeus of Lyons (around 180). In succeeding years other Catholics took an occasional stab at Gnostic pretensions, indicating that even then the beast wasn’t dead; indeed, traces of Gnostic teaching might even lurk in the Muslim Koran, a seventh-century product.
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Because of its secretive and adaptable nature, Gnosticism is impossible to capture in a single creed or list of doctrines. There were, however, certain beliefs evidently held by all Gnostic schools, or at least by the ones combatted in the New Testament and later Catholic polemicists. These included the idea that the creation of this world was fundamentally an error, the product of wickedness.
The mistake was precisely its physicality, as explained in the third-century Gnostic Gospel of Philip: “The world came about through a mistake. For he who created it wanted to create it imperishable and immortal. he fell short of attaining his desire.” [The Gospel of Philip, 75, Wesley Isenberg, trans., in The Nag Hammadi Library. ]
This creator and god of the base world, the Demiurge, was no nobler than his handiwork. Gnostics portrayed him as so ignorant that he thought he was the only God; he wasn’t able to perceive the profusion of greater beings from whom he (unfortunately for them) sprang. Some humans, meanwhile, had been given a spark of knowledge of the higher gods. This knowledge would ultimately result in the believer’s being rescued from this lesser and fallen material world and reunited with the higher gods in the purely spiritual realm.
Christ in Christian-based Gnosticism was an agent of the higher realms come to rescue men from the dreary material world and its s----d tyrant god. Consequently Gnostics in Christian circles tended to reject the Old Testament and claim that it depicted a different God from that of the New; the Creator had to be separated from the Savior. Christ, moreover, was a purely spiritual being who would never deign to assume flesh drawn from the evil earth of the Demiurge.
Paul takes up this challenge and teaches that in Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9). The Greek word for fullness, moreover, is pleroma, the term the Gnostics used for their party-house of spiritual beings. But Paul insists that Christ was no mere ambassador from the pleroma; on the contrary, the only real pleroma was in him.
Gnostics trying to deny the reality of the Savior’s body had to explain the manifest records of Christ’s walking, eating, and sleeping in the gospels. For that they resorted to the theory that his body was somehow only an apparent one, assumed by Christ only to make himself known to man: the Gospel of Philip reports, “Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not reveal himself in the manner in which he was, but it was in the manner in which they would be able to see him that he revealed himself.” [The Gospel of Philip, 57.] Another Gnostic work, the Acts of John, goes further: “I will tell you another glory, brethren: sometimes when I meant to touch him I encountered a material, solid body; but at other times again when I felt him, his substance was immaterial and incorporeal . . . as if it did not exist at all.” [Acts of John 93, in Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels New York: Vintage, 1981, 88.]
John counters the allegation of an immaterial Christ in his first Epistle when he insists that “the Word of Life,” that is, Christ, is “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). Christ did not take on flesh in appearance only or merely as a vehicle; rather, “the Life was made manifest, and we saw it” (1 John 1:2). John and the other apostles actually saw the Life, Christ himself; they didn’t see a semblance of the Life, or some container that held the Life. The apostle adds an anti-Gnostic test for orthodox Catholics: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God” (1 John 4:2).
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Years later, in 107, firsthand memories of the apostles were fading in the young Church, but the Gnosticism that Paul and John had fought had not gone away. Ignatius Theophorus, Bishop of Antioch, who was rumored to have been the little child placed among the apostles by our Lord (Matt. 18 :2), wrote a series of letters to Churches while on his way to Rome. He was going to the imperial capital for his own martyrdom, for which he longed; he knew the truth of Paul’s words that it is “far better” to “depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23).
To the Church in Tralles, a town in Asia Minor, he wrote: “Stop your ears, therefore, when anyone speaks to you at variance with Jesus Christ, who was descended from David, and was also of Mary; who was truly born, and did eat and drink. He was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate; he was truly crucified, and truly died, in the sight of beings in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth. He was also truly raised from the dead . . . But if, as some that are without God, that is, the unbelieving, say, that he only seemed to suffer (they themselves only seeming to exist), then why am I in bonds? Why do I long to be exposed to the wild beasts?”[ Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Trallians, 8-9 in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol 1.]
The verdict of the Church was unanimous against the strange doctrines, but Gnosticism held its own. In the second century, probably after Ignatius attained his cherished goal, the heresy seems to have enjoyed its greatest flowering. Gnostic texts proliferated then and in the following century, often ascribed to an apostle to lend them greater weight: the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Apocryphon of James, the Apocryphon of John, the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles, the Apocalypse of Paul, and so on.
These continued to abhor the material world and deny the reality of the Incarnation.
From A Fellow Patriot
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