Questions relative to the condemnation, explanation or vindication of God for the permission, creation or toleration of evil in the world are not ones that can arise beyond mere speculation. Man is not purview to a perspective of the eternal and can only grasp in a sense so abstract as to be near useless in debate. Either evil exists for a reason that we do not at present understand or it exists in spite of God. Sans the eternal we do not have any way to determine which it may be, rendering debate of the matter moot. At day's end it comes down to what you as an individual are willing to believe, which kind of goes for most everything about religious questions on the divine.

The original intention of this thread was not to introduce rampant speculation about the nature of either God or evil. Theodicy is a consideration that would be more appropriate to a Christian forum, where a constellation of basic assumptions about creation, God and evil can be taken as a given and thus provide common ground for debate. Likewise the vindication of man for actions done at the bequest of God is equally a digression. That vindication is between man and God, the rest of us don't enter into the equation.

The notion was rather more to the point of considering man's justification of actions done at the bequest of God to society. The ancients were possessing of the same caliber of intellect as is found today. So, it stands to reason that most people contemporary with events of Scriptures would be inclined to the same measure of suspicion to someone like say Gideon stumbling out the desert with a tale of divine mandate and a call to arms.

The Book of Joshua poses an even more daunting problem. Consider the Israelite infantry marching into battle to claim the Promised Land. Not being privy to conversations between God and Joshua reduces his actions to nothing short of genocide. Certes, the prophet may tell him "God wills it" as was the custom among later crusaders, but one has to wonder how such a man sleeps at night. Despite opinions to the contrary, violence is not natural to the human condition. We are not predators by nature, but only took to predation out of necessity. Result, people are not like cats and vaguely sociopathic from the womb, but rather experience such activities as traumatic events.

A vindication in Scripture for vigilantism, or more specifically committing acts of violence at the bequest of God and not necessarily from the support of the state, is one way to sooth the conscience in dealing with this breed of trauma, which is part of why I pitched it out there in the first place. Curiosities stems not so much from the question of religious belief as the question of how those beliefs affect people.

Scriptures were written over a period in the neighborhood of a thousand years. In that time the authors bore witness to dramatic changes in the social orders of mankind. The progression from tribalistic societies subject to the agathon and dictates of honor unto the rigid legal codifications of the Romans. The Old Testament rests on both sides of politicization and the New testifies to the advent of nationalism.

In the scheme of things, the vigilante is an anachronism, a holdover from the age of the agathon that survives by some measure under the rule of law. A vigilante is one who functions under the dictates of honor, who believes it is his personal responsibility to right wrongs done against him or those close to him. In recent years Hollywood has undertaken to render the vigilante into the narrow terms of a revenge-seeker, one who indulges the audience's sadism by letting them take part in sensational violence victims bestow upon their late attackers. I'm inclined to use a somewhat broader definition of anyone who answers an offense by throwing out the law of acts on honor, (or 'takes the law into their own hands' as we mistakenly term it).

The consideration of the vigilante in the context of Scriptures came to me a few years ago when I first sat down to read the Book of Judges.

As a classicist, I tend to read Scripture as historical documents as much as holy writ. This is to say that, as I read, part of my mind is thinking about the writer sitting down at his desk and trying to describe an event as he believes it to have happened years or centuries before. That part then works back from the textual account towards the actual event in consideration of how said event would appear to contemporaries.

The question of vigilantism stems from an application of this method to Judges, most all of which raise certain issues. Take the account of Gideon, for instance, Judges, chapter six and eight.

For reasons cyclical and unnecessary to repeat, it came that Israel fell under the rule of the Midianites. Every year as the Israelites brought in their harvests the Midianites and two others would ride in and pillage or destroy these harvests. The effect was to ensure the Israelites remain poor and starving, so that they would not arise as rivals to their power. An angel of the Lord comes to Gideon to call him as a judge. He's to set forth and free Israel from Midian. In order to prove it is the Lord he devises some elaborate tests that are passed. Then he raises an army and sets out to war. The Lord comes to again and tells him he has too many men. A test is undertaking to trim the army to a smaller number. Then this smaller force goes into battle and is victorious, which understandably teed off those who were left behind.

Think about these events appear in empirical terms. Part of why Judges is good for this is how easy it comes. There is no indication that anyone besides Gideon is in communion with the angel of the Lord. The post-battle criticisms from Ephraim suggests further that the communion itself was not common knowledge. Ergo, in the consideration of the contemporary experience one has to remove God from the equation, as, with the exception of Gideon , the contemporaries themselves were not aware of the Lord being involved in the first place.

So what do you have then?

There is a man. He is a member of a vassal state. The vassals are subject to oppression and harassment from the foreign body, due apparently to a war that was lost some years before. This man decides that he has had enough. He goes to his countrymen and begs that they join him in a war against the oppressors. That Israel shake off her yoke and be strong once again. What reasons he gives to them do not survive, but "God is our side again" was either not among his arguments or its presence was something taken for mere rhetoric by his audience. Regardless, an army forms and sets out to make war on the oppressor. At some point after the army stops and camps. The man decides his army is too large. Reasonable given tactics and the fact of hill country. Plausible that he desired the formation of a strike force, to send the main army one way while his smaller body hit the flanks, or some stratagem along those lines. The reason he gave to his soldiers does not survive. Instead we have a story about judging men by how they drink from a stream. The man fights his battle and wins. Some of his people are upset afterwards, but he tells them by these methods God has delivered them of tyranny. They should rejoice the ends instead of dwelling over the means.

What you have here is a vigilante band. This far back in time the Midianites are certainly not a lawful government, given that the very idea of law was still a novelty, but they are the effective rulers of the land. From this that they demand tribute of the Israelites.

Render unto Caesar would seem to suggest that law holds power and should be respected, but if rulers are to be respected why then are judges vindicated for acts that amount to open rebellion? More importantly, how is this message supposed to enmesh with modern times?

A man comes into town with a call to arms. Say he takes a route different from Gideon and decides to let you in on the real reason why. He says he was up on the mountain yestereve whereupon he was visited by an angel of the Lord. The angel said to go down to this place and call the people to war.

Hopefully, the people of this place would hesitate before taking the man at his word. If the man tried to use rhetoric to further his opinion, to suggest the violence that comes naturally to be what the people should undertake, hopefully they hesitate doubly so, (as indulgence of that violence that comes naturally typically ends in a lynch mob).

Saint Augustine suggested that the way to test preachers of this kind is to weigh their words against the tradition. God being eternal, he is thus unchanging and consequently the new material of the vision should not stand in contradiction to the received wisdom. So the question then: do the Scriptures validate vigilantism or are the results of this empirical reading of Judges merely an anomaly of the period and the hypostasis assumed by the writers?

I've heard of them, but not much else.

Theology wasn't my major. I've a very developed grasp on the first four hundred years or so of Christendom since one of my majors was classical humanities (and classics professors have an obnoxious habit of pretending religious and practical thought didn't occur in the period, which is why I started on it in the first place). After that period my knowledge is fairly patchwork, relative more to areas of thought that I find interesting - i.e., the crusades, Christian existentialism and theodicy - than general histories.

Online there are a handful of sources to draw upon. Nag Hammadi should still be under copyright but seems like whoever did the translation isn't looking to make money off of it. Rest are all public domain and easy to get at.

The Gnostic Society Library <www.gnosis.org/library> has all the major heretical works including the Nag Hammadi codices, Manichaean scriptures, the Bruce Codex and the Corpus Hermeticum.

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library <www.ccel.org> has the patristic texts, including the heresiologists Irenaeus and Tertullian. It looks like they also have mediaeval works in there, so the assorted theologians who wrote against the Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars are probably included in there as well. (I don't know the period well enough to refer you to who they are.)

Otherwise, they're all available in print editions. I found a few of them at the Jeff Parish library, so they shouldn't be too hard to track down. If you do look in libraries, the Dewey decimal has a separate listing for works on heresies, I believe it's under 273.

cheers

'Reinforcement of the church' doesn't feel like the right to me. Raises the most immediate question: what church? There really wasn't one in the sense we think, not that early in time. While there was a definite inclination for the Christians of that period to acknowledge the authority of the apostles, few of the apostles were still around and those that were seem to be constantly in disagreement with one another. The Apostles seem to have partially disbanded after Jesus' ascension. If the later apocryphal acts can at least be given some vague trust, they suggest that a number of them journeyed east preaching to their eventual martyrdom in India. The rest clustered around Jerusalem, with a few odd balls like Peter and Paul moving through the classical world.

The New Testaments suggests that there were two particular crises dominating their thought in the period. The first was how Jewish Christianity was to become. The second was a political crisis that arose from the question of the authority of some individuals to dictate the nature of Christianity itself. That is to say, once they realized that Christianity had divided into a Jewish and a Gentile sect, the question became whether any individual had the right to say that the other sect was wrong in their beliefs or to dictate what defined the righteousness of their own sect. History indicates that the Gentile sect won out and churches and episcopacies began to evolve, but neither the New Testament nor the patristic writings indicate that they ever came to a philosophic or theologic resolution to the political problem.

There is a loose line of intellectual development that connects Protestants to Gnostics. Martin Luther's emphasis on poverty in contrast with the Medici pope's extravagances is related the philosophy of poverty held by Franciscan brothers. St, Francis d'Assisi acquired his understanding in the founding of the order from a vague syncretism with the Cathar heretics of southern France. The Cathars were one of those less creative mediaeval Gnostics and the only part about them that seemed to have impressed Francis was their ascetic theories. By extension the Cathars can be traced through the Bogomils and Messalians in the Balkans to the Paulicians of Armenia thence direct to the Manichaeans and the Gnostics of ancient heretical texts.

That said, it's pretty clear that most of the early Protestants would have seriously disapproved of the heresy, despite the contemporary Church ranking them in their number. Early Gnostics borrowed from Christian scriptures and apocrypha and manufactured a few of their own besides, but their theology is at root antithetical to Christendom. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians are all built around a theology of pistis. There is disagreement between them about pistis - how it relates in importance to acts and how or if Christians have need of intermediary figures like priests to facilitate their relationship with God, but as a concept pistis remains at the heart of Christianity. Pistis, however, has no place in Gnosticism, where it is replaced by the theophanic experience of gnosis. A theology built around certain knowledge of God is something even Protestants would object to. As implied in an earlier post, I'm inclined to the belief that some Protestants have adopted a de facto form of gnosis, but that's something they seem to get more from liberal philosophy - especially the traditions of Locke and Rousseau - than their actual faith.

As a Southerner I'm a bit weary of the impoverishment attitude. I believe in family and I have a hard time with the notion that Christ would agree with the idea of a man leaving his family destitute in order to wander the desert in pursuit of his faith. And I'll cleave to that notion even if you can name apostles who were sainted for doing so.

The Papacy cannot actually be dated in those terms. At issue is that the foundation of the church of Rome and the establishment of the Papacy are not in themselves the same. Tradition treats them as the same, but evidence would seem to indicate that the office of Pope was something that evolved over the course of a few centuries or more.

St. Peter most probably did found the church of Rome when tradition holds that he did. There's no reason to doubt that date so figure, late first century on the outside. The church of Peter's time was most likely a small community of believers over which Peter was the senior pastor. At some point from Peter's martyrdom to say the mid-second century the senior pastor of the Roman church developed into a bishop. Contemporary with this period are the first epistle of St. Clement of Rome to Corinthians and the epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch.

Clement shows up on later papal lists of Pope Clement I. He writes to the church of Corinth upon learning that the congregation had deposed their clergy. The presbyters had apparently done some things that the congregants found objectionable. Clement argues for respect to be given to clerics by presenting the concept of apostolic succession. Specifically that there is some ritual of laying hands that connects your day to day preacher with one of the Twelve, in this case plus St. Paul.

Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch. In the second century he was arrested by Roman authorities and, given that he was himself a citizen, they found it necessary to bring him to Rome where he was put on trial and then executed in the Coliseum. On the road and in Rome he wrote a series of letters to various churches then extant. The letters show that he had a particular concern for his own episcopacy, especially in the context of how they would survive against the influence of rival sects then circulating. (It's tempting to point to these other 'Christianities' as Gnosticism, but there's no real evidence to indicate such.)

In order, he thought, to prevent the dissolution of the church of Antioch, Ignatius developed in the letter the concept of a monarchial episcopacy. The idea that a bishop rules as a monarch over the parishes in his care and that pastors of those parishes must preach the same religion as their bishop dictates. Thus the bishop as a trusted and holy man would ensure that rival faiths and heathenism would not infect the congregants.

Monarchial episcopacy and apostolic succession developed independent of one another, but by the end of the second century both theories had been integrated into the office of the bishop. The third key was the aforementioned passage from St. Irenaeus of Lyons and his heresiology. It basically amounts to establishing the Church of Rome as an authority in the west. The writings of these three being indicative of theories that were already brewing in the great church, only to be voiced first by them. The combination of them made the bishop of Rome a de facto patriarch to the western church, de facto in that he did not at the time have theological authority over other episcopacies, but there was a growing tendencies of those bishops to defer to his opinion.

The foundation of the Papal States around the fourth or fifth century was the final stage and made the bishop a Pope in the sense of wielding genuine secular power, though the extent of that power was certainly not so pronounced until well into the mediaeval period. Additionally, the Catholic Church would remain a de facto patriarchate, connected to the three Orthodox sees until the great schism of the eleventh century, a scant generation or two shy of the start of the crusades.

***

The issue of canonicity is not a matter of Gnostic or false texts being thrown out so much it is about as canonical texts being put in. The Old Testament was already arranged and organized by the Greek translation, the Septuagint. While the works of the New Testament were written at generally early dates - very early in the case of the epistles of St. Paul - they were not actually organized or even treated a singular work until much later.

For the early church the books and epistles circulates as individual scrolls. The Gnostic works and the more general body of apocrypha circulated freely with the canon. Paper was expensive, they didn't generally have all the books and frankly in the age of Roman persecution they were lucky they had any books to draw upon. Even at that time, however, certain works were beginning to emerge as more authoritative than others. While there was no canon at the time of Irenaeus, in 180, his arguments only stem from books that would become the Bible.

In the fourth century, St. Augustine of Hippo invented literary theory through a work On Christian Doctrine. A former Gnostic himself, he was trying to create a philosophical device that would allow Christian to discern righteous works from heretical ones. He relates to the story of a guy named Christianus who walked into town one day talking about how God appeared to him in a vision and told him this, that and the other'n. How do you take something like that? To you take him at his word that God came to him or do you regard him with suspicion given the prevalence of charlatans. The theory is basically validity through association. Testing what one Christianus says against what is already known, then seeing how they jive together.

Around the same time St. Jerome undertook to translate the Septuagint and a collection of Christian works into Latin so that they would be accessible to western readers who had little use for Greek, of which the dialect Koine was only a lingua franca in the eastern parts of the Empire. The New Testament of his Vulgate includes all the works of modern Catholic Bibles, plus some odd ends that look authentic but we've later found not to be. (The Catholic distinction is due to certain works in the Septuagint - known as Deuterocanonical works, which Jews and Protestants later rejected given that the Septuagint's Greek translation is the only surviving edition.) In a commentary or maybe it was a prologue, Jerome explains the process by which he judges certain works to be valid and other works to not be valid.

Important to note that by the fourth century, Jerome is well after the height of Gnostic speculation and the heresiologists. Manichaeans were an existing problem that the great church was still trying to deal with. Jerome's reasoning was taken by mediaeval catholics as read and the Vulgate alone was treated as canon. In point of fact though, the Catholics never actually come down and say this is the canon, these other things aren't until the Council of Trent in the fifteenth century amid the Counterreformation, wherein presumably early Protestant were throwing around questions about the Bible that made them realize they hadn't yet attempted to figure answers.

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The Roman Legions were not a cult unto themselves. They were soldiers in a standing army, probably not too different in attitudes from what you might hear of a U.S. Marine or infantryman today. Yes, some of them were Mithraists, but that doesn't make initiation into the cult of Mithras a condition of enlistment. Mithraists probably outnumbered Christians because Christians, especially the Grecian Christians tended against militarism. Pagans, lacking any theological obstruction, were more comfortable with career murder. The fact of the Mithraic cult is an example that Paganism itself was becoming less tenable at the time of Constantine. Republican-era pagans joined cults, but they tended to accept all gods as having particular provinces. They were never so exclusively devout to one. Mithraists and the cult of Isis seem to indicate a theological movement in paganism that was comparable to the shifts towards orthodoxy among the Christians, suggesting a deeper current than just bishop Irenaeus or such having a problem with Valentinian Gnostics.

That the legalization of Christianity and its elevation of importance in the Roman Empire was a factor in the persecution of heretics is a given. The State is always the arm through which persecutions are undertaken. Clerics themselves tend to be less than effective at such things. Excommunication, for instance, only holds immediate power in the world provided the excommunicate recognizing the bishop's authority to do so. In the Balkans there was a rare case where the nobility supported heretics, specifically the Bogomils and the Patarenes. That sect managed to hold onto power for centuries despite the vehement disapproval of both the pope and the patriarchs and their seemingly constant missionaries sent into the region. Only reason they're not still around today is that they met with and were conquered by the Turks who demanded conversion to Islam or a loss of property.

The Gnostics of Antiquity were sometimes, as you say, within the church. The Nag Hammadi texts were certainly held by Christians prior to their burial. That, however, was not universally the case. The heresiologists are definitely talking about them as outsiders to the established Christian communities. The sentiment that would seem to imply that whoever was the elect of that particular Gnostic community had at some point in the recent past wandered into town and set up shop.

The classification of the ancient Gnostic as the intellectuals of Christianity in antithesis to orthodox traditions is an assertion that is not supported by contemporary sources. The intellectual peek for Antiquity lies in the influence of Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, for which both Christianity and Gnosticism show evidence of study.

Among Christians there was an initial inclination to reject philosophy as a tool of paganism, and by extension of Satan, but that notion did not last very long in the mainstream or at least in the practical application by writers of the mainstream. Justin Martyr starts it off by pointing to philosophy as a tool through which Christians can bring over their enemies to the faith, thus inventing Christian theology. Justin's reasoning was that in the creation of man God endowed him with powers of reason. The Greeks were masters in the use reason and it stands that there is the possibility that through reason even a heathen might stumble upon gospel truths. Later writers - especially the Alexandrini Clemens and Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Ambrose and most especially his convert Augustine - were themselves philosophers of high caliber and ability, easily able to hold their own in debate against any of the Greeks and anyone else who happened along.

Gnostics likewise show signs of influence from Greek philosophy. Nag Hammadi itself contains a revised excerpt from Plato's Republic. So, clearly, they were reading the same books and the Christians, but they were not learning the same lessons. There is no Justin in the early Gnostic tradition to emphasize philosophy as tool. Instead, what you have is philosophy being used as inspiration, especially as an inspiration for metaphysical considerations. So, for instance, you have the Valentinian-Gnostic cosmos where the Unknowable True God out in the distance, then spheres of abstractions like Silence and Wisdom, then a ways below that the material world. That metaphysics comes from Neoplatonism, presumably by way of the Hermeticist. While Valentinus stuck several more emanations in their down from the One its the same concept as described by Plotinus. This form of derivation from philosophy, of using Greek metaphysics to alter those of Scripture is something Christians would and did find appalling.

There is also the problem of gnosis. While gnosis does mean knowledge is does not refer to all knowledge, but rather the specific knowledge gained through the initiate's personal experience of a theophany. St. Paul getting knocked off his *** on the road to Damascus, that would qualify as gnosis. The problem in the context of your statement is that gnosis is, in and of itself, an anti-intellectual concept.

A Christian missionary can meet a man on the road and tell him about the death of Christ on the Cross and how it was done to ensure his salvation. He can then use philosophy to create a rational superstructure to account for how the world fits together and if that man on the road should be in agreement with the missionary that man then has faith. The same story does not work if the man meets a Gnostic on the road. The Gnostic can explain his religion, but he cannot share the experience of gnosis. That knowledge can only come of the man's own theophanic experience of the True God, Sophia, or some emanation therefrom reaching into the world and awakening in his soul knowledge of the truth of his condition. Ergo: anti-intellectual.


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Pseudography in the gospels is not really all that new or even questionable. Ancients routinely wrote books on behalf of famous personages as a way of ensuring the text would enjoy a wider readership by latching on to the authority of past leaders. That the gospels were assigned authors within decades of their writing and not centuries suggests that for the most part we can trust that a Matthew, a Mark, a Luke and a John were at the least leaders of the community that produced the individual works. Your argument on the subject of authorship, however, is moot given that evangelists themselves are virtually anonymous at this point in time. There is not a lot we can say about, St. Mark, for instance, besides the fact of his being an evangelist.

There is no doubt that the gospels do not present the full story of Jesus's life. There around thirty years of his life that go largely unrecorded. The fact that Jesus was not teaching during that period is the most probably explanation. Either the evangelists knew about that period and did not consider it to be of importance, or the Q-text, a lost document which was the primary source for the synoptic gospels, was written by someone who felt the teachings more important than the origins. In any event, work your way back through enough of the textual history and you're going to find somebody who knew a bit about Jesus's childhood and felt it not applicable to the text. And that somebody is most probably a Jew or a Roman who followed him around from day to day.

Gnostic writing is almost universally of later authorship. Popular readings like the various apocryphal acts tend to be much later works. The fact that only known effort of Gnostic at the discernment of textual validity was Marcion's attempt to wash the Jewish out of the Bible should tell you something about how they qualified Scripture.

Additionally, textual criticism is a lot more advanced than you're giving credit for. Scholars go through documents analyzing language and content. Language in terms of what it's written in, what words are used, the patterns of syntax and phrasing and so on. Content in terms of the expression of theology, the arrangement of ideas and so on. And both of which are applied to outside sources and things that we can date with certainty. Writers leaving fingerprints in their style and diction that even millennia of scribes can't wholly obfuscate. (Take Genesis for instance and how textual critics have managed to pick apart three separate writers that were integrated into a single manuscript. Two of them were principally identified by variations on the use of a single word.) When scholars say a work of apocryphon can be dated to somewhere between the third and fourth century there is a complex science underlying that assertion. A science that, if you have the appropriate skill set and access to the materials, you can go back and check the assertion to see if it's true.

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Taking your own offensive tone in stride, the idea that the Catholic Church is by any means 'afraid' of the revelation of Gnostic texts today is idiotic at best. Five hundred years ago, they might have gotten a little worked up. Nowadays? Who cares. In the hierarchy of the Pope's concerns the revival of an archaic heresy is small potatoes compared to more immediate issues that stem from Protestants, Hollywood and the onward march of secularism.

More importantly, the Gnostics texts are not actually threatening to Christianity. Not in this day and age. In ancient times the mere fact of its being written would incline would to consider it reasonably valid or at least an authority of some kind. In modern times we're used to the distrust of authors, we start out in the opinion that it's mythological or some such and look for evidence that might contradict that initial opinion.

Evidence, the Christian Brothers, a lay catholic order that ran my high school, as a part of a sophomore religion course required us to read the Infant Gospels of Thomas. Now, if there's anyone from whom apocryphal works ought be hidden for the good of the faith and their soul, it's an adolescent. No such luck. We read them, we discussed them. The teacher wasn't even all that mean about it. He offered as a possibly authentic source for things that happened in Jesus's life during the aforementioned gap of the gospel record. And really, nothing at all destructive happened. In fact, of that class I'm probably the only one who went away with anything more than general apathy about having to read another book.

The Jesuits, who ran my university, took an even more extreme route. In those courses we studied the Nag Hammadi texts themselves along side contemporary Christian theologians, pagan writers and classical histories. Textual criticism, hermeneutics, philosophy, theology and such like were all standard tools put to good use in understanding what the books were and how they fit into the broader context. Again, there was no mention of the validity or the invalidity of the texts themselves. A text is a text and for a Jesuit all texts are treated to the same degree of analysis first. Positions in regard to their validity and applicability to be formed afterwards.

There is no need to hide apocrypha in this day and age. They're just old books. They don't actually hurt anyone. Given the text and the rationality behind which its exclusion from the canon, nine times out of ten exclusion was the right answer. And it's clear that once they came to answer the question of canonicity, the question of their disposal, especially the disposal of problematic and misleading works, was a given. Most the time I don't agree with their disposal, but I can see why the idea of such a broad shift in the hypostatic foundations of western thought is not something they could have taken into account two thousand years ago.

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Your comments on Constantine and Nicea would seem to involve a confusion of the First Council of Nicea with the Edict of Milan along with some vague implications about papal influence and the suggestion of a grab for power.

Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 with another emperor or caesar whose name I can't remember. It followed an edict from some years early calling for the toleration of the Christian faith by the Roman authority. Milan went a step further to order to return of confiscated properties and repealed early laws hindering their meetings and practices. In other words, Constantine already had the Roman Church's wealth as his own, the Edict is how he gave it back to them.

I have little doubt that Constantine's motives in the Edict were more political than religious. Not so much from his deathbed conversion as the fact of his being a Roman emperor. Roman culture of the imperial period was masterful at breeding in plots of assassination and usurpation. A man who was your best friend when you take office is likely to be the one to five or six years later slice open your throat or poison your food. The fact that Constantine not only grew up in that world but was able to rule in it suggests he was quite a long ways from naïve religious fervor.

In validating Christianity he maintain the title of pontifex maximus. That title was not very useful among pagans in that day and age. Pagans in the Republican times were manageable. But, Romans had a nasty habit of inviting the gods of conquered cities to come to Rome, and then taking their conquests as evidence of assent. This all accepting attitude brought a number of cults that were not so accepting into the culture, those of Isis and Mithras for instance, also the eastern mystery cults. Paganism had debased itself in this method to such extremes that the title of highest pontiff no longer meant anything. But, high pontiff over Christianity was a different matter. It allowed him to unite the people and bring back the Republican Roman view of religion as a form of patriotism. On the Christian side, acceptance of Constantine meant that they were no longer persecuted and allowed to practice the faith freely. After all, Constantine was not asking them to violate any core tenets of the faith, in fact he organized the First Council of Nicea some years later as a way of getting to move past their differences and work out what the disagreements are and what can philosophically and rationally have been accepted as the truth.

Constantine was not a theologian. Nicea did not rubber stamp his will or anything tot hat effect. It was a point where disparate beliefs of christology were debated, specifically the Arians and the Homoousian concepts. In the short run it didn't even work. The Homousians won. Their ideas are in the creed. But, soon as it was over the Arians started taking hold of various bishoprics and marginalizing them. It was only years after that the Homousian position returned to dominance and the Arians exiled.

The Bishop of Rome was not the Pope in Constantine's day. From the time of St. Peter until the city's fall the Roman Church was nothing more than just another episcopacy among several hundred episcopacies. A hundred years earlier western theology made it's first move in the heresiology of St. Irenaeus. The movement was basically his suggestion that if it should come that you have any doubts about the validity of a text or an assertion about God you should look to the Church of Rome as an example for what good Christians are. That's about all the Bishop represented in Constantine's day. An episcopacy of particular note.

The eastern churches organized themselves into three patriarchates. The western church had on its own shifted to treat the bishop of Rome as a de facto patriarch, but a patriarch is still not the Pope. The Bishop becomes the Pope with the fall of the Roman Empire. When secular government collapse Rome had a population in the millions and suddenly the entire infrastructure, (as in the thing that makes sure grain shipments are on time), was gone. Without government, the bishop was the only man in the city with sufficient power and organization to make sure those millions didn't starve. Thus, while municipal governments and foederati in the rest of Italy began laying the foundations for principalities and republics, the absence of local government in Rome left the region to the bishop, establishing a nation later known as the Papal States.

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Zoroastrians are actually still around today. They go by the name Parsee now, I think, and are isolated to a mountainous region in either Pakistan or India.

In the early days there were several dozen sects. But, you can't really level blame for ancient persecution on the Catholic Church. Sure, what we know as the Catholics were a part of the great church that was involved, but the persecution of heretics in Antiquity tended to involve the sees of Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, none of which needed an ok from the Bishop of Rome. The Roman branch just didn't have the same kind of problems the eastern divisions did. Aside from a few odd instances, Rome's only constant rivals were pagans and the sociopolitical landscape after the Edict of Milan made it inconvenient to stay a pagan.

As the nuance has been floating around here for a while, I would like to suggest something that would seem the minority opinion on this board. That the suppression of Gnosticism, (in the sense of the religion, not the scriptural texts), regardless of whether you agree with what I've been saying or still maintain the Catholic Church is to blame, was not necessarily a bad thing, and to a limited extent would not be a bad thing today.

The average Gnostic in Antiquity is a snobbish antisemite. The esoteric knowledge gleaned through the lens of gnosis is not much beyond snobbery. I know something. You can't know it because you haven't been shown what I know. (Picture me blowing a raspberry, for effect.)

The esoteric knowledge they gleaned from that lens is in effect an antisemitic metaphysics: i.e., Yahweh reconceived as the Demiurge renders Jews as his chosen people into minions of the dark lord. The mythos today would be like a newage revision of the Protocols of Zion.

Admittedly, exclusive antisemitism is a little strange for this period. That is to say, it's not unusual for a Gentile to hate Jews in Antiquity, but it is unusual for him to single out Jews, to hate them to the exclusion of Greeks, Celts, Arabs, Persians and everyone else not of his own hometown. But, we can kind of forgive them for that. Hate wasn't unusually. And more important, when you look on Antiquity at the history of Gnostics what you find is that they didn't really do a whole lot. The average Gnostic in Antiquity joined a monastery. At worst he formed a cult in some town like Lyons or Alexandria. He made trouble for the local bishop, but that was about all he did. Like church as a collegium or a social club.

On the other hand, think about what it would like if he did go out and do something. While they tended to disagree on the number of gods and arrangement of the cosmos, there are a few points they can be nailed down on. One is the emphasis on esoteric knowledge and perceptions that are enabled through the experience of gnosis. The attitude that only they and those like them are capable of understanding the world as it truly is, as opposed to what the Demiurge wants you to believe it is. The other part they agreed on was radical dualism. Christians have dualistic tendencies, but it's only the rare nut that takes it so far as the Gnostics did.

Review: A belief in Christ. A sense of personal superiority in perception and understanding of the world and man's place in it. Radical dualism that colors their perception of the world. An sense of utter disgust with the material realm. A hatred for the institutions of the world as instruments of Yaldabaoth: government, the media, the census, et cetera. A distrust of Jews.

Roll all that together and take a look around. What kinds of people ring closest to it. What kind of pastors do those people go to see on Sundays? What you're going to find are characters like Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps at the helm.

Against all odds: Gnosticism alive and well today.

Cities, really aren't that great for preserving books.

Picture: first century house in Jerusalem. You live there with your family. You spend your time spying on your neighbor across the way. Neighbor lives with his family. Neighbor moves out. Takes his stuff with him. Maybe he dies. Heirs inherit the house. Heirs take the stuff out. Paper's expensive. Means paper holds more value sold to be washed and reused than to lie in a house. At some point the time comes that you have an owner who wants to redevelop. More oft than not the new owner demolishes the existing house and builds over the same lot. And, even should some guy bury books in his backyard, cities are subject to constant development. People are always digging up gardens, laying new foundations or running pipes for aqueducts or sewer lines. That kind of work makes it unlike for a private individual to be able to bury something at the right level for it to be found today.

Even then, the kind of paper specimens that tend survive in cities are most often characteristic of the general population, not a minority of believers. For instance, mercantile paperwork is very common: inventories, book keeping, debt accounts and that sort. Also, quasi-religious fragments, like blessings and curses. A little note written on a scrap of paper, then rolled up and stuck someplace holy (or unholy), like the bottom of a well or a crack in a wall, for gods to find and answer.

On a very rare occasion we find books in cites. I'm still crossing my fingers that the Emperor Claudius's works on the Etruscans and the Carthaginians will surface during my lifetime, but I fully expect a lifetime of disappointment on that count. The library at Pompeii is a good example of what hopes along those lines lead to. A.D. 74, Pompeii gets buried in ash. In the twentieth century excavations of the city stumble upon a Roman villa wherein they find a library packed full of burnt scrolls. They painstaking dismantle the scrolls. Gently peeling off bits of burnt paper that's more delicate than tissue paper. They arrange the paper fragments as close as they can to the shape of the original scroll unrolled. They scan the paper in infrared and in that spectrum are able to pull up the ink and determine what was written on it. They forward a transcription to a classical scholar who then sets to work trying to translate the text. Inherent problems in texts of that period make the work slow. Takes a long while. Finally though, the classicist comes back with a finished translation of the scroll. It's one scroll of maybe a dozen or so. It's a scroll from the middle of the work. The work is a book by an Epicurean philosopher. The translation is fifty print pages of drivel categorizing the different kinds of atoms and what they're good for.

The big and worthy finds for great old books are not in cities, where two millennia of developers have pillaged before us. The big and worthy finds lie out in the middle of nowhere. Buried in the desert. Especially in the desert around old monasteries. Monk wrote a lot. They're like the bloggers of Antiquity. They wake up. They eat. They pray. And they write. There's not a lot left for a monk to do besides. Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls both come from ascetic communities, same probably goes for the Bruce Codex. Most Greco-Roman secular materials are preserved through monastic writing. Plato and Aristotle survive this way with real strength, while Thales, Democritus and Heracleitus have fallen into obscurity. The Latin poet Catullus actually survived through a single manuscript found under a dead monk's bed. Saved from the brink of extinction by one religious man's perversion.

That said, new discovered manuscripts have not really added anything significant to what we know about Gnosticism. The mediaeval and ancient style of attacking a theological or philosophical position involved the necessity of showing that they understood the position in the first place. They would show their understanding by either explaining the position in detail or quoting passage from the text they were writing against. In combination with the heresiologists of the period, we already have a very well document record of who the Gnostics were, what their beliefs amounted to and what they were like in practice. Findings like Nag Hammadi are great, but they are not actually telling us anything about them that we didn't already know. Just giving us insights into how they tried to tell others about what they knew.

I don't know all the dates off hand for everything. We can date the origin of some Gnostic sects based on the appearance of their founders. Manichaeism to the third century, as that's when Mani lived. Valentinian Gnostics to the fourth. Sethians are a little ambiguous since they claimed to predate Christ, possibly spinning off from one of the Jewish apocalyptic cults that were en vogue from around the second or first century B.C.

The pronounced parallels between Gnostic imagery and Zoroastrianism inclines me to lean more towards Late Antiquity -- when Christianity was already well-established and moving toward dominance in major Neareastern cities -- when speculating about their origins.

That said, I think some of the Gnostic writing, particular the Gospel of Thomas, smells like it's an adaptation of something older. Like the Thomas writer in the fourth century picked up a copy or version of the Q-text, then integrated his own thoughts in writing it out. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt we're going to find the older text under the newer one.

Regarding the dates for the canonical books, whoever gave you that date was right on maybe two counts and wrong otherwise. The earliest canonical books are the epistles of Paul. Most of them date to the 50's. The pseudepigraphic pauline epistles dating to a period a little bit after that, probably closer to 70's.

The synoptic gospels were all written in the period after that. The Gospel of Mark in the 70's, showing a clear bitterness about the Jewish War. Matthew, Luke and Acts were written sometime after that, but still a ways before the century-turn. I've seen mixed views on John and Revelation, but it's usually placed at or possibly just past 100.

Friend of mine actually emailed me those photos. She was all smug about it till I pointed the shadows were out of sync.

I remember reading a paper or contribution to a book by a biologist who pointed out that there's a cutoff for how far you can stretch an organism's size. Like a giant ant, for instance, wouldn't work, cause they don't have the diaphragm to draw air into their lungs when the molecules get that small relative to their size. I can see a similar problem emerging for hypothetical giants ranging from arthritis and circulatory problems to the weight of beer bellies surpassing the strength of muscle tissue.

Even so, international news agencies jump for talk about ritzy dinosaur finds or the uncovering of the frozen neanderthal remains. If evidence ever surfaced of the Nephilim it would hit all of the major news networks in a big way, probably even before they got the bones out the ground.

Post in regards to the Nephilim

There is certainly ample evidence to support the existence the Nephilim. That is, if in questioning on the Nephilim your principal intention lies in the possibility of their physical existence, which is to say an inquiry into the historical precedent for the existence of giants. In that case, there is certainly ample evidence to support their existence and more to that effect, the existence of such race in the neighborhood of the Neareast around the same time period as the kingship of Saul and the battle with Goliath.

The dimensions of the Nephilim are never actually laid out. Tradition leads us to assume a massive figure of the dimensions of Polyphemus eating cattle like they're mcnuggets, but that's not actually supported by the text. In the text the Nephilim are just big. Which is to say if you are a lanky five foot tall Israelite and you find yourself facing a man who's six foot six and built like a freight train you might be inclined to call that man a giant.

This attribute is ascribed to the Mycenaeans. The heroes of the Iliad are all describes as unusually large. That may be rhetoric, but it does possess a certain authentic quality. Around one thousand B.C. the Heraclidae returned to Greece after years of exile. They destroyed the Mycenaean civilization along the way and kicked off the Greek Dark Ages, which would be the way of things with their funky Doric figurines and sparsity of writing on until the dawn of the Classical period. Question: what happened to the Mycenaeans then?

A theory that I'm rather fond of is that they became the Philistines. The Philistines are referred to as of great stature in the First Book of Samuel. There is also confirmation of this from their neighbors in Assyria and Babylon. More importantly, the Philistines were very well organized for a people who just stumbled off the boat. Almost like they had an organized system already in place when they made landfall and built up their confederacy... either through being Mycenaeans themselves or through integrating the Mycenaean system into an existent Philistine culture à la Aeneas and the Latins.

In any event, they were most likely merely a race of men who were slightly larger than their neighbors. The ascription of their descent from fallen angels sound suspiciously like old school racism to me. Most of the Old Testament passages that deal with these events were written not too long after the time of David. The idea of the scribes remembering this race of men who were gigantic and twenty different kinds of nasty, then of course they would perceive them as descended of some form of evil, the only one being extant at that time the b'anai ha Elohim.

If your question is in reference to Scripture, as to whether the Nephilim are actually the sons of fallen angels, as the above indicates I'm inclined to say 'no', that's most likely an old notion that found its way into Scripture. Kind of like the parts that talk about the place of women and the status of slaves. More descriptive of the period in which is was written than prescriptive of contemporary mores.

As to the aliens, that's more mythological than anything and as such is subject to your faith tales of abduction and not something that would greatly benefit reasoned debate with one who lacks faith. I would observe a few points in the video that seem suspect to me, as a classicist and amateur philologist, in the main because I get irritated when I see UFO theorists trying to bend the facts to support their vision of an alien armageddon.

The Egyptians are not going to offer any reasonable proof for aliens. Stargate sounds great in theory, but when you actually start chewing over the primary sources all you come up with is a lot of work and few results. A hieroglyph, for instance, cannot indicate a flying saucer. Any hieroglyph that looks like a flying saucer could just as easily be indicative of pita bread or a plate.

Egyptian art is not viable as an indicator of the existence of Nephilim in particular or giants in general. The rhetoric of imagery in Egyptian arts tends to use size as an indicator of importance. A pharaoh as a god is always portrayed as unusually large beside mortals, subjects, slaves, and a conquered foe. The film also tries to slip in images of stele from Assyria and Babylon as support for their vision of alien hybrids, when there is no critical support even offered for that position. It almost seems like the director just googled for ancient stele depicting large men and wrote them in as evidence.

Furthermore, pyramids are an evolution that develops from temple mounds and ziggurats over the course of centuries. (We know this because the earlier constructions are still standing, just not popular with tourists or documentary crews given way out the middle of nowhere.) The rhetoric of the architecture would seem to indicate an artificial mountain or womb. A long time passes before the kind of mathematical skill of the Giza pyramids is evident. Similarities with megalithic structures outside of the Neareastern tradition is stretching the facts. In Mesoamerica, for instance, the entrance to a pyramid is always at the top, from which the lord can stand and look down over the jungle. The entrance of an Egyptian pyramid is always at the bottom, with the actual tomb lying belowground, where it is most difficult to plunder. Giza pyramids were made at sharp angles. Mesoamericans were made in a step pattern. At Giza the only adornment is a golden point. In Mesoamerica the pyramids have a whole series of adornments, plus a staircase. That kind of variance suggests that the use of a pyramid structure is relative to the universality of the math and imagery more than a shared inspiration from alien sources.



Whato all,

I read a fair chunk of the Nag Hammadi library, as well as some of the Bruce Codex and the related but nonchristian Corpus Hermeticum. Some of it was part of a course I did in college and some is just because it's interesting to me.

From a historical perspective, it helps to avoid referring to the Catholic Church when talking about things that happened in Antiquity. This is mainly because the Catholic Church doesn't really exist in the terms we understand. I know the Church argues otherwise, but there just isn't evidence to back them on that point. The theological baggage for a Pope isn't written until until well into the second century, and we're almost in the third before anyone suggests the Bishop of Rome might be viewed as an authority on anything to anyone outside of the Roman episcopacy. The term my professor put forth was 'great church', which seems a little more accurate since the Great Church includes Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, rather than seeming isolated to Rome.

The Great Church seems to have largely evolved in consequence of the influence of Gnostics. The Gnostics were not so much an organized contra-church as they were a body of random spiritualists, ascetics, fanatics and charlatans who wandered into cities with claims of religious experience and esoteric knowledge. The spiritualists were disruptive to the Christian churches. They were also not always good intentioned. St. Irenaeus mentioned one fellowed called Marcius who's the earliest version of a sleazy preacher I can think of off hand. Irenaeus complains of him using his 'church' and the idea of gnosis to get women into sleeping with him, ( and given that Lyons was a Roman town, it's not too far a stretch to say that the 'getting women to sleep with him' part probably extended to include boys and was not exclusive of pedophilia).

Ancient texts, it should be noted, are subject to certain peculiarities when it comes to authorship. Most of the time, an author is very confident and is good enough to write his name on whatever book he's just finished. However, there is also a big chunk of writers who did not feel very confident and chose to hide their identities by ascribing their work instead to a more famous individual. Aristotle and Plato were both subject to this, their complete works supply and marking pseudonymous texts. The above mentioned Corpus Hermeticum was written by members a Greco-Egyptian pagan cult, called, conveniently, the Hermeticists. They were big on complex and vaguely Platonist metaphysics and popular among Gnostics, who tended to pillage their works with the same shamelessness with which they approach Christian texts. They are also distinct in this line of argument, given that each book in the Corpus claims to have been written by the god Hermes. One of the arguments against canonicity for Gnostic writing is their late dates. Most of them, while claiming the authorship of apostles, are by internal references and language dated to much more recent periods, claiming the authority of first hand experience with the apostles centuries after the New Testament texts were written.

Lastly, I don't think there's much argument for Nag Hammadi being the result of Gnostics on the run. In the main because heretics in Antiquity were not backed into a corner as was the case with say the Cathars or Jews in post-Reconquista Spain. Antiquity saw a lot of heretical sects, the majority of which were localized in the Neareast. When heretics of this period found themselves persecuted they tended, more often than not, to pick up and move eastward. Most of Asia's earliest experience with Christendom was through these outcast heretical tribes.

Even when they went east, they didn't just die out in the desert. (Well, some probably did.) In Mongolia, thirteenth century (?), Genghis Khan's mother was a Nestorian Christian, descending from a group of schismatics who broke off from the Great Church in the fifth and took to the East. The Manichaeans -- who were kind of Gnostic and condemned by such a lauded figure as St. Augustine of Hippo -- went as far as China and lasted until the eleventh century, when the Emperor decided he had enough of them. The travels and preaching of lesser heretics and schismatics who argued for Christ being only a man is the most likely reason for Muslims continuing that assertion today. And the Mandaean Gnostics are still around and practicing today in Iraq.

The fact that Nag Hammadi texts were buried and not brought along suggests that the owners wanted to stick around and were not that picky about their belief system. The best theory I've come across is relative to a festal letter written by St. Athanasius.

Alexandria was a mess in this period and Athanasius, trying to push for a vision of orthodoxy had a real pain in his ***. This is the period of the Nestorians and the Arians, it's the period the monophysites, the homoousians and maybe dozen other schisms just waiting to occur. Alexandria was also a major crossroad even back then. It was the last stop on the spice road before Europe. The cults of isis and Mithras were still forces to be reckoned with. The Hermeticists originated in Alexandria. There were sects of Gnostics in at least the Sethian and Valentinian traditions. A generation or two early, St. Clement of Alexandria had even met with Buddhists, after a group of them wandered into town. Faced with this mess of beliefs and lack of clear authority, I get the impression Athanasius went after the heretical texts with a kind of desperation / reactionary conservatism in an attempt to keep his church from going to pieces on him.

The theory ascribse ownership of the Nag Hammadi library to a Pachomian monastery that existed formerly in the vicinity of where they were found. Genuine Gnostics, that is to say Gnostics who earnestly believed their preaching, as opposed the charlatans like Marcius, tended to take a very ascetic line. The body is created by the Demiurge and is therefore evil. The soul comes from the True God and is awakened by Sophia and thus is pure. Anything that had to do with the body was generally bad news in their book. The Marcionites even went so far as to condemn sex. All sex. Even between married couples, was evil and therefore forbidden. Monasticism is likewise ascetic, but it tends to be a little less explicit about it. The body is not evil. God created all things and called them good. But, indulgences of the body are viewed as the slippery slope to sin and damnation, so they in turn remove themselves not only from indulgence but from the possibility of indulgence by moving their church out into the desert where they can be left alone to practice in purity. It makes perfects that monks would find Gnostic writing of value in that lens. The idea of a canon was still a novelty for Christians. Writing's sole value was through its utility to the reader. They preserved the Gnostic writing alongside the Christian writing and probably also the Rule of their order because all that writing spoke to them in a deep way. When the bishop, their superior in matters of faith, said here's the canon, get rid of the rest, they did as they were told. Cause, as monks they were anything if not obedient. They buried the books because they felt no need to abandon the monastery on the grounds of semantics. Nag Hammadi wasn't holy scripture to them, just a set of books the bishop decided they shouldn't be fiddling around with.

Anyways, that turned out a bit longer than I was expecting. Enjoy.

--K.