richardhutnik said:
The early Christian church, if you speak second century onward, wasn't even large enough to do any sort of large scale persecution of gnostics. If anything, it was a sparring of words and writings. What you do find, in the Catholic church, is they have the tendency to document everything, and store it. They don't stamp out considered heretical teaching, but label it and treat it as a disease, and then come up with lines of arguments against it. In short, it has a name and a description of why it is error. And this is used to build a theological system. In regards to gnostic teaching, there are issues with a number of it. Part of it is that gnostics have an alergy to matter, and think matter is evil. Christ being God incarnate seems to be offensive, because the material world doesn't matter at least, if not evil. This is an assault on the incarnation (denial of Christ as God incarnate, and also denying Christ came in the flesh). They also have a general rule of believing salvation comes through right knowledge. If I was going to critique evangelical theology, it is their tendency to put belief, not as trusting in God/Christ, but believe certain things true, that ends up being like gnosticism. The denial of the flesh and the material world, is a dangerous thing on a lot of levels. It leads to people not doing good deeds, and not manifesting love in any form. It also has people not take ownership over their own body and their own lives, because they don't believe it matters. You see the letters of John write on this, about how denial of Christ coming in the flesh, is of the spirit of the Anti-Christ. Paul writes a lot of about love in the letters also. Another aspect of gnosticism, particularly the teaching on how the Old Testament God was not the real God, is that a leading person preaching that, decided to come up with what was considered "True" scripture, and selectively took some of Paul's writings, and some of the gospel accounts. They also threw out the Old Testament. This drove the conventional Christians to counter, and led to the eventual formation of a New Testament canon in response. I think we may be nearing the end here. Carry on. I have other things I need to get to now. |
You seem to have a christian view rather than a historical view on Gnostics....
Most Christian Gnostics (the ones directly at odds with the Orthodox church of the time) did not believe in what you speak, in fact gnosticism was a large movement of many unrelated groups. Some were more philosophers, as Plato's teachings were found in the Nag Hamandi texts, Some Worshipped John the Baptist, others worshipped Seth from the bible, some saw the creator God as pure evil and worshipped anything that stood against him such as Cain. Most Gnostics actually believed that Christ was still the son of God, but not the son of the Demiurge (their name for the creator God), and others believe that Christ and Jesus were two seperate entities merged only temporarily. The Gospel of Judas, a recently discovered Gnostic text, lays out exactly how Jesus plays into the Sethian grand scheme of things, and it is not the "we hate Christ" mentality you are speaking of.
Of course some of the apostles hated the Gnostics, they had a book of Mary Magdalene that basically said "men and women are equal" as well as a book that showed Jesus not to be completely free of flaws. They also did this with the Apocryphal texts by making Simon Magus look like a crazed madman even though what happens in the text is obviously false.
On Heresy hunters: actually Christian persecution of Gnostics by heresy hunters is fairly well documented by scholars. Someone had to have made many of them dissapear from history didn't they? By the fourth century Christianity was the ONLY religion allowed in the Roman Empire, so a mass wave of "false doctrine" burnings, temple burnings, and a "witch hunt" for heretics began. This can be seen the most eloquently by The utter destruction of a few Gnostic sects caused by one of the movers and shakers of the old Orthodox church, Iraneus. Iraneus did not hold a sword by himself, as I can recall, but his writings incited mobs of "heresy hunters" much in the same way that Eupopean witch hunts began after writings were published. This is ironic, as Iraneus was one of the folks that had to flee Rome when Christian persecution was going on.
Iraneus's book "against heresies" http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm
The first recirded man killed by heresy hunters was Pricillian, who was thought to be a magician, this continued well into the 1800's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscillian
I'm not sure how you can claim that there was no persecution as many of these groups went as far as to hide in mountains, bury their holy books etc.. Obviously something went down...
Also the same thing about "not loving" and "hating the material word" can be pretty well observed by many Christians - Monks for instance don't want any sort of pleasure in their lives, some monks even mutilate themselves to repent for their sins. how is that mentality any better?
