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The Gnostic Gospels and Orthodox Christianity | Bible Hunters paccione .co.uk 2 Views • 2 months ago

Charles Freeman A New History of Early Christianity :This stimulating history of early Christianity revisits the extraordinary birth of a world religion and gives a new slant on a familiar story. The relevance of Christianity is as hotly contested today as it has ever been. A New History of Early Christianity shows how our current debates are rooted in the many controversies surrounding the birth of the religion and the earliest attempts to resolve them. Charles Freeman’s meticulous historical account of Christianity from its birth in Judaea in the first century A.D. to the emergence of Western and Eastern churches by A.D. 600 reveals that it was a distinctive, vibrant, and incredibly diverse movement brought into order at the cost of intellectual and spiritual vitality. Against the conventional narrative of the inevitable “triumph” of a single distinct Christianity, Freeman shows that there was a host of competing Christianities, many of which had as much claim to authenticity as those that eventually dominated. Looking with fresh eyes at the historical record, Freeman explores the ambiguities and contradictions that underlay Christian theology and the unavoidable compromises enforced in the name of doctrine.
Jamesian Jewish Christianity represented by the Ebionites was too close to Earth and Gnostic Christianity was too exclusive and close to heaven. The Pauline theology had the middle ground that was able to be universal and flexible.

Uncovering the difficulties in establishing the Christian church, he examines its relationship with Judaism, Gnosticism, Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society, and he offers dramatic new accounts of Paul, the resurrection, and the church fathers and emperors.Christians have proved oddly unwilling to dig into the particularities of their faith, beyond familiarizing themselves with a few tentpole doctrines. They share this reluctance with one of Christianity’s most spectacular converts, the Roman emperor Constantine, who credited his victory at the Milvian Bridge in A.D. 312 to the auspices of the Christian deity, despite not knowing much about Christianity, including the degree to which it was riven by sectarian disagreement. The following year, Constantine co-issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christians the right to practice their faith unmolested.
In “The Triumph of Christianity,” Ehrman describes the Edict of Milan (which was neither an edict nor written in Milan) as the Western world’s first known government document to proclaim the freedom of belief.
When the emperor Valentinian II removed the altar of the goddess Victory from the Roman Senate house in A.D. 382, for instance, a pagan statesman named Symmachus reminded him, “This worship subdued the world.”
When Constantine converted, the New Testament didn’t formally exist and Christians disagreed on basic theological concepts, among them how Jesus and God were related.
Christianity went far beyond henotheism’s hesitant claim upon ultimate truth. It was an exclusivist faith that foreclosed — was designed to foreclose — devotion to all other deities. Yet it was different from Judaism, which was just as exclusivist but crucially lacked a missionary impulse.
Ehrman, summarizing the argument of the social historian Ramsay MacMullen, imagines a crowd of 100 pagans watching a persuasive Christian debate an equally persuasive adherent of the healing god Asclepius: “What happens to the overall relationship of (inclusive) paganism and (exclusive) Christianity? … Paganism has lost 50 worshipers and gained no one, whereas Christianity has gained 50 worshipers and lost no one.” Thus, Christian believers go from roughly 1,000 in A.D. 60, to 40,000 in A.D. 150, to 2.5 million in A.D. 300. Ehrman allows that these raw numbers may look “incredible. But in fact they are simply the result of an exponential curve.” At a certain point, math took over. (Mormonism, which has been around less than 200 years, has seen comparable rates of growth.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0....2/13/books/review/ba

The diversity of early Christianity met the bottleneck of the Roman Jewish wars where adaptation and survival were paramount on what was transmitted and protected. With the crushing Roman victories over the Jews the story could not be carried by Apocalyptic Judaism alone it had to be a story that carried within it the Universalism of Hellenism and the familiarity of the mystery cults within the Roman Empire. Who has the best (adaptable and inclusive) universal story and who can survive the sword and eventually wield the sword itself was important in what story could sit on the throne of orthodoxy. The Story must be able to reach universally (Apostle Paul/Gospels) and it must be protected and propagated with the Sword (When Christianity became the official religion of Rome) The Gnostics were too exclusive and too close to heaven to win the battle on Earth. Secret knowledge vs universal knowledge.

GNOSTICISM is TRUE paccione .co.uk 1 Views • 2 months ago

Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6k5oVBsBWM&t=1245s

Dr. Bilby's iterative open science book demonstrating a new scientific solution to retrieve and reconstruct the earliest gospel strata may be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3927056
Please support his commitment to open science scholarship on the Gospels via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/VocesAnticae

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Dr. Mark G. Bilby holds a PhD from the University of Virginia, graduating in 2012 from its program
in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity, which combined the study of Early Christianity, New
Testament, Greco-Roman Classics, Rabbinics, and TaNaKh studies. Mark also earned a Masters in
Library and Information Science from Drexel University in 2012, and previously completed two
masters degrees in theology from Nazarene Theological Seminary. He also completed coursework in Syriac at Notre Dame and French and Latin at the University of Missouri Kansas City. Mark has
taught at numerous universities, including Iowa State University, Point Loma Nazarene University,
the University of San Diego, Azusa Pacific University, Claremont School of Theology, and Cal State
Fullerton. At Claremont, Mark served as a Reference and Systems librarian as well as the thesis
secretary for their doctoral programs. He also served for six years as faculty librarian of Scholarly
Communications at Cal State Fullerton, where he led the successful passage of two resolutions
related to open access in the statewide academic senate of the CSU. Mark has published one scholarly monograph with the University of Strasbourg and edited two scholarly book compilations, one with Claremont Press and one with Abingdon. He has published peer-reviewed articles in Harvard Theological Review, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the de Gruyter Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, and the Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. He has contributed chapters to numerous peer-reviewed scholarly compilations, including all three volumes of the More New Testament Apocrypha series edited by Tony Burke and published by Eerdmans.

Marcion of Sinope
( 85 – c. 160) was an early Christian theologian in early Christianity. Marcion preached that God had sent Jesus Christ who was an entirely new, alien god, distinct from the "vengeful" God who had created the world. He considered himself a follower of Paul the Apostle, whom he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus Christ; his doctrine is called Marcionism. Marcion published the earliest record of a canon of New Testament books.

Early Church Fathers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian denounced Marcion as a heretic, and he was excommunicated by the church of Rome around 144. He published his own canon of Christian sacred scriptures, which contained ten Pauline epistles (the Pastoral epistles were not included) and the Gospel of Marcion which historically is claimed to be an edited version of the Gospel of Luke. Several modern scholars have theorized that Marcion's Gospel was the oldest, although this has received strong criticism as it seems to rest on special pleading.

This made Marcionism a catalyst in the process of the development of the New Testament canon by forcing the proto-orthodox Church to respond to his canon.

#gnosticinformant #christianity #marcion

How To REPROGRAM Your Mind While You Sleep To Heal The BODY & MIND! | Bruce Lipton paccione .co.uk 1 Views • 2 months ago

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Have you ever felt held back by a habit or pattern of thinking that you feel powerless to break? Or perhaps felt frustrated by a loved one’s failure to see mistakes they’re repeating? The reason it’s so hard, says today’s guest, is that these actions are programmed into our subconscious minds from early childhood. And they affect not just our behaviour but our whole experience of life and even our risk of disease. The chances are we’re completely unaware of these programs but, importantly, we can change them.

#feelbetterlivemore
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Show notes available at: https://drchatterjee.com/308

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