Forerunners and rivals of Christianity : $b being studies in religious history from 330 B.C. to 330 A.D., Vol. 2 (of 2)Legge, Francis
Religion
Forerunners and rivals of Christianity : $b being studies in religious history from 330 B.C. to 330 A.D., Vol. 2 (of 2)
Legge, Francis
Christianity and other religions; Religions
It is to the survival of these ideas that books like the _Texts of the
Saviour_ and those in the Papyrus Bruce must be attributed. The Gnostic
Christianity of Valentinus, direct descendant as it was of the amalgam
of Christianity with pre-Christian faiths which the Ophites had
compounded, no sooner reached the great mass of the Egyptian people than
it found itself under their influence. In this later Gnostic literature
we hear no more of the Supreme Father of Valentinus, “who alone” in his
words, “is good”; no more weight is laid upon the Faith, Hope, and Love
who were the first three members of his Heavenly Man; and the Jesus in
whom were summed up all the perfections of the Godhead becomes
transformed into a mere mystagogue or revealer of secret words and
things. All expectation of the immediate arrival of the Parusia or
Second Coming, when the world is to be caught up and all wickedness to
be destroyed, has passed into the background, as has also the millennium
in which the faithful were, in accordance with a very early belief in
Egypt, to share the felicity of those who had been kings on earth[676].
Instead we have only appeals to the lowest motives of fear and the
selfish desire to obtain higher privileges than ordinary men. Even the
avoidance of crime has no other sanction, and complete withdrawal from
the world is advocated on merely prudential grounds; while rejection of
the mysteries is the unpardonable sin:
“When I have gone unto the light” (says the Jesus of the _Texts of
the Saviour_ to His disciples) “preach unto the whole world, saying:
Renounce the whole world and the matter that is therein, all its
cares, its sins, and in a word all its conversation, that ye may be
worthy of the mysteries of the light, that ye may be saved from all
the torments which are in the judgments. Renounce murmuring, that ye
may be worthy of the mysteries of the light, that ye may escape the
judgment of that dog-faced one.... Renounce wrath, that ye may be
worthy of the mysteries of the light, that ye may be saved from the
fire of the seas of the dragon-faced one.... Renounce adultery, that
ye may be worthy of the mysteries of the kingdom of light, that ye
may be saved from the seas of sulphur and pitch of the lion-faced
one.... Say unto them that abandon the doctrines of truth of the
First Mystery ‘Woe unto you, for your torment shall be worse than
that of all men, for ye shall dwell in the great ice and frost and
hail in the midst of the Dragon of the Outer Darkness, and ye shall
escape no more from the world from that hour unto evermore, but ye
shall be as stones therein, and in the dissolution of the universe
ye shall be annihilated, so that ye exist no more for ever[677]’.”
The priests who engraved the horrors of the next world on the walls of
the royal tombs at Thebes would probably have written no differently.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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