The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments RemainBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Apocryphal Gospels
He does this by pointing out that the saying of our Lord is found only in
the Gospel of the Egyptians, and not in those four generally received. But
as Julius Cassianus appealed at the same time to a saying of St. Paul, the
authenticity of which was not to be contested, the Alexandrine doctor did
not consider that he could avoid discussing the question; and he gives, on
his side, an interpretation of the saying of Jesus in the Apocryphal
Gospel, and of that of St. Paul, associated with it by Julius Cassianus.
The words of St. Paul quoted by the heretic were those in Galatians (iii.
28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, male or
female.” Cassianus paid no regard to the general sense of the passage,
which is, that the privileges of the gospel are common to all of every
degree and nation and sex, but fastening on the words “neither male nor
female,” contended that this was a prohibition of marriage. St. Clement
pays every whit as little regard to the plain sense of the passage, and
gives the whole an absurd mystic signification, as far removed from the
thought of the apostle as the explanation of Julius Cassianus. “By male,”
says he, “understand anger, folly. By female understand lust; and when
these are carried out, the result is penitence and shame.”
It has been thought that the words “when two shall be one” recall the
philosophic doctrine of the Pythagoreans on the subject of numbers and the
dualism which was upheld by many of the Gnostics. St. Mark, according to
Irenaeus, taught that everything had sprung out of the monad and
dyad.(382) But it is not so. The teaching was not philosophic, but
practical. It may be thus paraphrased: “The kingdom of heaven shall have
come when the soul shall have so broken with the passions and feelings of
the body, that it will no longer be sensible of shame. The body will be
lost in the soul, so that the two shall become one; the body which is
without shall be like the soul within, and the male with the female shall
be insensible to passion.”
It was a doctrine which infected whole bodies of men later: the
independence of the soul from the body led to wild asceticism and frantic
sensuality running hand in hand. Holding this doctrine, the Fraticelli in
the thirteenth century flung themselves into the most fiery temptations,
placed themselves in the most perilous positions; if they fell, it
mattered not, the soul was not stained by the deeds of the body; if they
remained unmoved, the body was indeed mastered, “the two had become one.”
The garment of shame is to be trampled under foot. Julius Cassianus
explains this singular expression. It is the apron of skins wherewith our
first parents were clothed, when they blushed at their nakedness. They
blushed because they were in sin; when men and women shall cease to blush
at their nudity, then they have attained to the spiritual condition of
unfallen man.
We see in embryo the Adamites of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists of the
Reformation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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