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)
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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
The manifestation of the ideas of God is in unity; but in opposition to
unity exists anarchy; in antagonism with creation emerges the principle of
destruction. The representative of destruction, disunion, chaos, is Satan.
The work of creation is infinite differentiation in perfect harmony. But
in the midst of this emerges discord, an element of opposition which seeks
to ruin the concord in the manifestation of the divine ideas. Therefore
redemption is necessary, and Christ is the medium of redemption, which
consists in the restoration to harmony and unity of that which by the
fraud of Satan is thrown into disorder and antagonism.
But how comes it that in creation there should be a disturbing element?
That element must issue in some manner from the Creator; it must arise
from some defect in Him. Therefore, Valentinian concluded, the God who
created the world and gave source to the being of Satan cannot have been
the supreme, all‐good, perfect God.
But if redemption be the perfecting of man, it must be the work of the
only perfect God, who thereby counteracts the evil that has sprung up
through the imperfection of the Demiurge.
Therefore Jesus Christ is an emanation from the Supreme God, destroying
the ill effects produced in the world by the faulty nature of the Creator,
undoing the discord and restoring all to harmony.
Jesus was formed by the Demiurge of a wondrously constituted ethereal
body, visible to the outward sense. This Jesus entered the world through
man, as a sunbeam enters a chamber through the window. The Demiurge
created Jesus to redeem the people from the disorganizing, destructive
effects of Satan, to be their Messiah.
But the Supreme God had alone power perfectly to accomplish this work;
therefore at the baptism of Christ, the Saviour (Soter) descended on him,
consecrating him to be the perfect Redeemer of mankind, conveying to him a
mission and power which the Demiurge could not have given.
In all this we see the influence of Marcion’s ideas.
We need not follow out this fundamental principle of his theosophy into
all its fantastic formularies. If Valentine was the precursor of Hegel in
the enunciation of the universal antinomy, he was like Hegel also in
involving his system in a cloud of incomprehensible terminology, in
producing bewilderment where he sought simplicity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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