To the Gnostics of /x/, why did Jesus appear with Moses and Elijah if they served a different god from the God Jesus spoke of? Also, why did he call himself "I am" in John 8:58, and say that he came not to abolish the old law?Genuinely asking, not going for some epic own here.
>>38438860The spiritually confused who are calling themselves Gnostics on /x/ and other parts of the internet are not the real deal. They're just mad at YHWH and base their whole personality on that. They also don't like addressing ideas that are tied to what they claim. Gnosticism is about knowledge and ironically the most ignorant people call themselves Gnostics.
>>38438860Gnostic texts literally quote OT prophets as speaking words from the demiurge, as if he would have any purpose in doing that. It has never made any sense and nobody unironically adheres to it. It has style and is cool though I will say.
>>38438860Fulfilling the law means he claims to be God walking on Earth. This is important because God said a lot of things in the Old Testament about what God would do and this is how Jews prove who God is, except for some reason fulfilling all the Jewish prophecies only convinced non-Jews that Jesus was the messiah. All of this is besides the main point Jesus is trying to make. God is a woman, so all of those things are irrelevant.
>>38438860jesus christ stated in the bible that he came to fulfill the law but not abolish it going on to say that this would be fulfillment to the fullest extent of the law. i interpret this as meaning there is truth in what moses and elijah were ultimately taught by yahweh i suppose or that the revelations revealed to them didnt come from yahweh directly but some other source. gnosticism is about fulfillment of knowledge anyways so it'd also be fair in as well to say that not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” or that nothing will be changed until all knowledge esoteric apocryphal and canonical is known at which point one will have understood everything, then would one be fulfilled. I could be wrong though, i'm new to Gnosticism.
>>38438860>why did Jesus appear with Moses and Elijah if they served a different god from the God Jesus spoke ofThey didn't. Moses' work came through three different authors, the father, the demiurge and the priesthood. His most important, the 10 commandments, came through the father himself. Elijah was sent to put people on the gnostic path, but they only made connection with the demiurge. That is the hylic phenomenon, anon. Those who know and read between the lines see the work of the father in the prophets. Those who don't, only see the work of the demiurge.
>>38438860>To the Gnostics of /x/, why did Jesus appear with Moses and Elijah if they served a different god from the God Jesus spoke of? Because the author of Mark wanted to portray it that way.>Also, why did he call himself "I am" in John 8:58, and say that he came not to abolish the old law?Because the author of John wanted to portray it that way.Different authors with different understandings of Jesus wrote different things, because they disagreed. And not all Gnostics, whether historically or modern-day Neo Gnostics, identified the God of the OT as evil or malicious.
>>38438860All gods before me are SATAN.
>>38440879I understand the accounts differ, but all of the synoptic gospels have this event in them. I don't think there's a better resource on the life of Jesus, and only believing the parts we like seems wrong.>Different authors with different understandings of Jesus wrote different things, because they disagreed. And not all Gnostics, whether historically or modern-day Neo Gnostics, identified the God of the OT as evil or malicious.I understand that not all gnostics believed the Demiurge was evil. I believe Marcion considered him to be more of a fool than malicious, if I'm not remembering. Regardless of this, every gospel seems to contradict. Each gnostic gospel has cosmology incompatible with others. Do you think there's any truth to be taken from these texts, or they're all simply written by bias authors?
>>38440852Pretty much this. I would add that Jesus represented a a huge forward leap in human spirituality. The ancient Isrealite religion was not so much the one-and-only perfect "true" religion so much as it was the cultural backdrop which Jesus was born into, so he therefore used it as a basis for his teachings. Also keep in mind that the OT as we've received it is a somewhat corrupted text, some is good and some bad. "The Bible" wasn't a one volume book as we know it but a collection of books over a very large span of time, many were removed, edited, or reinterpreted. Basically you should think of a Jesus as something more akin to a religious reformer (though he was much more than this) than a prophet in perfect congruence with the pre-existing religion.>tl;dr it's complicated but the normie interpretation is too over-simple and absolutist
>>38438860>why did Jesus appear with Moses and Elijah if they served a different god from the God Jesus spoke of?Read further, the disciples put their heads down in fear, but when they raised them again they only saw Jesus. This already explains everything>Also, why did he call himself "I am" in John 8:58Because He, the Divine Will, existed before the demiurge made its foolish creation, this line actually proves gnosticism>and say that he came not to abolish the old law?Because that's what He did, He did not came to change the laws of this world, He came here to teach the Law of Heaven
>>38438860Why do you spew the bible so much when in order for it to be true actual people have to exist rather than you just larping as people and being full of shit?
>>38438860This whole thread = Yikes
>>38438860Jesus is YHWH in a human body
>>38438860Because the crucifixion represented the ego death of the demiurge. "I AM" no longer refers to the egoic false self, but to the true One Self of the cosmos.
>>38442242>all of the synoptic gospels have this event in them. I don't think there's a better resource on the life of Jesus, and only believing the parts we like seems wrongThe problem is that they are not actually the only source on the life of Jesus, just the ones that survive all the way to us in the most complete form. For example, there is a very incomplete source called "The Gospel of the Hebrews" that has the Holy Spirit as Jesus' Mother. From the way it was quoted, a reasonable number of people used it, but a reasonable number of other people didn't trust it. And you might then say "see, if only some people trusted it and others did not, surely that shows that it is not all that meaningful a contribution to our knowledge of Jesus' life." Well, okay, but what about Revelation? That, too, was extremely controversial for a long time. A lot of people did not accept it for a long time. When do we supernaturally get confirmation that we've chosen the correct list? The first standardization of a canon was Marcion, and the standardization we're familiar with is much later. Revelation is canon while the Shepherd of Hermas is non-canon, but if history went slightly left instead of slightly right the opposite would be true.But then, what about the Apocrypha? Those were published as part of "the Bible" for a very long time, and nowdays a huge number of Protestants live a kind of dread of them, like there are actual demons you summon by reading the texts. Do the apocrypha lend real spiritual insights or not?What we call the "New Testament" is not "a book," it is "a library" of books, a small curated subset of all the material ever written about Jesus. And like any written material about any person, some is true, some is false, some is exaggerated, some is understated, some is this or that genre etc. You dive in and try to make sense of the mess. Gnostic cosmologies contradict, yes, but so do the canonical gospels on matters as crucial as Jesus' relation to God.
>>38444643I just find it difficult determining which gospels are the closest to truth when almost all of them contradict in some way.>Well, okay, but what about Revelation? That, too, was extremely controversial for a long time. A lot of people did not accept it for a long time. When do we supernaturally get confirmation that we've chosen the correct list? The only way you'd be fully confident in the canon we have today is if you believe in apostolic succession, which I personally don't place full faith in. >What we call the "New Testament" is not "a book," it is "a library" of books, a small curated subset of all the material ever written about Jesus.I recognize this, but should think this way more often. I've read many of the gospels, including the surviving portions of the Gospel of the Hebrews you mentioned, but I really don't know what to believe. Throughout all my reading of religious texts and history, and even when I had trouble believing in God as a child, I've always felt something special about Jesus Himself. I just wish I could easily determine which parts about him are true and which are not. That he came to free us, I am sure about, but everything else is not so clear to me.I try to make sense of the mess, as you say, but it's a very difficult task for me.
>>38438860Is it possible to visualize and determine the ends of a potential evil without having to allow for that evil to happen?What makes me able to draw the line between these things, what makes the creator unable to do so?Is it the restriction of referring to oneself as a "just" entity, where one has to allow for all of evil to happen and only then be able to determine what was righteous and what was not? Is a judge who allows for evil only to then present oneself as "'righteous'" not a liar?
>>38445473I think fundamentally, once you reject the easy answers then you've kind of signed yourself up for the hard answers. There is no text you're going to look at and think "oh, I've finally cracked the code." But what you can do, I think, is figure out whst exactly it is about Jesus you find so compelling. He came to free us: what exactly does that mean? What does it mean to be free? From what?All these other texts are an attempt to answer that question, but from the particular cultural perspective and internal anxieties of the author. Well, you have a particular cultural perspective, ane you have internal anxieties: what makes your attempt to answer this question any less reliable? You might not be an author (or maybe you are, I don't know), but they were subject to the same uncertainties as you were, the same task of sorting out the prior traditions and trying to make sense of them. That's all anyone can really ask. Good luck with your search, anon.
>>38445698You've given me a lot to think about, thank you. I hope all goes well in your life.
>>38445509>Is it possible to visualize and determine the ends of a potential evil without having to allow for that evil to happen?I think so. Could you not imagine a scenario that hasn't occurred and already know it to be evil? I could, although maybe some wouldn't see this judgement as valid? I don't think allowing evil to occur is a prerequisite to be just, though. You certainly shouldn't allow it repeatedly.
>>38442655Do you think the different names for God are indicative of this? Or do you just take the good portions as being from the father, and the rest from the demiurge or priesthood?
