Why has this site seen a huge turn towards Christian shit? It smells waaay off. Like, Russel Brand and all these other influencers turn Christian and this forum becomes overrun with worshippers of the Lord God of Israel via the Jesus psy op.
Why have TPTB decided to shove Christianity down everyones throats and flood boards with Christian bots etc?
Are they trying to strengthen their grip over us spiritually by reinforcing their original deception or what?
isn't Enoch apocryphal rather than gnostic?
It seems to predate gnosticism by hundreds of years - perhaps it is a seminal text?
You are correct! Although the term "Deuterocanonical" is helpful to introduce here, as apocrypha is also used in ways that don't pertain to Enoch and that makes everything confusing. Deuterocanon simply means second Canon, which is appropriate.
Additionally, most of the difficult sayings of Jesus quote the book of Enoch. This is important because it tells us that Jews of His day read Enoch, enough to be VERY familiar with it.
Parts of Enoch make it impossible to miss that Jesus was the Promised Messiah, and these parts were written more than 150 years before He was born. It then becomes significant why Jews felt it necessary to remove Enoch from their Canon.
Define apocryphal as you’re using it, because I don’t think those two words are mutually exclusive? Apocryphal just means “not included in the canon”, and considering who selected that canon, it seems logical that {they} would exclude the gnostic texts
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch
Specifically id point you towards:
Edit4edit:
Yeah hence my use of “lowercase g, gnostic” - I don’t mean to link it to the neoplatonists or anything like that
so, I was thinking of apocryphal still in the sense of being 'excluded from canon' but nonetheless acknowledged as contemporaneous with the other books of the hebrew scriptures or the new testament, contrasted with the gnostic texts which appeared much later than any canonical books.
Just to clarify then, you initially said that there was good reason to believe that the Gnostic texts predate the synoptics and referenced the Dead Sea Scrolls (provably amongst the oldest extant manuscripts) as supporting evidence. The gnostic element contained within the DSS however is purely the Book of Enoch which is not Gnostic per se but is perhaps an early precursor of gnostic thought.
I think I'm back where I began in this case - that in order to accept the Gnostic rebranding of Jesus, I would have to toss out all of the NT which came before.
Well, look at the link you posted earlier, even there, where you perceive a distancing between the DSS and the NHT, they too echo the idea that the Gospel of Thomas predated the synoptic gospels.
Further, I would just suggest not letting yourself get bogged down in what “the experts” or even what any other person labels as Gnostic or not - what I mean by that is, any “gnostic” would believe that their interpretation is (atleast an approximation of) the “original” “true” interpretation of / nature of existence - or in other words, “Adam was the first gnostic” or something along those lines, hence why Enoch could be called gnostic as well - hope I’m conveying my point here adequately
Have you read about the Essenes before? That’s a group I would call “gnostic” (jews), whereas groups like the Sethians or the Marcionites would probably more accurately be called Gnostic (Christians). My overarching point being there’s way too much nuance to accurately convey in (even a series of) comments lol. More important I think is the lowercase g “gnostic line of thought” which we can arguably trace back to the beginning (depending on how literally you want to take the gnostic cosmogonies)
yeah, I think it's probably best not to conflate these terms.
Gnostic refers to a specific group in and around early Christianity, correct? And this sect (if that's the right term) have their own gospels which are generally considered to post date the synoptics.
The Gospel of Thomas predating or being contemporaneous with the early Christian texts is a fascinating idea and I'm not saying it isn't the case. It could well be. But it still doesn't undo all the other Christian texts which are abundantly evil and deceptive and anti-gentile and which only serve to underpin the OT anyway.
It doesn't move the needle on any of that. Unless, you DO agree that the NT should be thrown out entirely for the sake of the Gnostic gospels.
Can both the canonical NT and the Gnostic texts coexist and complement each other? Or are they irreconcilably opposed in fundamental ways?
Completely false.
That's what happens when you get your theology from Wikipedia, you get led astray by every foolish suggestion you encounter because you literally don't know any better.
This extends throughout the rest of your comment.. Wikipedia pays big money to make sure every article has leftist ideology; none of this is even concerned with accuracy.