Well, I ask because (as I guessed) you have a technical meaning for "remember": you call it "reconnect to source", which is not problematic. You also have some technical meanings that don't quite make sense to me, as in saying "archons cannot create" but referring to the "creator, the Demiurge". The reason I say "adversary" or "Samael" is that we can agree on this general character without agreeing on all his attributes. It seems to me that in most gnostic schemes Samael is an archon or less than one, so why should I credit him with "creating" if (as I agree) archons can't? Nor do I need to commit to any list of archons, because it seems to me that no gnostic teacher committed to the list of archons he was taught, but each had their own interpretation.
The core issue is the explanation of evil. In the Apocryphon you have Sophia conceiving nonconsensually, which is taken as evil because she is taken as having repented of it; and there's no explanation of why a good creature would commit evil. But in Isaiah and Ezekiel there are very specific analyses of why a good creature would commit evil: because he was tempted by that which does not exist, namely a creation being equal to the Creator. Further, the speech of Samael in Apocryphon seems clearly related to the speeches attributed to the adversary in Isaiah and Ezekiel, but the explanation of the origin of evil is missing and is substituted with bare language about Sophia. So I understand why people want to bypass the origin of evil by postulating that the Creator must be evil, but it's unnecessary because it's a good thing for a Creator to give creatures free will even if some of them commit evil. That is, the whole template added onto the older narrative is completely unneeded.
You've got some traditional skeptical teaching on the origin of Yahweh too. The "mythology" doesn't actually speak of 70 children, it is the oral tradition that is inferred around the text of Deut. 32:8-9, which only says Elyon (not etymologically related to El) separated the Adamites and Yahweh took the Israelites. But it's better to read this as a parallel about the same God under two names; there is no implied inferiority to Yahweh in any text. There is intense recent effort to imagine this whole structure of a polytheist interpretation and to smuggle Baal into this text from elsewhere, but it's not the plain reading or the historical development. Israelite worship always used the Divine Council monotheist model where gods (angels and archons) were ruled by one Judge and Lord (el and baal, both titles) whose personal name was Yahweh. When you compare the prior Semitic Hyksos model amply attested in Egypt's 14th and 15th dynasties, you see a clear Divine Council pattern emerging within Egyptian polytheism.
Now, we're sharing historical facts about Yahweh and about Samael. But we're judging authorities differently and siding with different agendas (and Conspiracies is well aware of the agendas of these various factions). We could appeal to the words of Jesus in the various texts, but we might then again end up siding with different valuations of those texts so the meta question remains. So our commitment to pursue truth at all costs must be tested as to whether we can agree on how to resolve the competing agendas. It seems to me that whatever source you take, you don't have Jesus teaching against Yahweh as he was understood. Specifically when Jesus quotes Ex. 3:15 in Matt. 22:32, he is referring to Yahweh and translating that name as "I am", thus affirming the name and not just the monism. There are many other direct and indirect references to Yahweh in his teaching. So how do we get around that to the idea that deprecation of Yahweh was original? It seems the gnostics were mostly Greeks who liked the new Sophia teaching but didn't like the Hebrew god and who made up an according responsive narrative. I don't see how to credit them with originality when there's a clear originality in the Gospel texts that goes against them.
that don't quite make sense to me, as in saying "archons cannot create" but referring to the "creator, the Demiurge"
The Demiurge creates through duality. He cannot create the unity of the Pleroma. He can only build a world based on friction, positive and negative, light and dark, predator and prey, good and evil. This material world is a flawed copy of the divine Pleroma, not the real thing but a simulation. So, archons created their own world but it's not real, it’s based on a simulation. Their influence comes from forgetting. When you forget that you are pure divine awareness, unbound by form, you fall asleep inside their dream.
You're not sure you're living in a simulation? pay attention. The moment you begin to raise your frequency, the matrix will notice. The simulation is designed to keep energy low, stable, and predictable. A state of homeostasis, from the Greek words “homeo” (meaning similar to) and “stasis” (meaning standing still). When you start glowing brighter, the system treats you like a virus, a foreign object that threatens the stability of the illusion. We could call this the matrix immune response.
In the Apocryphon you have Sophia conceiving nonconsensually, which is taken as evil because she is taken as having repented of it
Your take on this is either incorrect, or we have a different definition for evil. Sophia wanted to have a child. But she went about it in the wrong way, she conceived without the involvement of her male partner or the approval of the Father. Sophia immediately realized her horrible mistake and cast her child out of the Pleroma. To me, there is a difference between evil and mistake. It is correct to say Sophia repented, and the Father agreed to bring her back to the Pleroma once what had become lacking in her was restored to its natural fullness. I can see the mistake, but I don't see the evil here.
Moreover like I said before, look at Isaiah 45:7. "I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil,". The Hebrew word used here is raw. It means adversity, calamity, disaster, evil,". Yahweh does not say he allows evil. He says he creates it. He authors it. So, my interpretation: Sophia made a mistake and evil came later. So, if Yahweh creates evil, he is the architect of the matrix. And a matrix needs conflict to run. Without the war between good and evil, the script would stop and we might wake up. He needs the drama to keep you engaged. Which is exactly what we are witnessing in the world today.
You've got some traditional skeptical teaching on the origin of Yahweh too. The "mythology" doesn't actually speak of 70 children
I just did a search and several links pointed to this. I admit I haven't done much study in Canaanite mythology, maybe you're right and El had only 7 children. Or maybe only had two. It doesn't really matter to me, I don't care.
translating that name as "I am", thus affirming the name and not just the monism
Let's put some context around this. The soul that became Jesus had lived many times before. There were several of these incarnations that prepared the Christ's
soul. Adam, the first incarnation, where the soul first entered matter. Then it was Enoch who walked with God. Melchizedek, the mysterious priest king
without beginning or end. Joseph, son of Jacob, who saved his people through forgiveness. Joshua, who led the people into the promised land. Each life added
something essential. Each death taught something necessary. By the time this soul entered Mary's womb, it had been prepared through millennia of human experience to accomplish what no soul had done before. Achieve complete God consciousness while maintaining human form. This is why Jesus could say with authority "Before Abraham was born, I am." - John 8:58. He remembered his journey. He recognized his ancient purpose finally coming to fruition.
Jesus taught two levels of truth. parables for the masses, mysteries for the disciples, and many of the deepest mysteries were removed from scripture by church councils who feared people discovering their own divine nature. Jesus taught reincarnation openly, shocking many Christians. When he asked, "Who do men say I am?" his disciples answered, "Some say Elijah, some say Jeremiah," he didn't correct them. He was acknowledging the soul's journey through bodies.
Between ages 12 and 30, Jesus vanishes from the biblical record. The church says nothing happened worth recording. But, these were the years that transformed Jesus from gifted youth to Christ. Jesus studied in Egypt, in India, in Tibet, in Persia. Not because Jewish tradition was insufficient, but because the Christ message was universal, requiring universal preparation. The teaching, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" wasn't Jesus claiming exclusive access to Monad. He was saying the I am consciousness, the divine self-awareness he achieved is the way.
It seems the gnostics were mostly Greeks who liked the new Sophia teaching but didn't like the Hebrew god and who made up an according responsive narrative
Wow... I have yet to meet someone who is so into the OT as you are. And I know many jews.
Wow... I have yet to meet someone who is so into the OT as you are. And I know many jews.
Yes, as a covenant Christian I take the whole covenant seriously. I have always connected with the same mainstream conservative denomination, but have also studied the Hebrew roots of the covenant. And it's the testimony of Jews that the majority of them are secular and not interested in their own covenant to a high degree. Now, I came there because I observed that the historical Jesus (Yeshua) was "so into the OT". When Jesus says "I am" in John 8:58, he may be remembering humanity's journey but he is certainly invoking oneness with "Yahweh", which is the meaning of "I am" there (as proven by the immediate attempts to stone him in the next verse). He's not saying "I am Enoch", nobody took him to mean that at all, even with a nascent gilgul doctrine. So the whole idea that Yahweh is someone other than Jesus implies, when he upholds the mainstream Jewish view of Yahweh, doesn't really seem to come from Jesus.
This material world is a flawed copy of the divine Pleroma, not the real thing but a simulation.
You're quoting a system. It's more accurate to say that the Pleroma is the reality as conceived by the Monad consciousness, and the flawed copy is a map of reality as conceived by us faulty creatures. We are free to borrow from others' flawed copies (like the archons'), but we only awake when we are perceiving the reality substantially without flaws arising during duplication. So, not that the world is flawed, but that our relationship with it is flawed. (IMHO the whole spilling over of the question of evil into making the whole physical universe evil was one of the least useful things gnostics did; it drove several of them crazy because they ended up in rampant immorality, believing the physical so evil that they could not be blamed for partaking in adulteration and violence.)
When people say "it's a simulation" I agree because the Monad conceives it and that is indistinguishable from a simulation (as when I, or a computer, conceives something). But if, by "it's a simulation", you were to mean it's false or conceived by another than the Monad consciousness, then you'd be treating the physical as always requiring an archon as an intermediary. But I perceive the physical in the Monad without intermediary, so I have no need to give archons credit. I make mistakes in my perception, which are corrected in time by the Monad itself.
When you start glowing brighter, the system treats you like a virus, a foreign object that threatens the stability of the illusion.
It's happened to me. I assert my authority over the matrix and it retreats again.
To me, there is a difference between evil and mistake.
How could a perfect creature ever be mistaken though? It seems like "evil with extra steps". Perfect creature commits horrible imperfection and repents but that's not evil, but it explains why other creature isn't perfect but is evil and ignorant. (Y'know, it sounds just like what Satan would say when confronted, "it wasn't my fault because Wisdom's mistake made me so"; we call that "sus".) There was never a conception that Wisdom could ever be horribly mistaken and need repentance until this gnosis came along.
Isaiah 45:7.
Yeah, if we wanted to take a single verse and say it's consistent with Yahweh being the devil and creating evils, that wouldn't prove the proposition because it's also consistent with Yahweh being the Monad and creating evils. (This is shown by the facts that Isaiah speaks highly of Yahweh throughout, all readers took Yahweh to be the Monadic "I Am", all other Scriptures are consistent with Yahweh being the head of the Divine Council, and Jesus taught the same.)
Now, in interpretation, one is just "The Creator creates evils", i.e. he ordains bad things happening; this is shown by comparison with darkness (a relative absence of light), which would be a nonentity unless defined with respect to light. That's the simplest from context. But if we were to pretend that Isaiah really meant that Yahweh causes absolute evil, that too would not be problematic because it's like causing a vacuum: absolute evil is a complete absence, a nonentity, not something "created" in the ordinary sense but caused. You've interpreted "creating" as "authoring", but "authoring" is a technical word in theology that is distinguished: the author is the performer of an evil deed (as opposed to an abstract concept of evil).
The resolution is given in a very early text, Gen. 50:20, where Joseph teaches how good and evil wills are confluent: "Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good". It's possible for God to give the good gift of free will by which another thinks evil and for God to mean that that thinking of evil will work unto good. God is not doing evil by giving creatures limited free will.
But those are asides to show how many understand the text. The fact is that it doesn't logically show that Yahweh is an evil being and was never understood as such by its readers. If we are still in agreement that Samael did the first evil, then we keep that foundation. But as for evidence that Samael caused physical creation because he had some ability to create "dualism" (as if no emanation before had any duality to it), it's not forthcoming.
Jesus taught from both Gen. 1 and Gen. 2, which affirm that the physical creation was very good, indefinitely, without any need to do evil. You say "a matrix needs conflict to run", but this is belied by Gen. 1-2, and every good work done without conflict ever since. There is no conflict in the Pleroma in the Consciousness, it's one reality. It's possible for our maps of that reality to be completely unconflicted with it; that's being awake. It's possible to be in conflict (whether in body or in spirit, they both happen); that's accepting illusion.
So I'm listening to you but I'm not hearing the case be carried. And it doesn't seem to be that helpful to just say what you read vs. what I read. It seems that it'd be more helpful to agree on objective ways of interpreting these things because we are probably weighing our witnesses differently and making different judgments. I think truthfulness of witnesses can be weighed so objectively that all seekers of truth conclude the same.
The soul that became Jesus had lived many times before. There were several of these incarnations that prepared the Christ's soul. Adam, the first incarnation, where the soul first entered matter. Then it was Enoch who walked with God. Melchizedek, the mysterious priest king without beginning or end. Joseph, son of Jacob, who saved his people through forgiveness. Joshua, who led the people into the promised land.
Well, I've been asking everyone if reincarnation means gilgul or transmigration, and nobody answers. After that question, if Gen. 5 indicates that Adam was alive at Enoch's birth and lived more than 300 years afterward, how do you do reincarnation with bilocation? Then, how do you account for the increase in humans? What's the difference between those in this generation ensouled for the first time and those not? Then we get to the details of how it can be known who was what. And did Melchizedek die, or not? (It appears to me the particular argument you gave just started as a misreading of Heb. 7, where Melchidezek is like Jesus and people misread the tight rabbinical reasoning as if they are being equated. It's a metaphor just like saying "Hagar is Sinai".) I hope these don't sound skeptical, it's just that most reincarnation systems don't work these out and I'm wondering how they are resolved by people from within their systems.
When he asked, "Who do men say I am?" his disciples answered, "Some say Elijah, some say Jeremiah," he didn't correct them.
Heh! Haven't heard that argument. Technically, he corrected them separately when he said that Elijah was John. But I don't think he meant transmigration there, because he said it twofold: both John represents Elijah in some way (which might be called gilgul or oversoul if carefully defined), and Elijah has his own destiny. So he did deny being Elijah himself, and that means he didn't affirm being Jeremiah either.
So, I continue to appreciate your patience with my questions and interactions. Ultimately, when we get to a question of reality we're inferring from evidence to seek the best explanation. You're giving me lots of assertions from your experience, some of which I'm not engaging because they're not central enough IMHO. It wouldn't matter so much on what titles you give to Samael if it didn't undercut the actual Hebrew teaching about Yahweh that Jesus taught. "Yahweh" just means "I Am" and was taken as defining the attribute of self-existence that is monistic rather than emanated. But when Jesus many times claimed this attribute for himself, in his context he tied it to whatever was right about the covenant worship of Yahweh. What he taught didn't require attributing creation to something less than the First Consciousness. And if he was the Logos or First Emanation then that makes him firstborn of creation, and he affirmed that creation started out very good and could run just fine that way indefinitely. So, of all the trappings brought by gnosis, many of them need not be disputed, but the ones that lead to a difference in definition of the God whose divine nature we are partaking of, those are the ones where we would need to hammer out true vs. false.
Yes, as a covenant Christian... but have also studied the Hebrew roots of the covenant
That's why you try to make Yahweh one and the same with the Monad. They're different entities. And this distinction matters. Because the God of the Old Testament and the Monad are not two different interpretations of the same God. They are not two faces of the same coin. These are two completely different entities operating at opposite frequencies with opposite natures. The God of the OT is jealous. He admits it. He screams it. He demands exclusive worship and threatens violent punishment for acknowledging other gods. That is insecurity. That is an entity that fears competition because he knows he is not actually supreme. The Monad does not have jealousy. Jealousy requires separation. Jealousy requires a lack of something. But the Monad is everything. It is the Pleroma, the fullness.
I observed that the historical Jesus (Yeshua) was "so into the OT"
No he wasn't. Jesus came to expose Yahweh, not to worship him. Let me tell you a story. Late one evening in the quiet hills of Galilee, Jesus sat with his inner circle reading from the Torah. The fire light danced on the parchment illuminating the ancient Hebrew letters. They had just finished a passage in Exodus, a terrifying passage where Yahweh commands the Israelites to slaughter entire cities, men, women, children, livestock, everything that breathes. Leave nothing alive. "The words hung in the air like smoke. Peter looked up from the scroll, his face pale and disturbed. He asked in a low voice. Master, why is the god of our fathers so violent? Why is he so jealous? Why is he so angry? You teach us about a father of infinite love, a father of light, but this he gestured at the scroll with a trembling hand. This does not feel like love, this feels like rage. Jesus closed the scroll slowly. He looked at each of them in the eyes, Peter, John, Mary Magdalene, and he said something that would eventually get him killed. Something the church would spend 2,000 years trying to erase from human consciousness. He said, "That is not the Father. That is not the Monad. The god you are reading about, the one who demands blood sacrifices... the one who drowns the world in floods... the one who commands genocide and calls it holy. He has a name. Yaldaboath, the demiurge, the chief archon, and he has been pretending to be the most high since the beginning of this realm. This teaching never made it into the Bible.
When the church compiled the canonical texts in the 4th century, they removed every reference to Jesus exposing Yahweh as the Demiurge. They burned the Gnostic Gospels. They hunted the teachers who preserved the distinction because they knew the danger. If Christians knew that the God of the Old Testament, the God they have been worshipping, praying to, fearing for millennia, was actually the chief archon, the false god of the material prison, not the true father Jesus served. The entire religious system would collapse instantly. No more guilt, no more fear of divine punishment, no more sacrificial salvation. Because that angry, jealous God demanding obedience was never God. He was the impostor and Jesus came to expose him.
It seems like "evil with extra steps". Perfect creature commits horrible imperfection and repents but that's not evil, but it explains why other creature isn't perfect but is evil and ignorant
So, let me get this straight. Are you saying Sophia is evil because she wanted to have a child and conceived without approval of the Father? But, Yahweh is righteous and good when demands the first born of all Israelites? when Yahweh demands war? when Yahweh demands genocide? how about the story of Jericho or the Amalekites. The attackers killed every inhabitant in the city, men, women, and children. They killed all the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. They spared only a prostitute who had protected their spies, along with her family. "So Joshua... utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded." - Joshua 10:40
LORD God of Israel is Yahweh, the god of the Jews. The god of the OT. Is this what you honestly believe?
That's why you try to make Yahweh one and the same with the Monad. They're different entities. And this distinction matters.
Well, I appreciate you saying so. If Monad and Yahweh are different, we're pursuing two different things and can only find harmony in some deeper truth than either. If, however, we are both to pursue truth at all costs, then differences can be reconciled. If my attempts to reconcile disappoint you, I can only encourage you to keep pursuing the truth at all costs and we will get there in time.
For instance, you have Monad as all Consciousness, but you also have him apparently unable to communicate, yet still able to emanate. It seems that if all emanates from the Monad then all must be present in the Monad, both communication and silence, for instance. So that's why I encourage you to attribute more to the Monad than you do, because otherwise the core deity is deficient and overtaken by his emanation. E.g., you do imply Jesus taught the Monad was love; but love is usually regarded as relational and not monistic.
Now when it comes to the ordinary objections people have to Yahweh's depiction in Hebrew, I've found that it regularly amounts simply to reading the text from a very different cultural perspective. Your questions about Yahweh all have good answers if we are willing to give the Hebrew authors credit for seeking to teach good values in their own culture.
"Jealousy" is one of those words that can be rightly or wrongly practiced. It is right to be jealous for something worthy. The Monad is worthy of being the core emanator and you are "jealous" on its behalf that it be held there and not deprecated. You might not want to use that word for that practice, but that protectiveness is the same meaning intended in the original. "Jealousy requires separation"? That's needlessly philosophical and separate from how the word was used culturally (it was the same as "zealous" and originally referred to being red-hot).
Threats of consequences for doing wrong are normal no matter how righteous the speaker is. If I do wrong, in your wisdom you know things that can go wrong for you and would want to warn me of them, even if I hated and disbelieved your warnings. That's not insecurity or fear.
Violence and anger: Just as communication must be present in the Monad, judgment must be present as well, or nothing would be right or wrong. If some things are wrong, there are generally negative natural consequences for doing wrong, or else people would be emboldened to continue doing wrong. So the Monad must be emanating in such unique way that evil consequences befall those who commit evil deeds (even up to one full and wisely placed deluge). This why Paul says, if not so, how could the world be judged? Similarly, humans believe in righteous anger, so it had to come from somewhere; and both violent consequences and a responsive resistance to the one who resists are (monistic) attributes that are the same laws for everyone.
Blood sacrifice: Noah's account pointed out that sins that rise to the level of lifeblood are to be paid by lifeblood (Hammurabi later agreed). This is the universal testimony of human justice. Adam's account also says that the way to restore the fellowship of the Creator was by taking on the skins he provided: this was understood as identifying with the innocence of the sacrificial victim and as being one with innocence again. The meat was eaten as a (restoration) covenant meal. Nowadays we eat meat all the time without thinking of the blood shed at all, but its original meaning is identification as innocent. There is no sin in humane slaughter.
"Genocide": First, that word was coined by a Jewish lawyer so that it can mean anything and nothing. However, most nations have recognized a principle of just war that includes (1) self-defense and (2) defense of innocents that are being abused by a belligerent. The details are complex given the number of wars in Scripture, but they all fall under teaching the principles of just war. The nations killed by the Israelites (and those killed by several other Semitic and Japhetic tribes) had been killing innocents for generations and all the other peoples of the realm generally agreed that the Canaanites and their allies were subject to the death penalty; and the individual Canaanite cities proved this by their belligerence when terms were sought (with peace-making exceptions like Gibeon). In this cultural context the events are explicable; but for skeptics who aren't interested in learning Near East history or in judging beyond biased appearances, it wouldn't matter.
Let me tell you a story.
Thank you for taking the time to compose your thoughts into a winsome narrative, but that doesn't help me to judge the history as shown by all the evidences.
Evidence: (1) There is no passage in Exodus where God says slaughter everything that breathes, you may be thinking of Deut. 20:16, but it doesn't mention the rest. So your creative narrative is off factually from the start. (2) Exodus (34:5-7) actually says the name of Yahweh was "Merciful and Gracious", as well as just toward the guilty, resolving both poles of the spectrum in One; so that same scroll you mention does teach a God of infinite love. Exodus (13:21) teaches that Yahweh was a Light to his people; same scroll again. (3) Historically, the very doubts you attribute to Peter had already been stated and answered and regarded as moot for centuries by the readers of the prophets. Ezek. 18:25-28 is one example (whole chapter applies), Hab. 1:2-3 another (whole book applies). The answers are deep and require attention and not batting away; and the people were familiar with them, often alluding to the same as self-evident, as Rom. 3:5-6 shows. (4) I pointed out to you that Jesus regularly identified the Father with the I Am, such as by quoting Scriptures using that name, so he was not going to deny the I Am found in the scrolls; and he said not one letter or serif would depart from the scrolls. (5) Just as "Yahweh" would have meant "I Am" (the self-existent) to everyone, if "Yaldabaoth" had been a word it would have been understood as "Yah Sabaoth" to everyone (a title used explicitly by Paul and James) and would've referred to a positive attribute, not a negative deity. (6) I've pointed out that Paul uses the word Demiurge to mean his own Christian God and not Samael (Heb. 11:10). (7) Now that same Bible, as I said, shows a chief archon that does pretend to be the Most High, explicitly so in Is. 14:14, given the name Helel (Lucifer) and who is explicitly different from Yahweh Sabaoth who is contrasted in 14:22 ff. So they already knew of this archon and that he was not Yahweh.
For me to take your narrative as if Jesus taught the rejection of the thousands of references to Yahweh in the Hebrew Scripture when he was noted for being more strict with Scripture than the Pharisees, as if he affirmed Yahweh in public without variation but privately taught the rejection of that same Yahweh, would be contrary to so much evidence that it's staggering to imagine such a disconnected hypothetical. Even if we argued that suppression and manipulation change things they can't change thousands of years of history. If Jesus had taught rejection of Yahweh he would never have had the following of thousands of faithful Jews (and if he had taught contradiction he would not have been worth following either). The reason he was accepted by so many, and by so many more after his death, was that there was no contradiction: like other prophets he had no problem with the Biblical character of Yahweh. The recent imagination that the Hebrew Lord and the Greek Lord are different is exceptionally strained and distant from the evidence.
in the 4th century, they removed every reference to Jesus exposing Yahweh as the Demiurge.
Argument from silence, there is no reference to Jesus rejecting Yahweh. There were many texts circulating, disagreeing with each other, but there was no "removal" because there was no compiled "book" from which to remove something. All Scriptures began as ordinary scrolls and were only counted as Scriptures after centuries of the covenant people accepting them as such; any other ordinary scrolls had ordinary circulation and never achieved broad recognition of being Scripture (though many reached a secondary level of "deuterocanonical"). The idea that there was some event at which a holy text could be expurgated and all centuries of prior evidence removed is, frankly, inquisitorial.
They burned the Gnostic Gospels.
There is no evidence of this. The only books I find burned by these Christians were Arius and Priscillian, neither of which are anything like gnostic.
They hunted the teachers who preserved the distinction because they knew the danger.
I don't know who this could refer to because most gnostic schools were closed long before Nicea. I don't know of any pure gnostic systems that could have continued in their own logic; the only thing I know of were side movements that had moved on from gnosticism to incorporate other elements so as to stay relevant with the majority proto-orthodoxy.
If Christians knew that the God of the Old Testament, the God they have been worshiping, praying to, fearing for millennia, was actually the chief archon, the false god of the material prison, not the true father Jesus served. The entire religious system would collapse instantly.
If.
But this question is either settled by agreement on actual facts, or by disagreement (separation). You don't strike me as someone who wants to pursue his own conception of the Monad if it isn't an actual fact.
No more guilt, no more fear of divine punishment, no more sacrificial salvation.
If it's a good thing that we have free will to choose right or wrong, then it follows that there is guilt and disorder for doing wrong and that it takes effort (sacrifice) to correct things that are wrong. If there's no guilt, then nothing is wrong and there's no morality.
Are you saying Sophia is evil because she wanted to have a child and conceived without approval of the Father?
Actually, we do consider that evil when humans do it, it's called eloping. But I'm not saying the narrative calls Sophia good or evil, I'm saying that imperfection entered the world somehow and I think it's silly to say one creature was imperfect and that caused another to be evil involuntarily when you could just say one creature chose of free will to be evil.
how about the story of Jericho or the Amalekites. The attackers killed every inhabitant in the city, men, women, and children. They killed all the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. They spared only a prostitute who had protected their spies, along with her family.
And Joshua sparing them proved that, if anyone else had accepted peace, they would have been spared too. The belligerents in the city were all to be killed; the animals were in this special case destroyed because of the centrality of the corruption. The passage is ambiguous (6:21, the word for youths) and might or might not imply that young children were also killed, but this only happens in one or two explicit passages out of all the Hebrew wars where it's stated that the children were knowing participants in the parents' rebellion.
You allude separately to Amalek, and to the southern campaign summarized in Josh. 10:40. Modern translations recognize that the word translated "utterly destroyed", haram, ultimately means "utterly dedicated" by whatever means (a modern equivalent is "neutralized", which can mean killed or merely incapacitated). It also appears in sources as "harem", dedicated women, who are obviously not destroyed. The kings were stated to be killed; everyone else was neutralized in the most effective way, whether they became casualties of war, or displaced refugees, or defectors like Gibeon.
So when you go to the original sources and culture, both Jewish and Christian review has hardly ever had problems with the righteousness of these wars. Only a recent skeptical view has separated itself from this testimony and invented a dichotomy. I doubt there are any actual gnostic texts that use these German arguments!
In sum, if we look at the divergences (rather than the convergences as I prefer), you'd have a Monad that has less power to create than its emanation does, you'd have a Yahwist culture for thousands of years that would have been walking in complete deception like every other culture, you'd have a Jesus that totally embodies that culture but that is also believed to be totally against it, and you'd have no power by this Monad to do anything about it except by random chance this Jesus happens to figure the Monad out (but still doesn't succeed in getting his message across). See why I don't focus on the divergences. I think it's more worthwhile to say, suspend for now the question of how this worked in history and just get the core points that anything we see in ourselves must be present in the Monad and anything we see in Jesus must have been consistent with the reality he lived in.
Well, I ask because (as I guessed) you have a technical meaning for "remember": you call it "reconnect to source", which is not problematic. You also have some technical meanings that don't quite make sense to me, as in saying "archons cannot create" but referring to the "creator, the Demiurge". The reason I say "adversary" or "Samael" is that we can agree on this general character without agreeing on all his attributes. It seems to me that in most gnostic schemes Samael is an archon or less than one, so why should I credit him with "creating" if (as I agree) archons can't? Nor do I need to commit to any list of archons, because it seems to me that no gnostic teacher committed to the list of archons he was taught, but each had their own interpretation.
The core issue is the explanation of evil. In the Apocryphon you have Sophia conceiving nonconsensually, which is taken as evil because she is taken as having repented of it; and there's no explanation of why a good creature would commit evil. But in Isaiah and Ezekiel there are very specific analyses of why a good creature would commit evil: because he was tempted by that which does not exist, namely a creation being equal to the Creator. Further, the speech of Samael in Apocryphon seems clearly related to the speeches attributed to the adversary in Isaiah and Ezekiel, but the explanation of the origin of evil is missing and is substituted with bare language about Sophia. So I understand why people want to bypass the origin of evil by postulating that the Creator must be evil, but it's unnecessary because it's a good thing for a Creator to give creatures free will even if some of them commit evil. That is, the whole template added onto the older narrative is completely unneeded.
You've got some traditional skeptical teaching on the origin of Yahweh too. The "mythology" doesn't actually speak of 70 children, it is the oral tradition that is inferred around the text of Deut. 32:8-9, which only says Elyon (not etymologically related to El) separated the Adamites and Yahweh took the Israelites. But it's better to read this as a parallel about the same God under two names; there is no implied inferiority to Yahweh in any text. There is intense recent effort to imagine this whole structure of a polytheist interpretation and to smuggle Baal into this text from elsewhere, but it's not the plain reading or the historical development. Israelite worship always used the Divine Council monotheist model where gods (angels and archons) were ruled by one Judge and Lord (el and baal, both titles) whose personal name was Yahweh. When you compare the prior Semitic Hyksos model amply attested in Egypt's 14th and 15th dynasties, you see a clear Divine Council pattern emerging within Egyptian polytheism.
Now, we're sharing historical facts about Yahweh and about Samael. But we're judging authorities differently and siding with different agendas (and Conspiracies is well aware of the agendas of these various factions). We could appeal to the words of Jesus in the various texts, but we might then again end up siding with different valuations of those texts so the meta question remains. So our commitment to pursue truth at all costs must be tested as to whether we can agree on how to resolve the competing agendas. It seems to me that whatever source you take, you don't have Jesus teaching against Yahweh as he was understood. Specifically when Jesus quotes Ex. 3:15 in Matt. 22:32, he is referring to Yahweh and translating that name as "I am", thus affirming the name and not just the monism. There are many other direct and indirect references to Yahweh in his teaching. So how do we get around that to the idea that deprecation of Yahweh was original? It seems the gnostics were mostly Greeks who liked the new Sophia teaching but didn't like the Hebrew god and who made up an according responsive narrative. I don't see how to credit them with originality when there's a clear originality in the Gospel texts that goes against them.
The Demiurge creates through duality. He cannot create the unity of the Pleroma. He can only build a world based on friction, positive and negative, light and dark, predator and prey, good and evil. This material world is a flawed copy of the divine Pleroma, not the real thing but a simulation. So, archons created their own world but it's not real, it’s based on a simulation. Their influence comes from forgetting. When you forget that you are pure divine awareness, unbound by form, you fall asleep inside their dream.
You're not sure you're living in a simulation? pay attention. The moment you begin to raise your frequency, the matrix will notice. The simulation is designed to keep energy low, stable, and predictable. A state of homeostasis, from the Greek words “homeo” (meaning similar to) and “stasis” (meaning standing still). When you start glowing brighter, the system treats you like a virus, a foreign object that threatens the stability of the illusion. We could call this the matrix immune response.
Your take on this is either incorrect, or we have a different definition for evil. Sophia wanted to have a child. But she went about it in the wrong way, she conceived without the involvement of her male partner or the approval of the Father. Sophia immediately realized her horrible mistake and cast her child out of the Pleroma. To me, there is a difference between evil and mistake. It is correct to say Sophia repented, and the Father agreed to bring her back to the Pleroma once what had become lacking in her was restored to its natural fullness. I can see the mistake, but I don't see the evil here.
Moreover like I said before, look at Isaiah 45:7. "I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil,". The Hebrew word used here is raw. It means adversity, calamity, disaster, evil,". Yahweh does not say he allows evil. He says he creates it. He authors it. So, my interpretation: Sophia made a mistake and evil came later. So, if Yahweh creates evil, he is the architect of the matrix. And a matrix needs conflict to run. Without the war between good and evil, the script would stop and we might wake up. He needs the drama to keep you engaged. Which is exactly what we are witnessing in the world today.
I just did a search and several links pointed to this. I admit I haven't done much study in Canaanite mythology, maybe you're right and El had only 7 children. Or maybe only had two. It doesn't really matter to me, I don't care.
Let's put some context around this. The soul that became Jesus had lived many times before. There were several of these incarnations that prepared the Christ's soul. Adam, the first incarnation, where the soul first entered matter. Then it was Enoch who walked with God. Melchizedek, the mysterious priest king without beginning or end. Joseph, son of Jacob, who saved his people through forgiveness. Joshua, who led the people into the promised land. Each life added something essential. Each death taught something necessary. By the time this soul entered Mary's womb, it had been prepared through millennia of human experience to accomplish what no soul had done before. Achieve complete God consciousness while maintaining human form. This is why Jesus could say with authority "Before Abraham was born, I am." - John 8:58. He remembered his journey. He recognized his ancient purpose finally coming to fruition.
Jesus taught two levels of truth. parables for the masses, mysteries for the disciples, and many of the deepest mysteries were removed from scripture by church councils who feared people discovering their own divine nature. Jesus taught reincarnation openly, shocking many Christians. When he asked, "Who do men say I am?" his disciples answered, "Some say Elijah, some say Jeremiah," he didn't correct them. He was acknowledging the soul's journey through bodies.
Between ages 12 and 30, Jesus vanishes from the biblical record. The church says nothing happened worth recording. But, these were the years that transformed Jesus from gifted youth to Christ. Jesus studied in Egypt, in India, in Tibet, in Persia. Not because Jewish tradition was insufficient, but because the Christ message was universal, requiring universal preparation. The teaching, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" wasn't Jesus claiming exclusive access to Monad. He was saying the I am consciousness, the divine self-awareness he achieved is the way.
Wow... I have yet to meet someone who is so into the OT as you are. And I know many jews.
Yes, as a covenant Christian I take the whole covenant seriously. I have always connected with the same mainstream conservative denomination, but have also studied the Hebrew roots of the covenant. And it's the testimony of Jews that the majority of them are secular and not interested in their own covenant to a high degree. Now, I came there because I observed that the historical Jesus (Yeshua) was "so into the OT". When Jesus says "I am" in John 8:58, he may be remembering humanity's journey but he is certainly invoking oneness with "Yahweh", which is the meaning of "I am" there (as proven by the immediate attempts to stone him in the next verse). He's not saying "I am Enoch", nobody took him to mean that at all, even with a nascent gilgul doctrine. So the whole idea that Yahweh is someone other than Jesus implies, when he upholds the mainstream Jewish view of Yahweh, doesn't really seem to come from Jesus.
You're quoting a system. It's more accurate to say that the Pleroma is the reality as conceived by the Monad consciousness, and the flawed copy is a map of reality as conceived by us faulty creatures. We are free to borrow from others' flawed copies (like the archons'), but we only awake when we are perceiving the reality substantially without flaws arising during duplication. So, not that the world is flawed, but that our relationship with it is flawed. (IMHO the whole spilling over of the question of evil into making the whole physical universe evil was one of the least useful things gnostics did; it drove several of them crazy because they ended up in rampant immorality, believing the physical so evil that they could not be blamed for partaking in adulteration and violence.)
When people say "it's a simulation" I agree because the Monad conceives it and that is indistinguishable from a simulation (as when I, or a computer, conceives something). But if, by "it's a simulation", you were to mean it's false or conceived by another than the Monad consciousness, then you'd be treating the physical as always requiring an archon as an intermediary. But I perceive the physical in the Monad without intermediary, so I have no need to give archons credit. I make mistakes in my perception, which are corrected in time by the Monad itself.
It's happened to me. I assert my authority over the matrix and it retreats again.
How could a perfect creature ever be mistaken though? It seems like "evil with extra steps". Perfect creature commits horrible imperfection and repents but that's not evil, but it explains why other creature isn't perfect but is evil and ignorant. (Y'know, it sounds just like what Satan would say when confronted, "it wasn't my fault because Wisdom's mistake made me so"; we call that "sus".) There was never a conception that Wisdom could ever be horribly mistaken and need repentance until this gnosis came along.
Yeah, if we wanted to take a single verse and say it's consistent with Yahweh being the devil and creating evils, that wouldn't prove the proposition because it's also consistent with Yahweh being the Monad and creating evils. (This is shown by the facts that Isaiah speaks highly of Yahweh throughout, all readers took Yahweh to be the Monadic "I Am", all other Scriptures are consistent with Yahweh being the head of the Divine Council, and Jesus taught the same.)
Now, in interpretation, one is just "The Creator creates evils", i.e. he ordains bad things happening; this is shown by comparison with darkness (a relative absence of light), which would be a nonentity unless defined with respect to light. That's the simplest from context. But if we were to pretend that Isaiah really meant that Yahweh causes absolute evil, that too would not be problematic because it's like causing a vacuum: absolute evil is a complete absence, a nonentity, not something "created" in the ordinary sense but caused. You've interpreted "creating" as "authoring", but "authoring" is a technical word in theology that is distinguished: the author is the performer of an evil deed (as opposed to an abstract concept of evil).
The resolution is given in a very early text, Gen. 50:20, where Joseph teaches how good and evil wills are confluent: "Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good". It's possible for God to give the good gift of free will by which another thinks evil and for God to mean that that thinking of evil will work unto good. God is not doing evil by giving creatures limited free will.
But those are asides to show how many understand the text. The fact is that it doesn't logically show that Yahweh is an evil being and was never understood as such by its readers. If we are still in agreement that Samael did the first evil, then we keep that foundation. But as for evidence that Samael caused physical creation because he had some ability to create "dualism" (as if no emanation before had any duality to it), it's not forthcoming.
Jesus taught from both Gen. 1 and Gen. 2, which affirm that the physical creation was very good, indefinitely, without any need to do evil. You say "a matrix needs conflict to run", but this is belied by Gen. 1-2, and every good work done without conflict ever since. There is no conflict in the Pleroma in the Consciousness, it's one reality. It's possible for our maps of that reality to be completely unconflicted with it; that's being awake. It's possible to be in conflict (whether in body or in spirit, they both happen); that's accepting illusion.
So I'm listening to you but I'm not hearing the case be carried. And it doesn't seem to be that helpful to just say what you read vs. what I read. It seems that it'd be more helpful to agree on objective ways of interpreting these things because we are probably weighing our witnesses differently and making different judgments. I think truthfulness of witnesses can be weighed so objectively that all seekers of truth conclude the same.
Well, I've been asking everyone if reincarnation means gilgul or transmigration, and nobody answers. After that question, if Gen. 5 indicates that Adam was alive at Enoch's birth and lived more than 300 years afterward, how do you do reincarnation with bilocation? Then, how do you account for the increase in humans? What's the difference between those in this generation ensouled for the first time and those not? Then we get to the details of how it can be known who was what. And did Melchizedek die, or not? (It appears to me the particular argument you gave just started as a misreading of Heb. 7, where Melchidezek is like Jesus and people misread the tight rabbinical reasoning as if they are being equated. It's a metaphor just like saying "Hagar is Sinai".) I hope these don't sound skeptical, it's just that most reincarnation systems don't work these out and I'm wondering how they are resolved by people from within their systems.
Heh! Haven't heard that argument. Technically, he corrected them separately when he said that Elijah was John. But I don't think he meant transmigration there, because he said it twofold: both John represents Elijah in some way (which might be called gilgul or oversoul if carefully defined), and Elijah has his own destiny. So he did deny being Elijah himself, and that means he didn't affirm being Jeremiah either.
So, I continue to appreciate your patience with my questions and interactions. Ultimately, when we get to a question of reality we're inferring from evidence to seek the best explanation. You're giving me lots of assertions from your experience, some of which I'm not engaging because they're not central enough IMHO. It wouldn't matter so much on what titles you give to Samael if it didn't undercut the actual Hebrew teaching about Yahweh that Jesus taught. "Yahweh" just means "I Am" and was taken as defining the attribute of self-existence that is monistic rather than emanated. But when Jesus many times claimed this attribute for himself, in his context he tied it to whatever was right about the covenant worship of Yahweh. What he taught didn't require attributing creation to something less than the First Consciousness. And if he was the Logos or First Emanation then that makes him firstborn of creation, and he affirmed that creation started out very good and could run just fine that way indefinitely. So, of all the trappings brought by gnosis, many of them need not be disputed, but the ones that lead to a difference in definition of the God whose divine nature we are partaking of, those are the ones where we would need to hammer out true vs. false.
That's why you try to make Yahweh one and the same with the Monad. They're different entities. And this distinction matters. Because the God of the Old Testament and the Monad are not two different interpretations of the same God. They are not two faces of the same coin. These are two completely different entities operating at opposite frequencies with opposite natures. The God of the OT is jealous. He admits it. He screams it. He demands exclusive worship and threatens violent punishment for acknowledging other gods. That is insecurity. That is an entity that fears competition because he knows he is not actually supreme. The Monad does not have jealousy. Jealousy requires separation. Jealousy requires a lack of something. But the Monad is everything. It is the Pleroma, the fullness.
No he wasn't. Jesus came to expose Yahweh, not to worship him. Let me tell you a story. Late one evening in the quiet hills of Galilee, Jesus sat with his inner circle reading from the Torah. The fire light danced on the parchment illuminating the ancient Hebrew letters. They had just finished a passage in Exodus, a terrifying passage where Yahweh commands the Israelites to slaughter entire cities, men, women, children, livestock, everything that breathes. Leave nothing alive. "The words hung in the air like smoke. Peter looked up from the scroll, his face pale and disturbed. He asked in a low voice. Master, why is the god of our fathers so violent? Why is he so jealous? Why is he so angry? You teach us about a father of infinite love, a father of light, but this he gestured at the scroll with a trembling hand. This does not feel like love, this feels like rage. Jesus closed the scroll slowly. He looked at each of them in the eyes, Peter, John, Mary Magdalene, and he said something that would eventually get him killed. Something the church would spend 2,000 years trying to erase from human consciousness. He said, "That is not the Father. That is not the Monad. The god you are reading about, the one who demands blood sacrifices... the one who drowns the world in floods... the one who commands genocide and calls it holy. He has a name. Yaldaboath, the demiurge, the chief archon, and he has been pretending to be the most high since the beginning of this realm. This teaching never made it into the Bible.
When the church compiled the canonical texts in the 4th century, they removed every reference to Jesus exposing Yahweh as the Demiurge. They burned the Gnostic Gospels. They hunted the teachers who preserved the distinction because they knew the danger. If Christians knew that the God of the Old Testament, the God they have been worshipping, praying to, fearing for millennia, was actually the chief archon, the false god of the material prison, not the true father Jesus served. The entire religious system would collapse instantly. No more guilt, no more fear of divine punishment, no more sacrificial salvation. Because that angry, jealous God demanding obedience was never God. He was the impostor and Jesus came to expose him.
So, let me get this straight. Are you saying Sophia is evil because she wanted to have a child and conceived without approval of the Father? But, Yahweh is righteous and good when demands the first born of all Israelites? when Yahweh demands war? when Yahweh demands genocide? how about the story of Jericho or the Amalekites. The attackers killed every inhabitant in the city, men, women, and children. They killed all the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. They spared only a prostitute who had protected their spies, along with her family. "So Joshua... utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded." - Joshua 10:40
LORD God of Israel is Yahweh, the god of the Jews. The god of the OT. Is this what you honestly believe?
Well, I appreciate you saying so. If Monad and Yahweh are different, we're pursuing two different things and can only find harmony in some deeper truth than either. If, however, we are both to pursue truth at all costs, then differences can be reconciled. If my attempts to reconcile disappoint you, I can only encourage you to keep pursuing the truth at all costs and we will get there in time.
For instance, you have Monad as all Consciousness, but you also have him apparently unable to communicate, yet still able to emanate. It seems that if all emanates from the Monad then all must be present in the Monad, both communication and silence, for instance. So that's why I encourage you to attribute more to the Monad than you do, because otherwise the core deity is deficient and overtaken by his emanation. E.g., you do imply Jesus taught the Monad was love; but love is usually regarded as relational and not monistic.
Now when it comes to the ordinary objections people have to Yahweh's depiction in Hebrew, I've found that it regularly amounts simply to reading the text from a very different cultural perspective. Your questions about Yahweh all have good answers if we are willing to give the Hebrew authors credit for seeking to teach good values in their own culture.
"Jealousy" is one of those words that can be rightly or wrongly practiced. It is right to be jealous for something worthy. The Monad is worthy of being the core emanator and you are "jealous" on its behalf that it be held there and not deprecated. You might not want to use that word for that practice, but that protectiveness is the same meaning intended in the original. "Jealousy requires separation"? That's needlessly philosophical and separate from how the word was used culturally (it was the same as "zealous" and originally referred to being red-hot).
Threats of consequences for doing wrong are normal no matter how righteous the speaker is. If I do wrong, in your wisdom you know things that can go wrong for you and would want to warn me of them, even if I hated and disbelieved your warnings. That's not insecurity or fear.
Violence and anger: Just as communication must be present in the Monad, judgment must be present as well, or nothing would be right or wrong. If some things are wrong, there are generally negative natural consequences for doing wrong, or else people would be emboldened to continue doing wrong. So the Monad must be emanating in such unique way that evil consequences befall those who commit evil deeds (even up to one full and wisely placed deluge). This why Paul says, if not so, how could the world be judged? Similarly, humans believe in righteous anger, so it had to come from somewhere; and both violent consequences and a responsive resistance to the one who resists are (monistic) attributes that are the same laws for everyone.
Blood sacrifice: Noah's account pointed out that sins that rise to the level of lifeblood are to be paid by lifeblood (Hammurabi later agreed). This is the universal testimony of human justice. Adam's account also says that the way to restore the fellowship of the Creator was by taking on the skins he provided: this was understood as identifying with the innocence of the sacrificial victim and as being one with innocence again. The meat was eaten as a (restoration) covenant meal. Nowadays we eat meat all the time without thinking of the blood shed at all, but its original meaning is identification as innocent. There is no sin in humane slaughter.
"Genocide": First, that word was coined by a Jewish lawyer so that it can mean anything and nothing. However, most nations have recognized a principle of just war that includes (1) self-defense and (2) defense of innocents that are being abused by a belligerent. The details are complex given the number of wars in Scripture, but they all fall under teaching the principles of just war. The nations killed by the Israelites (and those killed by several other Semitic and Japhetic tribes) had been killing innocents for generations and all the other peoples of the realm generally agreed that the Canaanites and their allies were subject to the death penalty; and the individual Canaanite cities proved this by their belligerence when terms were sought (with peace-making exceptions like Gibeon). In this cultural context the events are explicable; but for skeptics who aren't interested in learning Near East history or in judging beyond biased appearances, it wouldn't matter.
Thank you for taking the time to compose your thoughts into a winsome narrative, but that doesn't help me to judge the history as shown by all the evidences.
Evidence: (1) There is no passage in Exodus where God says slaughter everything that breathes, you may be thinking of Deut. 20:16, but it doesn't mention the rest. So your creative narrative is off factually from the start. (2) Exodus (34:5-7) actually says the name of Yahweh was "Merciful and Gracious", as well as just toward the guilty, resolving both poles of the spectrum in One; so that same scroll you mention does teach a God of infinite love. Exodus (13:21) teaches that Yahweh was a Light to his people; same scroll again. (3) Historically, the very doubts you attribute to Peter had already been stated and answered and regarded as moot for centuries by the readers of the prophets. Ezek. 18:25-28 is one example (whole chapter applies), Hab. 1:2-3 another (whole book applies). The answers are deep and require attention and not batting away; and the people were familiar with them, often alluding to the same as self-evident, as Rom. 3:5-6 shows. (4) I pointed out to you that Jesus regularly identified the Father with the I Am, such as by quoting Scriptures using that name, so he was not going to deny the I Am found in the scrolls; and he said not one letter or serif would depart from the scrolls. (5) Just as "Yahweh" would have meant "I Am" (the self-existent) to everyone, if "Yaldabaoth" had been a word it would have been understood as "Yah Sabaoth" to everyone (a title used explicitly by Paul and James) and would've referred to a positive attribute, not a negative deity. (6) I've pointed out that Paul uses the word Demiurge to mean his own Christian God and not Samael (Heb. 11:10). (7) Now that same Bible, as I said, shows a chief archon that does pretend to be the Most High, explicitly so in Is. 14:14, given the name Helel (Lucifer) and who is explicitly different from Yahweh Sabaoth who is contrasted in 14:22 ff. So they already knew of this archon and that he was not Yahweh.
For me to take your narrative as if Jesus taught the rejection of the thousands of references to Yahweh in the Hebrew Scripture when he was noted for being more strict with Scripture than the Pharisees, as if he affirmed Yahweh in public without variation but privately taught the rejection of that same Yahweh, would be contrary to so much evidence that it's staggering to imagine such a disconnected hypothetical. Even if we argued that suppression and manipulation change things they can't change thousands of years of history. If Jesus had taught rejection of Yahweh he would never have had the following of thousands of faithful Jews (and if he had taught contradiction he would not have been worth following either). The reason he was accepted by so many, and by so many more after his death, was that there was no contradiction: like other prophets he had no problem with the Biblical character of Yahweh. The recent imagination that the Hebrew Lord and the Greek Lord are different is exceptionally strained and distant from the evidence.
Argument from silence, there is no reference to Jesus rejecting Yahweh. There were many texts circulating, disagreeing with each other, but there was no "removal" because there was no compiled "book" from which to remove something. All Scriptures began as ordinary scrolls and were only counted as Scriptures after centuries of the covenant people accepting them as such; any other ordinary scrolls had ordinary circulation and never achieved broad recognition of being Scripture (though many reached a secondary level of "deuterocanonical"). The idea that there was some event at which a holy text could be expurgated and all centuries of prior evidence removed is, frankly, inquisitorial.
There is no evidence of this. The only books I find burned by these Christians were Arius and Priscillian, neither of which are anything like gnostic.
I don't know who this could refer to because most gnostic schools were closed long before Nicea. I don't know of any pure gnostic systems that could have continued in their own logic; the only thing I know of were side movements that had moved on from gnosticism to incorporate other elements so as to stay relevant with the majority proto-orthodoxy.
If.
But this question is either settled by agreement on actual facts, or by disagreement (separation). You don't strike me as someone who wants to pursue his own conception of the Monad if it isn't an actual fact.
If it's a good thing that we have free will to choose right or wrong, then it follows that there is guilt and disorder for doing wrong and that it takes effort (sacrifice) to correct things that are wrong. If there's no guilt, then nothing is wrong and there's no morality.
Actually, we do consider that evil when humans do it, it's called eloping. But I'm not saying the narrative calls Sophia good or evil, I'm saying that imperfection entered the world somehow and I think it's silly to say one creature was imperfect and that caused another to be evil involuntarily when you could just say one creature chose of free will to be evil.
And Joshua sparing them proved that, if anyone else had accepted peace, they would have been spared too. The belligerents in the city were all to be killed; the animals were in this special case destroyed because of the centrality of the corruption. The passage is ambiguous (6:21, the word for youths) and might or might not imply that young children were also killed, but this only happens in one or two explicit passages out of all the Hebrew wars where it's stated that the children were knowing participants in the parents' rebellion.
You allude separately to Amalek, and to the southern campaign summarized in Josh. 10:40. Modern translations recognize that the word translated "utterly destroyed", haram, ultimately means "utterly dedicated" by whatever means (a modern equivalent is "neutralized", which can mean killed or merely incapacitated). It also appears in sources as "harem", dedicated women, who are obviously not destroyed. The kings were stated to be killed; everyone else was neutralized in the most effective way, whether they became casualties of war, or displaced refugees, or defectors like Gibeon.
So when you go to the original sources and culture, both Jewish and Christian review has hardly ever had problems with the righteousness of these wars. Only a recent skeptical view has separated itself from this testimony and invented a dichotomy. I doubt there are any actual gnostic texts that use these German arguments!
In sum, if we look at the divergences (rather than the convergences as I prefer), you'd have a Monad that has less power to create than its emanation does, you'd have a Yahwist culture for thousands of years that would have been walking in complete deception like every other culture, you'd have a Jesus that totally embodies that culture but that is also believed to be totally against it, and you'd have no power by this Monad to do anything about it except by random chance this Jesus happens to figure the Monad out (but still doesn't succeed in getting his message across). See why I don't focus on the divergences. I think it's more worthwhile to say, suspend for now the question of how this worked in history and just get the core points that anything we see in ourselves must be present in the Monad and anything we see in Jesus must have been consistent with the reality he lived in.