All the verses I quoted for pisteuo are active verbs. John 14:1 and Acts 19:4 are both imperative. The only difference is plural versus singular, and Paul uses the aorist which refers to a state of being rather than an immediate action, i.e., "be believing". But it's rare that one needs tense to interpret accurately what a text says.

On my own, I looked at all the classic discrepancies alleged in the Bible, and found that 100% of them rely upon assuming one knows better rather than looking into the culture to see if the person could have had a consistent meaning. The same is true of other holy books like the Quran; if you give the source credit you can resolve every charge of contradiction. The same is not true of any major narrative franchise or cinematic universe proposed nowadays: they all have admitted irreconcilable narrative gaps that are spotted by fans; some of them are retconned by special pleading, and some just ignored. Watson told Holmes he was shot in the arm, then later he was shot in the leg, with no evidence he was shot in both places, and the fans all know that and accept it. But the tensions in long-accepted texts are accepted by fans because they do have reconciliations, not because they are judged irreconcilable; that comes from a contrary spirit. This is why I'm so open to apocrypha and pseudepigrapha: because most of the time they really are reconcilable (and on occasion, when the fans themselves did point out a true impossibility, that remains known and accepted as a reason for the text to have lesser status than others). All the 19th-century skepticism against the Bible rejected the text as culturally transmitted and stood against it to fight it; in prior eras nobody could mass together to do that.

Kabbalah means "received" and should have meant any formal teaching. I pointed out that the same word, in Greek, was used for the confession of the resurrection in the 30s, as evidenced later. It was used by proto-orthodox, by gnostics, by rabbinicals, and by Essenes for their formal creeds and symbols. Only the rabbinical strand retained it as the word "kabbalah", so nowadays it means a narrative containing ten core attributes, the withdrawal of light and the divine spark, and the return of human superpowers, very much like gnosticism with its aeons. Its only problem is if it denies the nature of God while getting sidetracked with its human advancement.

Like I said before Jesus came to teach a message of love and forgiveness and spiritual transformation. There's nothing to prove here.

If it's not proven to someone that love is the way, the message doesn't click. Love requires both the spirit and the mind; if I fail by losing focus on either, I apologize.

This takes me back to the council of Nicaea in 325 AD, where Emperor Constantine and the bishops chose which gospels would be canonized and which would be hidden or destroyed. The alternative gospels, Gospel of Thomas a collection of sayings of Jesus given secretly to the apostles, those that gave Mary Magdalene her true power, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Truth, The Gospel of the Egyptians and many more were rejected, their teachings suppressed for centuries. These gospels were branded heresy. Their wisdom was forbidden. And the memory blurred until only fragments remained.

Didn't happen, fren. There's no Nicene action about the Scriptural canon. I find that Jerome mentioned that Nicea used Judith in its deliberations, but canonization happened later. There was no suppression of any document there except the writings of Arius, there was no branding any of these as heresy, there was no forbidding their reading. The Gospel of Thomas found was dated 340; its use was noted by Cyril in the 4th century and continued by Manichaeans in the 5th. The Gospel of Mary didn't circulate enough to get much notice from the church, it appears to be 2nd-century origin from its framing, and only has a couple Coptic and Greek manuscripts. The Gospel of Philip also circulated into later in the 4th century, though its origin may be 3rd-century in Syriac thought. The Gospel of Truth which we have may have been one rejected by Irenaeus, or may have been written in the 4th century, but it had enough literary merit that it circulated quite awhile and was knowably related to (but distinct from) Valentinian gnosticism. The Gospel of the Egyptians (Coptic), with five ogdoads, Sakla creating archons, is also late in Nag Hammadi but I don't see its immediate provenance (it sounds quite late with its developments).

So, trying to make the best reconciliation of your statement, what I find is: (1) Constantine did make up a list, exact contents unknown, of books to be included in 50 Bibles he ordered for printing for Constantinople; this is not likely equal to the dual canon that arose later. (2) There are no acts through the 4th century calling for destruction of old texts circulating among Christians besides those of Arius. (3) Nag Hammadi did take it on itself to protect (and lose track of) a number of the alternative books, which very few others were able to do; yet this was not active suppression or rejection. (4) There were individuals who deprecated individual books in exactly the same way any opinion was raised against any book, including some of the canonical books like Hebrews, 1-3 John, and Revelation. (5) The boundary between heresy and orthodoxy was pretty straightforward at this time, with the only blurry one being that Valentinus was condemned 200 years later (I can't prove that his works were burned) and some of the circulating works echo Valentinianism.

To paint a narrative in which a coordinated power actively suppressed and rejected apocrypha and pseudepigrapha would go against the fact that when there was active suppression and rejection we have clear marks of it. Now we could try the conspiracy theory that the powers subtly coached Christians toward accepting some and forgetting about others, without overt action, which is indeed a general trend that happens over centuries, but that potential framing doesn't agree with yours. What actually happens is that leaders either condemn books on their own initiative as voices in a continuum, or groups give formal condemnation in the cases of clearly defined heresies like that of Arius, or certain books are promoted to the neglect of other books. But for the most part Christian leaders allowed ideas to circulate so that they could be proven right or wrong, and only judged heresies after long periods of circulation. The idea that Christian emperors secretly judged writings to be detrimental to their retaining power is belied by their not taking formal action against them; I wouldn't have a problem with counting these emperors as engaging an informal war of attrition against them when noticed, but the manuscripts were too weakly supported already to be worthy of formal imperial attention.

But those fragments, those forbidden lines and half buried stories, refuse to die.

I'm all for going to all the sources, there's tremendous much in Egyptology for instance. They give alternatives of what was thought at the time. It rarely means that those at the time were all wrong and the hidden text was all correct; it usually only means that our current understanding has occasional neglected aspects. Considering all the uncovered stories we've now accessed, I don't see that much in the way of significant error. I'm pretty active about one such error, the loss of 7th-day Sabbath, but after 25 years of investigation I was finally able to reconcile church practice with the actual meaning of the 7th day, and I think such reconciliation is available for any gnostic tension.

When I say there's no evidence, it's an invitation for evidence (manuscripts and archaeology) to be produced. I greatly appreciate your producing narrative, which I judge on the likelihood of its fit to the known evidence.

Yes, Gnostics were subjected to censorship. However, it is known that efforts to destroy Gnostic texts were largely successful, resulting in the survival of very little writing by Gnostic thinkers and theologians. And yes, Gnostics were persecuted. Gnostic groups were often persecuted as a result of being declared a heresy. The response of orthodoxy to gnosticism significantly defined the evolution of Christian doctrine and church order. After gnostic and orthodox Christianity parted, Gnostic Christianity continued as a separate movement in some areas for centuries.

I don't see it. I see that Irenaeus ridiculed Valentinus, and Hippolytus condemned Naassenes, which would obviously chill some gnostic speech locally, but that is not censorship. There was no hierarchical structure and Irenaeus worked by voluntaryism and bridge-building, not authoritarianism. I don't see efforts to destroy gnostic texts. I see that gnostic teachers had a bad habit of mostly not committing to writing texts. As I said, Manichaeanism was the chief surviving aspect of gnosticism because it contained reconcilable elements instead of being a personality cult. Tertullian rehabilitated it, and then Augustine claimed what could still be retained of its usefulness. I might grant you that Theodosian I created a "parting of ways" in 381 or 382 (not under the name gnosticism but Manichaeanism), but I see nothing about suppression of the gnostic system in those edicts, only about generic (loosely enforced) deprecation of teachings against trinitarianism. There was no formal schism event for gnosticism that I see, and I try to find all the schism events!

There's no denial the persecution of Gnostics took place, for example, during the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade.

I didn't think we were talking about medieval times because that isn't about the Roman empire's fears but about the HRE's fears, which is quite different.

Peter the fisherman has a career described in the gospels and the two letters attributed to him. Why would I doubt his place as a unique leader among the disciples? Maybe you're trying to ask if I think him supreme as opposed to primary?

I also have no problem with greater study on the role of every Mary and other woman in the NT. It is very traditional to regard the Virgin Mary as a mirror for the divine feminine, and there's evidence this also transfers to Mary Magdalene (though some gnostics transferred it to their own love interests, which was generally regarded as a warning sign because demonstrably abused much more than used). I don't think Magdalene was silenced. The oral tradition that went into the Gospel of Mary was not strong, but now we have it and it fits with the rest. But what's overlooked is that the diatesseron gospels, whose glorification and ennoblement of women is now banally familiar to us, were cutting-edge at the time in their promotion of the feminine and contradicted the suppression of women in most other contemporary Hebrew, Greek, or Latin texts. So Mary was not silenced, but she was given a nonpareil place as first witness of the resurrection and her influence was demonstrated in hundreds of cases of Christian promotion of femininity. The fact that the Gospel of Mary is within that trend, and has a few unique aspects not found elsewhere, is not a real loss of any doctrine of femininity.

Similarly, Christians made exceeding much of the character of Sophia as depicted in their sourcetexts like Proverbs 8. They overcame Greek abstractions by presenting a real power compatible with the many prior indications in Judaism, and this overlapped with their high view of the Virgin and others. This is why they didn't neatly accept a message that Sophia ever erred, or indeed that the Virgin Mary ever did. It seems to me that every case that can be made, saying that something about females is neglected, can be answered by demonstration from orthodox tradition that it was not neglected but promoted. The primary contribution of the Gospel of Mary is the mystic experience, which is echoed in later anchorite traditions of gnosis and theoria; that experience developed from the first century but was only hinted at it in small bits and has taken centuries for any movement to get well-established views about. So I don't see much there for a story of silencing. We could certainly theorize together that certain truths were omitted or sidelined, but if they are really truths they can be tested objectively!