>>18325739
>Gnosticism popped up too frequently and too early for there to be absolutely nothing to it.
No it didn't? All of the Gnostic Gospels save for Thomas are dated to the absolute earliest to the 2nd Century AD.

>>18325739
>Christianity is self-admittedly a branch-off of a religion that followed John the Baptist
Fucking source? When has Christianity "admitted" this?

>>18325743
Nope. Based on fragments of the original Greek versions the Nag Hammadi texts were originally translated from, they are now concluding that the Gnostic gospels date back to the 1st century.
Cope.

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>>18325755
>they are now concluding that the Gnostic gospels date back to the 1st century.

Satan was behind it, doctrines of demons

>>18325875
Why would Satan push for Gnosticism? They were big Jesus freaks

>>18327120
No they weren't, they just used him as a mouthpiece for their Neo-platonist ideas, Gnostics despised the God of the Old Testament, the same God Jesus worships in the NT.

>>18327139
>they just used him as a mouthpiece for their Neo-platonist ideas
Sounds just like Christians
>Gnostics despised the God of the Old Testament,
Yep but they loved Jesus and believed in his sacrifice for their sins therefore they are saved according to Christians. So you're saying Satan saved them

>>18327145
>Sounds just like Christians
You think the average Christian is a Neo-Platonist?
>Yep but
Then they were Satanists, by definition.
>they loved Jesus and believed in his sacrifice for their sins
LOL no they didn't. They thought the Atonement was absolute lunacy, THEY are the ones who came up with the subtitution doctrine, the one that says that Jesus only appeared to have been crucified and it was someone else who was made up to look like Jesus, which Muslims would later adopt in their scripture.

Gnostic concepts are very Greek in nature, so no, John and Jesus wouldn’t have had anything to do with them.

>>18327149
The average christian doesn't know anything but the actual theologians of course they are lol. Satanists don't love Jesus they love Satan but most are larping atheists. Many gnostics were docetic that's why they had beliefs like these

>>18327164
>but the actual theologians of course they are lol.
What theologians? Be specific.
>Satanists don't love Jesus
Gnostics love the Jesus of their imagination, the one who descended from the Pleroma on behalf of the Monad to liberate the sparks from this world created by the Demiurge.
>Many gnostics were docetic
Which directly denied Jesus ever suffering on the Cross.

No matter how you slice it, Gnostic beliefs are exactly what Satan would want you to believe.

>>18325739
You're speaking about Gnosticism as though it were an original idea tied to Christianity. It's the conspiracy theory among religions. It pops up everywhere by anyone desperate enough to reach for "muh lying elites" except they're divine instead of Jewish this time. It appears all over the place.

>>18327168
I mean to be fair, it is a legitimate historical mystery the exact relationship between early Christianity and Gnosticism. Did Gnosticism exists even before Jesus came? Is Gnosticism an offshoot of early Christianity? Did they exist in parallel? Did they influence each other and if so how much? Did Christianity influence Gnosticism or was it vice versa and to what degree?

>>18327172
There is always a million and one hypotheses in question form, but the one that holds most water is that Gnosticism is a Middle Platonic theory that parasitizes on existing religions and its most widespread form logically follows the most widespread religion. Islam and Judaism have the same problems, although the earliest truly identifiable forms of Gnosticism appear around 1st century, following Middle Platonism.
It's impressive lore but once you see the conspiracy core of it, you can't unsee it.

>>18327180
>. Islam and Judaism have the same problems
Indeed, Islam has Sufism and there's the Neo-platonist monstruosity that is Kabbalah

>>18327184
I'd argue Gnosticism is the natural conclusion of Platonism. In the works of Plato and later Middle Platonist and Neoplatonist texts, core Gnostic ideas like the Monad and Demiurge are already present (just read Plato's work Timaeus). Neoplatonism itself is basically reskinned Gnosticism. It's why the Kabbalah sounds so similar to Gnosticism, because both it and Gnosticism ultimately deprive from Platonism. Gnosticism itself only exists because people interpreted Christianity through the lens of Platonism.

This is why I laugh when certain e-crusaders say that Platonism is “proto-Christianity” when Plato literally pioneered the core ideas of Gnosticism and if he converted to Christianity.

>>18327192
>if he converted to Christianity.
Forgot to remove this mb

>>18327192
Plato's demiurge is benevolent. Gnosticism is no smaller leap from Platonism than Christianity.

>>18327167
How do you know what "Satan" would have you believe? Do you share a brain with this entity?

>>18328121
>How do you know what "Satan" would have you believe?
By studying the Bible.

>>18328126
Oh you believe in the Hebrew Scriptures? Ah, a common folly in the West. Better bless Israel so YHWH will bless you. :^)

>>18328128
Israel is the Church, not some secular democracy run by pedophiles.

>>18327120
They were big freaks for a false Jesus, a false gospel, and a false God. Their religion led to damnation alone.

>>18328128
We are Israel, sir.

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>>18327149
>They thought the Atonement was absolute lunacy
The idea of God unjustly subjecting his innocent son to a cruel death in order to satisfy his sense of "justice" as a prerequisite for showing mercy to a subset of humans is absolute lunacy.

If I have to choose a justice-based atonement theory, I would go with the one attributed to Marcionites, where it's specifically the injustice of Jesus' death, demonstrating a failure of justice on the part of the demiurge, that allows Jesus to demand freedom for any who would go with him.

I've had similar thoughts. There existed some kind of "Baptismal" religion centered around John which Christianity hijacked to legitimise itself and the Mandeans are the only apparent descendants of this original community, but clearly contaminated with many later innovations and syncretism.
>>18325749
John the Baptist was already a major public figure preaching heretical(from a Jewish perspective) ideas to followers of his own before Jesus, as the NT records. His whole encounter with Jesus may be fictional and picked up by Mandeans from Christians. Either way, it would be a compelling source for some "Gnostic" ideas.

Until recently there was a website which did a schizophrenic Bible analysis with methods that seem certainly incorrect but which curiously arrived at extremely similar conclusions to Mandeanism, and the author didn't seem to display any knowledge that a religion closely aligning to his conclusions actually existed.
I've never been entirely sure what to make of it but what's clear is that the historical development of Christianity is fascinatingly complex.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250121012550/https://authentic-christianity.org/

>>18328175
No, the Gnostic stuff emerged because these movements (the John and the Jesus sects) were Jewish apocalyptic cults. They were opposed to the priests running the Jerusalem temple (the Saducceens), they thought that the temple has become corrupted, so they wanted to renew the Jewish religion and overthrow the priests, which they believed they would trigger some kind of end-time event and bring about the kingdom of God on Earth.

But, two things happened, first, their leaders were executed before they could become the messianic leaders they aspired to be, and second, in 66-74 AD the Jewish revolt did happen, and a Jewish apocalyptic-fundamentalist faction (the Sicarii) did take over the temple, but instead of an apocalypse, it only led to a Roman crackdown and he destruction of the temple.

So, the apocalyptic ideology was no longer sustainable, so all the groups that came from that milieu had to rethink what they were about. That's when some of them got super into more abstract mystical concepts and realms, which already had precedent in pagan and Jewish religion, even Paul himself used to be into a kind of proto-Kabbalah mysticism before his conversion. But the og John and Jesus sect wasn't like that, they were mostly about the apocalpyse.

>>18328186
>But the og John and Jesus sect wasn't like that, they were mostly about the apocalpyse
We really don't know enough about the John sect to say that, but your theory is good too.
The thing is, once the Jewish religious authorities of the time are rejected, there's nothing stopping these sects from mutating unorthodox ideas now that they're not beholden to an authority anymore. The practice of baptism is one such thing and could have come with any number of theological innovations, so I think some Proto-Gnostic ideas totally could date to this period.

>>18328188
>some Proto-Gnostic ideas totally could date to this period

The reason this is unlikely is that Gnosticism is very syncretic, much of its core ideas come from Greek philosophy, and these Jewish groups didn't come out of hellenized communities, but from rural hinterlands like Gallilea.

>>18328200
What do you make of Catharism which developed similar theology in pre-Renaissance Europe without apparent access to Greek philosophy?

>>18328200
NTA and I already said this in another recent thread, but you can actually get the core pleroma/kenoma and good God/demiurge conceptual divide (though maybe not in those terms) just from seeing that there are two different creation stories in Genesis that are in many ways opposed to each other, and, instead of trying to reconcile them by blurring the differences, you can just say there were two creations, the first good and the second maybe not so good, and we're in the second one.

Then once you've got the idea that there are at least two different gods talking through the Hebrew Bible without clear differentiation, you can come to all sorts of bizarre conclusions depending on how you imagine it should be diced it up. Like maybe half the laws in the Hebrew Bible shouldn't be taken so seriously, because "I desire mercy and not sacrifice" or "Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required" or "For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices." are from the true God, while all those parts of the law about how God really wants lots and lots of sacrifices are from the lesser god(s).

The fact that this division very conveniently syncretizes with some Greek ideas doesn't mean the Greek ideas are strictly required to inspire them.

>>18328225
And if the new testament is representative, taking snippets of scripture out of context and interpreting them in strange ways that the author likely didn't intend wasn't uncommon. Stuff that isn't prophetic in its original context gets interpreted as prophetic, stuff with no indication of allegorical intent gets interpreted allegorically, and things that aren't clearly being said by or about the messiah in a preincarnate state are nevertheless interpreted as if they were.

If the following saying from Matthew 7:9-11 goes back to a historical Jesus:
>Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for bread, would give a stone? Or if the child asked for a fish, would give a snake? If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Then I wonder if said historical Jesus read or heard about Numbers 21:5-7
>The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.
And thought, "Well, no God of mine would do such a thing!"

>>18327192
I think Gnosticism and early Christianity could have been influenced by Neo-Platonism without them necessarily being reproductions of it. I also think Gnosticism can be a heretical branch of Christianity that sprung up intertwined with the Christian religion and also not have been a fundamental theological premise for wider Christianity. Gnosticism itself does not read as the original set of beliefs, it reads as sort of an extra chapter added on to the life of Christ and the epistles. The entire premise of the Gnostic gospels, for example, makes a lot more sense if you already know the story and you know that Judas Iscariot was the betrayer and if you maybe find the resurrection a less than compelling ending. Subtract the context of Jesus's life, and the passion, and the resurrection, and just keep the bizarre cosmology of Gnosticism and the sect it self does not have much of a reason to exist. I'm not going to deny the existence of strange apocalyptic Jewish-sects and Classical philosophy that probably fed into this, but I view their beliefs as a reaction more than the pure substance.

>>18328225
>>18328228
Marcionism already has this good god/bad god distinction and displays no other overt Gnostic traits, so that's a good reference. While a lot of the more autistic details of Gnosticism probably come later, I think false-creator dualism is very ancient. As many have noted, Platonism does not actually postulate that idea, the Greek Demiurge is good, so why would the Greek idea necessarily underlie the Jewish one?

>>18328237
I believe Marcionism is closer to a pared down Gnosticism rather than Gnosticism being an expanded Marcionism, unless you think Marcion really did have the best grasp of what the apostle Paul was on about.

The autistic Gnostic Valentinus taught about the same time as Marcion in the first half of the second century, and IIRC the heresiologists think Marcion got his basic idea that Jesus' Father was in some way distinct from the Jewish God from the Gnostics rather than the other way around, though he emphasized faith over gnosis.

And the Gospel of John arguably shows signs of having been written after Thomas, which should put the spooky mystical insight part of Gnosticism pretty early as well. Though whether that could go back to a historical Jesus would depend on how far you think Jesus' "mystery of the kingdom God" which was given to his disciples, while "to those outside everything is done in parables" went.

>>18328251
>The autistic Gnostic Valentinus
*Well, maybe he himself wasn't *that* autistic, but over time his followers definitely got increasingly autistic with how elaborate their cosmology became.

>the Jesus movement
Arguement discarded

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>>18328132
>Eat my flesh & drink my blood
Kek. That Egyptian gayreek christing cult became the current cannibal vampire Christianity that still rules this world for over 2000 years.

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>>18328225
>two different creation stories in Genesis
Knowers will pick up what Paul is putting down in picrel.

>>18325739
I mean technically speaking the first people to whole-heartedly embrace the Gospel of John were the Valentinians, as far as I know. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

>>18328175
The Mandeans don't have any literature that mentions John from before Islam. It's very unlikely that they were legitimate followers of John the Baptist.

>>18329595
And how are you dating this? Just because they mention Islam in the text doesn't mean their entire lore is 100% written after Islam, these things were added later.

>>18329605
Well not all of their lore, as a community they have been proven to exist at least since the second century or so. Only their emphasis on John the baptist. He never actually teaches any mysteries or does anything particularly important in the Ginza Rabba. Repeated references to the River Jordan rarely mention him, and they don't do initiatory repentance baptism, which was as far as we can know, John's thing.

>>18329616
Nobody is all that important in their scriptures from what I read of them, so I wouldn't come to any conclusions just from that. The historical John might genuinely not have said that many interesting things himself.

>>18329624
He's never mentioned in Magic, Liturgy. Most of his mentions are in Arabic.