Chapter Two: Jesus Gnosis
1. In the time that breathes within the book we call the Old Testament, there were great Prophets warning their people that the dominating ways of a Younger Culture were contaminating the ancient mysteries of Israel.
2. In the time of Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, a prophet came to walk the earth, in continuation of that tradition, and in foundation of a further teaching, a mystic way to knowing God. His name was Jesus.
3. Three books relate his story as prophet and teacher, calling him Anointed One, calling him King. But still they knew him to be a man. These authors are known to us as Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
4. Another version, a different interpretation, developed through the first century, stating that Jesus was not just a man, but God, and only through this Christ was salvation possible. These believers we know as the followers of Peter.
5. Countering this new reading were followers of the apostle Thomas. They believed in sundry ways and wrote in a wealth of books that the prophet Jesus taught all that God is within each, a knowledge known as gnosticism.
6. But a fourth book known now as the Gospel of John was written in direct negation of the followers of Thomas and in complete affirmation of the school of Peter saying Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Lord God. So says Elaine Pagels.
7. In addition, the character of Thomas was slandered in that Gospel of John not once but three times, an early version of a modern political smear campaign. This is the one and only gospel to speak of the character that history knows as the Doubting Thomas.
8. In time, that school of Peter, passing on through the author and apostle John the Evangelist, through John’s student Polycarp, the bishop of the church at Smyrna, now in Turkey, was led by Irenaius, Polycarp’s student and the second bishop of the church at Lugdunum in Gaul, who lived to see the third century of Christianity arrive.
9. Irenaius’ desire was to create an orthodox Christianity, refuting all mystical and Gnostic ways as schismatic heresies, writing the five-volume treatise ‘On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis.’
10. He vigorously suggested that a four formed divinely inspired gospel be canonized, consisting of the synoptic books of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, but underpinned by the Logos theology of John.
11. In the fourth century, Christianity became legalized under the Roman Emperor Constantine,
12. who ordered all bishops to come together in The First Council of Nicaea, in 325 AD, the first ecumenical conference of bishops of the Christian Church, to quell the disorder arising from schisms, and establish an orthodox religion,
13. where the Nicene creed was established, saying Jesus is "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,” "begotten, not made," and "of one substance with the Father,"
14. thereby endorsing the arguments of Irenaius and validating the Gospel of John.
15. Anyone who refused to endorse the Creed faced exile.
16. Soon after, all heretical books were ordered to be destroyed,
17. and more than 16 centuries of orthodox domination and persecution of heresies would endure.
18. In 1945, the complete Gospel of Thomas, along with 51 other Gnostic books, was discovered in Nag Hammadi.
19. The Gnostic prophecies of the mystical holy man Jesus still live:
20. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you
."
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