IANAChristian, but OTTOMH “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, that you do unto me.” and “Love the Lord with all your heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself. Upon these two commandments hang the whole of the law and all the prophets.” I have vague knowledge of a risen Jesus calling tongues of fire to descend from heaven and empower the apostles so that they could bring salvation to all nations.
You are correct. Various sages have decided just how often a man should have sex with his wife, based on his job and other factors. If a husband refuses to have sex with his wife, she has grounds for a divorce.
But, the Essenes, with their celibacy and disgust for the material world were Jews. There have been other ascetic movements in Judaism. I know of none that lasted.
I’ve got nothing much to add here, but something did inspire me to dig out the CD’s of Jesus Christ Superstar. If I may quote (not excessively, I hope):
Paul was preaching and writing letters against Gnosticism at least 20 years before the church developed a serious hierarchy. Doctrine was still in flux for another hundred years, or so. (I am also not aware that all Gnostics rejected the idea of leaders who interpreted the Divine order; I would think that most groups eventually wind up with someone setting the tone and the doctrine.)
This is not to say that the second and third century Christians might not have looked askance at the “chaotic” nature of the Gnostics, but as far as I know, a lack of hierarchy was not a primary objection to Gnosticism.
I wish that I could agree with this. (It may depend on how one defines “serious persecution.”) Certainly, the heyday for burning heretics and launching wars against groups of heretics did not get into full swing until around the eleventh or twelfth centuries. However, banishment, ostracism, and other expressions of physical excommunication started fairly early. In North Africa, there was a fairly nasty period following the persecution of Diocletian where there was a lot of bitterness between those who had accepted imprisonment and torture for the faith and those who had either (nominally) renounced the faith or had gone into hiding to escape persecution. Once the Church was made legal, the various factions of (lower case) orthodox, Arians, Manichaeans, Pelagians, and others had a distressing habit of rioting in the streets to demonstrate that the other guys were destroying God’s Truth. Such riots often led to bloodshed and death.
You might want to look at the post I responded to again as well as my post. Your comment is completely irrelevant to the point I was making. The time frame of when torture started has nothing to do with it.
Arianists were executed following the condemnation of the their doctrine in 380, but the death of Priscillian, around 386 AD, is often considered as the first execution of an heretic.
The first thing that I think you will find is that they were more a movement than a sect. Gnosticism got off the ground at the same time or slightly before Christianity. It included a number of general beliefs, incorporated differently by different people, that could be either expressed on their own or included in ways that modified other beliefs.
A very loose analogy might be to New Age beliefs, today, which might display in Wiccan or Neo-pagan traditions or in Westernized reworkings of several Eastern mystical traditions or which might take form in wholly separate approaches to religion or even attach themselves to some groups within Christianity. (This is not a great analogy, given that Wicca and Neo-Paganism (to say nothing of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism), preceded New Age beliefs by tens to thousands of years. The point is more that the general beliefs do not seem to have been organized into a coherent structure held by all Gnostics.)
As Christianity was introduced to an area, its new adherents might have been recruited from among existing Gnostics or else Gnostic beliefs might be brought to a newly proselytized Christian region to influence or shape the way that Christianity developed in that area.
The point was in response to the question regarding an opposition to Gnosticism because it was anti-hierarchy. Paul’s epistles, aside from the three “pastoral” Epistles that most scholars attribute to a later author, were written at a time when there was no clearly defined hierarchy passing down the “truth.” (This is one reason why some people claim that Paul, not Jesus, “invented” Christianity–so much of what appears to be Paul’s personal views are now a basis of much Christian theology.) At the time Paul was writing, he could go storming back into meetings of the Twelve and demand that they change their views of Gentile converts.
Since Paul wrote against Gnostic views in some letters at a time when the hierarchy and doctrine was not rigidly defined, this would be evidence that the conflict between (what became) mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism preceded the period when a hierarchy had begun to arise within Christianity.
It does not mean that later conflicts were never fueled by conflicts over authority, only that the conflict preceded that authority.
No. It’s not worth getting into, but priests are not forbidden to have sex. They are forbodden to have sex outside of marriage, and are not given both sacraments within the church. However, the reasons are as much practical as spiritual. The church wants priests devoted to the needs of the flock, not their blood relations.
Plus, raising a family on a preist’s salary is hard.
Not that there aren’t also spiritual reasons, but the practical ones were the reason we started doing it.
You’re right. It’s a bit confusing because it seems to have borrowed from several other religions and philosophies including Christianity, and it’s various leaders then sprin kled in their own ideas as they saw fit. Not that much different than any other religion I suppose.
From what I read Jesus influenced them to adopt certain Christian ideas and they in turn influnced Christianity with their own ideas that certain other branches of Christianity didn’t like. Some groups became known as Christian Gnostics. They flourished in the second and third centuries but all but disappeared when Christianity became official and they were declared heretics.
In a feeble defense of my previous post I offer this
In the beliefs section I found this
HA told ya!
of course this is only one {and probably a minor one at that} of several theological reasons that the “official” church disliked them. It occurred later in the history of Christian Gnostic relations.
Gnostics also had radically different interpretations of the OT. Jesus said “I have not come to change one dot, one tittle of the law.”. The apostles occasionaly cite a story from the OT, and don’t suggest any re-interpretation except ‘You see this prophecy here? That was about our friend the carpenter.’. After ( I can’t remember if it was Peter or Paul) the vision of G-d lifting up a sheet and uncovering nonkosher food three times, an apostle says that law has changed. The other apostles and founding theologians agree that Jesus has fulfilled various things and that the old covenant with G-d is no longer binding.
But all of that is dependent on the belief that the G-d of the OT is the one true god, that the prophets of the OT were true prophets delivering His message, that the covenant with Israel was valid, etc.
Mainstream Christianity could, and of course did, recruit Jews- “We’ve got news about new profits, and the Messiah!”. The Gnostics were far less successful “Hi there, everything you thought you knew about G-d and the Bible was wrong.”
:smack: That was a mistake due to having too many windows open at once. It was not my intention to imply that the founders of Christianity were motived by greed.
