Christianity's Hidden History

[Liudmilla]

http://www.newsday.com/features/books/n ... -headlines

This was an article that appeared in a local newspaper. It raises some "interesting" questions.

[Justin Kissel]

What interesting questions? It discusses Elaine Pagels? Pagels is a pseudo-scholar who's research I wouldn't, at this point, touch with a 10 foot pole (and yes, I have read some of the material Pagels has published). And I don't find it odd that it'd be interesting, that's people like Pagel's whole schtick: come up with some strange, interesting perspective, dig up quotes and historical examples and rip them from their context, and then claim to have insight into Christianity or the Bible.

[Liudmilla]

I'm going to have to learn how to instill into the written word, that toungue-in-cheek, sort of sacrastic turn of phrase that can be so prevalent in the spoken word ...especially in Russian... considered from that view...the word "interesting" takes on a whole wealth of color....

[Seraphim Reeves]

I would have taken the article more seriously, had it's author even understood (since she's obviously not even read) any of the Orthodox polemic against gnosticism. The Fathers knew full well what gnosticism was (and never characterized it as "know-it-all-ism".) In fact many fathers spoke of a "true gnosis", and even a small reading of Orthodox Fathers makes it quite clear this "true gnosis" is a live and well in Orthodox Christianity...including the idea that true understanding often comes in ways which rise far above rational categories or straight discursive logic (namely, through paradox.)

The funny thing about the original gnostics themselves (and their modern day apologists, who oddly enough would probably be horrified by the expectations of most early gnostic sects - complete abstinance from meat and sexual relations of any sort, a rejection of the idea of this world having any value or goodness of itself, etc.) is that they can be accused of the same thing as the likes of Pagels and others with "itching ears" - they really don't understand much about the "real thing" (real Christianity, which allows for this "true gnosis"), for if they did they'd realize just how bad a substitution heretical gnosticism is.

For example, for all of the talk about gnosticism being opposed to Orthodoxy because the latter is "rationalistic", it is precisely because the gnostics themselves didn't get paradox, and were simplitic in their thinking, that they thought the "Old Testament God" was in fact a "demiurge", a lesser deity who wants to keep us all in the dark, and is prone to baseness and cruelty. It is they who lack genuine gnosis, they who perish for a lack of knowlege, which the Scripture warns against.

Seraphim