I'm not too sure about a marriage of James the Just and Gnosticism, Rob, my
understanding is that the Jerusalem church (up to AD 62) was quite
moralistic and severe in its adherence to Mosaic law. Tho' at the same time
it seemed to practise a kind of simple communism. I recall its adjuration to
Paul and his followers 'that (they) remember the poor'. I like the notion
that I have sometimes seen sadly proposed, that the Ebionite sect, their
name I believe meant 'the Lord's poor, who came to an extinction in
(Southern?) Turkey as unorthodox, were actually the descendants, as in
inheritors of traditions of the original Christian sect, so one is presented
with the plangent irony of the last remants of original Christianity being
expunged by the Church Trumphans.
But surely the sophisms of the Gnostics, the very Hellenic concern with
'Wisdom', Hagia Sophia, is unlike the Judaic line?
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
A Chide's Alphabet
www.chidesplay.8m.com
Painting Without Numbers
www.paintstuff.20m.com/default.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/default.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 11:36 PM
Subject: Re: Letter to a leftist friend/the real mystics/innocents
> Candice:
>
> With reservations, as this isn't my area ...
>
>
> > The authors of the NT didn't really have the OT, as such, did
> > they?
>
> The Septuagint was compiled/translated in 250 BC, which means well before
> the NT is written, there's a (relatively) fixed OT canon, roughly
equivalent
> to the one we have today.
>
> > They and their legatees were also perhaps our
> > first religious censors to the extent that they actively suppressed the
> > Apocrypha from the work which became the New Testament because it
diverged
> > at so many points from the party line on Jesus they were proselytizing.
>
> Depends +which+ Apochrypha -- if it's the Gnostic Gospels (Thomas, Truth,
> etc.) I'd agree, but if we're talking about the Childhood of Jesus
gospels,
> I'd have to say they were right on grounds of taste alone.
>
> And obviously, the Gospels-as-we-know-them are post-Pauline. James,
pushing
> for a Judaic-centred version of "Christianity" lost out to the
proselytising
> preach-to-the-Romans P(S)aul [the hatchetman of the Sanhedrin before he
> threw an epileptic fit on the way to Damascus]. Isn't there an argument
> that the Gnostic versions reflect James?
>
> [Sorry, Candice, I'm wittering a bit, and you'll probably cut me (rightly)
> down in flames.]
>
> Robin
>
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