Yes, David, I've just been trying to sort out the Jameses (is your James the
Just the NT epistler?). I think the James Robin has in mind relative to the
Gnostics must be St James of Campostela, whose cult in the Middle Ages gave
rise to the famous pilgrimages beginning in the 10th or 11th century (as I
recall) and who for probably quite other reasons is also known as the patron
saint of alchemy. That puts him squarely in the Hermetic tradition on which
the Gnostics drew so heavily. But he's a different James than the epistler,
isn't he?
By the way, I highly recommend _Jacobus Magnus_, composed by the Galician
group Milladoiro (whose name is the Portuguese word for the small white
stones left by the pilgrims on the road to Compostela) and recorded with the
English Chamber Orchestra on a Green Linnet CD of the late 1990s. I also
love Milladoiro's early '90s composition _Galicia No Tempo_ (Gallicia
through time)--another Green Linnet CD--which was commissioned as part of a
big exhibition on the art, culture, and history of Spain's Celts. (And The
Chieftains _Santiago_ is a wonderful collaboration with some of the
Milladoiro musicians, along with others such as Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder,
and Los Lobos--you can hear some of the same folk themes in all three works,
bent to the generic demands of each project, which is fascinating.
Candice
> 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
|