Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Saturday, October 3rd, 2026
Nature of the Hoard
972 manuscripts
In the form of scrolls or fragments of scrolls
The fragments in Cave 4 are in >15,000 pieces
Mostly parchment, some papyrus, and one of copper
Written mostly in Hebrew, about 15% in Aramaic, and a few in Greek
Dated 3rd C BC – ...
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Thursday, September 24th, 2026
Nature of the Hoard
12 codices
Contain 52 tractates (51 bound and one unbound)
The unbound tractate, formerly ‘Codex XIII,’ was found inside the front cover of Codex VI
Comprise at least parts of 1139 pages of text
Written in Coptic.
Dated to the 4th C AD.
Principally gnostic – ...
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Sunday, July 19th, 2026
Suppose that we have justified a Gnostic cosmology and cosmogony of the usual form: hierarchical heavens presided over by a more or less tripartite God and its Aeons and Luminaries and so on, a material world existing as the failed creative effort of a Demiurge, humans containing particles of divinity ...
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Thursday, July 16th, 2026
Secondary Texts
Modern
Brakke, D (2010) The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity, Harvard University Press.
Ehrman, B (2003) Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, Oxford University Press
Jonas, H (1958) The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, ...
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Sunday, July 12th, 2026
The massively complicated cosmogony, cosmology, and metaphysics of Gnosticism often strikes students as merely fantastical. I propose, however, that a very large part of it can be explained as an attempt to integrate a small set of not-obviously-coherent principles and presuppositions. Amongst those are the following, listed here in no ...
Posted in Arguments, Philosophy, Religion | 1 Comment »
Friday, July 3rd, 2026
Genesis 6:4 in the KJV says
There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Here ‘giants’ translates ...
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Saturday, June 27th, 2026
Plato is not now generally thought of as being overly sympathetic to the mystical path to knowledge – the later position of the Academy notwithstanding – yet in the Phaedrus 244a-245c, 265b and Symposium 210e-211b, Plato makes claims that seem to amount to an acknowledgement that there are paths to ...
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Thursday, June 25th, 2026
Powers aren’t Persons
The status of the Holy Spirit has often been a bone of contention amongst sectarians and is central to many of the heresies that the Church had had to fight off. it seems to have been a hypostatization of the Divine Presence or the Divine inspiration that ...
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Saturday, June 20th, 2026
It’s remarkable the amount of incoherence there is in this merely speculative cosmology. One that struck me in the first paragraphs is that the Neoplatonists do not succeed in supporting the consistency of their claims that ‘The One’ (το ‘εν) is absolutely united and singular and perfect and also that ...
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Saturday, May 23rd, 2026
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presents a theory of love fitting a comic poet. Ignoring the details included to explain/excuse homosexuality, the story is roughly that humans were originally spherical beings with no distinction of sexes, then the gods divided us, forming a male and a female out of each divided ...
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