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Date Posted: 23:15:19 04/13/06 Thu
Author: Valentinius
Subject: Pericope
In reply to: Witch of Endor 's message, "The Druze Conspiracy" on 23:07:36 04/13/06 Thu

In Christianity, Docetism is the belief, regarded by most Christian theologians as heretical, that Jesus did not have a physical body; rather, that his body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion.

This belief is most commonly attributed to the Gnostics, who believed that matter was evil, and hence that God would not take on a material body. This sort of statement, however, is rooted in the idea that a divine spark is imprisoned within the material body and that the material body is in itself an obstacle, deliberately created by an evil lesser god (the demiurge) for this purpose, that prevents man from seeing his divine origin. Humanity is, in essence, asleep.

Docetism could be further explained as the view that, because the human body is temporary and the spirit is eternal, the body of Jesus therefore must have been an illusion and his crucifixion as well. It could be compared to how a Buddhist speaks about illusion: illusion is everything that is temporary, not everything that is not real. Even so, saying that the human body is temporary has a tendency to undercut the importance of the belief in resurrection of the dead and the goodness of created matter, and is in opposition to this orthodox view.

Docetism was rejected by the ecumenical councils and mainstream Christianity, and largely died out during the first millennium A.D. Catharism, and other surviving gnostic movements, incorporated docetism into their beliefs, but the movement was destroyed by the genocide of the Albigensian Crusade.

Islam also teaches that Jesus's crucifixion was an illusion ("… They did not kill him and they did not crucify him, but it was made to seem so to them..." (Qur'an, 4:157)).

Zostrianos is a sethian gnostic text from the New Testament apocrypha. The main surviving copies come from the Nag Hammadi library, although it is heavily damaged (although on a word-by-word basis).

Like Marsenes and Allogenes, the text concerns a vision received by a man named Zostrianos and explains and enumerates, in great detail, the emanations that the gnostics said god (the true, highest, god) produced, in their esoteric cosmology. Within the text there are indications that the sethians had developed ideas of monism, an idea from Platonism which is thought to have become part of sethianism towards the end of the 3rd century.

The Sethian were a group of ancient Gnostics, that date their existence before Christianity. Their influence spread throughout the Mediterranean into the later systems of the Thomasines, the Basilideans and the Valentinians. Their thinking, though it is predominantly Judaic in foundation, is arguably strongly influenced by Platonism. Sethians are so called for their veneration of the biblical Seth, third son of Adam and Eve, who is depicted in their myths of creation as a divine incarnation; consequently, the offspring or 'posterity' of Seth are held to comprise a superior elect within human society.

Pre-Christian texts

The Apocalypse of Adam
Christian texts

The Apocryphon of John
The Thought of Norea
The Trimorphic Protennoia
The Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians
Later texts (arguably with a Platonist influence)

Zostrianos
Three Steles of Seth
Marsenes

Commonly, the Sethian cosmogonic myth describes an intended prologue to the events of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch, which by its emendation brings about a radical reinterpretation of the typical orthodox Jewish conception of creation, and the divine's relation to reality. This myth is typically presupposed by Sethian manuscripts, and occasionally by those of later schools. Though many of their concepts derived from a fusion of Platonic and Neoplatonic concepts with the Old Testament are not unique since Philo also engaged in the same behavior.

The Sethian cosmogony as most famously contained in the Apocryphon ('Secret book') of John describes an unknown God, the same as Paul had done in the Acts of the Apostles chapter 17 verse 23. The latter conception defines God through a series of explicit positive statements, themselves universal but in the divine taken to their superlative degrees: as well as being explicitly male, he is omniscient, omnipotent and truly benevolent. The Sethian conception of God is, by contrast, defined through negative theology exclusively: he is immovable, invisible, intangible, ineffable; commonly, 'He' is seen as being hermaphroditic, a potent symbol for being, as it were, 'all-containing' but identity wise hermaphroditic. Though by attaching such descriptions to God would be cataphatic since saying what God is in its self is the opposite of apophatic. See Essence Energies Distinction.

This negative theology mode of thinking about God is found throughout Gnosticism, Vendantic Hinduism, Platonic and Aristotle theology as well. It may be seen in Judaic sources as well. In essence, Sethianism posits a God that may not be described in any rational sense; much like Plato (see Parmenides) and Philo had also stated earlier in history but it is only possible to say what God isn't, and the experience of it remains something, again, in defiance of rational description. Apophatic or Negative theology is also a strong and prominent tradition in the Greek Orthodox church's theology. Note in Greek Orthodox Christian theology, the Father of the Trinity is only called "Father" to connotate first origin or primordial origin of the Trinity. The Father apophatically of the Trinity is beyond sexual identity, beyond being anything and or hermaphroditic.

The emanation of the spiritual universe
This original God went through a series of emanations, during which its essence is seen as spontaneously expanding into many successive 'generations' of paired male and female beings, called 'aeons'. The first of these is the Barbelo, a figure common throughout Sethianism, who is coactor in the emanations that follow. The aeons that result can be seen as representative of the various attributes of God, themselves indiscernible when not abstracted from their origin. In this sense, the Barbelo and the emanations are akin to a poetic device allowing an otherwise utterly unknowable God to be discussed in a meaningful way amongst initiates. Collectively, God and the aeons comprise the sum total of the spiritual universe, known as the Pleroma.

At this point in the myth the universe is still entirely non-material. However, the increasing fragmentation of the nature of God into more and more aeons led, eventually, to instability within this primordial universe. This growing problem reached its climax with the appearance of the lowest aeon, called Sophia (Gr. "wisdom"). In most versions of the Sethian myth, Sophia attempts to surmount the rigid hierarchy of the divine nature, trying to approach close to the God that resides at its centre. In other cases, Sophia imitates God's actions in performing an emanation of her own, without the prior approval of the other aeons in the Pleroma. In both cases, this intransigence causes a crisis within the Pleroma, leading to the creation of demiurge (gnosticism)|Yaldabaoth]], a 'serpent with a lion's head'. This figure is commonly known as the demiurge, after the figure in Plato's Timaeus (Gr. demiurgos - "one who shapes" or "craftsman" [typical translation]; "Tame Worker / One Who Domesticates" [literal translation]). This being is at first hidden by Sophia but subsequently escapes, stealing a portion of divine power from her in the process.

The creation of matter
Using this stolen power, Yaldabaoth creates a material world in imitation of the divine Pleroma. To complete this task, he spawns a group of entities known collectively as Archons, 'petty rulers' and craftsmen of the physical world. Like him, they are commonly depicted as theriomorphic, having the heads of animals. At this point the events of the Sethian narrative begin to cohere with the events of Genesis, with the demiurge and his archontic cohorts fulfilling the role of the creator. As in Genesis, the demiurge declares himself to be the only god, and that none exist superior to him; however, the audience's knowledge of what has gone before casts this statement, and the nature of the creator itself, in a radically different light.

The demiurge creates Adam, during the process unwittingly transferring the portion of power stolen from Sophia into the first physical human body. He then creates Eve from Adam's rib, in an attempt to isolate and regain the power he has lost. By way of this he attempts to rape Eve who now contains Sophia's divine power; several texts depict him as failing when Sophia's spirit transplant itself into the Tree of Knowledge; thereafter, the pair are 'tempted' by the serpent, and eat of the forbidden fruit, thereby once more regaining the power that the demiurge had stolen.

As is evident, the addition of the prologue radically alters the significance of events in Eden; rather than attributing the fall to human weakness in breaking God's fiat, Sethians (and their inheritors) locate the ultimate cause of the fall in the instability of the divine nature itself, in the actions of Sophia that precipitated the entire cosmic drama. The 'fall' of Adam and Eve thus becomes something of a redemption, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden becomes a heroic, salvific figure rather than an adversary of humanity or a 'proto-Satan'. Eating the fruit of Knowledge is the first act of human salvation from cruel, oppressive powers. This bears a resemblance to His Dark Materials in which the 'Fall' is necessary to save the world. The references to Sophia also appear in the final work of that series The Book of Dust

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