Papias-wrote-it theories

The following are my own theories: I thought they were needed, because they use the earliest "testimonies" properly, and don't dismiss Church Fathers on flimsy grounds. Also: they accept both the onomastic argument for the Gospels as biographies, and they are based on the Markan Priority theory.

Papias-wrote-it theories

The Gospels are biographies, not pure fiction, according to the onomastic argument. That doesn't imply that everything about the Gospels must then be perfectly true, which appears to be claimed by the inventors of the argument, it just means that there is a historical background wherein the personage refers to people that for the most part were real people, but we must also have a biographer. What indications do we have about a historical biographer on the life of Jesus? We have Papias of Hierapolis, who wrote a commentary on the logions of Matthew and John Mark! According to the history Papias used logia from Matthew and John Mark to write his commentaries. These logia sets were not written down in order, nor did they provide a coherent biography. Matthew wrote his logia set in chronological order, but not as anecdotes, and he wrote them in Hebreew, or more likely in Aramaic. John Mark wrote his logia set in Greek, and he wrote them as short stories that he allegedly recorded from the apostle Peter, but they were not arranged in chronological order. What did then Papias do? He interviewed elders and other persons with indirect knowledge about the Jesus events. Why? Probable answers: 1. he wanted to identify important persons in the Jesus movement, 2. he wanted to establish a context for the logia of Matthew, in order to interpret them, 3. he wanted to establish a chronology and context also for the logia of John Mark.

Papias-Mark theories

To accomplish that, he wrote a sketch of the life of Jesus, and this sketch is the most original proto-Mark. It may have contained Matthew statements that are absent from our Gospel of Mark, but they may also have been absent, because Papias kept the Matthew logia in a separate set. So in essence Papias is the collator of Gospel of Mark, which was called the Memoirs of the Apostles.

Papias-Matthew theories

Papias translated Matthew's logia from Aramaic to Greek that he kept in a series which is now regarded as Q. Papias' list contained more logia than our currently known Q, and this list was the basis for the additions to our Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Now Papias redacted the Gospel of John Mark – which he himself, or someone else wrote/collated – by adding the statements of Q where he saw fit. So in essence Papias is the collator of the Gospel of Matthew from earlier sources.

Papias-Mark-Matthew theory

Papias wrote the Gospel of Mark based on John Mark's logia. That was the first edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. Next he amended the Gospel of Mark with logia of Matthew that he had translated in a later stage, and that book now constitutes the Gospel of Matthew. That was the second edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. He used them as short stories to analyse the Logia sets of John Mark and Matthew, with no intent that they should constitute eye-witness accounts.

• Papias and the Gospels, © 6 oct 2012, Richard Bauckham
• The Gospel of Matthew, John the elder, and the Papias tradition: A response to R H Gundry, David C Sim

Homily about the archons

(the following is my personal opinion)

The archons are "demons" ruling this "evil" or entropic universe of death according to Gnostic mythology. They are either regarded as fallen angels or creations by the soulless demiurge (Yaldabaoth, Sammael etc.). There is a general confusion about those archons, sometimes they are represented as real evil forces that persecute us and create troubles for us in our lifes, like a giant conspiracy. This is not a proper understanding of the archons. The point is this: 'Gnosis' is associated with knowledge about how to overcome negative passions, and conspiracy theories of a demonic persecution are negative passions, i.e. exactly the trap that Gnosticism warns us against! A Gnostic that have experienced real 'Gnosis' have experienced an inner calmness that makes 'Error' go away. 'Error' is a kind of colored world view filled with passions of one's own self-import and the evil of the world around oneself. That's the paradox of Gnosticism: it informs us that the universe is in a sense evil, while understanding the world makes the evil go away in ourselves, by a detachment from (negative) passions and dedication to knowledge. And by knowledge I mean knowledge, not "knowledge". 'Gnosis' is experiential knowledge, so a part of mastering the All is ... experiential knowledge about the All. Where the All includes the universe. A starkly vivid example of a passion-ridden person from history is Adolf Hitler: everything in his world was circulating around his own self-import: he was "the savior of the German people" leading it to "greatness", and everything around him was "enemies" or tools of the "German folk spirit". He was extreme, but the pattern of self-import and black and white world view of narcissist persons are clear signs that they are archon-ridden and trapped into matter. Cults are like that too, and therefore if a movement is a cult, it is by definition not Gnostic, but if it is Gnostic it is not a cult. By definition.

Now, what's the reason this universe is "evil" and to what degree? My personal opinion is that there are five qualitative degrees of "evil":

1. entropy: all energy spreads in the energy spectrum, and in the whole all structure disappear, (if I got the definition from Boltzmann right),
2. death follows from entropy as applied on living bodies, life is when the entropy is kept low, and there are just a few energy levels kept up by certain chemical biocatalytic reactions in clusters of cells,
3. predation is when an organism to survive kills another organism and absorbs its nutritional contents, just to keep itself alive, predation could be directed against you individually, but only as a nonpersonal need for the other's survival,
4. persecution is when a human recognizes you individually for what you are, and tries to make your life sour and perhaps kill you,
5. cults are groups of evil people that keeps an archon-ridden world view, and persecutes everybody that threatens the integrity of the cult, as well as any internal dissenter.

Gnosis according to the original Gnostics (my opinion)

Gnosticism was a trend in the antiquity to combine heretical Judaic mythology with Mesoplatonic concepts. Gnosis according to this original model, was enlightenment of one's own divine nature, usually the inborn ethics and the inborn attitude to the world. When being elected gnostic (on some level) one "married" the heavenly twin in Pleroma, an angel representing the true self. Some Gnostics maintained the monogamous marriage to this perfect twin, some other didn't regard this "monogamy".

The Platonic cosmology claims that there is a perfect eternal world of "Ideas" which is more real than the physical world wherein we live, and in comparison of which this world is just a defect shadow. Mesoplatonism (middle platonism before Plotinus) also borrowed a lot of concepts from the Peripatetics (Aristotle) and the Stoics (Zeno of Citium) and the science of the time, among others Ptolemy's geocentric cosmology of planetary bodies, and the earliest known alchemy. According to the Gnostics and most Platonics, this material world is fundamentally "evil" - so when Plotinos the Neoplatonic attacks the Gnostics for regarding this world as evil, he deviates from the standard Platonic position by adopting the pompous God-powerism shared by Hermetics, Jews and (non-Gnostic) Christians. The "evil" of this world is not the satanic evil from a predator that have selected its victim, or a hateful dictators murderlust against opponents, but rather a fundamentally corrupt quality of the creation that corrupts, decomposes and kills, and that indirectly creates predation and hateful dictators through the action of Error which is kind of a violation against the rules of the divine existences in the World of Ideas or Pleroma. In modern physical terms this "evil" can be compared to entropy. This world inevitably leads to death, and our only way to get eternal life is to emulate the qualities upheld by our heavenly twins who already have eternal life - according to Mani (the founder of Manichaeism) and probably the Valentinians, through the so called Bridal Chamber. Irenaeus reports that some "heretics" admitted through the Bridal Chamber ("nuptial couch" section 3), some through the baptism, and some through incomprehensible formulae. According to the Mandeans a newborn baby will get a secret constellation name (malwasha) to get a connection to the Pleroma above.

The archons, the evil rulers of this world, are a symbol for passions, and strong uncontrolled feelings. Evil rulers affect us and manipulate us through our feelings. Pleroma - the Gnostic counterpart of the Christian Heaven is free from emotions, we are there purely intellectual light beings (page 78) acting perfectly logical according to reason. The Living water (page 89) is a symbol for streams of energy that provides us nourishment in our intellectual form.

Life itself is, according to Gnostic theology, a holy entity (section 2.1.1. Pira), otherwordly and divine, and it turns evil only in contact with the matter, where predation emerges as a mechanism to temporarily avoid death, which in the long run is unavoidable nevertheless, an unchangeable force that drags us down to the center of earth. It is reasonable to imagine Pleroma as a number of Aeons (heavens) of increasing brightness, permanency and purity, but they are full of life that doesn't perish. After the death we have to pass the planets of this Universe, and these are regarded as evil archons keeping us trapped in this world trying to keep us in control astrologically using emotional affect. Mandeans (page 153 and forth) and Ophites are clear with this, and provide secret formulae to pass each planet on our road to Pleroma. This was the established scientific cosmology during the antiquity.