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.

The big revelation of Gnosis

This article is obsoleted for the following one: Gnosis according to the original Gnostics (my opinion))

(Imagine an ironic tone in this post)

At last the grand revelation of what Gnosis is, is finally here:

"Gnosis" is Greek for (experiental) knowledge. Or for experience.

...

...

...

... just kidding ...

Again: at last the grand revelation of what Gnosis is, is finally here:

"Gnosis" in the original Gnostic contexts meant: "the recognition of the divine heritage of oneself", or "knowledge that saves you from (committing) evil (acts)." Or perhaps: "knowledge of the perfection of the platonic ideal highest heaven, and since we are instantiations of the ideal man in the highest heaven, we are ultimately of divine heritage."

And that's probably it. Nothing more.

The real Gospels of Matthew and Mark, my hypothesis

Addition 180204: I regard this theory as improbable – I just need the theory to be formulated

There are a lot of theories of how the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) were written and how they relate to each other. The academics proposing those theories are making a lot of text analyses, comparing Greek language with the language of certain centuries in the Antiquities. I have no competence to contest anything of that, but I can make a simple skip-the-academics-go-to-the-sources operation and propose some theories of my own that nobody else seem to have conjured up. If my theory is good, somebody really has, but I haven't discovered it yet. If my theory is bad, then nobody will ever accept my theory for being crack-pot balderdash.

Nevertheless: the source I'm boldly invoking is Papias of Hierapolis, speaking through the citation of Eusebius the Christian historian:

[John] The Elder used to say: Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory—though not in an ordered form—of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of chreiai, but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia of the Lord. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything.

Naïve interpretation (according to wikipedia on chreia): John Mark wrote a list of logia like the Gospel of Thomas, of the form followers asks, Jesus answers, or Jesus says, without context in either case. Mark wrote the logia in the order that he remembered them, and he wrote them down remembering Simon Kaifas (Peter) speeches. If this text is to be taken for true, then John Mark didn't write the Gospel of Mark, at the very best he wrote fragments that later was extended and reordered to become the "Gospel of Mark".

Furthermore Papias writes:

Therefore Matthew put the logia in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language, but each person interpreted them as best he could.

The only clear thing here is that Matthew also wrote something like the Gospel of Thomas, but his logia were 1. written in some order, possibly chronological, or perhaps alphabethical, 2. wrote them in the Hebrew language. Scholars use to assume that Matthew wrote in Greek, but I think this is unwarranted, given that Eusebius's citation of Papias is correct, and that Papias correctly relates to truthful sources that know what they speak about.

My bold addition to this scheme is that Papias himself either collated the "modern" Gospel of Mark or the "modern" Gospel of Matthew, or both. He wrote a (now lost) five book comment on the Gospels according to later sources. He also interviewed a lot of elders, including the daughters of Philip. It is reasonable to believe that he collated the original Gospels of Matthew and Mark with the stories of his interviewed persons, so as to bring the original Gospels in chronological order and make reasonable interpretations of the chreiai and the logia. This constituted what was initially called the "Memoirs of the Apostles", but which later came to develop to the synoptic Gospels.

Why Jesus really did exist, personal opinion

For a very long time after losing my confidence in Christianity, I was bewildered by the lack of proofs that Jesus existed, and the relative strength of some of the Jesus-Myth theories' arguments. I was in a vacuum whether Jesus really did exist or not, since I could find neither the Jesus-existence arguments nor the Jesus-myth arguments convincing, until I saw a serious historian making a Youtube video series validating the arguments from a historians perspective. This series can be found here: Fishers of Evidence.

Fishers of Evidence easily sank my Josephus three-point verification argument for Josephus actually referring to Jesus. My three-point verification argument was formulated as follows:

★ Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews claims that Jesus existed and was the Messiah in a completely unlikely and obviously interpolated glorification from a Jew that was on the losing side in a war against the Romans, and now considers emperor Vespasian being the real Messiah. Someone (whom everybody suspect is the Christian historian Eusebius) messed with the text. ★ On the other hand Origen complains against Josephus that he doesn't regard Jesus as Messiah (Eusebius had no chance to make a scribble on Origen's texts), and ★ we have alternative versions of Josephus in Syriac and Arabic that doesn't praise Jesus but instead regard him as a magician. ERGO – I thought – Josephus must really have written about a real Jesus, Josephus was three-point verified in analogy of verifying a HTTPS web server (Josephus) with a Certificate Authority (Origen).

Update 190717: This three-point verification is now doubly falsified because the "alternate versions" of Testimonium Flavianum has been proven[?] to be spurious.

Except the Fishers of Evidence just asked where from Josephus got his information. Plausibly from some Christian, which in the phase of history when Josephus wrote books, was more likely to believe that Jesus was a real person. The three-point verification system just verified that Josephus wrote something.

Now, a much heavier argument why Jesus existed is the Onomastic argument, which is an unlikely application of statistics. It claims that the Gospels are referring to (mostly) real persons, that probably existed, based on their names. The names in the Gospels distribute fairly similar to the names found on archeological tombstones in the region of Judea and Galilee. In fiction names are chosen as to not collide with each other so that confusion does not occur. For the Gospels to have been written as fiction, the author must either unlikely take the names of a clearly delimited group of people, keeping the names of all of them, and then fantasize a completely fictional story around them, or, impossibly: guess that readers of the Gospels in the future will doubt the content, and therefore contrive a random distribution of persons, that counterparts the statistics of real persons in the geographical vicinity. Statistics was invented in the 17th century Europe. ERGO: not necessarily Jesus, but most of the persons in the Gospels must have existed. It is less likely then that the main character Jesus is mythical than say one of the Jameses.

Henceforth I will write this blog as if Jesus the man really existed. The Jesus-mythicists sometimes have good arguments, but their main case is weak.

Sylvia Browne and Novus Spiritus

Sylvia Browne (1936–2013) was a well-known author and TV artist that made a lot of money on claiming to be a medium with psychic abilities, abilities that was hardly criticised for being worse than random guesses regarding known cases of disappearances, such as Amanda Berry (the Ariel Castro case) who was "predicted" to be dead, despite being alive. One could (unnecessarily generously) maintain that Browne had learnt cold reading and believed herself to be a medium, but that she "boldly expanded" her sphere of application of the techniques to where it shouldn't work according to socio-psychological common sense.

Sylvia Browne founded a church called Novus Spiritus (new spirit) in 1986, that describe itself as "Gnostic". The adherents are called "Browneites" among the Hoellerite Gnostics, and the earlier are reputed for their arrogance against everybody not accepting their own dogmatics, indicating a slightly cultic culture. From the traits I write about below, it is reasonable to believe that such a cultic tendency will soon disappear. The church in question maintains some standing points:

• Novus Spiritus describe God in a way that can be interpreted as a modern way to say "ineffable"[1];
• they claim that there are at least two gods, the Father Om and the Mother Azna, which could certainly fit in a polytheistic Gnostic system; this Azna is partaking in the world in a similar way that a Providence saves people from trouble at prayer – Azna is vaguely similar to Sophia Achamot but not just the guiding angel of the Gnostic community, but to anyone praying to God; the existence of this Om and this Azna was revealed by Brownes's spirit guide Francine[2];
• they assert that Christ lived on earth as non-unique Son of God, meaning that the son/daughter-hood is universal, but that his uniqueness rested in his teachings which are the only way to come to God; however our son/daughter-hood doesn't imply that we are gods[3];
• on the other hand, they deny the Godhood of Christ[3];
• they believe in the Neo-Theosophical (non-Gnostic) concept of all religions being equal and valuable and their own beliefs being more equal than anyone else [3];
• they regard knowledge more important than faith, which certainly is a Gnostic attitude[4];
• there is no Satan, but this planet is a Hell, which we leave for an eternal life in Heaven[5];
• every soul reincarnates until perfection is reached, after which we can enter Heaven [6];

The main deviations from Gnosticism are the lack of Aeons and a lack of a theory of the freedom in intellect versus imprisonment in passions. Formerly I regarded Novus Spiritus as not Gnostic, but rather Marcionite in design, but from their current material, one can actually maintain that they are Gnostics with their own (deceased) prophet.

Their website novus.org also refers to lots of external material, some of it really fringy, such as The Tomb of God (Andrews & Schellenberger) and Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent), and on the other hand serious works as The Gnostic Gospels (Pagels) and The Nag Hammadi Library (ed. Robinson). This means that Novus Spiritus is open to the outside, and not a cult proper.

Novus Spiritus otherwise share many traits with New-Ageish Spiritualism, and makes some profit from dubious practices such as hypnosis and "past life" examination, and also less dubious practices such as dream analysis and meditation.