Gnosticism - Gnosticism Gnosticism is a blanket term for various religions and sects most prominent in the first few centuries A.D. Many elements of second-century gnosticsm are pre-Christian. The name of gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis (γνῶσις), referring to the idea that there is special, hidden knowledge (esoteric knowledge) that only a few may possess. The occult nature of Gnostic teaching and the fact that much of the evidence for that teaching comes from attacks by orthodox Christians makes it difficult to be precise about the differences between different Gnostic systems. Recently, the word Gnosticism has been used to describe more modern sects which have formed out of the New Age movement and who really do not share the main core idea of Theological.
Agnosticism - of Agnosticism 6 See also 7 External references Origin of the term The word agnostic comes from the Greek a (no) and gnosis (knowledge). Among the most famous agnostics (in the original sense) were Huxley, Charles Darwin, and Bertrand Russell. Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian is considered a classic text about agnosticism. It has been argued from his works, especially Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, that David Hume was an agnostic, this however remains subject to debate. Agnosticism is not to be confused with a view specifically opposing the doctrine of gnosis and Gnosticism - these are religious concepts that are not generally related to agnosticism. Modern uses Most modern uses focus on the question of the existence of God rather than a broad range of metaphysical questions. The term.
Kult - role-playing game. The game universe is strongly influenced by Gnosticism. Influences of Clive Barker, H. R. Giger are also obvious. The setting is exceedingly gloomy: The world is nothing but a prison for humanity, put there by a mad Demiurge (or if you will, God). The world as we see it is as real as a movie set: All smoke and mirrors. In reality, humanity lives in the ruins of its former greatness. Around us in the darkness are our guardians, the Archons, put there by the Demiurge to keep humanity in ignorance. The Archons have various creatures do their bidding, and these are our jailers. Death is merely a ploy to reset the consciousness of the soul and make impossible the acquisition of enough knowledge to escape the prison. The.
Jesus Christ as the Messiah - has Jesus in total control from the cross, saying "It is finished" upon his death, and instead of asking the "bitter cup" to be taken away from him while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before, he actually asks for it in John's account. Resurrection, Ascension, and Second Coming According to the New Testament, he rose from the dead on the third day following his crucifixion and appeared to his disciples; the Acts of the Apostles reports that forty days later he ascended bodily into Heaven. Paul's letters to the Romans, Ephesians and Colossians, as well as the letter to the Hebrews (traditionally attributed to Paul) claim that Jesus presently exercises all authority in heaven and on earth for the sake of the Church, until all of the earth.
John the Baptist - body to the grave, went and told Jesus all that had occurred (Matt. 14:3-12). John's death occurred apparently just before the third Passover of Jesus' ministry. Jesus himself testified regarding John that he was a "burning and a shining light" (John 5:35). The Eastern Orthodox believe that John was the last of the Old Testament prophets, thus serving as a bridge figure between that period of revelation and Jesus. They also embrace a tradition that, following his death, John descended into Hell and there once more preached that Jesus the Messiah was coming. Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of French Canada. His feast day is June 24. He is also counted as the Patron of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem. The Eastern Orthodox Church remembers Saint John the.
Idolatry - of Old Testament scenes and of Jesus Christ. There are similar paintings of Old Testament scenes found in Jewish catacombs of the same time frame.[1] The Christian use of relics also dates to the catacombs, when Christians found themselves praying in the presence of the bodies of martyrs, sometimes using their tombs as altars for sharing the Eucharist. Many stories of the earliest martyrs end with an account of how Christians would gather up the martyr's remains, to the extent possible, in order to retain the martyr's relics. Christian views on images Christianity holds that the essential element of the commandment not to make "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above" is "and bow down and worship it". At the same time, Christian prayer.
Irenaeus - by the Calvinist Huguenots. The remains of Leonardo da Vinci and Kepler, among others, also were lost in the religious wars of those times. Writings Irenaeus wrote a number of books, but the most important that survives is the five-volume On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis, normally referred to as Adversus Haereses (English: Against Heresies). Only fragments in its original Greek exist, but a complete copy exists in a wooden Latin translation, made shortly after its publication in Greek, and Books IV and V are present in a literal Armenian translation. The purpose of Against Heresies is to refute the teachings of various gnostic groups. Until the discovery of the Library of Nag Hammadi in 1945, Against Heresies was the best surviving description of Gnosticism. Irenaeus cites from.
Harpocrates - the god [Harpokrates] who holds his finger to his lips for silence sake.” —Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.691. In the Alexandrian and Roman vogue for mystery cults at the turn of the millennium, his worship was widely extended, linked with Isis and Serapis. Inexpensive cast terracotta images of Harpocrates, suitable for house shrines, are scattered throughout the Roman Emnpire. Modern occultists display his image, loosely connected now with Hermeneutic gnosticism. Typically, "Harpocrates is the Babe in the Egg of Blue that sits upon the lotus flower in the Nile. He is the 'God of Silence' and represents the Higher Self and is the 'Holy Guardian Angel'" and more in similar vein. By the Egyptians the full-grown Horus was considered the victorious god of light that annually overcomes darkness, winter, and drought. He is.
Harold Bloom - Jacob and David Moses. Bloom began his career by defending the reputations of the High Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T.S. Eliot. After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Hermetism. Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focussed on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write. Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, which has crept into everything he has written since. Beginning with The Book of J in 1990, Bloom began a series of miscellaneous works.
History of Christianity - hymns and prayer; ascetic disciplines such as fasting and almsgiving. Christians initially adopted the Jewish Septuagint as their scripture or Bible, and later also canonized the books of the New Testament. Judaism The Messiah prophesies Essenes The Life of Jesus of Nazareth Jesus Christ The Twelve Apostles Pharisee The earliest emergence of Christianity Starting with the events recorded in the Gospels and Acts, Christianity grew from the personal practice of a minority of Jews, to the dominant religious group of the Mediterranean world in little over 300 years. It also gained important extensions to the east and south of the Mediterranean. This section will examine those first 300 years. The Earliest Church: Jerusalem The Gentile Church House Churches Dura-Europos, Syria is the site of the earliest discovered identifiable Christian house church..
Historicity of Jesus Christ - suggests that Paul's idea of Jesus was derived from his reading of the Hebrew Bible. In this view, Paul never met or heard of any actual person named Jesus from Nazareth (or Bethlehem), but rather believed in a Jesus who died on some ethereal plane at the beginning of time, or some far-off time in history. The Jesus of Nazareth character was made up after Paul's time by a composite of Old Testament prophecies, with embellishments added by many people. In this view, the interpretation of the meaning of Jesus was also informed by messianic, apocalyptic and resurrectionist myths that were common during the late Hellenistic age. Others contend that aspects of Jesus' life as related in the New Testament were derived from popular mystery religions in the Roman Empire at.
History of Greek and Roman Egypt - the murder of Pompey in Egypt in 48 BC and the appearance in the country of Julius Caesar in 47 BC. In the wars of that period the young king perished and his younger brother, Ptolemy XIV Philopator, was nominally king with Cleopatra till 44 BC, when she had him murdered. From then till her death in 30 BC, Cleopatra's nominal co-ruler was her infant son by Caesar, Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor Caesar, known as Caesarion. Cleopatra then made her last fatal alliance with Marcus Antonius, and when he was defeated by Octavius, she killed herself. Roman Egypt In 30 BC, following the death of Cleopatra, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, under the personal control of the Emperor, free from any interference by the Roman Senate. The main.
Gnosis - a group of humans that could achieve this insight. Among heresiologists gnosis denote different christian belief systems of esoteric nature, such as, first and foremost, gnosticism and other dualist systems the two first centuries A.D., but also rosicrucianism, christian kabbalah etc. Gnosis is also the name of magazine published between 1985 and 1999 in California as a "Journal of the Western Inner Traditions" featuring articles, interviews and reviewing dealing with various traditions of spirituality and mysticism. It was a project of the Lumen Foundation..
Gnostic Society - in 1928 by James Morgan Pryse and his brother John Pryse for studies of gnosticism. It has strong ties to the Ecclesia Gnostica, an active gnostic church, and its current bishop Stephan A. Hoeller. The organization has no formal membership requirements, and relies on voluntary offerings. On the Internet the Gnostic Society has a large and very popular archive of gnostic writings..
Gospel of Thomas - and was therefore probably written in the second century. They take the view that the Thomas gospel is derived of earlier (lost) copies of the known Gospels —that the known Gospels, not the Thomas Gospel, are authoritative. The Gospel of Thomas is, in any case, one of the earliest accounts of the teaching of Jesus outside of the canonical gospels and so is considered a valuable text. The Jesus Seminar sometimes calls it the "fifth gospel". Some say that this gospel makes no mention of Jesus' resurrection, an important point of faith among Christians. Others, however, interpret the opening words of the book, "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down" (Nag Hammadi Library translation, 2d. edition, ISBN 0-06-066935-7) to mean that.
Godhead - Christianity, including Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and some branches of Protestantism, the Godhead is viewed as a Trinity, and the word Godhead is often used interchangably with Trinity. Contrasting views of the Godhead include the version of tritheism accepted by some denominations of Mormonism, the strict Monotheism of the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Monotheistic Modalism of the Oneness Pentecostals (in which manifestations of God are not limited to three)), the Dualism of Gnosticism, and various other views by denominations including the Church of Christ, Scientist, the Unification Church, and Unitarian Universalism. See also Theology God Trinity Godhead (Mormonism) External Links "The Oneness of God" by David K. Bernard (Series in Pentecostal Theology, Volume 1).
Ferdinand Christian Baur - philosophy of history. "Without philosophy," he has said, "history is always for me dead and dumb." The change of view is illustrated clearly in the essay, published in the Tübinger Zeitschrift for 1831, on the Christ-party in the Corinthian Church, Die Christuspartei in der korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des paulinischen und petrinischen in der ältesten Kirche, den Apostel Petrus in Rom, the trend of which is suggested by the title. Baur contends that the apostle Paul was opposed in Corinth by a Jewish-christian party which wished to set up its own form of Christian religion instead of his universal Christianity. He finds traces of a keen conflict of parties in the post-apostolic age. The theory is further developed in a later work (1835, the year in which David Strauss' Leben Jesu.
Ecclesia Gnostica - England. It has a sister organization named the Gnostic Society, which also run the gnosis.org website on gnosticism. This organization is intended for studies of gnosticism, not religious services. The regionary bishop of the church is Stephan A. Hoeller, a notable gnostic who has written extensively on gnosticism and the occult. External Links http://www.gnosis.org/eghome.htm.
Emanationism - emanated lower spiritual beings who consequently carried out the actual work. Emanationism is a key feature of: Platonism and Neoplatonism Gnosticism Mandaeanism Manicheanism Catharism.
Ephraim the Syrian - town in Mesopotamia. It is said that he accompanied his bishop to the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Throughout his life, he fought against Gnosticism and Arianism. To counter the Gnostic heresies being spread through their songs, he wrote many hymns and poems proclaiming the Christian faith. One of his prayers is still extensively used today by Eastern Orthodox churches during the season of Great Lent leading up to Easter: O Lord and Master of my life, do not give me the spirit of laziness, meddling, self-importance and idle talk. Instead, grace me, Your servant, with the spirit of modesty, humility, patience, and love. Indeed, my Lord and King, grant that I may see my own faults, and not condemn my brothers and sisters, for You are blessed unto ages.
