12/17/10

Gnostic Christianity and the Myth of Sophia
by Bette Stockbauer

1. An in-depth survey of early Gnostic Christianity, its teachers, its relationship to modern esoteric thought, and the religious/political environment which shaped its expression.
In 1945, near the banks of the River Nile, a jar was unearthed which contained one of the richest manuscript finds of modern history — the Nag Hammadi codices. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered two years later, this library of ancient documents (dated AD 350) contained texts relating to early Christianity that the world had never seen. The Dead Sea texts belonged to an earlier, Jewish branch of Christianity, and the works from Nag Hammadi to a later philosophical movement, called Gnosticism. Since their discovery scholars have long pondered their contents, questioning their relation to original Christianity.
In Share International, May 1994, Benjamin Creme refers to these two sets of documents, saying that their discovery "... was inspired by the Master Jesus to shed a clearer light on the events of that time in preparation for the Christ's return today." We suggest that the "clearer light" of the Christian Gnostics was their understanding of esoteric wisdom or "gnosis" — those sacred truths of the spiritual universe which sustain all human progress. These writers of the Nag Hammadi documents belong to a long and ancient line of similar teachers who, throughout the world and over the ages, have kept these truths alive. In many ways they can be considered the true early Christians, the real inheritors of a wisdom tradition which Jesus relayed, in secret, to a select group of his disciples. Between 50 and 250 AD their ideas flourished and were largely tolerated, but reactionary voices began to prevail and by the end of the 4th century they were practically silenced, their writings, until now, lost to history...

read more: http://www.essene.com/Gospels/GnosticAndSophia.html

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