‘Notwithstanding the fact that we cannot attain knowledge (gnosis) of the gods by reason (logismos), the role of reasoning is crucial. If correctly used, it provides a clear discrimination of what is possible and impossible, real and unreal. For Iamblichus “there is a distinction between the words science and knowledge: the one signifying the theoretic faculty by which we apprehend real beings, the other the practical faculty by which we acquire phenomenal facts and information”‘
From Philosophy As A Right Of Rebirth.
I just surfed upon this video and must comment:
I have taken the time to listen to his take on this and my comments are not personal to whoever this is.
He says what the Bible says is not the point (belief or not) but he is incorrect and it is very much the point.
He uses scripture to prove the Jewishness of Jesus and I concede if one uses this method then Jesus is Jewish–an aside is that god is Jewish from a plain reading. This in itself is extroadinarily problematic but I will not cover this ground here.
I will deconstruct this assertion from a Christian Gnostic perspective. I will focus on two primary avenues of critique. The supposed historical lineage of the Jewish Jesus will show that the historical evidence does not show that this person existed as written in the N.T. And reason will show that Gumby like contortionism on this issue is not the way to discern truth–it leads to incoherence.
Archaeologists have been searching Israel for well over 100 years and have found next to no evidence for the major characters and events in the Torah. There is little evidence for Moses, the Exodus, or a Grand Davidic/Solomon kingdom. It’s here that his perspective fails unless we don’t care about the reality of historical truth and only promote the Torah as ‘literally infallible as literature’. He seems to sit in the latter camp while I sit squarely in the former. It matters that Moses, the Exodus, David, and Solomon are character fictions that did not exist in historical reality. One can only get to my perspective by dealing with the evidence of historical reality rather than asserting historical fiction as fact and this is his methodology.
So the right question to ask is if *David and Solomon didn’t exist then how can Jesus be from their lineage? Obviously, one cannot come from a lineage that did not exist.
This brings us to the Jesus character as written by the Jews in the centuries after 33AD. We now know that there are ZERO first-person attestations for this character. I’ve said in other blogs this is much more plausible if the Cosmic Christ showed up on earth in 29AD as a fully formed adult which was/is the assertion of the Marcionite church. This alone means Jesus was not Jewish. Now, even if this is true, there is still the issue of whether he was fully human or an avatar/angel only appearing human. The latter called Docetism is my view.
But my point, according to Marcion, is that he was only on earth for 3 years in the backwater of a troubled Roman province and this is the only possible explanation why NO ONE wrote about him. I have conceded that even this isn’t definitive but it gets much closer to reality if his time here was only 3 years. This brings us to other facts about this character.
Paul never says that he met Jesus and his testimony is solely about the Cosmic Christ as his testimony is founded on visions and not human relational history. Secondly, all the earliest scriptures omit most (All?) of the early life narratives about Jesus. These early life stories are later additions to the text–some much later. So we can see via this line of research that someone created a narrative fiction about him in an attempt to superglue him to the Torah and its history which we know is false from most modern research. The above linked video correctly asserts that Christmas wasn’t celebrated by Christians until after Constantine.
So Baal Kadmon’s line of reasoning here is to assert historical fiction as evidence for the nature of Christ. I’d argue that one good fiction does not necessarily lead to another good fiction although I do concede that much like the Urantia Book or the Anurag Sagar; they are all testimonies to the amazing religious imaginations that we humans have. But, to say Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne really existed with certain genetic traits because someone wrote a book about them is an entirely bizarre mode of argument.
But to the Christian Gnostics, who believe that the Torah god/s are malevolent, it’s simply a no-brainer that Christ was not a Jew nor was he the son of these not-so-nice gods of the Torah. On this alone, we KNOW (spiritual knowledge and not scientific epistemology) that the N.T. version of a Jewish Jesus as God is impossible. So the Demiurge and his human minion writers lied! Who could have thought the devil could lie?
A final note is that this person has an extensive website on spiritual gnosis. The site you are reading from is also fairly extensive for a layperson. On my site, you will find that I acknowledge Kabbalah as a type of Gnosis but the wrong Gnosis. In these teachings it asserts that Christ is Samael acting as Messiah Ben Joseph who comes to offer salvation the Gentile nations. But there is reason to reject this view of Christ from a Christian Gnostic perspective because this Messiah ben Joseph is prophesied to betray the Gentile nations at the Third Temple and will bow to Messiah Ben David who will usher in the Noahide Law system. These so-called Messiahs will testify to the lie that Gentiles should be good slaves to the Jews! This is something no Christian Gnostic could accept and these injunctions are the edicts of ARCHONTIC ENTITIES! In my opinion, of course.
A few thoughts to end here. I could be accused of picking on the Torah here but I completely reject the historicity of Buddha, too! This person is as much a fiction of the Archons as Moses is or a Jewish Jesus.
And lastly, the ongoing carnage brought on by the terrible parenting of Yahweh/Allah regarding Isaac and Ismael is thoroughly disgusting to any rational Christian Gnostic. No true Christian could cheerlead for such debauched irrationality.
*I have my own theories for alternative explanations for who this Jewish Jesus person might have been. Anyone can ask me for links to my speculations in that regard. Or search my site.
NOTE: On my intro quote. I’ve conceded that original spiritual gnosis did not view the demiurge (Ptah) as evil. I’ve even said many times that the non-dual schools could be correct. But those views are simply not my views. If I were living in the time of Plotinus I would not be hostile towards him. But he would be hostile towards me for not subscribing to his metaphysics.
