Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition PDF Download

Author: John Douglas Turner
Publisher: Presses Université Laval
ISBN: 9782763778341
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 868

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Author: Dylan M. Burns
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812245792
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In the second century, Platonist and Judeo-Christian thought were sufficiently friendly that a Greek philosopher could declare, "What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?" Four hundred years later, a Christian emperor had ended the public teaching of subversive Platonic thought. When and how did this philosophical rupture occur? Dylan M. Burns argues that the fundamental break occurred in Rome, ca. 263, in the circle of the great mystic Plotinus, author of the Enneads. Groups of controversial Christian metaphysicians called Gnostics ("knowers") frequented his seminars, disputed his views, and then disappeared from the history of philosophy—until the 1945 discovery, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of codices containing Gnostic literature, including versions of the books circulated by Plotinus's Christian opponents. Blending state-of-the-art Greek metaphysics and ecstatic Jewish mysticism, these texts describe techniques for entering celestial realms, participating in the angelic liturgy, confronting the transcendent God, and even becoming a divine being oneself. They also describe the revelation of an alien God to his elect, a race of "foreigners" under the protection of the patriarch Seth, whose interventions will ultimately culminate in the end of the world. Apocalypse of the Alien God proposes a radical interpretation of these long-lost apocalypses, placing them firmly in the context of Judeo-Christian authorship rather than ascribing them to a pagan offshoot of Gnosticism. According to Burns, this Sethian literature emerged along the fault lines between Judaism and Christianity, drew on traditions known to scholars from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Enochic texts, and ultimately catalyzed the rivalry of Platonism with Christianity. Plunging the reader into the culture wars and classrooms of the high Empire, Apocalypse of the Alien God offers the most concrete social and historical description available of any group of Gnostic Christians as it explores the intersections of ancient Judaism, Christianity, Hellenism, myth, and philosophy.

Author: Bart D. Ehrman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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The remarkable diversity of Christianity during the formative years of the first three centuries has become a plain, even natural, "fact" for most ancient historians. However, until now there has been no source book of primary texts that reveals the many varieties of Christian beliefs, practices, ethics, experiences, confrontations, and self-understandings. To help readers recognize and experience the rich diversity of the early Christian movement, After the New Testament provides a wide range of texts, both "orthodox" and "heterodox". It includes such works as the Apostolic Fathers, the writings of Nag Hammadi, early pseudepigrapha, martyrologies, anti-Jewish tractates, heresiologies, canon lists, church orders, Liturgical texts, and theological treatises. In addition, rather than including only fragments of texts, this collection provides substantial sections -- entire documents wherever possible -- organized under social and historical rubrics.

Author: Zeke Mazur
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004441719
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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In The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus’s Mysticism, Zeke Mazur offers a radical reconceptualization of Plotinus with reference to Gnostic thought and praxis, chiefly as evidenced by Coptic works among the Nag Hammadi Codices whose Greek Vorlagen were read in Plotinus’s school.

Author: Kevin Corrigan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004254765
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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This Festschrift honors the life and work of John D. Turner (Charles J. Mach University Professor of Classics and History at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln) on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Professor Turner’s work has been of profound importance for the study of the interaction between Greek philosophy and Gnosticism in late antiquity. This volume contains essays by international scholars on a broad range of topics that deal with Sethian, Valentinian and other early Christian thought, as well as with Platonism and Neoplatonism, and offer a variety of perspectives spanning intellectual history, Greek and Coptic philology, and the study of religions.

Author: Carl Séan O'Brien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316240657
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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How was the world generated and how does matter continue to be ordered so that the world can continue functioning? Questions like these have existed as long as humanity has been capable of rational thought. In antiquity, Plato's Timaeus introduced the concept of the Demiurge, or Craftsman-god, to answer them. This lucid and wide-ranging book argues that the concept of the Demiurge was highly influential on the many discussions operating in Middle Platonist, Gnostic, Hermetic and Christian contexts in the first three centuries AD. It explores key metaphysical problems such as the origin of evil, the relationship between matter and the First Principle and the deployment of ever-increasing numbers of secondary deities to insulate the First Principle from the sensible world. It also focuses on the decreasing importance of demiurgy in Neoplatonism, with its postulation of procession and return.

Author: Dylan M. Burns
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812209222
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In the second century, Platonist and Judeo-Christian thought were sufficiently friendly that a Greek philosopher could declare, "What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?" Four hundred years later, a Christian emperor had ended the public teaching of subversive Platonic thought. When and how did this philosophical rupture occur? Dylan M. Burns argues that the fundamental break occurred in Rome, ca. 263, in the circle of the great mystic Plotinus, author of the Enneads. Groups of controversial Christian metaphysicians called Gnostics ("knowers") frequented his seminars, disputed his views, and then disappeared from the history of philosophy—until the 1945 discovery, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of codices containing Gnostic literature, including versions of the books circulated by Plotinus's Christian opponents. Blending state-of-the-art Greek metaphysics and ecstatic Jewish mysticism, these texts describe techniques for entering celestial realms, participating in the angelic liturgy, confronting the transcendent God, and even becoming a divine being oneself. They also describe the revelation of an alien God to his elect, a race of "foreigners" under the protection of the patriarch Seth, whose interventions will ultimately culminate in the end of the world. Apocalypse of the Alien God proposes a radical interpretation of these long-lost apocalypses, placing them firmly in the context of Judeo-Christian authorship rather than ascribing them to a pagan offshoot of Gnosticism. According to Burns, this Sethian literature emerged along the fault lines between Judaism and Christianity, drew on traditions known to scholars from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Enochic texts, and ultimately catalyzed the rivalry of Platonism with Christianity. Plunging the reader into the culture wars and classrooms of the high Empire, Apocalypse of the Alien God offers the most concrete social and historical description available of any group of Gnostic Christians as it explores the intersections of ancient Judaism, Christianity, Hellenism, myth, and philosophy.

Author: R. van den Broek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107031370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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An examination of Gnostic religion in Late Antiquity within its historical and religious context, using Greek, Latin and Coptic sources.

Author: D. Jeffrey Bingham
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111620522
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In a day fascinated with questions of historiography and with explicating a distinctive Christian philosophy of time and history, Henri-Charles Puech’s (1950s) work on Gnosis and time found an audience. Studying four second-century texts he marked as Gnostic, he argued for the Gnostic, anti-cosmic, anti-historical pessimism about existence within the tyrannical temporal world of bondage and error. Bliss and truth were otherworldly and atemporal. This book reassesses Puech’s argument by analysis of the writings undergirding his sample and a wide array of second-century Christian and Gnostic-Christian texts that display not the Gnostic view, as if there were one, but a broader second-century theological discussion regarding time, world and knowledge manifesting a spectrum of perspectives. A review of past and present scholarly discourse that evoked discussions of Gnosticism and anti-cosmism, and informed Puech’s thesis begins the volume along with study of his own thesis. A discussion of the academy’s reception of Puech then follows. The close reading of early pertinent texts forms the heart of the work arguing for eight discernible models of history, time, and world that arose within the second-century intellectual debate.

Author: Tilde Bak Halvgaard
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004309497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Both the Thunder: Perfect Mind (NHC VI,2) and the Trimorphic Protennoia (NHC XIII,1) present their readers with goddesses who descend in such auditive terms as sound, voice, and word. In Linguistic Manifestations in the Trimorphic Protennoia and the Thunder: Perfect Mind, Tilde Bak Halvgaard argues that these presentations reflect a philosophical discussion about the nature of words and names, utterances and language, as well as the relationship between language and reality, inspired especially by Platonic and Stoic dialectics. Her analysis of these linguistic manifestations against the background of ancient philosophy of language offers many new insights into the structure of the two texts and the paradoxical sayings of the Thunder: Perfect Mind.