Gnostic Gospels

[Iowa_Mike]

Did anyone see the article in today’s Omaha World Herald by Bob Fischbach about a play named ‘Apocrypha’ currently running at the Blue Barn Theartre on 11th St.?

The article was titled, “Provocative play offers interesting questions as it explores Christianity”. The play is based on the Gnostic Gospels which were written in the 4th century. The notion that this play explores Chritianity, I find offensive. Gnostic’s deride Christ and all other Christian beliefs for that matter. The representation by Fishbach that the play explores Christianity is both wrong and, in my humble opinion, offensive. In his article he provides a few snippets from the play…

A lonely Yeshua the Son of Man wants to know: Why all this blood and sand and time? " For God so loved himself, he needed an audience," the resentful, somewhat estranged son shouts skyward. “They’ve outgrown you, some of them.”

Does this sound even remotely Christian?

The following is some information about Gnosticsim that I lifted off a web-site,

The Gnostic gospels are a product of Gnosticism. Gnosticism, broadly construed, recognizes two deities: the Demiurge-flawed and wicked creator of a flawed and wicked material world-who is often equated with the God of the Old Testament; and the “good God,” the Father of Jesus, who sent his Son to show humans the way of salvation from the corrupt material world. Salvation, under Gnosticism, does not require forgiveness of sins or necessarily entail any type of physical sacrament; it instead consists primarily of acquiring secret knowledge, or gnosis.1 Until the middle of the twentieth century, the primary access scholars had to Gnostic writings came through polemics written against them by church fathers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian. Despite the fervor that characterizes these anti-gnostic polemics, it appears, based on recent discoveries, that these church fathers were charitable in their treatments. The most heralded of these recent discoveries contains the Nag Hammadi collection of Coptic documents, “discovered by a happy accident” in Upper Egypt toward the end of 1945.2 This collection of documents sparked anew much scholarly discussion as to the relationship between Gnosticism and early Christianity, especially in terms of what sort of dependence relationships can be ascertained among their respective textual traditions. Despite recent popular and scholarly infatuation with the “gospels” of the Nag Hammadi collection, their textual inferiority demonstrates that they are not to be accorded the status reserved for the canonical gospels of the Bible. "

Does anyone else think this is as offensive as I do?

Iowa Mike

 

[puzzleannie]

Gnostic “gospels” and any research based on them explores Gnosticism, not Christianity, and sheds no light at all on early Christianity except in the negative, as in, “studying Mormonism would give you a great idea of what Catholics reject.”

what I find offensive is that there are plenty of good writers who can’t find jobs in the media, yet an individual who has such appalling ignorance of the distinction I cite above is allowed a media forum.