Is Mary Magdalene's gosple real?

[Brendan]

LOL - I think the catholic church has way too many books! :whacky:

xxx zundrah xxx

Well, that’s what all those medieval monks did during the time they weren’t praying, they made copies of old books.

 

[Erich]

How do you get from this:

I think there is always a possibility that some books were left out because they did not fit with what the early Church was teaching.

to this:

Finally, some one who admits that there were books removed from the bible!

If something is left out, by definition that something is not included. On the other hand, if something is removed, by definition that something has to have been included in the first place.

Saying that something was removed from the bible when in reality it was never included in the first place, is like saying that certain books written in reformed Egyptian on plates of gold (instead of in Greek on scrolls of papyrus) were removed from the Bible.

 

[Sailor_Kenshin]

Now, as for what Gnosticism is:
Gnosticism is a term encompassing diverse, syncretistic religious movements in antiquity consisting of various belief systems that share some common beliefs with each other (so there is technically not a ‘Gnosticism’, but ‘GnosticismS’). These beliefs are generally:

• Matter, in fact anything physical, is imperfect and evil.
• The blame for the world’s failings lies not with humans, but with the creator. The physical world is imperfect because the one who created the universe (usually referred to as the Demiurge) is an inferior god, himself a flawed being. Some sects, meanwhile, identify this Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament - which they hold to be separate from the far superior and remote true God - usually termed the Monad.
• Humans were originally divine souls who are trapped in their physical bodies, in this material world, by the evil Demiurge.
• Humans are by default ignorant of the “divine spark” present within them, due to the influence of the Demiurge and his subordinates. What can liberate mankind from this slavery, is the hidden gnosis (knowledge).
• Gnostics believe that the true God had time and again sent messengers to assist and teach humans in their quest to attain this secret knowledge, this gnosis. Gnostics therefore do not seek liberation from “sin”, but freedom from this ignorance of which “sin” is only a consequence - thus being ‘enlightened’ is very important.

Sounds pretty messed up.

 

[elts1956]

I think there is always a possibility that some books were left out because they did not fit with what the early Church was teaching. They had the power to remove them and they did. Something to ponder: no where in the bible do we hear the names of Mary’s parents. Yet we know their names, we call them St. Joachim and St. Anne. How would their names be known unless they were read in the gnostic gospels?

I think some of them were left out because they were redundant and not necessary to explain the beliefs of the Church.

 

[patrick457]

Ummmmm, yeah. While you’re taking some Bible History courses, you might want to look into a good comparative World Religions course, as well. This is Buddhism you’re talking about here, not Islam.

That reminds me of the possible Buddhist influence in Gnostic thinking. Buddhism was known to the Greeks, having encountered it during Alexander the Great’s conquests.
Greco-Buddhism was a cultural consequence of a long chain of interactions begun by Greek forays into India from the time of Alexander the Great, carried further by the establishment of Indo-Greek rule in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and the north-western borders of India for some centuries. The Greco-Bactrians’ expansion into India, where they established the Indo-Greek kingdom (which lasted until the Kushans invaded northern parts of Pakistan and India in the first century AD), enabled Greco-Buddhism to flourish.

The pointed similarities are:

• True enlightenment can only be truly achieved by knowledge/awareness (gnosis/jñāna).
• “Ignorance” or “delusion” (agnosis/avidyā) is the root of all evil.
• Gnosis is arrived as a result of interior revelation and not through ordinary means.
• The tendencies for antinomianism. While rules for behavior are considered important, even crucial, in the lower rungs of the spiritual ladder, in more exalted states such rules become relative.
• The important role of the feminine principle of wisdom (Prajñā/Sophia)
• The preference for hidden meanings and secret, mysterious teachings which can only be truly understood by the elite.
• The metaphysical monism of the two faiths - the aspiration to transcend the multiplicity of manifest things and achieve a condition of ultimate oneness. The wish to break free from all the sufferings of the physical world.[/INDENT]