In spite of my attempts to argue for the illogical nature of the claim in the Gospel of Truth that “those who are ignorant until the end are creatures of forgetfulness [who] will dissolve with it,” it seems that Valentinus (or whoever wrote this text)
I’ve written an entire book about the origins of the doctrine of Hell, Jesus Undefeated: Condemning the False Doctrine of Eternal Torment, but the other day I found myself in a conversation about the topic that gave me another perspective. We were talking about how the fire metaphor took hold of the early Christian imagination as the concept was introduced from pagan sources, and how the Hebrew Scriptures never breathe a word about the idea of an eternal state of... Read more
A Few Thoughts About Oneness Reading through the Gospel of Truth, one may discern a mixed message of Oneness and Connection with the Divine on the one hand, and Separation from the Father on the other. This bears further study and reflection before we
America was founded on the foundation of an unrealized promise: The idea that everyone is endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Founding Fathers originally meant that “all MEN were created equal” and specifically that “all white land-owning men” (and not women, or people of color) were created equal. However, the nature of that language left open the tantalizing possibility that a nation could be founded on the promise that... Read more
In modern American Evangelical Christianity, the death of Jesus is interpreted as a sacrificial death where the Son of God suffers and dies in our place as our substitute, taking on the punishment we so rightly deserve for rejecting the Father’s love But, in the
Yesterday, Wendy and I took our son Dylan to see a film together. As the credits rolled at the end, we grabbed our phones to check messages and discovered that there had just been an assassination attempt on Donald Trump. By the time we got home, the conspiracy theories were already in full swing. Had he faked it? Who was the shooter? Why didn’t the Secret Service react differently? Would this lead to more violence? This morning, the media storm... Read more
I want to say a few things about the language found in Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Truth (GoT) regarding the interaction between Christ and those who “discover him in themselves” even as he “discovered them in himself.” This language speaks to the
As we’ve seen, the author of the Gospel of Truth says that error is mankind’s inability to comprehend the incomprehensible God. That error is what drove mankind away from God, and God’s response to this was to send the Christ to reveal the Truth to
One of the early mysteries in the Gospel of Truth centers around the identity of the “Error” mentioned in Chapter 2, or “Transgression” in some translations. This metaphor serves as a central theme in the Gospel of Truth early on, so properly understanding what this
The Gospel of Truth, like the lost Gospel of Thomas, was one of several ancient texts that were suppressed by Irenaeus and other early Church Fathers, and only recently uncovered in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi find in Egypt. In our ongoing weekly
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