Greetings, and welcome back to Gnostic Insights.
I imagine that some people who tune into this broadcast or read my writing, when they see the word Gnostic, they’re hoping it’s going to be more exotic than it turns out to be, because there are many ancient myths and stories that are labeled as Gnostic and Gnostic scriptures that don’t much resemble what is taught in the Judeo-Christian line of religions. But when you read the New Testament afresh with this new translation by David Bentley Hart, you see that many of the phrases and concepts that we’ve become accustomed to in the standard translations of the Bible are not entirely accurate to the original ancient Greek writing. The New Testament as recently translated by David Bentley Hart sounds very much like the Tripartite Tractate in its speech and in its allegories.
Hart has translated the New Testament afresh from the ancient Greek without reference to what we have come to believe the words mean—doctrinal expectations, you could say. Quoting from his preface, he says, “The relation between Christian theology and scriptural translation has a long and complicated history; theology has not only influenced translation, but particular translations have had enormous consequences for the development of theology (it would be almost impossible, for instance, to exaggerate how consequential the Latin Vulgate’s inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 5:12, proved for the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin).”
He says that, “In the end, even the most conscientious translations tend at certain crucial junctures to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the plain meaning of the words on the page.” He says that what happens as a consequence often verges on a kind of “pious fraudulence.” So, in this translation, he has elected to produce an “almost pitilessly literal translation.” Many of his departures from received practices are Hart’s efforts to “make the original text as visible as possible, through the palimpsest of its translation.” Palimpsest? I paused a moment to look up palimpsest, and it means something reused or altered, but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
This morning I want to share with you some important passages out of the New Testament from Hart’s translation, which demonstrates the compatibility between this Gnostic Christianity that I talk about, and more conventional Christianity, although few people have noticed or care to draw these similarities.
So let’s begin with a passage from John, chapter one, verses 1-6. And, it’s a very familiar passage for us. It usually reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Well, the actual Word is Logos, and we talk about Logos a lot here. And so it reads like this: “In the origin, there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD.” And, by the way, when Hart is referring to the highest character of God—The God Above All Gods, as we would say—he uses GOD in all capital letters. And when he refers to God in the more usual way that we refer to God—the God that is involving itself in our human existence—it’s god or God. And those differences are all indicated in the original Greek, but they don’t ever translate through into our modern Bibles.
So, “In the origin there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) and the Logos was god.” God meaning, then, that the Logos incorporated all of the attributes of the God Above All Gods, but in a place in a particularity. Going on, “This one was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) in the origin. All things came to be through him (Logos) and without him came not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life and this life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.”
Carrying on, “It was the true light which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos. He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be. And the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. But as many as did accept him, to them, he gave the power to become GOD’s children (the God Above All Gods’ children)—to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD. And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:9-14.)
Now, of course, this is usually meant to refer to Jesus Christ coming to Earth in fleshly form. And that “he came to those who were his own” is usually thought to mean to the Jews, but the Jews did not recognize him as the Messiah and did not accept him. And, in conventional Christianity, “but as many of the Jews that did accept him, he gave the power to become the originating source’s children, (the God Above All God’s children), to those having faith in his name.” That name generally is considered to be Jesus.
“Logos became flesh” (that is being born into the human body) “and pitched a tent among us.” (He came to dwell with us, but not permanently, so he didn’t build a cathedral; he didn’t build a synagogue, but rather he just pitched a tent because he wasn’t going to be here that long.) “And we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.”
Now, in the sense that we often talk about here, all of these truths that we speak are fractals, and they all begin above in the ethereal realm. That’s where the grand fractals, the archetypal stories, are written and dreamed of by the Aeons. And they are played out over and over again, down here on Earth. So we can take the story that comes to Earth—the story of Jesus coming to his own and his own not knowing him—but we can also back that story back up. We can go upstream with it, back into the Fullness. So let’s look at this John 1:9-14 again in that sense.
Logos was the true light which illuminates everyone that was coming into the cosmos. Well, we realize from our Gnostic myth, that Logos fell out of the Fullness and it was the falling out that traversed into a new dimension, this material dimension. And so he came into the cosmos, and the cosmos is down here. The cosmos is what was formed after the Fall. So, Logos was in the cosmos and through Logos, the Cosmos came to be. And we call that the result of the Fall. “But the Cosmos did not recognize him.” So here is that familiar story where Logos falls, he breaks open, and this material cosmos rolls out of them and does not recognize that it came from Logos. The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos was horrified at the things that came out of him and they refused to recognize him. They did not see him. They went their own way. So that’s a description of the Fall—that was his own that did not accept him.
So, what was existent just immediately prior to the Fall? This is where I’ve put together, so forgive me if I am taking license here, but I’ve put together that Logos, who was himself a fractal of the Fullness of God, remember, was sitting right up there on top of the hierarchy of God (so he is a small hierarchy consisting of fractals of all the originating Aeons). What existed then, just prior to his overreach, prior to the Fall? Well, there’s Logos. There’s his fractals. OK, those are those of his own. They are part of his sub- selves. And then he also had his name, Logos. He had his position at the top of the hierarchy—his place. He had his duty, which was to replicate the Fullness as a Whole. And his job was to be the head, the capstone, of the Fullness of God. So that is what existed. And, splitting them out from the fractals that he contains within his body, which are true fractal replications, (and, we can say in this newspeak that we like to do, of the formula of the Fullness of God). All of the Fullnesses were contained within Logos, but one fractal iteration down, removed. So that is what belonged to him. And it was his position, place, and name, and job that was his identifier, right? His name—his identifier. What do you do for a living? Well, I’m the capstone of the Fullness of God. That’s his ego. That’s his identity, his egoic identity.
So, what Logos consisted of just prior to the Fall was the fractal iterations of all the formulas of the Fullness of God and his ego designation of who he was and what he was. When that fell, in the Gnostic tradition of the Tripartite Tractate, it broke apart down here into this material cosmos, forming space, time, distance. And all of the hierarchy that existed within Logos lost its hierarchical arrangement. It was no longer a hierarchy; it was a splat. It was, I think, quantum foam. Chaotic small, bubbling, not knowing who or what it was, not having any particular job, just chaotic boiling. And so, “He came to the things that were his own and they who were his own did not accept him,” that being his egoic quantum foam self didn’t recognize him as the organizing principle of their existence. So Logos fled back up to the Fullness and abandoned it down here below, and that quantum chaos became the foundation of our cosmos, the foundation of our existence down here. I take that all out of John 1:9-14 in combination with the Tripartite Tractate myth.
Carrying on, John 1:15-18, says, “John (and that would be John the Baptist) testifies concerning him and has cried out, saying, ‘This was he of whom I said, He who is coming after me has surpassed me, for he was before me. For we have all received from his Fullness, and grace upon grace; Because the law was given through Moses, the grace and truth came through Jesus, the Anointed.’” (And Hart generally uses the term the Anointed instead of the Christ, because that was the more literal translation of the Greek.) “No one has ever seen GOD (the God Above All Gods); the one who is uniquely god. . . (the one who is uniquely god, specifies to me the monad, the son, the first iteration of the Father, and unique in this sense of the word means particular in a place—he’s the monad of what is otherwise the God Above All Gods who is illimitable has no boundaries and no one can see or touch.) So it says, “No one has ever seen the God Above All Gods; the one who is uniquely god, (that being the Son) who is in the Father’s breast, that one has declared him.” So, we can see that the Son is not down here on Earth because the Son is declaring someone else—Logos, or Jesus.
So, the Son who is in the Father’s breast, that is another way of saying that the Son never separated out from the Father—he is an extrusion. He is a reaching forward but still connected. He’s within the Father’s breast. I always use this analogy, this metaphor: that the Son is the bucket dipped into the illimitable sea of consciousness and the bucket contains within it the same exact stuff that the God Above All Gods is, but within that contained shape. And that’s the definition of the Son. The bucket is still sitting within the Father, it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Now, jumping to what’s called First John 3:1-9. 1 John is a different book—it’s not the first book of John we’ve been reading from, which is one of the Gospels. It’s a letter from John and it says, “See what kind of love the Father has given us so that we might be called children of God—and we are. . . Little children, let no one lead you astray. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, just as that one is righteous. Whoever commits sin is from the Slanderer, because the Slanderer has been sinning from the beginning. For this the Son of God appeared: that he might dissolve the works of the Slanderer.” Hart translates the devil or the evil one as the Slanderer. That is the most precise definition of what we have come to think of as Satan or the devil. And the Slanderer is a good term because you know what it means to be a slanderer—to tell lies about someone; to interpret their behavior in the worst possible way and then fill them with guilt for the things they have supposedly done. The Slanderer’s representation of what it calls the truth is not the truth—it’s its version of the truth designed to make you feel bad, designed to make you feel guilt. And guilt drives you away from the truth. Your conscience, conviction of wrongdoing, and repentance drives you toward the truth, but guilt makes you hide and drives you away.
So, there is a difference between what the Slanderer tells you and what the Holy Spirit tells you. The Slanderer always puts it in the worst possible light, and it’s designed to mortify you, to kill you, to kill your spirit. The Holy Spirit is love, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, empathy. The Holy Spirit may convict you that, Oh dear, I misspoke, or I mis-stepped or I gotta quit this what I’m doing, but it drives you in the direction of the Father and the Son. So you can tell the difference between the two by righteousness versus unrighteousness. And that’s what this 1 John 3:1-9 is talking about. It says, “Let no one lead you astray. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous.”
And remember: we are forgiven. We belong. We are the children of the Father. We are the children of the Fullness of God. We are the children of the Aeons. We come from the good thought. We remember the Father, unlike the quantum chaos of the material world that doesn’t remember the Father, doesn’t have a clue as to who it is or where it came from. We are directly from the Fullness of God. We did come in with full remembrance of righteousness. We know the difference between right and wrong. We do.
If you can’t tell the difference between righteousness and unrighteousness, between a virtue and a vice, that’s because you have developed within yourself a habit of unrighteousness. And maybe, let’s say, you were a little kid and you go into the store and you shoplift a candy bar and you get away with it. Perhaps, most likely the first time you ever shoplifted a candy bar, you felt bad about it. Certainly the Slanderer was telling you that you’re a horrible thing and that you do not belong to righteousness, because that’s what the Slanderer wants you to think. He wants you to be on his side, the unrighteous side. So, if you believe the Slanderer that you are worthless and no good, and you’re full of guilt, you’ll just go with it, if you believe him. And every time, then, thereafter when you steal something, you feel less and less guilty about it. Your conscience has stopped working at that point. That’s why you, now, sitting here listening to me, may not be able to tell the difference between righteous behavior and unrighteous behavior, between good and evil, because you have—it’s called hardening your heart—you have become deaf to the remembrance of righteousness. But only through disuse, and only because you’re listening too much to the Slanderer tell you how worthless you are, and you might as well go for it.
Here’s a reminder of some virtues and vices. The vices are inversions of the traits of the Father.
Now, if you’re in that situation, by this time I’m certain that you’re miserable. You’re a miserable person. You’re a miserable human being because love, joy, forgiveness, compassion, empathy, belonging belong on the side of righteousness, and the only thing that lives on the side of the Slanderer is ego, and ego out of control. Ego deaf to your true nature, to your true self—to your conscience. And once you become deaf and a follower of the Slanderer, then you’ve become a slave, is how the New Testament puts it. You have become a slave to those things that rule you. The Demiurge, remember, controls everything by strong bonds of power—the cosmos itself, the dead hard rocky parts, the molecules, the atoms, the elements, the minerals—they do not have free will. They are controlled precisely by the laws of physics and chemistry and whatnot—by the laws of the Demiurge.
And if you’re listening to the Slanderer, the chief Archon of the Demiurge (and the Archons are the minions of the Demiurge, what in traditional religions are called demons), so the Slanderer is ignorant of the Father, is ignorant of our spiritual inheritance, is ignorant. Doesn’t know love, doesn’t know God, doesn’t know forgiveness, doesn’t know kindness. It’s harsh, it controls you through bonds. And those are the bonds of addiction or the bonds of habit. And it keeps you in bondage through guilt and feelings of worthlessness. But hey, that’s what the Christ came for, you see? So why you would want to reject the Christ is beyond me.
The Christ—in our newspeak we could call the correcting algorithm for the Fallen nature of the cosmos—the Christ brings, not fractals of the Fullness of God, but the actual Fullness of God was incorporated within the Christ. Those are called the 3rd order of powers. We who were sent from the Fullness were the 2nd order of powers, and the 1st order of powers is our parents—the Fullness of God, the Aeons in the Fullness. We’re the second order—all of the living things on Earth and in the cosmos. The 3rd order of powers is “the Army of Christ,” and those are the full power, majesty, glory, forgiveness, all the virtues, all the true patterns of what we were meant to be—of what this fallen cosmos was meant to be. The true pattern of Paradise is embodied in the Christ. So it’s very wrong-headed to think that we don’t need the Christ, because the Christ is our correcting algorithm.
The Christ can immediately rectify and redeem us. The minute we say to the Slanderer, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” we can flip right over to the redemption of the Christ. You don’t have to be down. You don’t have to be wallowing in sin and regret and guilt. You don’t have to be that way. Let down your ego. It’s your ego that is the barrier. It’s the ego that resonates to the Demiurge. It’s the ego that is captured by the Slanderer, so your self-concept is evil. But, if you repent, which just means turn around, Get thee behind me, Satan, I look forward, onward, and upward at the Christ. You see, the minute you accept the Christ instead, you are redeemed. Now it may take some time to heal from the ravages and the destruction that a life of being under the control of the Slanderer and the Demiurge has put upon your body and your mind. But your spirit, your true Self, is in full blossom. It’s as perfect as it ever was, as it ever will be, and it’s just a matter of your material body and your ego recognizing that and catching up to the fact that you are redeemed.
Boy, the time really goes fast. I’ve got 7 pages of things to talk about and we’re still on page one. That’s funny, isn’t it? So I think next week we’ll pick up right here where we left off and we’ll look at more of Hart’s translation of the New Testament and how it works hand in hand with the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. Until then, repent from the Slanderer. Who needs him? Turn to the Christ. He’s standing there with open arms. Knock and the door will open. You don’t have to earn your way into heaven. You don’t have to be a perfect person. You just have to say, OK, I get it. Please help me, and it’s a done deal. Until next week, onward and upward and God bless.