The days are getting longer as Winter wanes Spring is nearer now.
I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I’m reading Metzger’s take on the development of the canon of the New Testament. Thursday morning 29 January, during a seemingly interminable wait to see a bone and joint specialist about the shoulder that’s been tormenting me the past eight or so months, I read these words (italics mine):
Valentinus’ system is an elaborate theogonic and cosmogonic epic. It describes in three acts the creation, the fall, and the redemption; first in heaven, then on earth. The spiritual world or ‘pleroma’ comprises thirty ‘aeons’ forming a succession of pairs (syzygies). The visible world owes its origin to the fall of Sophia (‘wisdom’), whose offspring, the Demiurge, is identified with the God of the Old Testament. Human beings belong to one of three classes, the spiritual people (pneumatikoi, or true Gnostics), those who merely possesses (sic) (psychikoi, or ordinary, unenlightened church members), and the rest of humankind, who are made up solely of matter (hylikoi) and are given over to eternal perdition.
Valentinus derived his teachings from his own fertile imagination, from Oriental and Greek speculations (including Pythagorean elements), and from Christian ideas…
(Metzger 80, 81)
My point in going on like this is not to interest the reader in the dead-end teachings of the so-called “Christian” gnostics. Rather, I was surprised to find that my own functional worldview, unflattering as it is to admit the fact of it, (that bit I’ve italicized) is like unto that of an early Christian Era gnostic heretic.
Christov_Tenn 