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Gnostic Garden of Eden

JohnPaul

JohnPaul

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The Gnostics, condemned by the early church as heretics, had a very different iinterpretation of the Garden of Eden story. The Gnostics believed that the Bible God was a false impostor god who had created a flawed material world and trapped human souls in it for his own amusement, while the True God remained remote and pure. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was an emanation of the True God, sent to rescue the trapped human souls by giving them Divine Knowledge from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Serpent promised Adam and Eve that if they ate the fruit, they would not surely die, but would become as gods.

The false God feared this promise and expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden, but we still have the promise of the Serpent. We will not surely die, but will become as gods. Each human has within him a tiny spark of the True God, his own Inner Light, which can be nurtured and developed through many reincarnations on earth to finally escape from the material world and rejoin the True God, which is our source. At physical death on earth, a human soul is reborn into a new human body. This continues until his Inner Light is spiritually developed enough to escape from the material world. It takes more than one brief human lifetime to learn to become a god.

The early Christian church tried to stamp out the Gnostic beliefs, but traces of them have always survived. Some ancient Gnostic scriptures were discovered in Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 and have now been translated and published.
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JohnPaul said:
The Gnostics, condemned by the early church as heretics, had a very different iinterpretation of the Garden of Eden story. The Gnostics believed that the Bible God was a false impostor god who had created a flawed material world and trapped human souls in it for his own amusement, while the True God remained remote and pure. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was an emanation of the True God, sent to rescue the trapped human souls by giving them Divine Knowledge from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Serpent promised Adam and Eve that if they ate the fruit, they would not surely die, but would become as gods.

The false God feared this promise and expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden, but we still have the promise of the Serpent. We will not surely die, but will become as gods. Each human has within him a tiny spark of the True God, his own Inner Light, which can be nurtured and developed through many reincarnations on earth to finally escape from the material world and rejoin the True God, which is our source. At physical death on earth, a human soul is reborn into a new human body. This continues until his Inner Light is spiritually developed enough to escape from the material world. It takes more than one brief human lifetime to learn to become a god.

The early Christian church tried to stamp out the Gnostic beliefs, but traces of them have always survived. Some ancient Gnostic scriptures were discovered in Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 and have now been translated and published.
t
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But is there something you want us to discuss? Or debate? For example, is this what you believe?
 
Sherman123 said:
But is there something you want us to discuss? Or debate? For example, is this what you believe?
Click to expand...
I am an agnostic and don't "believe" anything, but I think the Gnostic interpretation of the Garden of Eden story is very interesting, as valid as the Christian interpretation, and worth discussing. I like the idea of becoming a god.


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JohnPaul said:
I am an agnostic and don't "believe" anything, but I think the Gnostic interpretation of the Garden of Eden story is very interesting, as valid as the Christian interpretation, and worth discussing. I like the idea of becoming a god.


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If you like that you might find some LDS theology interesting.
 
Interesting. I know very little about the Gnostics, but you've inspired me to learn more about them.
 
JohnPaul said:
The Gnostics, condemned by the early church as heretics, had a very different iinterpretation of the Garden of Eden story. The Gnostics believed that the Bible God was a false impostor god who had created a flawed material world and trapped human souls in it for his own amusement, while the True God remained remote and pure. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was an emanation of the True God, sent to rescue the trapped human souls by giving them Divine Knowledge from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Serpent promised Adam and Eve that if they ate the fruit, they would not surely die, but would become as gods.

The false God feared this promise and expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden, but we still have the promise of the Serpent. We will not surely die, but will become as gods. Each human has within him a tiny spark of the True God, his own Inner Light, which can be nurtured and developed through many reincarnations on earth to finally escape from the material world and rejoin the True God, which is our source. At physical death on earth, a human soul is reborn into a new human body. This continues until his Inner Light is spiritually developed enough to escape from the material world. It takes more than one brief human lifetime to learn to become a god.

The early Christian church tried to stamp out the Gnostic beliefs, but traces of them have always survived. Some ancient Gnostic scriptures were discovered in Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 and have now been translated and published.
t
Click to expand...

I think youre referring to the Sethites, a rather small sect in early Christianity. Then again, during the early times, Christians had widely different dogmas and it was after the Catholics were able to suppress the others that they became the dominant sect of the religion until the Reformation. Augustine was actually a Manichean before he converted to Catholicism.
 
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