Lightfoot in Chicago Then A Helpful Introduction to the Gnostic Creation Myth

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I guess I have a voice. It was fine until just a moment ago. We are starting off the week. And I'm not exactly sure what the schedule is going to look like this week.

It's going to change from day to day. So we'll just try to let you know when we're going to be able to be with you. Sorry to all you truckers about yesterday. Hope you found something interesting to listen to.

We appreciate all your hard work. Though I have yet to see a single disinfecting wipe at Target since February. Could we somehow, I'd like to find at least one little thing of those again. That would be a good thing.

But at least we had toilet paper. That's good. That's good. That's good. Anyway, stuff happening over the weekend. According to what I found online, 10 people were shot and killed, 42 injured in gang violence in Chicago over the weekend.

New record for a single Memorial Day weekend. And yet, while that is going on, the mayor of New York, Lori Lightfoot, what did I say? Oh, did I say New York? I meant Chicago. Lori Lightfoot decided that police resources should be used to shut down churches, especially seemingly Black Baptist churches and Black Pentecostal churches.

And I'm just sort of left going, where are the priorities here again? I mean, if we were talking about the plague, then OK, because you'd be talking about churches meeting or you cause tens of thousands of deaths.

But we're not talking about the plague. The numbers are clear. The more numbers came out, even using the CDC numbers, which I'll be honest with you, I question in many ways as to the collection methodologies.

When you pay medical institutions factors of money more to have certain patients, money corrupts numbers. I mean, I won't even take the time to go into how many times we have documented over the years that money corrupts numbers.

Look what happened just in the, remember ClimateGate? Remember the hockey stick stuff? And how many times we've found people who were fudging the numbers because it meant money. So anyway, even using the CDC numbers, if you don't live in literally a few square miles in central New York, out onto the island, down toward New Jersey, if you don't live in that hot zone, and if you're under 50 and don't live in an old folks home, which those two normally go together, though there is that one guy.

How did that one guy get into an old folks home? The guy that beat up the veteran? I totally lost the plot on that one. How did that guy even get in there? I don't know. I can't figure that one out. That was just disgusting.

But if you don't fall into that area and those parameters, COVID -19 does have the exact same mortality rate as influenza. Now, throw in the insanity that happened. And by the way, I know the current meme on the right is to basically say that leftist governors did this on purpose.

I don't think they did it on purpose. I think they did it on panic. And this is why I have been talking about the dangers of panic. I think they did it on panic because a guy in England with a long track record of massively overestimating deaths was behind the paper that caused the world to shut down.

And I think these governors believed it. I remember it was only, what, a month and a half ago, at most, that in the president's news briefing, they were seriously telling us that the next week, 200 ,000 people would die.

That the very next week, this is going to hit. We've got to be prepared for it. 200 ,000 people are going to die. And so we're rushing hospital ships in. We're putting stuff up, and none of it ever happened.

But that's what they were expecting. And panic creates bad decisions that ended up costing lives. I think that's what happened. I don't think there was some nefarious, ah, we can get rid of all the old people.

No, I think that they sent the COVID-positive patients back to nursing centers, old folks' homes, because they were expecting every single bed, every single hallway to be inhabited with, well, with whom?

Because what was the average age? 81. That's what it was in Italy, too. But anyway, I think that's what happened there. So all of that aside, we can't put it aside, because I predict that there will be a second wave debacle coming, if not soon, at least in the fall, toward winter.

I think churches, if you're reopening, don't get used to it. Don't get used to it. The holidays are coming, and I'm not being a prophet to go, I can think of a couple states that will go, no Christmas stuff, no Christmas gatherings.

And in fact, during the height of the flu season, we need to go back into banning large gatherings. And the response is going to be, OK, that's fine, as long as you do it to everybody. So if you shut down all the sports and all the rest of that stuff, then we'll just go along with it type of a thing, and that's what's coming.

So you need to be thinking ahead. What's your response going to be to all of that kind of stuff? All of that is background to, if there was, if this was the plague, then I could understand why Lori Lightfoot in Chicago would use police resources on the most violent weekend of the year so far to shut down churches, instead of trying to suppress the violence that took 10 lives and hospitalized 42 others in the gangland gangbangers war that continues in the streets of Chicago.

All of that was, believe it or not, background. Wow, seven minutes in, good, this could take a while. All that was background to a series of tweets that I put up that no one read. No one read. Either that, or everybody was scared to say anything about it.

But I put up an entire thread over the weekend. I think it was Saturday, might have been Friday, may have been Sunday. I don't know, some day over the weekend. It's a long weekend. And I pointed something out.

Lori Lightfoot is a married lesbian. Married, according to the definitions of marriage that have absolutely no meaning. But she's a married lesbian. Now, if there had even been serious, credible rumors that she was a lesbian in 1980, would there have been any doubt?

Would there be any doubt whatsoever that that reality would have been central in any discussion of Lori Lightfoot's positions, stances, attitudes toward the church in 1980? Some of you are going, we don't remember 1980.

I get it. I understand. But yeah, 40 years ago, would there have been any hesitation on the part of anyone, even non-Christians, to have raised the question, does Lori Lightfoot's sexuality impact her attitude toward the church?

In 1980, there was no question that would have been on the table, front and center. Yet, in looking at all the articles, do you see? I mean serious articles. I guess there's probably some fundamentalists someplace that that's all they can talk about and that's what they go after.

But I mean, anyone who makes a serious attempt to connect, because theologically, you have to. Theologically, if Romans 1 is central to your anthropology, then that particular expression of the suppression of truth will be central to your analysis of an individual's actions and words and attitudes, the formation of their worldview.

I saw no reference to it whatsoever. It is like you cannot say that in our society any longer, and that includes Christians. Christians are not allowed to point out that if there is that settled level of rebellion, settled to the point where you will take the Christian, God-ordained state of marriage.

And this would be true of Pete Buttigieg, too, by the way. You will take that, redefine it, and rebel against the norms that God has established. You can't talk about that. You cannot connect that to the rest of a person's worldview, not in our land any longer, and not even in the church.

As Christians, we have to. You're going to have an incomplete, incoherent biblical analysis of why somebody is doing what they're doing. But we can't talk about it. We just are not allowed to do it. And it really struck me over this weekend as I saw the behavior going on there in Chicago.

In light of what was also, and it's interesting, I hadn't looked at the shooting stuff. It just so happened that in at least one of the articles that I was looking at, because it came from Chicago over on the side, it's in the sidebar.

And you're like, that's current. That's at the same time you're sending, you've got police squad cars roping parking off so that people can't get to churches and stuff like that. While a few blocks away, the bullets are flying.

And it's like, where do you get priorities like that? Well, there may be other things behind that. And you see, we're not allowed to, you're not allowed to, no, no, no, no, no. We've normalized this now.

And so biblical parameters don't, no, no, you can't. Society won't accept that. So you can't go there. You can't go there. That's all there is to it. And I posted a thread on that. I don't, there might've been one or two comments, but it was like, ooh, I ain't touching that.

No, I, I don't want to get kicked off Twitter. Well, I didn't get kicked off Twitter. Might've, if I had posted on Facebook, I might've, I might've, I think Facebook is significantly right now more censorious than Twitter is.

It's not that Twitter doesn't shadow ban and all the rest of that stuff they do. But as far as just straightforward, you're out of here. That seems to be more of a Facebook thing right now. So it seemed like a lot of folks are like, I'm not going to say a word about that.

Maybe true, but I'm not going to say a word about it. Not going to say a word about it. So also breaking news right now, um, stunningly another apostate from behind a microphone with a guitar. Um, evidently there is a lead singer of Christian rock band Hawk Nelson says he no longer believes in God.

I'll be honest with you. Never heard of him. I mean, I don't, okay, I'm not big on, you know, but it got a guy named John Steingard lead singer of the Christian rock band, Hawk Nelson regretfully announced on Instagram last week.

They no longer believes in God. And so it looks like he's a PK. Um, it says, I remember being uncomfortable with certain things, praying in public. I always felt like some kind of performance, weird performance art.

It can be, um, I've by the way, I've always had problems with some of the ways that we handle with flippancy public prayer. I've always had problems. Why? Because it's worship. So when you just attach it to stuff, okay, it's just time to do it now.

You know, it just, it's, it becomes this perfunctory say a few words in Jesus name. Amen. Type thing. Um, yeah, because you're, you're supposed to perform in a certain way, you know, um, anybody in a church that I've been associated with will tell you that they get a little worried when I'm the one asked to pray.

Because if it's, if it's going to be in, as a part of the service, I'm going to go longer than you're accustomed to. Um, and in fact, what I've got to do, I haven't done this, but, um, in my previous church, there would be a moment of silent prayer before the pastoral prayer, which I really like.

But what's fascinating is young people struggle with that horribly. Silence for more than five seconds means the battery on their iPhone died. And that's a bad thing. And so it stresses them out. And you could never do it, but I wish there was some way to do a test where you just remain silent before praying for a full 60 seconds and then ask people how long they estimated it was silent.

And they would, you would, you'd get people to think in 10 minutes. You really would. When you have silence for that long, the next generation is not accustomed to that. That's just my experience. Um, but anyways, um, emotional cries such as Holy Spirit, come fill this place, always felt clunky and awkward leaving my lips.

Um, our youth conference, I tend to encourage every team to sign a pledge. They would date Jesus for a year. It felt manipulative and unsettling to me. I didn't sign it. Well, yeah. Okay. So you got somebody PK exposed to some, who knows what, um, what they would date Jesus for date Jesus for a year.

What is that? I maybe it's some abstinence thing, but seriously, how about obey Jesus for your life? That was date Jesus for a year. Sorry, guy that you got exposed to that, but date Jesus for you. Um, despite those concerns in his youth, he still ended up pursuing music and generally found some peace in the band Hawk Nelson.

However, as time grew on, not overly time grew on what? Steingard increasingly had trouble with the concept of evil. If God is all loving and all powerful, why is there evil in the world? Can you not do anything about it?

Does he choose not to is the evil in the world or result of his desire to give us free will. Okay. Then what about famine and disease and floods and all the suffering that isn't caused by humans and our free will.

If God is loving, why does he send people to hell? Were all questions that plagued him. Now, these are the most fundamental basic questions that he should have been hearing clear and consistent answers to, especially as a PK from his youth onward.

Maybe they weren't in the service when these were being offered because they were being entertained in kid's church. I don't know. Um, it does. Whenever I hear anyone saying things that my first, my first question is, and so having missed the numerous sermons on this subject, unless he was in a church where there was just no verse by verse exposition, nothing.

If so, that explains all of this. Um, the reason you didn't go to your elders was exactly what again? Because you see, is the evil in the world a result of, is it already to give us free will? Yeah. It doesn't take the atheists too much to see through all this worship of free will on the part of so many in the church.

And it certainly leaves you with a rather impotent God who has a desire to give you free will. Every time I hear that, I can't help but think of the doctrine and covenants. You know, this is, this is God's purpose.

Mankind is the centrality of God's purpose rather than God being the centrality of man's purpose. It's just, it's just upside down and backwards and everything else in the process. But okay, let's say you, let's say because he's a Christian musician, he doesn't get to go to church very often, which doesn't make much sense.

And if that's the case, that should tell you a little something about that kind of ministry. Um, then you're saying there aren't billions of hours worth of resources online, even like important, serious books that maybe were even written, I don't know, 500 years ago that address all these things in depth.

It does make you wonder. Steingard then attacked what he felt were contradictions between the Old and New Testament. Listen to this. Why does God seem so bleeped off in most of the Old Testament? And then all of a sudden, he's a loving father in the New Testament.

Okay, right there. There's two possibilities. Either this is the, I'm a convert, so I'm going to grossly misrepresent my former faith syndrome, which you see all the time. Or this is some poor guy that got stuck up in front of people to perform because he had a good voice and could play the guitar well, and then never got the most basic, foundational Christian education that the kids in a good, solid church get, and they get it early on.

Because this is, as soon as you hear this, you know you're talking to someone who has minimal exposure to any serious theological training whatsoever. Why does he say not to kill, but then instruct Israel to turn around and kill men and women and children to take the promised land?

Because this was judgment upon them for their sin? Remember this flood thing? You know? Yeah. So the objections are all the standard stuff that there are 20 books that I can tell this gentleman never read and had no desire to read in the process.

So we shouldn't at all be surprised by these things. And I've been saying for a long time, tsunami of apostasy. As the society, as the cost of being a professed disciple of Jesus increases, those who are false disciples will refuse to pay the cost.

When you're in a society where there's not a great cost, then you will have a far greater percentage of people that will go along because, hey, I would imagine he's been able to pay the bills singing the songs.

But once that tipping point is reached, things change. Things change. It's interesting. Most of these famous apostates, when they're given the opportunity of actually talking to someone, who would have answers to their questions, they're just not interested.

They're just not interested. Just got to... We're still good? Whenever I hear that UPS going click, click, down there, it's like, hmm. I didn't see the lights flicker. That's not good. We're still going.

That's great. But it's only like 107 outside. Oh, the UPS is... The UPS is only going to go so long if APS doesn't keep going. They keep building houses and keep connecting electricity to them. And so I just wonder how we can keep all this stuff going.

I'll be perfectly honest with you. Anyways, I'm sorry. Oh, I know that. But most of that goes to California. That's the sad part of that. At least it used to. I'm not sure if that's changed or anything like that.

But anyway. Well, they are moving here and then they still vote for the same wackos they vote for in California. That's the problem. By the way, just in passing, I was interviewed by The Atlantic today.

Who knows where that's going to go or what that's going to do? I don't know. But the initial questioning was about churches reopening. I said, well, I need to make sure you understand. I'm one of the pastors of a church that never closed.

Oh, that all of a sudden changed everything. And so one of the things that's been really interesting. I met three couples yesterday. Two from California, one from Colorado that had flown to Arizona to go to church.

That's why they came. They knew Apologia was open and they flew here to go to church. And then they were going back on Monday. And the week before, a guy had two reasons to go to church and to get a haircut.

California. And the first thing I said to the guy from California was, strange times we live in, isn't it? That you would actually get on a plane and fly to Phoenix, Arizona to go to church and get a haircut.

Now, he did not get a haircut during church. I just want to make sure everyone understands that this is not a service that we have started offering in the back. A little trim, a little off top. A little, you know.

Yeah, definitely not in that church. No. Well, OK, that would be beard trimming. Yeah. Rich was saying, definitely not in that church. It's like, no, it's not like there's a bunch of people with long hair off the top of their head.

Beards, there are a few beards. But I notice as the hot weather is coming in, a lot of those are getting a little bit of a trim as well. Because trust me, that's a, you notice my beard is gone and my goatee is rather, rather short.

Because once that temperature starts regularly topping 100, it's going to be 100. Are they still talking 112? They drop it down to 111 the next couple of days. That's only 109? Oh, that's disappointing.

Back in the 90s next week for a while. So I'm happy about that. But anyway, how did I, I just found it really interesting. What days we live in that you have folks come up to you and we're from Colorado, we're from California, and we flew down to go to church.

Okay, well, I'm glad you all knew that we were here and hope that was a blessing. We're finishing up a series on Philippians. And then, you know, Jeff's got some work left to do in Matthew 24, to be honest with you.

He's not done there. I still got some questions for him in that section. So there's going to be some work to do there. But that will eventually finish. And so we've been talking about other things. I'm going to be doing, it's going to be a lot of work, but I'm going to be, I did a series on the Lord's Supper.

So I need to do a series on baptism as well. So that always is a controversial subject to address. All right, get a deep seat in the saddle because I need this particular element of our study in the general response to Dr. Ken Wilson's dissertation is valuable across a broad spectrum.

What we're gonna be talking about today. And that is we are going to specifically focus in upon Gnosticism. Now, as you know, Gnosticism is a term that is bantied about constantly. Orthodox Christians accuse these groups of Gnosticism.

Non-Orthodox groups accuse the Orthodox of Gnosticism. I have heard the Gnostic label attached to so many things that to be honest with you, it was very plain that the person using the phraseology knew nothing about Gnosticism.

I have, I just grabbed a few. These are just a couple of the books in my library on Gnosticism. This is the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the Gnostic Bible. Meyer did both of those. Ancient Gnosticism by Pearson.

This is a subject that I have had to what? I'm sure they're by sources because they're in my office. They're, yeah, anything in my office is a biased source, just by definition. Yeah, not even going to waste time on that.

Anyway, the reason that I have a pretty decent library of materials on Gnosticism is because of the broad number of topics in apologetics that Gnosticism is relevant to. That is because Gnosticism was the first great enemy of the Christian faith.

In fact, I've become convinced, absolutely convinced, and this is not a perspective that you would, I'm going to be in the minority in what I'm about to say. I'm just letting you know ahead of time, but I want you to hear what I'm saying so you can evaluate it for yourself.

Given how dangerous Gnosticism was, almost immediately after the Apostolic Age, I mean, second century, so matter of decades. And Proto-Gnosticism, sort of a Jewish conglomeration form is seen in Colossae.

So Gnosticism, as a religious system, flourishes and it threatens to destroy what we would consider orthodox Christianity. In other words, a Christianity that takes seriously the Christian scriptures in the context in which they were written.

Gnosticism was that dangerous. Gnosticism, especially Valentinian Gnosticism, was a purposeful, satanic imitation of the original that was highly effective in destroying many, many souls. And in academia today, I just slit my proverbial throat.

You're not allowed to say that. You can't. In fact, in academia today, there's this one professor I've listened. He has an extensive class on Gnosticism. And when it comes to factual material, it's very interesting.

But he is a wild-eyed leftist, as almost anybody in that field is. And you can just tell he loves Valentinus. Valentinus is just, oh, so wonderful and insightful and brilliant. Irenaeus, what a crabby, nasty.

Tertullian, just a martyr. Oh, they're just so... You want bias. Wow, there is a tremendous amount of bias in the academy when it comes to this particular subject. But the subject of Gnosticism is important to Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, Islam, Atheism, any type of dealing with church history, transmission of the text of scripture, canon issues, oh my goodness, the Gnostic Gospels, all of that stuff.

This is central to the apologetic task. And yet, I guess I can add this. Well, this would sort of fall into the church history section. I've never understood, and I'm doing as best I can as a one-man army to change this, but I've never understood why apologists in general are not Greek literate and church history literate, and especially in regards to Gnosticism.

I mean, broadly read, not just a narrow series of criticisms, but more broadly read. And I understand parts of it. I mean, we've taken some of these and done some story times with Uncle Jimmy, and for most people, it just sounds like babble.

And it's because, especially with Gnosticism, less so with Valentinian Gnosticism, but with classic or Sethian Gnosticism, there are so many peculiar names and terms and concepts that just trying to figure them all out is next to impossible.

There are so many different forms of it, because it's not like they're not functioning in worldview like you and I have in the West. It's not that this is some objective revelation that what one generation believes is going to be relevant to the next generation.

It's amorphous. It changes. Once it encounters a new belief, it sort of makes room for that. And so it changes over time. It's not like they're claiming, here is one objective revelation from God. Valentinian Gnosticism is different.

It's less complicated terminology. But that's because it was specifically designed with a knowledge of the Christian faith in mind to imitate it while fundamentally changing it. And here's where I'm different.

Here's where I am going to tell you something that I've never mentioned on this program before. You've never heard this. But as I have been delving into, especially Valentinian Gnosticism, it has struck me that if we believe that scripture is divine in its origin, it's interesting that we tend to adopt the mindset that while the Tanakh, the Torah, Nevim, Ketuvim, the Old Testament scriptures, the Hebrew scriptures, while the Tanakh can have a supernatural character to it that allows it to contain divine prophecy of the coming of the Messiah, when it comes to the New Testament, well, the New Testament is different.

And while the New Testament can give us end time stuff, and for a lot of people, that's Matthew 24, that's all of Revelation, that's some stuff that's Thessalonians, and that's all futuristic. But it's futuristic in such a way that the early church is never envisioned in the New Testament scriptures.

In other words, part of this is because we're moderns and we're living 2 ,000 years later, we're looking back at it, and we want these words to be all about us. Okay? I was raised with that. The books that I read, Late Great Planet Earth and stuff like that, instilled in your thinking the idea that what I'm reading, especially when you read the Book of Revelation, is all yet future and we get to look at modern events and figure out what that's going to be.

And so wasps with a man's head, that looks like an Apache helicopter. And so voila. Voila, I know. I just like messing with people. Anyway, so that becomes ingrained in our thinking. And the result is that basically this first, second, third, fourth generations of the early church, who cares?

And part of this is because I've spent so much time in that time period. Justin Martyr and obviously Ignatius and things like that. But then you get into the apologists, you get into Justin Martyr, you get into Tertullian, Irenaeus.

And they had incredible struggles. They really had incredible struggles. And basically we just go, God just left them on their own. There's nothing in the text of scripture that would be relevant to them.

There is in the Old Testament. Once you get the New Testament, there's nothing that's relevant until a future application, even from our own perspective. Isn't that a default way of thinking? And once it becomes default, that's what gets communicated in our preaching, our teaching and stuff like that.

What am I getting to? As I read the New Testament, I see elements that are specifically important to that early period in their fight against the greatest enemy that the church ever faced. That was Gnosticism.

Beware of Gnosis falsely so-called, Paul writes. And you see the way I was trained in seminary, that would be primarily seen as evidence of a late date for the writings to Timothy or minimally a very early presence of some form of Proto-Gnosticism.

But you weren't even allowed. It doesn't even enter into the commentaries to allow a supernatural element in scripture that would give foundation to the early church to survive the onslaught. And doesn't it make sense that that's exactly when the enemy would attack and would attack in the most vociferous and ferocious of ways before you have a completed canon, before you have the foundation to be able to...

I mean, Gnosticism in its full form is not much of a threat today. But why isn't it? It's because we stand on the shoulders of giants. We have definitions that allow us to see the consistency of scripture.

They didn't have that in those first decades. It's easy for us to go, okay, yeah, the one and then emanations and eons. But in that day, they didn't have the kind of background that you and I have. And so we're allowed a certain level of supernaturalism from the Old Testament into its fulfillment in the New.

But no one ever goes, I wonder if God placed in the scriptures a body of truth that was specifically designed to guard that faith in that early period of time. I think he did. I think we have in Colossians.

I think we have in Paul's warnings to Timothy. I think we have in 1 John are phrased in such a way that they become directly relevant to a threat that the church was not yet facing in its fullest form, the form that it would face in the second and third centuries.

And I just simply ask the question, why couldn't God do that? Because in essence, you're not even, that's not even a part of the discussion. Instead, that's used by someone who approaches scripture as if it's not divine, as if it's a product of human writing, as evidence of much later origination.

And therefore, Paul didn't write that and it came about later on. And that's why in the late 1800s, especially in the German schools, it was just a given that John was written around 170, 180. You know, that's well after the rise of Gnosticism.

And so, oh, okay, that's obviously a response to this type of stuff. But I think a lot of even believing evangelicals that would not have otherwise a foundational reason to not think this way, we just don't think this way.

We don't look at it in that way. So, as I've especially been looking at Valentinian Gnosticism, wow, like I said, I've been listening to this leftist, leftist liberal, and he's just, you can tell he just loathes to have to say that Irenaeus identified these as doctrines of demons.

You know why? Because Irenaeus was right. Irenaeus was spot on. In fact, the more you learn about, the more you realize these guys were not overstating things at all. They were spot on in what they were saying.

Especially Irenaeus. I mean, my my estimates of Irenaeus have gone up greatly. Especially in light of the fact that with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, he was found to have been incredibly accurate.

Incredibly accurate in what he described. And given the multifaceted nature, it's hard to describe something that is so, has so much variation and so many different flavors of it. And yet he did a good job.

Irenaeus. But what a difficult time to be an apologist. We've got it easy today, guys. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're sitting there going, you shouldn't be saying this. No, I need to if I'm going to be honest.

We got it easy. When I look at the resources that are available to us to do apologetics today, wow. It's amazing. Being an apologist in 170. Now that was tough. That was hard work. We get to stand on the shoulders of giants.

We've got all this research and writing and reasoning and argumentation that we can grab out there. Oh, we're wimps. Can you imagine what it was like in 170? And you're doing apologetics while the Romans want to throw you to the lions.

There's a question. How many of us will be doing apologetics under persecution? They were. Man, I don't know about you, but my respect for the early church just goes up and up and up the more I really realize what the context was that they were facing.

So, we've talked about Manichaeism and we've said Manichaeism drew from Gnosticism. And one of the important things to recognize in Manichaeism is its pure dualism. Pure dualism. What do I mean? In Manus theology, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness are co-eternal.

One does not give rise to the other. One does not come into existence after the other. One is not dependent for its existence upon the other. They're co-equal, co-eternal. That is as dualistic as you can get.

The Gnostic myth, let's talk about classic Sethian Gnosticism first. You can't define Valentinian Gnosticism without dealing with the Sethian stuff first. Classic Gnosticism is likewise identified as dualistic because you have the sharp distinction between the physical realm and the spiritual realm.

The spiritual realm is good. The physical realm is evil. But the physical realm is not co-eternal with the one parent, the one source of all good, the unknowable God. So Manichaeism is technically a purer form of dualism than the standard classical forms of Gnosticism.

So in Gnosticism, and again, you're going to find variations. One of the reasons you can pick up the Gnostic Bible here, you can pick up the Nag Hammadi scriptures. I've got the Coptic version in the other room.

It's four or five volumes long, just thousands and thousands of pages. And the reason that you can pick all of them up and find variations of thought is because there were variations of thought. Like Manichaeism, and I think Manny picked this up from Gnosticism, you edit stuff to make it attractive to the audience you're attempting to reach.

And so as your religion moves into different areas, if people are big on the Buddha, you put the Buddha in there. If people are big on Jesus, you put Jesus in there. Mix and match. And they didn't find that to be disingenuous because they weren't claiming this is some kind of, you know, we're Western thinkers.

We think of revelation as an unchangeable thing. They don't. That's not. No, they're basic parameters that sort of define something that's Gnostic. But man, you can, you can move around a lot within this system.

You really can't. So what I'm going to describe to you is sort of the basic vanilla version. And then as you read in these sources, you're going to find variation over here and variation there. This Eon is named differently over here.

And that's just, there's no way to avoid it. That's how it is. So in Gnosticism, you have not a personal, self-existent deity as you have in Christianity. That's not what you have. You have an unknowable, divine purity of thought.

The one parent that there's a, there's a all through Gnostic thought. There is a male female interplay. There is an androgynous concept. There is the idea. If you've remember, when we read years ago, we read the gospel of Thomas, we do every like two years, but read the gospel of Thomas and section 114.

Peter says, Jesus make Mary depart from this for women are not worthy of the kingdom of God. And Jesus says, don't worry yourself about it. I will make Mary into a man. And we're all like, wow, that's really weird.

That's because it comes to Gnosticism and all men are women too. In other words, the physical has a spiritual, angelic male counterpart. And salvation is the reuniting of the male and the female into one.

So there was no death until Eve was formed because Eve is taken out of Adam. And so there's a separation of male and female, and that's wrong. It shouldn't be that way. So salvation is those coming back together again.

Who knew? But that male aspect is angelic, spiritual. So you can imagine some of the things that resulted in. Anyway, so there is a background that the initiated would understand. The whole thing about Gnosis, mystery religions and learning that Gnosis and stuff like that.

And we get into Valentinianism, you'll really see how almost all the modern cults are just much less imaginative versions of what the Valentinians were back in the olden days. I'll just give you a hint right now.

What they would do is they would attend Christian churches and they'd attend Bible studies and sermons. And then they'd find what looked like one promising non-Valentinian. And then again, the conversation.

That was a really interesting conversation about the resurrection of Jesus. But you know, there's more to understand about the resurrection of Jesus. Would you like to come to a meeting where we do some in-depth Bible study about this?

And that's how they operated. That's how they spread. That's why the bishops were like, you have to learn to identify these people and see where they're coming from, because they would act like plain old Christians.