Bart Ehrman Stuff, then Valentinian Gnosticism

Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It's Wednesday. I got up early this morning and went out to East Valley and did a solar show for some kids.

Actually, I think there were more adults than there were kids, now that I think about it. And so I'm not quite sure how that worked out, but we're going to be doing a couple of those for the homeschoolers.

Because we have homeschoolers. Pretty much everybody there is homeschooled.

And I don't honestly have, I don't know a single other person in my circle of acquaintances that has a hydrogen

A solar scope. So that's better than owning a pickup truck, because if you own a pickup truck, all your weekends are shot because everyone says, could you help me move?

That's one reason I don't own a pickup truck. Or if you get a pickup truck, make sure to put a camper shell on it that you can't really get much into.

Because then just everybody just expects you to give your Saturdays to help them move. So of the two, it's much better to have, if you're going to have something unique, have the solar scope.

And here in Arizona, you can get a lot of use out of it. You just have to have a lot of sunscreen.

But I'm going to try to do that again next week for, there's a couple of families that live close to each other, and they're our largest homeschool families.

And so we have a name for that neighborhood after the largest family.

So it's Browntown. And they've got their own town. It's like a zip code and police department.

It's just that big. Anyway, so we're going to try to get out there sometime next week when weather allows and do that.

So this morning, I was looking over a video that Jason Wallace and the folks up at Christ Presbyterian and Magna, and they stopped shaking and rattling and rolling up there.

I'm not sure, but they had like 1 ,700 quakes up there over a period of time. So I guess they just get used to it after a while.

So I don't know. But they've put out another video, you know, they've put out videos on all sorts of stuff, atheism and homosexuality and Roman Catholicism and all sorts of fun stuff there.

And so they've put a 45 -minute piece out on Bart Ehrman, which is very interesting.

It sort of takes a presuppositional approach, I guess you might say, looking at some of the sources. You know,

Ehrman is well known for being a great Bauer devotee. So if you read heresy and orthodoxy, you'll see that that's the primary approach they take is they take

Bauer apart. And that pretty well takes Ehrman's legs out from underneath him as far as his theory of the early church.

If you're not familiar with it, Walter Bauer, highly speculative work, unfortunately is accepted as almost a given in many theological circles and seminaries and things like that.

He basically, if you've heard someone say that the early church was this mishmash of all sorts of different perspectives and nobody had any idea what to believe.

And then eventually the proto -orthodox won out primarily through politics and attrition or whatever else.

And then they wiped out everybody else's literature and then rewrote everything to make it look like they had won.

That is the Bauer hypothesis. And huge gaping holes have been blown through it since the thirties when it came out.

Bauer was part of the compromised German church under Nazi Germany.

And Jason just goes ahead and says what a lot of people wonder about.

And that basically is that there were other reasons why Bauer came to conclusions that he did that fit into political paradigms.

Not like that could ever happen today. Anyway, so I was looking at it.

I'll try to remember to link to it. It's on YouTube if you look up Christ Presbyterian Church, the

OPC church up in Magna, Utah, Jason Wallace, you'll find it there. But there are a couple quotes from Ehrman that I found really, really interesting that I wanted to play.

One of them, and I'll use the one to sort of transition back into some others, but this one was sort of fun because one of the things that I've pointed out about Bart Ehrman is that he really doesn't hear what the other side has to say, or he doesn't care to listen well enough to improve his own presentation.

And so if you've heard his debate presentations once, you've pretty much heard him over and over again.

For example, when I debated him in 2009, he had the exact same slides that he had used the year earlier in a debate with Dan Wallace, and had not even fixed typographical errors in the slides that had been there from the year before.

So that tells you that the person using that information really doesn't think that there's really...

the other side has anything meaningful to say, they're not really going back over things, improving their presentation, whatever else it might be.

And that can be seen by the fact that Bart uses a lot of the same lines.

As we've pointed out, he also uses a lot of the same jokes, which I don't understand.

Does he not think that the people attending this debate maybe have listened to the debate from a year before, and that therefore the exact same joke is, you know, probably going to have less impact than it did originally?

I don't know. Anyway, but one line that you can always tell when someone's been watching

Bart Ehrman debates, or reading Bart Ehrman books, especially

Muslims who use this material, is when he points out that there are more textual variants in the

New Testament than there are words in the New Testament. Now, I too have used that line in responding to its frequent utilization by atheists and others, primarily due to their dependence upon Bart Ehrman.

But he knows that that statement in and of itself communicates something that isn't really relevant.

And sometimes he'll take the time to sort of point that out, and sometimes he won't. But in this little section, you see just how consistent he is in utilization of that.

Watch this part of it. I'm sorry.

Video playback speed 100%. Oh, that's all grayed out, isn't it?

I think I have to... What do I have to do here? Video...

Wow, look at that. It will simply not allow...

How can it not allow me to change the speed? That doesn't make any...

I've never seen anything like this. Yeah, well, okay.

I'll take one more look at it here. No, it's gonna play at 125 % no matter what

I want to do here, unless I give up on it, which

I'm not sure I want to do. Well, that's what I'm looking at doing here.

I tried to save it. Let's... Sorry about this, kids.

I've never had that happen before. I suppose it could be a problem with the with the program.

I don't know. But let me see if file open recent.

Let's see if this can actually fix it. And video playback speed.

Yes, 100. There we go. All right. I guess once you have started it, that's just the way that it is.

It's gonna stay there. All right. Let me try to get this back up to full size.

It's already at the right spot. Yeah. All right. Choose that. Click there.

And let's try this again. Confusion. We don't have the first copy. We don't have copies of the copy.

We don't have copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies. There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the

New Testament. There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the

New Testament. There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the

New Testament. That last one should look familiar because that is from our debate in 2009.

And so there are more differences in the manuscripts than there are words in the

New Testament. There are just over 138 ,000 words in the

New Testament and estimates of 400 ,000 to 500 ,000 variants. And so the statement is true, but what does it mean?

Because he himself will admit the vast majority of those differences are not even translatable.

You can't even explain in English what the difference would be.

So many of those. Let's put it this way. There are more variants related to the movable new in the

New Testament than there are words in the New Testament. What does that mean? So?

That means that scribes struggled with movable news, just like most first year

Greek students do. The movable new does not change the meaning of anything. So what is that supposed to communicate?

Well, it communicates to his audience that the New Testament manuscript tradition is extremely corrupt.

That's why it was so useful. We've played the clip from that same debate where he said that the

New Testament has far earlier manuscript attestation than any other work of antiquity.

That was not something I was trying to get him to say. I was simply pressing on his assertion that our earliest manuscripts for Paul, which he had identified as a gigantic gap between the first Pauline fragments, which really aren't fragments, but anyway, the first Pauline manuscripts and when they're originally written, and the fact that in comparison to other works of that time period, it's a relatively small period of time,

I was just wanting to press on the consistency of that, and he's the one that came out with the statement that I never expected at that particular point in time.

So he does know, and in other contexts, especially scholarly contexts, we'll say things like we're just tinkering around with the original, we're as close as we're going to get, but then on the other hand, he'll point to a single variant in Mark and a single variant in Hebrews and say, well, it changes the meaning of the entirety of the book.

Well, it doesn't by a long shot. Ehrman is normally right on his facts and the issue becomes the application to overarching principles.

That's really where the issue comes down to with Bart Ehrman and the project that he has been pursuing for a couple of decades now, a project that I think is directly related by his own repeated testimony to the fact that he once claimed to believe what he doesn't believe any longer.

But then we had these two clips, and this is...

we had contacted Ehrman's people, somebody had gotten us in contact with Ehrman's people about two years ago.

And that's when we were told, you know, not only does he...

I think it was $25 ,000, but then he has complete control over the distribution of the tapes.

All rights to all media. You don't get to do anything with it. If he doesn't like it, there you go.

So he's not really open to being challenged on that level. But the fact is,

Bart Ehrman, when it comes to theology, is completely...

he... well, Phil Johnson said he was in theology class at Moody Bible Institute with Bart Ehrman, and he said years ago that he did not seem overly interested.

And there's good evidence of that. For example, this. He also makes statements like this.

Paradoxical statements about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as three separate beings, and yet comprising only one

God, the doctrine of the Trinity. There's only one God, but there are three beings, and they're not all the same being, they're three separate beings, but there aren't three gods, there's one

God. Now that's as bad as what you get from Jehovah's Witnesses.

You would expect a credentialed professor who teaches history of religions to at least be able to accurately identify the doctrine of the

Trinity. He can't. This wasn't the only place. This was the one, this was the issue, this part, this is the

Bass debate, remember? I couldn't remember what his name was. This was the Bass debate, and this is the very segment that I focused in on and said,

I'll debate him anytime, anyplace on this subject because he's going to lose, he's going to lose badly, and he won't.

So for all of you who are going, well, you know, Bart Ehrman, he'll debate anything. No, no, he won't.

I guarantee you he won't debate this. And if any of you are really rich Bart Ehrman supporters, why don't you pay his way to get him to do this, and then do a donation to charity type thing.

But he's not going to debate this subject because he's wrong. Here's exactly what he said in that debate.

Okay, so the man does not know the doctrine of the Trinity. That's embarrassing.

He would not pass the most basic level first -year Bible college -level theology class with his understanding of the

Trinity, if those Bible classes they quizzed on the doctrine of the Trinity. But he wouldn't, because that's not

Sabellianism. He is assuming Unitarianism, does not seem to understand

Trinitarian theology at all, and for someone who derisively laughed at me on the phone when we were preparing the debate in 2009 as knowing anything about history,

I can assure you I've read a whole lot more of the Cappadocian Fathers than he has, because you can't read them and then make the statements that he has made.

If he can't tell the difference between Sabellianism, modalism, patripassionism, the various different forms, and the recognition that the name

Yahweh is used of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, without turning them into one person, he doesn't seem to understand the distinction between being in person, just doesn't seem to understand any of the third or fourth century discussions of the doctrine of the

Trinity, which, you know, there you go. What does that say?

And yet he is viewed as the expert on all of these things, and his public statements are his public statements.

You know, this reminds me, it reminds me that I was going to do a series, and in fact

I still have the stuff in Evernote, in response to Ehrman's comments on homosexuality.

I never got around to doing it. I have to try to remember to do that, because it would be worthwhile, it remains a relevant thing that we can look at.

One other thing from the video, and this will actually get us into our topic, and that is this statement from a little bit early on in the video, which is also rather interesting.

We can only imagine what might have happened if things had turned out differently.

If different books, like the Gospel of Thomas, or the Epistle of Barnabas, or the

Apocalypse of Peter, had made it into the Bible. If different groups, like the

Valentinian Gnostics, or the Marcionites, or the Ebionites, had won more converts than their

Proto -Orthodox contemporaries. We can only imagine what would have happened. Yeah, we can only imagine the absolute incoherence of what would have happened.

There is no question, as we, in the last program, as we spent so much time on the subject of Gnosticism, and hopefully helped you to understand at least

Classical, or what's called Sethian Gnosticism to a greater degree.

If Christianity had been taken over by these perspectives, these understandings, there would be no

Christianity today, just there is no Gnosticism today. And the reason being that something like the

Gospel of Thomas is so completely outside the worldview of the

Apostles and Prophets, anything that would have come from first century Israel, anything that would have come from the

Tanakh, that it could not have possibly been held together and would be utterly indefensible.

And that, of course, was the enemy's purpose in all these things. But you'll notice he specifically mentioned the

Valentinian Gnostics. And so what I want to do for the last portion of the program is, this will only leave us, really, with some brief commentary on some other background issues, and probably seven or eight pages to read in the

Ken Wilson dissertation before we can put together a summary statement of why

Ken Wilson's very fanciful theory concerning Duped and the idea that Reformed theology is

Manichaean theology, why it must be completely rejected by any serious student of history.

And then I would invite, I would request brothers or sisters in other lands to take what

I put together in, I'll put it in various sundry forms. I'll put it in Keynote and PowerPoint and PDF and whatever.

We'll make it available for download. And I would desire and ask for others to translate that summary statement and make it available in other languages, the reason being that I was informed on Twitter last week that the

Wilson, the popular level Wilson book, is coming out in German soon.

And so these horrific misrepresentations and category errors and things like that are going to be being promulgated over and over again.

And so we want to have a response available to people that demonstrates where the real issues are.

And then we can get around to scheduling debates with Dr.

Wilson. And I think there needs to be more than one, because there's a lot of material there.

And I personally think the James 2 issue is also extremely relevant. I think that would be an excellent debate to pursue on the basis of the original language texts themselves on that particular subject.

And the fact that I have discovered that I had never heard of Ken Wilson before 2019,

I think. Yeah, I think that's the first I had heard of Ken Wilson. But evidently,

I don't have it up right now. Well, I guess I wouldn't take a second to do it and probably come up faster than rebooting the program

I was using there. But let me see here.

Yeah, right here. I just picked up a book. Wow. I also picked up a book called

Rediscipling the White Church, which is from a moody prof that's just a primer on social justice.

The social justice movement is alive and well on the campus of Moody Bible Institute. It's sad.

But this is a book titled A Defense of Free Grace Theology.

And this, I believe, is 2017.

Let me get to, yeah, 2017. Copyright, David R.

Anderson, Fred Chay, Joseph Dillow, Paul Tanner, Ken Wilson. And this is a, well, it's called

Free Grace Theology, is anti -lordship, no repentance. Go back to my

Wilkins debate from 2005, I think, four or five, if you want to see what that's all about.

But Ken Wilson has a chapter in here, let's see,

A Theological and Historical Investigation. I'm sure that probably goes after Augustine at some point.

And most of it, at least in this first section, is by Joseph Dillow.

Fred Chay, well known from these guys, David Anderson, Fred Chay, Fred Chay.

Looks like Ken, the only thing, Ken Wilson, even though he was one of the editors, only thing that I see specifically being assigned to him is the historical thing early on.

So A Theological and Historical Investigation. And so something tells me there's, yeah, there you go.

It took two clicks to get to Augustine. So haven't looked at that yet, we will.

But yeah, this seems to have been written, I'd love to know exactly when

Wilson was at Oxford, because this seems to have been written concurrently with all of that, which would, again, oh,

I just went to Oxford. I didn't know anything about these guys. I'm just, no. He had a goal in mind, had a purpose in mind, and pursued that purpose.

And that's what we, oh, look at that, Duped. Location 509. There's Duped immediately.

And let's see, there's Stoicism and Neoplatonism.

Oh, and then Manichaeism. Well, shock of all shocks. The same old, same old, same old stuff.

And so we'll take a look at that as well. But it is interesting that I just ran across that particular information, had not seen that before.

I just, it's not a movement that I really am tracking a lot with. Sort of after the

Wilkin debate, it was just like, whatever. But they are still out there and they're doing their thing.

So we will be able to put that information out. Let me, so, sorry about the, a little bit of a divergence there, but diversion,

I guess, would be the proper term. We talked about Gnosticism in the last program. We spent a lot of time on it.

We emphasized that this is important stuff to know, dealing with all sorts of apologetic issues, not just the subject of Ken Wilson's dissertation in Provisionism and defending

Augustine against the cavils that he would put forward. But Valentinian Gnosticism is, as I said on the previous program, much more insidious because it is plainly clear that Valentinus, who was born around the turn of the century, so around 100, died by 80, maybe before then.

We don't have a lot of information. He may have been from Alexandria, probably, but he flourished in Rome, and that's where he did most of his damage, was in Rome.

Valentinus plainly had access to Christian teaching, understood

Christian teaching, and sought to create a form of Gnosticism that would be specifically attractive to Christians.

He dropped the unusual, strange -sounding terminology that we gave last time in regards to the names of the eons, and all that kind of stuff.

Instead, it's not that he got rid of the eons. He didn't really even get rid of the numbers of the eons.

He just renamed them with biblical names. So instead of the

Barbalo, you'll have a biblical term of truth, or something along those lines, light, and the word, and things like this that will be utilized rather than strange vocabulary because it's clear that what he was trying to do was to develop followers from amongst

Christians, like Paul warned in Acts chapter 20, okay? Exactly like Paul warned in Acts chapter 20.

That's why I was saying what I said about the prophetic material before. And so, as I said, they would send their people in to fellowships, they would participate, they would claim fidelity to what was being taught, and then they would start taking people aside, and they would say, well, that was a great sermon, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was wonderful. But you know, I've been meeting with this group, and we've been doing some in -depth studies, and you know, we go a little bit deeper on this.

Would you be interested in learning a little bit more, you know, and come to our meeting? And the exact same mechanism that the cults continue to use to this day really find their first utilization in the

Christian era in Valentinus. He is just the prototypical cult -leading heretic, and he's brilliant.

Arius was smart, Valentinus was smart. Falsehood is rarely produced by stupid people.

They are very often people who have a very high view of their own intellect, and Valentinus had a very high view of his own intellect.

The Valentinians viewed themselves as the enlightened ones, the ones who have received that gnosis, and in fact, in Valentinian theology, they are the spiritual ones.

The rest of those Christians are the soulish ones, and then people who don't follow

Jesus, they're fleshly. And so, their idea is to grow the ranks of the spiritual by drawing from the soulish, by imparting to them this gnosis, this knowledge that will raise them up.

But in the process, what you discover, of course, is that this knowledge is a fundamental denial of the foundational beliefs of the

Christian faith. So, what did Valentinians believe?

Well, there are a lot of scholars who believe, and there seems to be fairly good reason to believe this, uh, yeah, there are some interesting things that you could, you can find in the

Gospel of Philip, and specifically, the Gospel of Truth.

Let me see, I don't know why they, let's see, how do they have this? Yeah, the

Gospel of Truth. You can find it in Marvin Myers, uh, he did the editing on the

Nag Hammadi scriptures. So, the Gospel of Truth would be what you'd want to look up. There are scholars who believe that the

Gospel of Truth is from Valentinus, and there's, there's at least one Christian source that specifically says the

Valentinians had something called the Gospel of Truth. So, there's a good reason to, to believe that. So, there would be other scriptures that you would be introduced to at a later point in time, but again, it was so plainly, when you look at what

Valentinus does, let's, let's remember the Gnostic myth, um, the

Father of Light, the Eternal Being, the Perfect Being, whatever you, however you want to describe

Him, um, begins to have these, these emanations.

Well, what Valentinus does is he uses

Christian terminology about the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and, and it could actually be understood in some ways that it's a form of modalism that, that he identifies that one primeval pure being as Father, Son, and Spirit, that these are different aspects of one substance of some type of thing.

Um, but he does not have the idea of actual persons who interact with one another, um, that one can become incarnate, truly take on flesh, uh, that kind of thing, that, that, that wouldn't, that wouldn't really fit, those things are all spiritualized, uh, in light of the important thing, and that is where does, where does creation come from, where does the physical creation come from within Valentinian Gnosticism?

He specifically recognizes that turning Yahweh into Yaltabarioth is not going to work if you're going to want to specifically infiltrate the church and corrupt the church from the inside.

That ain't gonna work. So there is a major de -emphasis on anti -Mosaic, anti -Old

Testament, um, stuff that you would find in standard classical

Sethian Gnosticism. So the guy of the Old Testament isn't an ignorant, evil rapist, um, but that still doesn't explain where creation came from, because here's the important thing to realize, in Valentinian Gnosticism, the one true

God, however you describe him, is still not the creator of all things. There is no divine decree, um, there is no basis for dupede, uh, there is no, none of that is, is even there.

There's, there's no, there's no foundation for it. Um, and instead, what you get is you get the father and the son, not as separate and distinct persons and homoousius or any of that kind of stuff.

That's not, that's not a part of what's, what's being even debated about at that particular point in time.

Then you get the eons, you get the emanations that are named after biblical, really, characteristics of God, attributes type things.

But guess what the, guess what the last emanation is?

I'm, I'm really tempted right now to give a quiz to Rich to see how closely he's, uh, he's listening. But he, he'll say he's busy watching

YouTube stuff right now, and, because that's his job, that's what he'll say. But, but the, the, the lowest eon.

So guess what the lowest eon, the last eon in Valentinian Gnosticism is?

That's right. Sophia, wisdom. I've just been reminded that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light from the other side of the window.

I'll let him explain that on Twitter later on today, which I'm sure he'll want to do, actually. Anyway, so the final eon is

Sophia. So you're going, okay, are we going to get yaldabaoth? And no, and you don't have quite as much.

It's still there. You don't have quite as much of the emphasis on the male, female stuff.

At least it doesn't seem to be. Remember, we, we have the descriptions of the enemies of Valentinianism, and we have a few fragments from Nag Hammadi.

It's not necessarily sufficient to allow you to answer every question you'd like to have answered about a particular perspective.

But anyway, what happens is something does happen with Sophia, but the result is not a disfigured deity of some kind.

Instead, what you get, and it's interesting, if you look up Valentinian Gnosticism on Google, there's actually an interesting graphic under the name of Valentinian Gnosticism that is somewhat useful at this point because it shows

Sophia and it shows Sophia in two, oh, no wonder it's two degrees warmer than normal and the fan's not on.

That explains all of that. There we go. Sorry about that. It was getting just a bit toasty in here.

We just fixed all that with ye olde cell phone. Sophia is shown in two different realms.

She's shown in the divine realm, and then there's a part of Sophia that extends down outside of that realm.

When Sophia does whatever it is she does, it is described as ignorance.

As ignorance. And as a result of this, she leaves the divine realm and this ignorance,

I know this sounds weird, it's the only way I can explain, coalesces almost into a cloud of ignorance that creates the physical realm.

So the physical realm is created out of ignorance of the truth and the true

God. And so anything that exists within that realm exists in ignorance.

And some of the sources say that there was a co -laborer called Error. And in the process,

Yahweh comes into existence, but Yahweh is not evil, is not a racist, rapist,

I'm sorry, rapist, racist, not going to go there on political terms right now, but He is a lower deity.

So in a sense, what

Valentinus could say, sometimes just called Valens instead of the Latinized version, but what he could say, or what his followers could say in a

Christian church was, certainly we worship the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But then you get into the meetings and you get introduced to the teachings and you get the gnosis revealed to you and you discover that there is a

God above, who did not Himself create Yahweh, but it was through His divine power through Sophia that Yahweh comes into existence.

And Yahweh then creates the physical realm, but it's in this fog of ignorance.

So what is salvation then? It's interesting, I mentioned to you last time that I've been listening to this way leftist professor who's very good on the facts.

I'm glad that I learned as a young person to listen to liberals and appreciate their ability to get the facts right and then recognize where they just go right off the edge of the cliff.

You can just tell this guy loves Valentinus. He detests Irenaeus, just thinks

Valentinus was, I bet he has a Valentinus tattoo someplace or something like that, because Valentinus was just awesome.

And he's just so insightful and everything else. The reality is that Valentinus developed a system specifically to draw disciples away after himself.

That's what he was doing. That's what he was doing. And so remember what they're trying to do is they're given his audience instead of the ideas that you have in Sethian Gnosticism about getting the energy of the

Pleroma or of the upper realm out and back to it.

Instead, what you have in Valentinian Gnosticism is this idea that you've got a part of the truth.

We're going to give you the rest of the truth and that truth will set you free. And salvation becomes learning this knowledge that you are much greater than you think you are, which has always been a great religious,

I mean, that's that's what mankind's religions are always about is it's not that there's a holy

God that you owe anything to or you violate his law or anything. No, no, no, no, no.

That's far too prosaic. Instead, Valentinus presents this idea that salvation is coming to know

God and by knowing him, you're in essence absorbed back into him in sort of a metaphysical type of spiritual concept.

And so, for example, all the Gnostics had this and Valentinus had to be very careful here, but I'm not sure if I mentioned this yesterday, but the

Gnostics had the idea that the garden scene and the fall completely misunderstood.

The Gnostics said it was because Yaldabaoth via Moses deceived everybody.

Valentinus had to spiritualize that, but the idea is in both that the fall was a good thing and that it was

Jesus or the Christ Spirit or the Son Spirit that not

Satan that was seeking to free mankind by partaking of the fruit.

In one of the, I'm not sure if it's in there, but in one of Valentinus's poems, it might have been the

Gospel of Truth, but I'm not 100 % certain, it is said that he was put on a cross to become the fruit of knowledge, the fruit of familiarity with God.

And so, Jesus doesn't die to forgive sins, Jesus gives himself and probably only in a spiritual sense so that we can have knowledge of God.

And therefore, it was he, the Christ Spirit who in the garden wanted mankind to partake of the fruit so you could know who you really were, you would have the tree of knowledge.

That's Gnosis, you need to have that knowledge. So the whole idea was, and I can't tell you how

Valentinus would answer the obvious question that immediately come up. If you were a

Christian, you had been, with pure motives, come to this meeting, you've been interested for a while, it sounds interesting, and now all of a sudden they drop this bombshell on you that what you've been taught all along about the fall and about the role of Satan was wrong and far too simplistic.

And that in fact, partaking of the knowledge, the tree of knowledge was a good thing and that this was what the

Christ Spirit wanted. You would think that, you know, sort of the first question that would be asked by a

Christian would be, but wait a minute, then how do you then deal with the entire narrative of the

Bible that is written in light of what happens in Genesis 1?

I don't know how he responded. There'd probably be some very, very well -thought -out, spiritualized way of getting around the plain meaning of the text.

And given that Valentinianism didn't start, it started before Origen, but it continues to flourish after Origen, Origen's influence would have only damaged the ability of the

Church to fight against that because of his allegorical interpretation, which moves the Church, not everybody in the

Church, but many people in Church, away from a grammatical historical interpretation of the text of Scripture.

But the Christ Spirit then is involved in that partaking of the fruit.

And salvation then is this taking in of knowledge of God and this personal relationship.

And you could say it's through Jesus, but it's not through the historical Jesus in a mechanism of providing forgiveness of sins and imputed righteousness or anything like that.

It is a Christ Spirit enlightening you as to your true nature.

Now, if you're thinking, that means that same Spirit has been active for a long, long time.

If you're familiar with any of the theosophy or Christian science and all the rest of this stuff, they've all drunk deeply at the well the same kinds of things.

And so, even when there were enough Valentinians to form their own fellowships, they would look very, very much like the

Christian Church. They would have baptism, they would...

But when they would do baptism, it would have a different significance. The taking off of the robe, the old life, sin, washing, new robe.

Instead, this is taking off ignorance. And salvation is a gnostic.

It's a obtaining of gnosis. And I couldn't help as I was reading this stuff.

It's been, oh man, how long? It's the late 90s here in the

Phoenix area. He's still active. There was a guy amongst, and he's still amongst reformed people, who took his church off into this strange stuff about how mankind never sins purposely, but only in ignorance.

And that the central emphasis of biblical revelation is the knowledge of God, the knowledge of Yahweh will fill the earth.

And therefore, that's really what brings about the end is the filling of the earth with the knowledge of Yahweh.

And so, the whole idea that you never sin purposefully, that it's not an act of will, it's an act of ignorance.

You just don't know better. I couldn't help but while studying

Valentinian Gnosticism going, oh, wow. That's a rather intriguing connection because it really does totally change the whole concept of the forensic nature of justification, the forensic nature of the law court scene that we have in Romans chapter eight and the mediator and all of those things.

It really removes the sin aspect and turns it into you just don't know.

And that's why the Valentinians had debates amongst themselves as to if you die as a soulish person rather than a spiritual person.

So, as a regular Christian that hasn't obtained the gnosis, what will happen to you?

And there were some who felt those people were lost and then there were others who actually had some type of a concept where the

God of this world, Yahweh, who is not the supreme

God, that possibly they might live in that being's presence after the final dissolution of all physical things.

Because physical things actually don't have any real being. Only those things, and they play

Roma in the fullness, have true being. And so at the end, and this is the same in Sethian Gnosticism, it's the same in Valentinian Gnosticism, and it's the same in a sense in Manichaeism.

In your eschatology, eventually the physical realm is done away with. There is no physical realm.

And so clearly the idea of resurrection as Christians understand it, and the new heavens and the new earth, a lot of Christians have, let's just be honest, a lot of Christians have the idea that the new heavens and new earth it's pretty much just a spiritual thing too.

Right? I mean, a lot of people think that way. Man, that's good.

Apple cider vinegar, man, with club soda. I have not touched a soda, diet or otherwise, since February.

And I highly recommend it to all. It will really, really help you out a lot.

Definitely wakes you up. It's good stuff. Anyway, sorry, this is a live program. So what is important?

Let's make immediate application, because time's running out. We're only going to go an hour today. Sorry, just the way it is.

But in regards to the idea of there being a consistent, a meaningfully consistent connection between Gnosticism, and now we see all the different kinds of Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Stoicism, Community of Qumran, Neoplatonism, that then is communicated via Augustine's alleged adoption of his former

Manichaean perspectives. Then the miraculous transmission without alteration or development from Augustine directly into the mind of John Calvin, and from him directly into each one of our minds today, 500 years later, the whole duped concept is plainly unsustainable on any logical or rational basis.

The reason being that that which is definitional of Reformed theology in regards to the decree of God cannot exist in any of those systems.

There is no deity of sufficient personality, power, activity, sovereignty in any of these systems to have a divine decree that determines the very fabric of time.

The forms of determinism found in those systems all differ from one another, and they differ on a level that categorically makes duped utterly unsustainable, and to be rejected by anyone upon any close examination and consideration of the actual issue.

That's the first thing to point out. Secondly, that time period,

I mean, think when Valentinus is born, as the last disciples dying, as,

I mean, John may have just passed away, and Valentinus is born. And that was a truly tremendous period of time as far as challenge for the

Church. Really, really was. We, it has surprised me more and more as I've been dealing with this, how rarely we give consideration to God's goodness and having protected divine truth during that time.

But then when you think about 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, you think about 2nd,

I think it's 2nd John, is it 2nd John? What is that reference?

Yes, there it is, 2nd John 2. Let me just read first two verses. The elder of the chosen lady and her children whom

I love in truth, and not only I, but also all who know the truth, for the sake of the truth which abides in us and will be with us eis tan aiona, forever.

The truth will abide amongst us, plural, in us, and will be with us forever.

This is the promise of the apostle in 2nd John, verse 2.

2. This is written right before what seems to be one of the greatest challenges that the

Church has ever faced. And it just strikes me that there's much that we could learn from that.

And one of the things that I have learned from that is to be thankful for God's faithfulness to preceding generations.

We, in our modern day, we look down upon those who came before us.

We diminish their accomplishments, their faithfulness.

We have so much more than they had, and yet they fought one of the greatest battles in the history of the

Church, with weapons significantly less well -armed than what we have, but had the same spirit.

That's the important thing, had the same spirit. We can have all the knowledge in the world, without spirit, it's not going to accomplish anything.

So, my appreciation for men like Irenaeus has grown tremendously as I have considered just the devilishness, the deceptiveness of Valentinian Gnosticism and the systems that sought to draw disciples away after themselves.

It's exactly what it was. That's exactly what happened. And what a battle it was, what a battle it was.

And it wasn't won by some silver -tongued orator. The other side,

Arius was a great singer. He wrote songs. Valentinus was a great orator.

And they still have their followers today, but not the followers of the truth by any stretch of the imagination.

So, that's always something to keep in mind. God used plain old people, committed to the truth, steadfast, and they prevailed.

They did prevail. So, with that, there's only a couple of other comments to get to.

There are two sections, but there's a concluding section to one of the chapters, and then the conclusion of the dissertation to work through.

And then we'll make the presentation that we will then put out and make available to anybody.

Anybody can take it, just don't edit it. Just translate it, make it available, because we want to provide a counter -documentation.

So, in that presentation, I'll be going through examples of the errors, providing examples, counter -argumentation.

This is why this thesis simply does not work, and we want to get that out there as well.

So, thanks for watching the program. We'll be back again tomorrow, Lord willing. We'll see you then.