Re: The Gospels

Ok, when I read this in your previous post:

> ie the sign of the fish for Christianity,

I took that to mean the "fish" symbol. However, in the Gospel accounts
the "fish" isn't a symbol of Christianity, it's a symbol for the lost,
"I will make you fishers of men" -- the lost are like fish that need to
be caught.

There's a great deal of anti-gnostic polemic in Paul, whose epistles
(when Pauline authorship isn't widely debated) were written well before
any of the Gospel accounts. For that matter, there's also anti-Gnostic
polemic in the epistles of John, "If anyone says that Christ has not
come in the flesh, he is not of God." The idea that early Christianity
was primarily a Gnostic movement is snake-oil salesman scholarship and
has little to no textual support.

Oh, that's right...all the evidence was destroyed in a conspiracy.

Please :)

Jim

tina carson wrote:

> Jim,
> You seem to have misunderstood. Allow me to be more clear.
> The fish that I was referring to is, specifically the story of the
> fisherman with a poor catch, then Jesus tells them when to throw their
> nets in. This is an old story of Pythagoras. Yes, though, there is
> ample evidence that early Christians used the fish as a symbol, which
> itself is a pythagorean formula for two circle merging. Jesus was a
> gnostic, his followers were gnostics following the new gnostic leader,
> and this was widely accepted until the Council of Nicea when
> Constantine and the Church were grasping for power. Gnosticism would
> take the power out of the hands of the clergy, so it had to be put
> down. The Church now glosses over this. They even martyred
> Valentinus for being a gnostic, then made him a saint.
> tina
>

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Received on Tue Aug 5 14:55:51 2003