Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »

Matthew 11:7-8
7 As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? 8 If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces

A "reed swayed by the wind" is not a reference to Herod.

The panpipes was invented by Hermes.

Image

And Hermes was euhemerized as John the Baptist.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »


Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark.

(Acts 15:37)

Barnabas is a reference on Barabbas, the alien "Son of Father". Hence Acts is saying thst the adorers of the Son of the Father (not the god of the Jews) wanted to co-opt the figure of "John called Mark", a reference to the author of the Earliest Gospel.

The rest of Acts says us about the fate of this book connected with the name of his author:

38but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. 39They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the believers to the grace of the Lord.



Barnabas (enemies of YHWH) took proto-Mark, while the Paulines took Silas.

Who is Silas?

Roman name derived from Latin silva meaning "wood, forest". Silvanus was the Roman god of forests.

Lucus was one of four Latin words meaning in general "forest, woodland, grove" (along with nemus, silva, and saltus).

Hence, a Gnostic sect used Luke, while the Judaizers used Mark.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Why "Mark" was not embarrassed by Jesus being baptized by John

Post by Giuseppe »

Now this is interesting.

The reason "Mark" (judaizer) was not embarrassed by Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist:


3. Reason (Logos) indeed, O Tat, among all men hath He distributed, but Mind not yet; not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not from Him, 3 but hath its place below, within the souls of men who have no Mind.
Tat. Why then did God, O father, not on all bestow a share of Mind?
Her. He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls, just as it were a prize.
4. Tat. And where hath He had it set up?
Her. 4 He tilled a mighty Cup 5 with it, and sent it down, joining a Herald [to it], to whom He gave command to make this proclamation to the hearts of men:

Baptize 1 thyself with this Cup’s baptism, what heart can do so, thou that hast faith thou canst ascend to Him that hath sent down the Cup, thou that dost know for what thou didst come into being!
As many then as understood the Herald’s tidings and doused themselves in Mind, became partakers in the Gnosis; and when they had “received the Mind” they were made “perfect men.”
But they who do not understand the tidings,these, since they possess the aid of Reason [only] and not Mind, are ignorant wherefor they have come into being and whereby.

http://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v2/th209.html

Note what is happening there. The author is denying that the Mind (Nous) was not given because of envy:

not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not from Him

This is an evident contrast with the envy of the demiurge (the god of the Jews), who had hidden the gnosis to prevent Adam and Eve from having it, because of "envy" sic et simpliciter.

Now, Hermes/"John" is not giving the Mind (Nous) because of "envy", differently from the demiurge. The Nous can be gained only by receiving a "baptism".

The presumed embarrassment for a Jesus baptized by John has been overcome by the same Jesus showing an example of the humility (=the absence of envy) of YHWH, the now rehabilitated demiurge.

If Jesus receives humbly the baptism by John, then Jesus shows no envy for John.

If Jesus shows no envy for John, then his father YHWH was not envious about Adam and Eve.

If YHWH was not envious, then YHWH is the supreme god.

If YHWH is the supreme god, then the Serpent is not the supreme god.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »

Ory does 2 + 2:

The answer is: because John [the Baptist] came as a witness to the Life and to the Light. This John must have originally been the Mandean John who believed in “the great Life in whose name the sublime Light magnified.” This Life—together with its brothers Justice and Truth—was a “son of the Light.”36 This great Life was a Mandean divinity.

http://www.mythicistpapers.com/2012/09/ ... -pt-3-ory/

1) proto-John had the Light and not the Word in the original incipit (docet Turmel).

2) in the Mandean tradition, John witnessed the Light, not the Word.

3) Therefore the Mandean tradition preserves a more ancient tradition than Mark: the latter makes John a witness of the mere carnalized man Jesus, not of the spiritual Light Christ.

COROLLARY: Doudna is wrong when he denies any utility in the Mandean tradition, to decipher John.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »


Let us consider the declaration of Marcion: “In the fifteenth year of Tiberias, Jesus Christ, the Saving Spirit, deigned to come down from heaven.” It is clear that this Jesus is not a man but an aeon who accepts to leave the divine Pleroma. Luke tells us why: to give the word of God to John. The Gospel of John (1:6) confirms this: John is sent by God to witness to the Kingdom of Light. The baptismal scene occurs between the god Jesus and the man John. Primitively, it was comparable to the baptism of John by Manda d’Hayye. The baptism was gnostic.

http://www.mythicistpapers.com/2012/09/ ... -pt-2-ory/

Whence came this Life, accompanied by the Light, that we find solemnly at the beginning of the Gospel of John? Why, appearing here in the place of honor, does it not appear likewise in the introductions to the other gospels?

The answer is: because John [the Baptist] came as a witness to the Life and to the Light. This John must have originally been the Mandean John who believed in “the great Life in whose name the sublime Light magnified.” This Life—together with its brothers Justice and Truth—was a “son of the Light.”36 This great Life was a Mandean divinity.

http://www.mythicistpapers.com/2012/09/ ... -pt-3-ory/

Even if he quotes the Mandean tradition (per se too much late to be considered as evidence) Georges Ory is correct to do the following argument:

1) in the original Gospel, the role of John was to give witness to the Light, i.e. the Jesus Son of Father ("Bar-Abbas").

2) "Mark" eclipsed the point 1: John didn't give witness to the spiritual Christ.

3) the Son of Father (a spiritual being) is euhemerized as a mere man Jesus coming from Galilee, eclipsing the fact that he descended already adult in Galilee.

Where Ory (and Renè Salm with him) was wrong is in considering that the Light descended on John by becoming John. That is the precise idea that has to be abandoned.

John witnessed the alien Son of Father. John didn't become him.

Mark makes John witness the mere carnal Jesus. The exact contrary of what the previous John did. Once John is made witness of only the carnal Jesus, he could be rejected by the same Gnostics as affected by this carnal knowledge. Marcion was one of these late Gnostics who harmonized vainly the previous Gnostic worship for John (as witness of the Son of Father) with the his necessary degradation to a mere Jewish prophet (witness only of the carnal Jesus).

The problems remain:

Why the name "John" (=YHWH gives grace") for a witness of the Son of an alien Father?
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »

Giuseppe wrote: Sat Dec 21, 2019 1:34 pm The problems remain:

Why the name "John" (=YHWH gives grace") for a witness of the Son of an alien Father?
My answer, by now:

"John" was introduced by the early Judaizers as the original name of who multiplied the 7 breads addressed to all the nations, to make it clear, even in a context of the miracle story where the message was gnostic (to abandon the earth to make return to celestial homeland), that the source of the grace given was YHWH in the figure of John.

But this was not sufficient. The breads became 12. Not only the grace but also the salvation had to be given by YHWH. Not only the Witness of the Light, but also the Light itself had to be sent from YHWH.

Hence: "Jesus": "It is YHWH who saves".
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »



I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat.

(Mark 8:2)

In a previous narrative, the hero of the episode was John himself, since:
  • "John" means "YHWH has compassion"
  • John sends the people in direction of the Way by giving them the breads of life for the voyage.
This is the reason John was considered the Christ in opposition to Jesus.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »

Hermes is connected with Elijah, but Elijah is obviously John the Baptist:

Returning to aspects of Hermes of which Jews might have been aware, we come to the cult of Hermes Trismegistus. For non-Christian Gentiles in late antiq￾uity, Hermes often took on the characteristics of Hermes Trismegistus. Developing from an Egyptian fusion of Hermes and Thoth, the Egyptian celestial scribe, god of wisdom, and judge of the dead, Hermes Trismegistus developed an influential cult of his own whose beliefs were disseminated in the Hermetic writings, which
ranged through magic, astrology, and theosophy to a philosophy with resemblances to both Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. One belief expressed throughout the Her￾metic corpus is that Hermes, or at least their Hermes, author of all the Hermetic books, had once been a mortal man, now divinized. 1 3 3
This belief that Hermes was a mortal who had been promoted to godhood is probably the pagan form of the increasing emphasis on human mediators of supernatural power in relation to Christianity and Judaism.
The human origins of Hermes in the Hermetic texts may have made it easier for Jews to compare him (unfavorably of course) with Elijah. Then, in becom￾ing better than Hermes, Elijah becomes in some ways like him. This process is analogous to that described by VanderKam for Enoch in Second Temple times when he writes that the Second Temple tradition's authors "enlivened .. . Enoch with a variety of mythological traits and thus created for Judaism a primeval hero
who outshone the legendary supermen or even divinities of any other people." 1 3 4
In this process, though, Enoch took on roles, such as that inventor of civilization, not played by the biblical Enoch. A similar process took place for at least one Hel￾lenistic writer, apparently Jewish, who assimilated Moses rather than Elijah to the
Egyptian Thoth-Hermes, whose cult was associated with the origins of Hermes
Trismegistus and who was far more respectable than the Greek god of wayfarers
and thieves. 1 3 5
But would the Rabbis have known of Trismegistus? Knowledge of the cult of Trismegistus was probably widely distributed in Syria. A Syriac Christian commentary on Acts 14:12, which says that Gentiles in Lystra think that Paul is Hermes, identifies the New Testament's unqualified "Hermes" as Hermes Tris￾megistus. "They called Hermes one of the gods who was more rational and skill￾ful and intelligent than all of the gods; and they called him Trismegistus .. . and because of this they called Paul Hermes." Given this wide distribution of Hermetic traditions throughout Syria, it is likely that Jews would have picked up the fact that some pagans held that Hermes was or had been a human person.

(Elijah and the Rabbis: Story and Theology, Kristen H. Lindbeck)

https://books.google.it/books?id=cQCcEu ... &q&f=false
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »

From the same book linked above:

At other times the Jewish tradi￾tion seems to enter into polemical dialogue with the Gentile culture, consciously
absorbing or co-opting the virtues of Hermes into the persona of Elijah and thus presenting Elijah as more powerful and authentic than his Gentile counterpart.
Once these stories existed, they then became part of the tradition and allowed other Elijah legends to be created along similar lines. It is difficult if not impos￾sible to prove whether any given resemblance between Elijah and Hermes is due to parallel development, unconscious assimilation, or conscious rivalry. However, in some cases, such as the court legends and the emperor's dream, a good case can be made that the original creators of the motif, and perhaps the composers of these particular legends, were aware of the correspondence between the two and exploited it (see table 3.2, "Elijah and Hermes," which shows that the legendary
Elijah of the Rabbis had more affinities with Hermes than with the biblical Elijah included for comparison).

All fits:

Hermes = Hermes Trimegistus = Oannes = Elijah = John the Baptist.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was "Mark", just as Apollos, learned in paulinism?

Post by Giuseppe »

Resuming this very long thread:

I have failed to prove that John the Baptist didn't exist. The passage in Josephus may still be genuine, afterall.

But I have proved in this thread that:
  • The figure of Hermes Trismegistus was famous among the Gnostics (not Christians).
  • This figure of Hermes was already connected with Elijah in pre-Christian times.
  • Hermes was masked as the Elijah redivivus expected before the Jewish Messiah : John the Baptist. Even if there was a historical John, the his name and his activity of baptizer were only co-opted to make him the Christian Hermes/Elijah redivivus.
Jean Magne is correct to explain the reasons of this co-optation:

Whereas Jesus is a divine person first sent to Paradise and again under Tiberius to teach the path of salvation and institute the eucharist, the sacrement of gnosis, John, according to the hermetist myth of baptism in the crater (C.H. IV,4-6, see Logique des sacrements, p. 105-140) is simply a man chosen by the Father to proclaim baptism, the sacrament of noûs, the "intellect" or "spirit", a faculty of supernatural knowledge, the faculty of acquiring gnosis.
In accordance, therefore, with the logical precedence of the faculty of knowing over the acquisition of knowledge, baptism will precede the eucharist and John will be the forerunner of Jesus. It was easy to find biblical passages applicable to this situation: "Behold, I send a messenger before you" (Ex 23.20); "He will prepare the way before you" (Mal 3:1); "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the Way of the Lord" (Is 40.3), quoted in Mk 1.2-3 and plls, the bad break in the last quotation gives it the meaning sought, which resulted in making John preach in the wilderness of Judaea.
As the Jews believed that Elijah who was taken to heaven (2 Kings 2.1) would one day return (Mal 4.5), John was invested with his coat of hair and leather belt (2 Kings 1.8; Mk 1.6).
In the infancy gospels John will be Jesus' cousin and necessarily his elder. He will die before him to leave him a clear field, and will be decapitated to symbolize, according to the Fathers, the cessation of the prophecy.
The first person of the new religion has thus become the last person of the ancient Law.

(Jean Magne, From Christianity to Gnosis and From Gnosis to Christianity, p. 203-204, my bold)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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