Why the Ophites adopted the name "Jesus"

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Giuseppe
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Why the Ophites adopted the name "Jesus"

Post by Giuseppe »

So there is a distinction between Christ and Jesus:

Christ was to the Ophites higher than Ialdabaoth; but they distinguished between a Christ of the world of Eons, the spiritual or pneumatical Christ, and a psychical Christ. The former is similar to Buddha residing in the Tusita Heaven. He descended from the world of Eons through all the seven heavens, assuming in each one of them the form of the angels who inhabit it, and became incarnated in Jesus at the moment of baptism, staying with him during the time of his Messianic work, but forsaking him when his passion began. This theory well agrees with the Buddhist doctrine that Buddha is Bhagavat, the Blessed One, i. e., the Perfect Man, who having already in this life attained Nirvana, is above all suffering. The Ophites had no explanation for Christ the sufferer other than to deny his Christhood. The passion itself appears to them as an evidence that Jesus was no longer a pneumatical man; he had ceased to be Christ.

Here lies the root of the origin of all doketic sects, which have their exact prototype in Buddhism

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27897524.pdf

1 Compare, for instance, the fragment of the Fo-Pan-Ni-fan-King, translated as an example of style by Samuel Beai, in his third Note to the Fo-Sho-Hing- 7san King. There the Buddha, when accepting the poisonous food of Chunda the smith, declares:
"Illustrious youth, for ages (Kalpas) innumerable the Tathagata has possessed no such body as that you named, as suffering from human wants or necessities, nor is there such an after-body as you describe as eternal, illimitable, indestructible. To those who as yet have no knowledge of the nature of Buddha to these the body of the Tathagata seems capable of suffering, liable to want [but to others it is not so]."

(Cf. S. B. of the F., Vol. XIX., p. 367).

Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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