. For her enthymesis (or inborn idea) having been taken away from her, along with its supervening passion, she herself certainly remained within the Pleroma; but her enthymesis, with its passion, was separated from her by Horos, crucified, and expelled from that circle. This enthymesis was, no doubt, a spiritual substance, possessing some of the natural tendencies of an Æon, but at the same time shapeless and without form, because it had received nothing. And on this account they say that it was an imbecile and feminine production.
Even if I despise you, I should thank you soundly and strongly, because only in the course of this polemic with you my eye posed himself on this important detail (see my previous post).
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
[*]The heresiologists scoured the religious landscape for any and all heresies they could scare up and criticize. There is even evidence that they practically invented a few heresies, based on hopeful misunderstandings, just to knock them down. I remember reading an article about the prospect of discovering new bird species around the world, and the author said that it was virtually impossible that there are new species of birds waiting to be discovered in North America and Western Europe, simply because there are so many eager bird watchers in those areas, and have been for decades. Well, the heresiologists strike me as having done for heresies what bird watchers do for birds, if you will; there were enough of them on the hunt over the course of decades and even centuries that it seems very doubtful that a heretical group was denying that Jesus ever walked the earth any time after the gospel story was being taken seriously. If people were denying it, they kept it a secret and took it to their grave. This is why I find Doherty's assertions about the Logos apologists to be very hard to credit: I find it incredible that a whole raft of influential mythicist authors were writing those apologies right under the noses of the heresiologists without being noticed.
But, in truth, the passion of Christ was neither similar to the passion of the Æon, nor did it take place in similar circumstances.
(Irenaeus, AH II, 20,3)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
That belief is attested too late to be of any use in reconstructing the origins of Christianity.
I mention such beliefs in general only in two sentences in OHJ and only as proofs of concept, i.e. that some groups could imagine such things (pp. 580-81, 609-610, and that only in regards nativities, although the same point would extend to crucifixions).
Gnosticism, BTW, didn’t exist. It’s a modern construct that actually had no ancient correlate.
(my underline)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
