Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Thu Jul 12, 2018 8:05 am
Your thinking is either that of a supergenius AI program from the future or that of a mental patient.
In the doubt, can we at least agree that
Paul is the mental patient?
On another front, when you suggest that the author of the Ascension evinces embarrassment at the delay of the parousia, which passage(s) are you talking about?
The feature of the not-knowledge of the identity of the victim by the his killers may be seen as similar to a feature of the 'docetic' death, viz the belief that the death of the victim was only apparent, since the victim was without body or - that is the same thing - another being was killed in the his place (and the killers don't know it).
For example, so prof Robert Price about the near-violation of Eve in
The Hypostasis of the Archons:
"In those days only one virgin, Istahar by name, remained chaste. When the Sons of God made lecherous demands upon her, she cried: 'First lend me your wings!' They assented and she, flying up to Heaven, took sanctuary at the throne of God, who transformed her into the constellation Virgo" (Liqqute Midrashim, 156). 18 The same astrological myth underlies the wing-borne escape of the virgin from the dragon in Revelation 12, and in both cases it is clear that the original identity of the virgin was the goddess Ishtar (= "Istahar"), as is evident from the crown of stars, etc. Like Hera and the Gnostic Eve (= the Greek and Phrygian Hebe), the threatened woman is divine. But the difference between the stories of Istahar on the one hand and of Hera and Eve on the other is that Istahar experiences a last-minute clean getaway, while the other two share the revealing motif of the doubling of the original victim into both victim and escapee. If the story of Eve's near-violation as we read it in The Hypostasis of the Archons preserves an original tale in which she was never actual raped, why does it not read more like the story of Istahar--a simple escape? The doubling motif tells the tale: originally Eve was raped.
(my bold)
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_amorous1.htm
So,
mutatis mutandis, the fact that the
false Eve was raped (
differently from other similar myths where the goddess escapes simply
without need of a false victim in the his place), is evidence, for Price, of the
embarrassment for an
older version of the story: one where the
true Eve was raped by the Archons.
Could something of similar be happened in the AoI ?
The fact that in AoI the Son was killed without being known by the his killers is evidence of
embarrassment for an
older version of the myth, one where the Son was killed by killers
who knew him, since we have also evidence of
other versions of the myth (for example: Basilides) where the Archons knew the identity of the Son but another person was killed in the his place.
So, insofar you see embarrassment for the death of the Son by the docetics à la Basilides (and I think that Ben
already concedes the fact that for Basilides the
real death of the Son was something of embarrassing), then you have to see an
equivalent embarrassment at work in AoI for the Archontic
knowledge of the Son.