Word: gnostics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Smith calls the film "a bizarre mix of lowbrow jokes and highbrow concepts and then vice versa." Ain't it, though? He mixes poop and prophecy, scatology and eschatology; he crams his script with enough belly laughs for six Adam Sandler movies and enough citations of angelology and the Gnostic gospels to make a Jesuit's head split. This is a Shavian debate--Don Juan in New Jersey--with potty mouth. Dogma, recall, comes from the Greek word meaning "to think." And that's what Smith wants the viewer...
...century, and out on the margins of spiritual life there's a strange phosphorescence. As predicted, the approach of the year 2000 is coaxing all the crazies out of the woodwork. They bring with them a twitchy hybrid of spirituality and pop obsession. Part Christian, part Asian mystic, part Gnostic, part X-Files, it mixes immemorial longings with the latest in trivial sentiments. When it all dissolves in overheated computer chat and harmless New Age vaporings, who cares? But sometimes it matters, for both the faithful and the people who care about them. Sometimes it makes death a consummation devoutly...
Marcion started his own church, and his ideas inspired Christians delving into the theologies of gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge, which, as opposed to faith, they argued, was the true source of salvation. For many Gnostic Christians, Jesus only appeared to be man, for the God of this world is the master of matter, and Jesus could not defile himself by actually materializing. Indeed, he was spirit and only seemed to die. Gnostic texts have Christ appearing to Peter as the Crucifixion is taking place, joyfully transcending all this world could hurl at him. The Resurrection becomes moot...
...Gnostic cosmologies would overturn biblical traditions. The God of the Old Testament became evil incarnate. For if Satan could tempt Jesus with earthly power and riches, did that not mean that the world was Satan's to give? In time, Jesus would be the spirit of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, giving Adam and Eve a chance to escape from their dastardly creator with a taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge...
This is the third provocative reconsideration of early Christian belief by Pagels, 52, an Episcopal churchgoer, though not one who counts herself a conventional believer. In The Gnostic Gospels, about the early Christian sect whose members aimed at mystical communion of the individual with God, Pagels set out a scriptural alternative that was shunned from the outset by the institutional church. In 1988 she published Adam, Eve and the Serpent, a study of the influential way St. Augustine read the Garden of Eden story as a symbol of man's fall, though some earlier Christians had seen...