> From: "Matt Cramer" <cramer at unix01.voicenet.com>
>
> > The central theme of Christianity is not the crucifixion, but the
> > resurrection. Christianity, as a superposition of various religions from
> > Gnosticism to Roman Catholicism to Fundamental Protestantism, always
> > revolves around the resurrection, as allegorical myth or literal reality.
>
> Hmmm. I was under the impression that one of the main features that
> distinguished the Gospel of Thomas and the Gnostic gospels from the four
> that made it into the canonical New Testament was the lack of a resurrection
> narrative.
True, the Gospel of Thomas lacks a resurrection (and crucifixion) story. As do most other Gnostic Gospels, which are alledged to be teachings of Jesus rather than biographies.
The Gospel of Phillip discusses the resurrection (in Gnostic germs, of course), and there are other resurrection oriented Gnostic texts: Gospel of Truth, Treatise on the Resurrection, etc.
I am by no means a Christian scholar, but I think it would be fair to say that the gnosis, awakening, etc., important to Gnosticism, is the resurrection that Jesus achieved. There is a passage from the Gospel of Phillip that says that Jesus did not die and them resurrected into eternal life, but that Jesus acheived eternal life and a resurrection from his material existence, so that when he was killed he could not truly die.
I'm very fascinated by the heretical Christian mythos but we've kind of wandered from the topic at hand so I'll refrain from going on mroe about it.
All of the texts discovered in Nag Hammadi are viewable in various translations at http://www.gnosis.org
Matt
-- Matt Cramer <cramer at voicenet.com> http://www.voicenet.com/~cramer/ Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason.
-Sir Edward Coke