Within Reason - #83 Esoterica - The History of the Demiurge

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Justin Sledge is currently a part-time professor of philosophy and religion at several institutions in the Metro-Detroit area and a popular local educator. His YouTube channel is "Esoterica". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin Sledge, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Alex. It's a real pleasure to be back after our conversation on Yahweh. I am so excited to have you back. It's one of my favorite episodes that I've ever produced at the podcast, our last episode. I hope people have already seen it. We were just talking off air about some of the reactions to it and why this topic of Yahweh is so interesting.

And it's funny because if I'd have called the episode like the history of God or the history of the Old Testament God or something, like this. I don't think it quite has that same aura as Yahweh. There's something about using that title, there's something about spelling it in that way and showing the sort of old artistic depiction of the god that really just captures people's interest. Yeah, I think that there's something interesting about the fact that God, at least the God, that's become sort of the god of the big Abrahamic religions and some other religions as well, that that God is a person, not an abstract entity. It's not the philosopher's God. It really is a

really is a person and like all people that person has a history and there's something about that the reality that God has a history that Yahweh has a history that I think uh again we talked about this off air that there's something about that does I think so much more heavy lifting in terms of getting people to think about theological questions philosophically or are are religiously, much more so than any philosophical argument ever had with a believer. Those arguments just go right off them like water off a duck. They can look at the problem of evil, Epicurus's famous contradiction and go, I don't really care about this.

I still believe in God. And you could do the straight formalization of the argument and show them like, this is a contradiction and you have to give up something to relieve the contradiction. And they'll go, no, no, I don't. I'm done. I'm fine. But if you do this Y'allway thing and say, look, we have good reason to believe that this deity has a history. There's something about that that they can't, I think people can't shake in quite the same way.

Because we're all convinced of the reality of history, and we're all committed to telling history correctly. And that's all well and good until your God has a history. And then that's deeply unsettling. It's probably a bit like when you get old enough to realize that your parents are just people. people, the people that you've sort of just seen as these unshakable foundations of provision if you're lucky enough to have such parents. One day you grow up, you get into your 20s, your 30s, maybe you have children yourself and you begin to look at your parents as people who themselves have hopes and desires and

get lonely and get sad and stressed. And there's something about that which demystifies parenthood. And so I think a lot of people report that as they get older, they sort of become more like friends with their parents. They look at their parents as someone to sort of hang out with someone to check in with, someone to look after. And that sort of shift can be quite

sort of seismic, I think. Yeah. Or when you come to the realization that is going on here. But your parents can't do something. I remember that moment where you have this sort of Freudian moment where your father can't do the thing and he's working on the car and gets frustrated and like hits the car with the wrench. You're like, hold on.

Dad can't. And then, you know, there's a sort of Freudian moment in that or just you know I've heard Christians also tell me that the moment when they realize that Santa Claus isn't real that they realize hold on like it's a spoiler alert that they yeah they find the presence in their attic or something and all of a sudden the magic just evaporates and again that's not my now I'm going to have to put an age rating on this episode yeah sorry yeah kids learn you know I always tell my I'm going to have shirts made for my kids that say you know your parents are really Santa Claus on the

back, it'll say happy Hanukkah. I'm actually not going to do that because I don't want my kids to get in a lot of trouble. That might be how they realize that their dad is not the most powerful agent in the world as you parade them down the street. I think something like that must be going on with this Yahweh stuff. It's just no matter what you find about the history of this God, the fact that it is a being that develops, that changes, that, seems to be beholden to certain historical contingent facts about the way that humans are interacting is demystifying. As I say, if you're sort of, if you're a Christian or something, it might shake your faith a little bit. But as a non-Christian, it's also just incredibly interesting.

That's why recently I've been doing a deep dive, as my regular listeners will know, into some of the sort of proto-Christian ideas and some of the early Christian communities that are now forgotten or condemned, and the Gnostic Gospels have been a big focus of mine, and throughout this investigation, there's this character that keeps cropping up wherever I look, be it in the Gospel of Judas, be it in the Apocryphon of John, be it potentially in the Old Testament, there's this character that crops up, which is kind of like a god, but it's kind of this weird, potentially evil or malevolent god, maybe a stupid or incompetent god, one that sort of creates the material world and is a little bit and does so in such a way as so as not to benefit

humankind. Keep sort of cropping up throughout the Gnostic literature. And the most popular term that I hear ascribed to this being is the demiurge. You are midway through a series of an undisclosed number of videos as of yet on this character of the demiurge. And I'm hoping hoping that today we can start to try to unpack who this person is. Yeah, I think that, again, this is also, the topic of the demiurge also has this sort of zeitgeist. People are really interested in this character as well. And I will also say that this is one of the most shocking ideas to come out of the ancient world. And I say shocking and scandalous, really, because not only did it scandalize other Christians, other Christians found this idea

completely horrifying, even other pagans, Platinus famously, wrote against this idea. So this was an idea that was so unsettling to many people at the time that you got, you know, everyone from Uranus to Platinus, you know, coming at this idea and saying, this is unacceptable.

This is horrifying. And I think that the, the demiurge carries that. And this idea that the creator of this world might be malevolent has crept up over and over and over again. We keep telling this story at some level. And, you know, as recently as things like the Matrix,

where the creators of this reality are somehow evil robots or something. That's just a version of this sort of demiurgic, malevolent creator mythology. And I find it interesting that we continue to invent and reinvent that myth. And so, yeah, it'll be fun to get into the topic of the demiurge. And what a strange theological shift to come to the conclusion that God, at least the God of this realm, is evil. And what a real, what a kick to the head in some ways. Yeah, we're going to dive into this because a lot of questions are already sort of bursting out.

We're talking about this concept of this evil, malevolent, creator deity. But I've also talked about it in the context of early Christian communities who believed in it. But to be a Christian, surely you have to believe in the all good creator of the universe, the Jesus Christ, the savior figure. and yet we're talking here about this malevolent evil creator of the world it can all be a little bit confusing but we're going to unpack it all we're going to describe it we're going to see how this all fits into different world views i think the best place to start is perhaps at the start where does this term demiurge first appear because there might be some people listening who say i've heard this word thrown around but i literally just don't even

know what it is that you're talking about it sounds like something out of dungeons and dragons what is a demiurge where does it come from originally yeah the term just means craftsmen. So it's just, it's, it's a very normal Greek term that would be used for any craftsman. But it emerges primarily in Plato, in the Tameas, probably one of Plato's, you know, top five most important, are most widely read text. In fact, the only text to survive into the Latin West of Plato through the Middle Ages was the Tameas. So in the Tameas, Plato gives what he calls a likely story or a likely myth, an Icotam-Muthon, he calls it, a likely narrative. because, again, he wasn't there, and he doesn't know how the world came into being.

But basically what he argues for is something along the lines of the principle of sufficient reason. There's a world. There must be a reason for that. And what is the reason for the world? What caused the world? Well, this demurge, the craftsperson, craftsman made the world. And the way that it works in the platonic mythology, or again, this likely story, is that Plato imagines, right, there's a world of the forms. And the world of the forms is an unchanging perfect world, sort of a collection of all the blueprints of ideas that comprise the eternality of all things, the ideas. And what we have is the Demiurge is there too. It's not really clear where the Demiurge comes from. So we can always ask where does entity come from?

And Plato doesn't give us a story about that. But what ends up happening is that the Demiurge looks to the forms and uses the forms by impressing them upon matter. And matter or Hulae is imperfect. It is by nature imperfect. It's changeable. It is not eternal. It is in the realm of becoming. And what ends up happening is that the Demiurge takes the eternal forms and impresses them upon matter and generates ultimately various platonic, platonic geometric forms.

And because matter is inherently imperfect, what ends up happening is that the forms are imperfectly impressed within the matter. And that means that we live in a world that is optimal, the, the, the, creator, the demurege did the best that he could, but it is not perfect. The world of the forms is perfect. The world of matter is not. And therefore, we live in an imperfect world, but it's still an optimal world. In a sort of Leibnizian kind of, this is the best of all possible worlds. In some sense, this is the best to Demiurge could have done given the imperfect, the imperfection of matter, but the perfection of the forms. And therefore, we live in an imperfect, but not bad world.

And so Plato's whole gist here is when we look at, for instance, a beautiful person and we see the beautiful person, beauty, the form of beauty is impressed or they're impressed upon the matter that they are, or another way of putting it is their, the matter participates in beauty. And rather than focusing on the physical beauty of the person, rather we should focus on the formal reality of beauty. And when we focus on the formal reality of beauty, then of course we are more in communication. or more in participation with what is fundamentally real, which is the forms. So basically Plato's telling us a story about how form became embedded in matter and why matter is not perfect. And I think anyone can look around and realize at some level that no matter how perfect you attempt to make a triangle out of, I don't know, clay, your clay triangle is never going to be as perfect as the abstract Euclidean concept of a triangle. And Plato's trying to understand or develop what he calls, again, a likely story about how we arrive at a situation in which we do have the perfect notion of a triangle if we conceive it intellectually, but there are no perfect triangles in actual matter. And so he's trying to bridge that gap.

And he develops the theory of the demiurge or the myth of the demiurge to do that philosophical, but also not only is it philosophical, but it's also cosmological. It's a cosmological story about the origins of the physical world. world. Yes. Interestingly, it brings to mind the fact that I'm pretty sure David Hume, who famously is an empiricist, meaning he thinks that all of our knowledge ultimately stems from our observations of the world, thought that we couldn't know that two parallel lines will never intersect. The fact that two parallel lines will never intersect, he thought we can't know that because we've never seen two perfect parallel lines. Everyone we've seen in reality will always be slightly imperfect.

And so we've no way to know that these lines will never intersect because we can't just have a perfect idea in our head that doesn't connect to something that we've seen in the past, which is, I think, in many ways, a reductive out absurdum, perhaps, of Hume's empiricism. But at least we can agree on the point that the physical world is imperfect. And here Plato is offering a likely account, a myth, about why this might be the case. And crucially, we have an explanation here for why a sort of

perfect creator, a good creator, a powerful creator, would yet create a world which is not itself perfect. Some people like to hypothesize that, you know, because the world is imperfect, the creator must have been evil, he must have been wanting humans to suffer or something like this. Crucially, we don't get that idea yet with Plato. It's just a sort of incompetent. but not an incompetence because of something wrong with the god. It's an incompetence because of something to do with the matter that he's working with. But there's still no sense in which we're dealing with like an evil creator here yet, right? No, not at all.

The god, the demiurgeon Plato is good. It is in some sense perfect. And again, you can imagine it a bit like trying to build a bookcase out of bad lumber. No matter how good of a carpenter you are, if you get warped, naughty, bad lumber, well the bookcase can only be as good as the lumber and that's true of the demiurge the world's only going to be as good as the stuff that it's made from and matter again not evil that's a really important thing that plato's not a duelist matters not evil it just can't be perfect and it's just limited and that limitation you know is cashed out for plato in the reality that when we take the perfect form again of triangle or beauty there is no instantiation of perfect beauty or perfect justice in matter. It just isn't possible. But that's to say, it's not to say that there is no justice and there is no beauty in the world. Of course there is, according to Plato, it's just that the demiurge could only do the best with what the demiurge had to work with. And matter by its nature

is imperfect. Now, that's not to say that we're going to eventually move in the direction of dualism where matter is discounted. And Plato begins that process himself. Matter is deeply discounted. And Plato, and eventually by Neoplatonism, will have Platinus, for instance, famously say, or at least Porphyry famously said of Platinus, that he was ashamed to have a body, that, you know, that idea that the body is somehow so deeply flawed and imperfect that one should, you know, be ashamed of it at some level. We don't quite have that yet in Plato, but we do have the nucleus of that kind of dualism in Plato in that the forms in the world of being are perfect. in Hulet, the world of matter is somehow inferior to that, the world of becoming is inferior, that's already the nucleus of what will become a kind of almost perennial Western dualism that we've never totally been able to shake. We'll get back to Justin Sledge in just a moment, but first, did you know that Pope Francis

recently said that refusing to aid migrants is a, quote, grave sin? It might depend on the kind of news you read. Of the sources reporting on this story, 56% of them are right-leaning, whilst only 20, 96% lean to the left. How could I possibly know this? It's all thanks to today's sponsor, Ground News. Ground News aggregates thousands of news sources from across the world in one place so you can compare reporting across the political spectrum. Every story has a quick breakdown of the political leaning of the sources reporting on the story, as well as a factuality rating for the sources, and information about who owns the sources. So for the story I just mentioned, I can see this political bias breakdown, but I can also compare directly the different headlines for the same story. Notice how some headlines simply quote the Pope in saying that opposing migration is a grave sin,

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And when we're talking about the demiurge, whether it's evil, good, incompetent, whatever. What we're talking about is the creator of the material world. And so Plato has this creator, you know, unable to do, unable to create perfection out of imperfect materials. Where do we start getting this idea that there's something more detestable about the material world, perhaps something a little more sort of distance between the good, perfect form, God, divine realm type stuff and, you know, bad matter type form stuff. I think we see it already in Plato, that there's sort of a discounting of the physical world and the discounting of physicality. In the same way that, again, when I see a beautiful person, I should turn my attention not to the physical person, which is perishable. They're in the world of becoming, but rather I should attune my soul to beauty itself. And in so far as I participate in beauty itself, I'm, you know, somehow my soul is nourished by that and perhaps we'll enjoy some kind of better afterlife if we follow the myth of er at the end of the republic.

that already is there in Plato and kind of in kind of an embryo but over time you begin to see that the the distance between that it become exacerbated that the that not only is there a difference between being a becoming and not only is there a difference between there being sort of perfect and imperfect then value judgments get laid onto that where the imperfect is bad or you know some sense one should you know one should discount it and this is a thing that happened all over Greek philosophy, whether it's the neoplatonist, like I mentioned with Plotinus, who again, was ashamed to have a body. But even you read it in someone like Marcus Aurelius, where he famously said that he was

a corpse carrying around a soul, you have this even in stoicism, which is ultimately a relatively optimistic vision of a reality of materialist and quite optimistic vision of reality. There's still even a sort of de facto discounting of the physical body and the physical realm. And that sort of becomes pervasive in Greek philosophy. Ultimately, Christianity will take a version of that with them. But you can think of things like the mortification of the flesh and the Catholic tradition that will develop there. But also the big thing that happens, and we're talking about sort of two moments in Greek philosophy. One is the discounting of the physical world and the discounting of the body.

So that's one moment that happens in Greek philosophy. The other moment that happens, which is also part of the story, is that increasingly after Plato, and really even before Plato, There is a sense in which the gods need to be rescued from themselves. If you read the stories of the Greek gods, they are not moral exemplars by any stretch of the imagination. They are capricious and jealous and, you know, not fair. You know, you look at the way that the Iliad plays out where, you know, gods and goddesses are just manipulating human beings into massacring each other.

And it's part of their own grand scheme of things. Zeus is a horrifying, you know, repine individual. These entities are not moral exemplars. And what we get in Greek philosophy is a sense in which we need to save the gods from themselves that the gods in order to be gods must be good and therefore these stories need to be dealt with somehow and we have a long tradition of

in the Greek world of trying to make the gods good despite the myths. So the gods apparently are not morally good and I think anyone again anyone who's read the Hesiod or the Homer can attest to that. And we have this weird thing of trying to rest you the gods. And in some ways, there's basically two mechanisms the ancient Greeks thought to deal with this. One of them was positively horrifying and scandalous. And that was Plato's answer.

And Plato's answer to deal with the myths was to edit them, was basically to censor them. To take all the elements of the myths, one can think of something like Thomas Jefferson's, the life and moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, where he just goes through with literally a razor blade. It was talking like cutting and pasting. He literally goes through Jefferson does and just remove. all the miracles and supernatural stuff harmonizes the gospels and we get a sort of a desupernaturalized version of Jesus. Plato wants to do something very

similar with the myths. He says, look, we can't give these myths as they are to our citizens and our Callipolis and the perfect republic. Because they'll emulate the gods, and if they emulate the gods, and they'll think that it's okay to do all this horrible stuff that the gods do. And therefore, what we have to do, as

guardians, of course, who know better, we carefully edit the myths to represent the gods as good. So that's one answer to that. And you can imagine how scandalous that must have been in the ancient worlds. Like, you can imagine, Socrates has just been executed for Asivia, for impiety. And you can imagine that his chief student comes right after him. And at some point in the middle of his career says, yeah, we should edit the myths because they're morally scam. The conservatives must have been horrified by Plato. And not only that, right, we edit the myths, but also women

can be leaders in this republic too. It means a horrifying, scandalous idea of Plato. The other answer to that, right, was the stoic answer. And the stoic answer was, we keep the myths, but we read them differently.

We say all those sections about the gods, and maybe the myths in general, but certainly those sections about the gods that are scandalous, they're really not about what the gods are doing and who the gods are. Rather, they're metaphors, their allegories, their symbolism.

And therefore, we rescue the gods, not by editing things out like Plato wanted to do, gods forbid, but rather what we do is that we reread them. We hermeneutically reread them and thereby rescue them because when Zeus transforms into a bull, it's not really him becoming a bull. It's actually representative of some natural force, for instance. And therefore, we rescue the gods hermeneutically. That's what we do. And so there was already in the Greek world, well, hundreds of years,

years before Christianity, probably beginning, our first attested version of this is probably something like the Dervini papyrus, where we already have a sense that there's a moral idea that the gods need to be good in order to be gods, and therefore the myths themselves need to be fixed or reread in order to rescue the gods from their own apparent depravity. And already there's an idea that the gods might not be good, and we need to do something with the myths to fix them. And so we have these two strategies, you know, editing, censorship, which never became popular for obvious reasons, and then this hermeneutical trick developed by the Stoics. And we already see that, you know, really early on in, you know, third century. We see that kind of thing developing. And so already,

right, there's a sense in which in order to be gods, they must be morally good. The myths depict the gods is not morally good, therefore something needs to be done. And so either there's a shift that has to happen, and already that's happening well before Christianity arrives in the scene. And still before Christianity arrives on the scene, we'll get to that. Listeners might begin to notice some of the Gnostic Christian themes beginning to emerge about the condemnation of the material world and of the body and of the sort of weird sense in which there might kind of be like two gods, but not really. It's a bit unclear.

We still see this further development from the gods and the sort of Demiurge of Plato into a distinctly evil, sort of demonic Demiurge creator. Where does this shift happen? Where do we get to something more like the way people use the term today of Demiurge, a sort of evil, malevolent, singular creator, not a linguistic. tool to help us sort of escape the trials of the Odyssey and the Iliad, but a theological concept of a of an evil demiurge. Yeah, so there's one more sort of step to kind of turn over the engine of the demiurge, and that has to do with the fact that with Hellenism, the Israelites enter the scene, and their God enters into this whole problem, right? What do we do with the gods? And when the Israelite God arrives on the scene, that exact same mechanism is going to be applied to the Israelites.

God. The Israelite God apparently seems to be morally compromised, and we'll get more into this in a bit. And already we see someone like Philo. Philo of Alexandria famously takes a lot of the material from the Hebrew Bible, which we find morally alarming for, I think, perfectly legitimate reasons. And Philo says, well, let me use this stoic technique on the Hebrew Bible to basically show that no, the Israelite God is not capricious and not jealous. That's not what you're happening. These are all symbols. And if you've ever read Philo's allegorical commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, which are positively torturous to read, he just goes through and symbolizes everything. They're horrible to read. But he applies the stoic

trick to the Israelic God. But there's a deeper antagonism here. And that deeper antagonism is that when Alexandria is formed as a city in Egypt, about a third of the population are Jews. People often forget that there were more Jews living in Alexandria than they were often living in what became Palestine. So in terms of Jewish population centers, Alexandria was much more the center of the Jewish world than than sort of Judea was or Israel or Roman Judea. In fact, Philo of Alexandria, again, one of the most prestigious Jews in ancient history, he only visited the temple once so far as we can tell. In fact, he never even learned Hebrew. He just admits to him. To him, it's a backwater.

It's a place that you go for religious reasons, but otherwise it's in the middle of nowhere. Sure, sure. It's way off there. And he lives in Alexandria, which is not terribly far away, but the idea of having to go way over there, and he's one of the richest Jews in the region, to him, Judea is a backwater, and he's not really that interested in going over there. He sends money, of course, but that's because he'd rather send money than go himself. But Alexandria, in many ways is a center of the educated Jewish world. This is the world that's producing the Septuagint and many other things. And when the Septuagint's produced, that is to say, the translation of the Hebrew Bible

into Greek, there's a kind of PR problem for the Jews living in Alexandria. And the PR problem, I think anyone can guess what it is. Central to the Israelite myth is the idea that they were slaves in Egypt and their God swoops in via Moses does a great deal of murder and plagues and all that sort of stuff and then leads them out of Egypt much to the

shame of Pharaoh and the Egyptian gods who are apparently defeated by this Israelite God. And again, you have to imagine that in many ways in the ancient mind, this is sort of my dad can beat up your dad kind of mentality. And if central to the Israelite myth is Yahweh

defeating the Egyptian pantheon And we have a situation where that literature is translated out of Hebrew into Greek and to make matters worse, we have an example of a character named Ezekiel the Tragedean who translates not only the Greek into, you know, not only from Hebrew to Greek, but he translates the Greek into into theater.

This is a thing that can be performed now. So I want you to put yourself into the position of an Egyptian. An average Egyptian, the Egyptian priesthood, which has been there for thousands of years. They've been invaded by the Greeks. They're invaded by the Romans. They're being actively colonized. And in your most prestigious city,

there's a group of people who are literally staging plays in which your gods, which are, again, thousands of years old, are being put to shame by foreigners, basically. You can imagine the Egyptian conservatives, the Egyptian religious conservatives, looking at the profound, of this idea that their God and their kings are just like nothing compared to a foreign

God, again, who are actively being colonized by the Greeks and the Romans, this is simply not going to, it's not going to fly. And the Egyptians have a solution for this. The Egyptians go back to their traditional religion, and in that traditional religion, they have a god. And that God, Seth, that God is associated with foreigners, with the desert, with chaos, With all the kind of things that we think of is typically sort of a relatively malevolent god. This is a god that contests with horace traditionally and things like this. And also this god, Seth, has been traditionally associated with Ba'al, the storm god of Kanan, of Canaan. And the Egyptians make the logical move.

Your God is not a good God. Your God is a malevolent desert foreign god. and not only that, you didn't escape from Egypt. Your God did not take you out of Egypt. We kicked you out of Egypt because you were a bunch of lepers. We quarantined you into the desert, and your God led you into the desert to die. And so the Egyptians make this theological move where Yahweh is identified with their God set as part of this religious polemic that's developing.

And so already the machinery, this is hundreds of years before Christianity will be on the scene, the machinery, the theological machinery, is already turning such that Yahweh in the Egyptian mind is identified with this deity set, and that deity represents foreigners, chaos, the desert, and ostensibly evil. And so Yahweh in the Egyptian mind has now become a malevolent deity. And you can imagine why. All they do is look at the story. Your deity plunged us into darkness and made the Nile blood and murdered these firstborn children, had nothing to do with this. Your God made Pharaoh's heart hard and made him unable to capitulate. Your God's

malevolent. Your God is Seth. And that's a big theological move. And we'll see, Gnosticism, whatever that is, this malevolent demiurge tradition is going to originate primarily in Alexandria, it seems like, so far as we can tell. And I think that's completely unsurprising, considering that several hundred years prior to the rise of Christianity, In the Egyptian mind, Y'allway has already become identified as a malevolent god, the Egyptian god Seth. I should say, by the way, that you lay this out and discuss this in that series I mentioned that you're producing on your YouTube channel Esoterica on the Demiurge. Just phenomenal viewing. I'm excited as I possibly could be for the next installment.

And it's wonderful. I'd recommend that anybody who is having their interest piqued here, go and go and check that out. And what really began to click for me was this history of the Exodus thinking about what it would mean to have these stories circulating. You know, the Jews say, our God saved us from Egypt. Our God just came in and just took us and we just won. And yeah, that is pretty surprising. And I thought, oh, okay, I can see why at least the Egyptian, Egyptians would begin to see this Yahweh, that's our old friend Yahweh again, as, you know, there's something sort of dodgy about him. But when you specifically point out that in the Greek pantheon, they have this god, Seth, who is the god? And I remember you were saying in this video, you say, he's the god of disorder.

Ah, he's the god of the desert. Okay, he's a god of chaos. Yeah, and a god of foreigners. It all just sort of fell into place. And storms. And storms. in to see that, and storms. Yeah, storms.

And listeners may remember that we talked about sort of, you know, the amalgamation of gods a bit in our previous episode and how we get from our sort of desert storm god to Yawai in the Jewish tradition itself. Here again, we've kind of got something like that going on. Listeners might remember that this Yahweh god is a sort of storm god. It has similar connotations. And so it's so easy to see how in the Egyptian tradition, in the same way, that a Christian may look at another religion's gods and say, oh, they're actually demons.

You know, oh, that God that you believe in, oh, that's actually the devil. You know, you just don't recognize it. These Egyptians are looking at the Jewish god and saying, oh, that Yahweh, that God that you have, that's actually just Seth. You just don't realize it. And so this seems to be what our sort of first historical indication of a, of a precise identification of Yahweh with a sort of evil god. Obviously, the Egyptians aren't going to believe that Yahweh is the kind of creative power behind the universe, but we've got this like demonization

of Yahweh beginning to occur. Yep, and that's one of the big theological shifts. And that, again, that began all the way back with the Hixos, right? You talk about when the Hixos, the Asiatic peoples invaded Egypt, they were Ba'al worship. or at least to some degree. And the major Ramseums, the major areas where Seth was venerated. And again, we should also say that Seth,

the history of Seth is quite complicated, and I have a whole video about the development of Seth as a deity. But already Seth and Ba'al were linked. And from the Egyptian point of view, Baal and Yahweh are just the same. For the Israelites, this is what Ford will call the narcissism of minor difference, that, you know, no one, from your point of view, if there are two different people of one national

animal living in the same neighborhood, they couldn't be more different from each other. But from, you know, three streets over, you know, the Italians think all the English are the same. But if there are two Englishmen living on the same street and one's from Manchester, one's from London, they couldn't think of themselves as more different. But from the Italian guy living down the street, just as English. Well, the same is true for the Egyptians. The Canaanite gods are all basically the same. Baal and Yahweh are just the same deity. But for the Israelites, that's a whole horrible idea because they're building Yalway

as a contrast competitor to Yahweh. And what we see in the Egyptian literature going all the way back to the Hicksos, basically, is that they've already included Yalway in some sense in their pantheon. It's not to say that Yalway isn't real. They never make that move. But they just say, yeah, Yalway and Baal

are the same. And then we get this Yalwe story in Ezekiel, the tragedian, and they look at this and go, yeah, your God is a desert storm foreign god. But Seth, we already have your god. You said all the way back in the Hixos. What's that?

So the Hixos were Asiatic peoples that invaded Egypt and ultimately became pharaohs. I mean, they're Hixos, pharaohs. The Ramses were Hicksos. So, again, we think of the Egyptians as sort of a quite stable place. And in many ways, it was culturally stable. But there were definitely periods in which there were Nubian pharaohs where Nubians had invaded Egypt. And they were Hixos invaders.

And those Hicksos people are people coming in from what is now, what we would now consider a Kanaan or Israel, Palestine now. And they invaded and were able to take political power for a period of time. And they brought their gods with them, and Ba'al was one of them. And we see, again, representations of Ba'al in Ramzid temples. And Baal is represented with the Seth head, this sort of, we have this, Most people know that the Egyptian deities would often have animal-headed gods, and many of those are immediately recognizable, you know, the falcon-headed god or the jackal-headed god, but Seth has a strange animal that no one's been able to quite identify, and to this day we call it the Seth beast. It sort of looks like an anteater or something, but no one's quite sure what it is, and eventually it becomes a donkey-headed god. And that idea of a donkey-headed god is going to become a big deal when we get to the demonization of Yahweh, and, even one of the first depictions of the crucifixion carries this donkey-headed,

your god is really seth business to a, to one might say, a blasphemous depiction of the crucifixion. Yeah, it is an interesting tidbit of this entire Yahweh and Demiard story that you have these strange ancient artistic depictions of Yahweh with a donkey for a head. It seems very strange to suggest, I mean, maybe people just see donkeys as a bit stupid and they're trying to mock Yahweh and so they give him a donkey head. But when you realize that the Egyptian god Seth has something like a donkey for a head traditionally, and we're sort of talking about this amalgamation of gods, it begins to look like more than just an arbitrary attempt at making fun of the Jewish god and instead a quite purposeful theological. mockery or a quite purposeful theological statement, observation, argument, right? And so what's kind of going on here with the donkey-headed god? And does this crop up before, I mean, we'll talk about the famous Christian Alexandonos graffiti and whatnot, but does this donkey-headed god, as applied to the Jewish god, appear before the development of Christianity? It does. It does. So the idea

that again, Seth is depicted as a strange animal, but by Hellenistic times, that strange animal has become basically sort of fossilized as a donkey-headed deity. And again, if Seth and Yahweh are the same deity in the Egyptian mind,

then Yahweh is going to be a donkey-headed deity, because Seth and Yahweh are the same thing, and if the Egyptians want to depict Yahweh, they'll depict him as donkey-headed. And then what ends up developing is that this slur against the Judean God, and the Judean God was always, Judaism and the Judean God were always thought of by the Romans, especially as an unusual group. The Romans, in some sense, always thought

of Judaism as an unusual, strange religion, because everything about the Jewish theology didn't match in some sense to the Roman theology. The Jewish God was invisible, and the Roman gods were visible. The Jewish God can only be worships in one place, whereas the Roman gods could have shrines all over. There were all kinds of things that there was just one of these gods, and the Romans thought this was a very unusual idea that they would just be one of them. But the Romans, for their point,

they had to accept the Jewish religion at some level because it was ancient. For the Romans, what mattered was that your religion was old. It didn't matter that your religion was weird. As long as your religion was old, then they basically accepted that it was true to some degree. But because there was this sense that the

Jewish religion was unusual, and also because there was some sense in which they just couldn't imagine that there just wasn't a physical representation of their God. Well, the God had to have some appearance. And what it ultimately ends up getting sort of passed around, whether it's through various historiographers or various playwrights and things like this, is the idea is that the Jews are worshipping a donkey-headed God. And you see this over and over and over again, even by Roman historians that probably knew

better that they had known that the Jews worshipped an invisible God. But again, the Jews in the Roman Empire weren't exactly the Romans most favorite people. This is a cantankerous, rebellious people with an unusual theology. And so if the Romans wanted a good excuse to mock them, then this was a great way. And again, the donkey was thought of and antiquity a bit like donkeys are thought of now, which is deeply unfortunate for donkeys. They're thought of as stupid. They're thought of as sort of dangerous and violent.

I thought of as extraordinarily virile, but also sterile, that they have these enormous venuses, but also they can't generate children. And so it's a great way of calling, you know, someone a donkey was a bit of a way of making fun of them. And this is sort of the lampooning of the Jewish religion is associating the Jewish deity with a donkey-headed deity. And that, of course, has its origin and the synthesis by the Egyptians of Seth and Yahweh. Yeah, and it's extraordinary. We'll get on to Christianity promptly, but just because I think it's relevant here for those who aren't aware, when you ask people what they think the earliest depiction of Christ in art that we have is, what might it be? Maybe a painting, maybe some kind of engraving. It turns out that one of the oldest depictions that we have, potentially the oldest depiction of Christ in art that we have, potentially the oldest depiction of Christ in art that we have. have available to us is a bit of graffiti that was discovered in the Palatine Hill in Rome,

which depicts a stick man worshipping another stick figure with a donkey for a head. Underneath is written the words, Alex Amonos worships his God. So presumably making fun of some man called Alex Aminos for worshipping a donkey-headed god. A crucify a donkey-headed god. A crucified A crucified donkey-headed Yeah, that's the crucial part

Is that this is a The donkey is being crucified Yeah, the donkey-headed man is being crucified And that That clearly tips us off That this is a representation of Christ Who the Roman graffiti artist Knows that this person

Alex Eminos worships as God And therefore, because this is a Jewish god They know in order to mock that God or perhaps just to depict that God, that the appropriate depiction is to depict that crucified God with a donkey head. So, yeah, most people I think have never seen this image, but it is, I don't know that it's the oldest depiction of Christ. I think one of the older, some of the older ones are in the catacombs.

In fact, many of the oldest depictions of Christ have him beardless. He doesn't get a beard until a couple centuries into the things. He's the beardless shepherd, the youthful beardless shepherd, which again, we can't imagine a clean-shaven Christ, but early Christians clearly have him as a clean-shaven, youthful shepherd Christ, but that is one of the earliest depictions of the crucifixion. And yeah, we have this depiction of a donkey-headed Christ-God, which must have been, I think even for Christians at that time, was doubly alarming, because it was alarming in the sense that, first of all, our God doesn't have a donkey head, how dare you? And also, we don't really don't want to be associated with the Jews

either. And so it's a double, like, no, our God's not donkey-headed. That's the Jewish God. We're not, that's not us anymore. And so it must have been doubly alarming, not only to depict Christ this blasphemous way, but also to still continue in some sense linking their religion with Judaism, which by that time Christians were actively distancing themselves for several reasons. Yeah, it's an extraordinary bit of religious history. And you can still see it today. Well, I don't know if you can see it actually today because the Palatine Hill Museum is under construction, or at least it was when I was last there relatively recently. So we sort of queued up and paid our 16 euros or whatever it was in the blazing heat to see something which was somehow

more offensive than this outright blasphemy, which is a bunch of scaffolding and a sign that says that, you know, you'll have to return in six months or whatever. It is amazing how Christians will queue up and pay money to go and see blasphemy. But it's a, it's a incredible bit of material because, again, it's somebody mocking this Alex Arminus figure just by depicting the God. It's sort of that idea that the crucified God is such an embarrassment. We forget because Christianity has become so popular and such a successful myth, that the whole idea of a crucifixion is that it is an embarrassing way to die, is that it is this completely disgraceful, dishonorable way to be put to the death. And as a reminder of that, we see that this is how he

is mocked in the ancient world. Interestingly, I think that somewhere nearby, like in a building sort of next door to where the Alex Amonos Graffito was discovered, there was another bit of graffiti discovered where it says something like Alex Amonos is faithful, written on a wall somewhere else, as if Alex Amonos has sort of responded to this. It's this great, great mystery, and I've always found an interesting part of religious history. No, I totally agree. It's, again, this is the way that people communicated. If you've ever into Pompeii, you can see dialogues in the graffiti where people are making fun of one another, calling each other names,

and I won't repeat the, you know, it's colorful, to say the very least. But yeah, this is, this character, Alex Eminos, is, you know, he would be a great sort of cameo character in a show about ancient Rome where we get a vision about that moment,

you know, because I think it would, you know, people know the meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen. I think all the biblical scholars would, you know, we were like, yeah, there it is, the Axemanos graffiti.

Yeah, yeah. I do, I do think, I thought when I was there, when I was queuing up, right? It took like an hour to get in and there's people like selling umbrellas because it's so hot and water and captive, captive crowd, you know. And I remember thinking to myself, some guy, God knows how long ago is just sort of sitting around and takes, you know, a rock and just like carves a little drawing into a wall. To think that, you know, this many years later people would, there'd be a museum built on top of it and there would be people queuing up paying money specifically to come and see that little drawing you did on the wall. Man, I'm glad he didn't know because he probably would have, would have, it would have changed what he said, you know, there's something, something magical about, about the, how casual that bit of art probably was that tells us just where the sort of public perception was at the point. I think it's a wonderful, sort of touchstone here for what we're talking about, about this image of the donkey-headed Christ who, you sort of got.

Christ, who is the Jewish God, but the Jewish God is kind of thought of by other people as kind of like a donkey-headed God, even though the Jews don't see their God as a donkey-headed. All of this sort of comes together in this Alex Amonos graffiti to show us that we've got this really weird sort of hurricane of theological ideas that are centering around this, eventually this person of Christ in the Christian tradition, which is where I think we should probably turn to next. Unless there's anything else that's super significant that happens between what we've been talking about and the life and times of a certain Jesus of Nazareth, perhaps it's time to introduce him to our story. Yeah, a very minor character, of course. But yes, yes, Jesus of Nazareth appears in the scene. And, of course, following his death and resurrection, he becomes deified, as sometimes that happens to gods or people. They get deified, you know, despite the fact that they've inconveniently died.

And, yeah, Christianity enters into it. And one of the things that I'll say about early Christianity is that we think of them, we think of early Christianity is having a great deal of internal theological unity because the institutional Christianity has a lot of skin in the game of telling us that story that the Catholic Church has always existed and we've always believed the same thing. And, you know, there's an idea of, you know, it goes all the way back to Peter and there's a sense of continuity, apostolic continuity, theological continuity. But the truth of the matter couldn't be further, that what Christians shared in common, basically, was that they accepted to some degree that Jesus had come, he had taught something very important, that he had died, at least in some sense, and that he had risen from that death, and that those things together represented something salvific.

Now, what that something was and what any of those things were, that Jesus came into the world, that he was born, that he taught certain kinds of things, that he died and that he was resurrected and he eventually ascended into heaven, what any of the details of that, how you cashed out those details represented dozens of Christianity's. And those could run the field an enormous variety. And so I think that it's very important that when we talk about the early Jesus movement, early Christianity, that we don't make the assumption that there's sort of a Christianity, but there is a field of Christianity. And they run the gamut from extraordinarily recognizable as something like proto-Cathalicism to something utterly unrecognizable in

something like the Pistice Sophia. When you read the Pistice Sophia are the books of you, it's difficult to imagine what kind of Christianity that even is. But Jesus is in the center of it, he's salvific. And I'm sure if you'd have asked those people what they were, they would told you Christians. And so it's very important that when we get into this, that these people understood themselves as Christians, no different than the big time people that we think of of Tartulian or Iranais or whatever. They were all Christians in their own way. But yeah, so to deal with Jesus, we have lots of different theological moves. And I think the really important theological move here is going to be Marcion. Marcion is going to be the character that is going

to begin the shift Christianity in this sort of malevolent demiurge direction. And again, that has everything to do with the fact that for basically all philosophical schools at the time of Christianity, this is a time period that we typically refer to as Middle Platonism, virtually all schools, with perhaps the exception of now cynics or Epicureans, but basically the general tenor of Greek philosophy at the time was that in order to be a God, you had to be good, that goodness, that the gods were good, and that in order to be a God, you had to be good. And Christianity is going to inherit the Israelites scriptures. They're going to inherit the Hebrew Bible. And so insofar as Christianity is an outgrowth of Judaism, they're going to have to deal with the Hebrew

Bible. And as we'll see, for instance, with Marcion, there's a lot of ways of dealing with the Hebrew Bible, One of which is to demonize it. And that's in some sense exactly what Marcion is going to do. Yeah, so Marcian provides our first attempt at something of a Christian canon, trying to put these sects together and say, these are the ones that we should follow, these are the ones that we should listen to. Much like the church eventually did,

giving us the Holy Bible that we have today, Marcian's approach was a little bit different to theirs, in part due to its exclusion. wholesale of the Hebrew Bible, which should tell us something already. It contains one gospel, which is a sort of shorter version of Luke, which may be an edited version of Luke, or potentially an early version of Luke, which was expanded upon to give us Luke's gospel, as well as some but not all of the letters of Paul. This is the canon that we're, that we're given by Marcion or is suggested used by Marcian. I suppose the question is this, when Marcian is

compiling his Christian canon, why does he exclude the Old Testament, what we now call the Old Testament? Why does he exclude the Hebrew Bible altogether? So, yeah, you're right to say, right? We have this text called the Apostolicon. We have the text of this, the Pauline letters, and you also have the text called the antitheses. We'll talk about the antitheses in just a minute as well. I think that the reason why Marcyon, and folks should know Marcian's living in the, you know, living in sort of the early second Century, he's a shipping magnate. He's quite wealthy. And like every person, if you have a lot of money, well, you have power and prestige. And we should remember at this time, Christianity is not a

highly organized religion. It is a religion basically organized in houses. And even in very powerful places like Rome, Christianity is not a, it's not a hierarchical system. It is much more distributed. And there are leaders, presbyters, they're called at that time. And the Roman presbyters do have some authority, but this is not like the Pope can decree things. That's, you know, that's not until you get to the, really the end of the second century that the bishop of Rome has the kind of authoritative power to decree things in the way that we think, maybe even later than the late second century. At any rate, Marcion, I think this does what any person would do. Marcion's Greek. He's not Jewish. And so he doesn't have any reason, unlike some, perhaps someone like Peter

or Paul, they're Jews. And when they look at the Hebrew Bible, what we now call the Hebrew Bible, they would have looked at that as part of their history. And therefore, they would have had not only a theological, but in some sense even an ethnic, as much as one can separate sort of ethnic identity and theology at that time, which is actually quite difficult to separate in some sense. And in Judaism, it's still quite difficult to separate. But someone like Paul or Peter, James, they would have had a deep-seated idea that the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, are part of their, story and they're part of their ultimate arc of their of their salvation history.

If you're not Jewish and if you're a Greek living way out and the outer reaches of the Roman Empire, Marcion is a Greek living in Pontus, what is on the Black Sea and what is now northern Turkey, he doesn't have any

he doesn't have any real reason to look at the Hebrew Bible as anything other than a bunch of books. They're just books to him. And they happen to feature the same God that he believes in, perhaps. But in some sense, they're just a collection of myths like all kinds of other myths. And so Marcion can see them in a way that the Jewish followers of Jesus, the early Jesus movement, could not. And Marcyon does the most dangerous thing that one can do to any scripture. And the most dangerous thing you can do to any scripture is just read it. It's just read it.

There's nothing more disturbing one can do. to any scripture, then read it. And if you read it and take a look at it and say, rather than doing all this hermeneutical mental gymnastics to rescue the gods, all these mental gymnastics to make the gods look good, just look at it. And does the story depict a deity that's morally good? And Marcion comes to the conclusion,

the imminently reasonable conclusion, that the deity depicted in the Hebrew Bible is not good. and insofar as that deity is not good and perhaps the deity is even malevolent if the deity is not good then by definition then the not goodness of that deity de-deifies them

they're not a deity anymore because again in the Greek imagination the Greek philosophical idea at the time goodness renders the deity insofar as the deity is not good they're not a deity Marcian does this thing he reads the Hebrew Bible and says

that is not a deity. Now, we'll get into what Marcion thought this entity was, but what Marcion does is he develops a third text called antithesis, and this is sort of a what we call an isogoga introduction. And he really packaged this as sort of a unit. He really wanted this to be the thing that he put in the hands of all his followers, and ultimately I think that he did. The Marcionite church lasted for centuries.

And the antitheses, Basically, and again, we have to reconstruct it because we don't have it, and we should be very careful that... Yeah, we don't have. We don't have access to this text. We don't have it. We have fragments quoted by his enemies. So we should always be careful about, you know, to what degree we can trust this. But we have good reason to believe that we can reconstruct to some degree, the apostolicon, and we have fragments of the antitheses. But what he does is he takes the example of Jesus, specifically from his apostolicon, this version of Luke, he has, and he contrasts Jesus, who he believed was God, with the God of the Hebrew Bible, and shows the Hebrew Bible God does X, and Jesus does not X.

The Hebrew Bible, God does Y, and Jesus does not Y. And they are they are theologically opposed, specifically morally opposed, and by doing this sort of moral opposition, I can give just one of examples. example of this. One of the good ones we have is, for instance, in the exodus, where Yahweh tells the Israelites to basically pillage Egypt on their way out. And that happens in the Hebrew Bible, and there's all kinds of justifications for that pillaging that happened in rabbinical literature. But the Bible just really makes it clear that they're just pillaging on their way out. Well, Yahweh says to pillage. What does Jesus say? Give your money away to the poor, right?

To be poor. Yep. And so that shows that the same entity cannot be the, it cannot be the same entity because they're operating from fundamentally opposed moral positions and therefore that must be two entities, one of which is good, one of which is malevolent. And Marcian ultimately can... You give examples in your video on your own channel, you give some more examples of these contrasting attitudes, the law of Yahweh saying an eye for an eye, Jesus saying to turn the other cheek and to forgive your enemies and love your enemies. Yahweh sending bears to avenge the prophet

Elisha. How do you say it? Elisha? Elisha? I think that it depends on people say, you know, people say Elisha. It's, in Hebrew, it's whatever. It's like, you know, can you, is it, there's a proper pronunciation,

Elijah? And I'm like, well, in Hebrew, it's Eliahu. So, you know, yeah, but Elish. Let's go with Elisha. Yeah, Alicia. Alicia. Well, okay, let's go with Alicia. Let's go with Alicia.

The creator, Yahweh sends bears to avenge the prophet Alicia after being mocked. Whereas it's just something you sort of can't imagine Jesus doing. You know, the Yahweh allows Moses to drop the Red Sea onto the Egyptians, killing them, drowning them. Which, again, it's sort of difficult to imagine Jesus doing. Jesus is the figure of sacrifice for all mankind coming to redeeming. sinners, so imagining the same kind of being, so turning around and drowning the Egyptians and some sort of vengeful wrath, because presumably Yahweh didn't like have to do that to get the Israelites to escape, who knows?

The hardening of the heart. It's certainly difficult, the hardening of the heart, of course, like Pharaoh's, this was one of my first objections. I remember when I was a child at school, I remember specifically asking about Pharaoh's hardened heart. If God hardens Pharaoh's heart, how can Pharaoh then be judged for having a hardened heart? It's just not the kind of behavior that you can see Jesus partaking in. And as you say in your video, even people today who maybe aren't aware of the ideas that we're discussing will still look at the Christian story and still talk about the Old Testament God as if it's like a different

character. You know, like Richard Dawkins famously, the God of the Old Testament is the most whatever, you know, vindictive character in all of fiction or whatever it is that he says, people talk about the God of the Old Testament. And you sort of describe this as a kind of like Neo-Marsianism, even if people don't realize they're doing what Marcian did, which has looked at this character and thought, there's just something about this God, which makes me unable to identify it with Jesus. Even like the critics, even the Christian critics who are trying to say that they don't believe it or they think it's evil or whatever, they still, even just in terms of like characters in a fictional story feel the need to separate these two beings

as different characters. So what Marcian was doing there seems to be pretty reasonable. I would say it's eminently reasonable. I also say that the vision of Jesus is sort of kumbaya, hippie, lovey-dovey Jesus also is a misreading of the Gospels. Jesus also says things like I didn't come to bring peace to the world, but I came to bring a sword. And if you love your father and mother, then you don't love me. Jesus also says some pretty extreme things in the New Testament. So they're both examples of selective reading, right? You can read all the evil stuff about Yahweh, and certainly it's there, and we can read

all the kumbaya stuff about Jesus, and that's certainly there, but also there's also great stuff about Y'allway, about him being compassionate and loving and kind, and there's also sections where Jesus is quite violent in his, you know, in the way that he is in the world. He's quite conservative. We think of Jesus as being a liberal in some sense, but Jesus, the few times that Jesus gives Jewish legal rulings, what we call halakha, they're more conservative than any other rabbi of his time.

So in many ways, he was not at all liberal. He was extremely conservative, maybe even xenophobic. We have this great line where the Samaritan woman comes to ask him for a miracle and Jesus says, no, I'm not going to deal with you, you're Samaritan. And she says, well, sometimes

crumbs fall off the table and we can eat the crumbs that fall from your table. And Jesus says, you can have the crumbs. And I'm like, a very xenophobic kind of Jesus. So I think the neo-Marsianism that some Christians ultimately adopt is also born of the fact that they don't read the New Testament either. They're reading a certain kind of hippie liberal Jesus, which I think is not there in many

ways. But for sure, I would say that many Christians come to a very reasonable conclusion once they actually do the dreadful thing of reading the Bible. famously Voltaire said the Bible is more celebrated than known and I think that's true no one reads the damn thing hardly and I think when you read it and if you read it without jumping through the mental gymnastics of trying to rescue this God or you read it as just a collection of Israelite literature no different than Assyrian literature a Babylonian literature it's hard to look at that God and think this is a loving caring good entity this is an

entity that seems to be jealous and capricious and God changes God's mind. Y'alloy changes Y'alloy's mind at some point. Y'alli repents of things. Y'alli wants to just kill all the Israelites and Moses is like not so fast. And you always like, yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. You get this completely different vision of this entity. And Marcyon just does the, he makes a logical conclusion and says, there are two gods here. Or rather, I'd say, one of these is not a god. Y'allie is. is in fact not a god. It's a really important. Yawai, or rather Marcion, was accused by his critics of being bi-theistic, which is to say he believed in two gods.

Polytheism was a pretty common thing to hurl at your opponents, polytheism being the most laughable idea for their Christians, which is a bit laughable considering they invented the Trinity, and they're surrounded by polytheists. Again, you know, again, you point a finger and many point back at you, again, it's a bit rich when they're accusing other people of polytheism. But, you know, one of the things that Tertulli and other people would do is accuse Marcian of bitheism and therefore polytheism. It's very clear if we read what we have of Marcian, he rejected the idea that Yahweh was a god. Again, because of the moral failures of

this entity. But what he does argue, and this is mostly coming out of Paul's letters, is that Yalway is responsible for the creation of this world. And in that sense, Yalway is in control. Sometimes Marcion calls Yahweh the cosmocrater, the world ruler. And what you get in some of Paul's letters, which again, most people don't read them very carefully, you do get the weird, from time to time, Paul's saying things like the ruler of this world. And you're like, who is he talking about? And many Christians say, oh, he's talking about the devil,

that the devil's sort of in control of this world to some degree, which is a Theologically unusual position in some senses, Marcion just says, yeah, the one that made this into this world is in charge of it. And that's not Christ. Christ came here to undermine that deity. And Marcion's creator being the malevolent demiurge, who will become the demiurge, that entity was ultimately responsible in his stupidity for trying to murder Jesus, thinking that he could basically murder God. And that didn't work because Christ wasn't a man and he was God. And so what you get is that shift. And so, yes, Marcyon did not believe in two gods, but he did believe is that the entity

described in the Hebrew Bible is responsible for creation, but ultimately is not a god. Now, there's a lot of questions lingering there, and we'll see how those get fleshed out in just a moment. Yeah. So crucially now, we've got a similar story of Marcian looking at this God, Yahweh, this character, and thinking, no, this is some kind of evil. malevolent deity, a bit like the Egyptians kind of did, and when they identified it with Seth. But Marcian is a Christian. He believes in Christ. And in Poole's letters, it's quite clear that this Old Testament, this law, this Hebrew Bible is like relevant. There's something about it.

There's something going on. Jesus is quoting the scriptures. You can't just sort of throw it out entirely. You have to offer some account of what's going on there. And so we have the first maybe fleshed out account here of a belief that Yahweh is this, you know, evil type demiurge creator of the universe, but not in such a way as to just like, you know, discount his theological significance or to amalgamate him into your own pantheon, but in a specifically Christian context where we finally end up with this idea of Jesus as God coming from the true divine realm and Yahweh as this demiurgic creator, I suppose. I think we might have spoken before in our last episode about how for Orthodox Christians,

Yahweh eventually becomes Christ, whereas for the Gnostics, Yahweh eventually becomes the demiurge. And we're exploring this second option here. And as you say, Marcian was quite popular. Marcian's followers, Marcianite churches existed until perhaps the mid-400s of the common era, I think. It's the last time they're mentioned. I mean, that's the last time that they're basically one of them burns down. There's a Marcianite church next to an Orthodox church, and the Marcianite church burns down, and there's a mention of the fact that it was being repaired. But no, it was popular enough.

So it could be even later. Yeah, it could be, I think it was much later. I think that there's examples where, you know, some of the Christians, Orthodox Christians, so-called Orthodox Christians, would say things like, if you go to a new city, make sure you ask for a Catholic church. Because if you just ask for a church, you're just as likely to end up in a Marcianite church. And so there's, you know... That, by the way, is like one of my favorite facts. It was first Elaine Pagels who brought my attention to it. And then I couldn't remember who it was that said this. In your video,

you say, it's Cyril of Jerusalem, yeah. Cyril of Jerusalem is warning Christians in the early church when they go to a new church to specifically ask for a Catholic church, rather than a Christian church, because if they ask for a Christian church, they might be sent to this Gnostic, Marcianite community. When people say to me, Alex, you're kind of becoming a bit obsessed with the Gnostics, and yeah, I am. I mean, I think it's interesting, but they say, you know, this was just some silly little fringe movement at the beginning of the Christian church. It was basically immediately condemned. It's like, then why were Christians being warned in this way? Yeah. That's why it's one of my favorite facts to point out that it was maybe a bit more

popular than people give it credit for. No, in fact, it was so not only popular, because we have good examples of Marcianite Churches lasting for centuries, but it was clear that Cyril of Jerusalem has to issue this warning because an average believer wouldn't know the difference. I think that's the part that I think flies under the radar. It's not just that they would end up in a Marcyonite church, but that they wouldn't even know the difference, that they need to be directed to the so-called Catholic Church because for them they would just be church. And I think that's so crucially important. When we call these people Valentinians or Marcionites or whatever, we're allowing their

enemies who intentionally named their beliefs after their so-called founders to oppose them to Christianity. You're not a Christian. You're a Marcionite. You're not a Christian. You're a Valentinian. if you went to a Marcyonite church, if you went to a Valentinian church and asked them what they were,

they would just tell you they were a Christian. Right. You know, we don't call, we don't call Catholicism, Iranianism. We don't call it Tratulianism. I sometimes I want to do that. I'm like, yeah, there's Marcionism and there's Iranianism.

And where's Christianity? It's all Christianity. But we shouldn't let, again, like, when we do this whole, there were Marcionites, I'm like, well, we don't refer to Iranianites. would I think we could, and we should perhaps. It would be a bit in the mouth, but you can see the point.

But I think that's the other point, too, is that the average believer wouldn't have known they were in a Catholic or Marseonite church. It probably was all the same to them. They had to be shepherded into the right place. And I think to this day, I think that people are very cozy with Marcionism. And as I mentioned in the video, when you brought up just a moment, I think most people are Marcyonites. if you really got into like asking them what do you think about this old testament god they're going to have to they're going to do some kind of hand wringing but their first answer is yeah that god you know the god that delights in the children's head being bashed against rocks which you know the bible says that you know

what a horrifying idea that you know this yaway god delights in you know the murder of children it's really hard to square that with with uh the jesus that people want that's not to say the jesus it's actually there in the Gospels. And they're going to, the immediate, I think a response will be a kind of low-key Marcianism. And I think that's endemic. I grew up with Christians all the time with sort of low-key Marxianism. Or they'll say something like, well, that's God the Father.

And God the Father is really strict. And Jesus is really a bit more loving and kind. I'm like, you're real close. He's like the cool, rebellious son. Yeah. Yeah, with a leather jacket. You know, like, you know, like, he's like, you know, listen to the cool music and mean old grumpy dad is, you know, he's the one that harden Pharaoh's heart. Yeah, I think I'm like, you would have ended up in a Marcy Knight church and not known the difference. But they're also going to point to the fact that Jesus says that he's there not to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law. Not until, you know, every, if a single joss or tittle is, you know, struck from the law, then that person is, is condemned.

and all of this kind of stuff. So where does that fit into a Christian demiurgic, Gnostic community, where Jesus is clearly quoted in at least some instances of being the fulfillment of what's sort of promise in the Old Testament? And I think that's in Matthew, and I think that's in Matthew, and I'm pretty sure that's part of the reason why Martin and he's not rejected it in his canon. Yeah, he's certainly much more comfortable with Luke, because Luke is a bit more of a, it's a bit more of a Greek,

You know, the Greek of Luke is a bit nicer. It's a bit better written. It's clearly written in Greek originally, unlike Mark and Matthew, which may have had Aramaic originals. It's less Jewish. I mean, in so many ways, Luke is just let, Matthew is quite Jewish, even though it has this. And also, Luke has these moments where the Jews, you know, again, we can think of all

the damage this is done through history, but we shouldn't put, you know, anti-Semitism into the mouth of Marcion. But it is this idea that in, Luke, you have the idea that the Jews are from the very beginning, Holy Hoodoi, like they are conspiring to kill Jesus from the very beginning. And Marcion's story is the malevolent creator of the world is manipulating his people, the Jews, who at that point were the enemies of Christianity in some degree to murder Jesus in the hopes of basically killing God. And we have the origins of this sort of thee-side myth and the Jews as a corporate entity, which also occurs, unfortunately,

in Matthew as well, but I think that those kinds of Jewish Christian polemics, Marciona is also instrumentalizing them and saying, yeah, not only does Christianity supersede Judaism, is in fact inherently opposed to Judaism. Judaism is a law of, is a religion of law and death, whereas Christianity is a religion of life and salvation. And those kinds of juxtapositions, you still hear in the mouth of some Christians in a sort of anti-Semitic way, but also just normative supersessionist theology, relies on that kind of logic, which is, of course, deeply pioneered by Marcion. Yeah, because this demonized demiurge God is this adapted vision of Yarmes,

and Yahweh is the god of the Jews, you do have these themes running throughout a lot of this demiurgic thinking that the Jews are like the chosen people of the demiurge, of malevolent, evil creator. They are his handymen. And there is a particular passage in John chapter 8, which is relevant here. In John chapter 8, verse 44, Jesus is, Jesus has sort of been arguing with the Jews. when Jesus implies that they don't have the same father

weirdly and the Jews say to him what are you talking about we're both from Abraham we both share a father we're not illegitimate children to which Jesus says in verse 44

you belong to your father the devil and you want to carry out your father's desires he was a murderer from the beginning not holding to truth and so on and so forth

you belong to your father the devil if you read any Translation of the New Testament, you're likely to come across this passage. You belong to your father, the devil. But another thing that I learned from your video, which again, just completely fascinated and astounded me, and I had to think about it for a really long time, was that that might be possibly a mistranslation.

Yeah, to frame this, you know, this whole debate between Jesus and the Jews and John, it's sort of the end result of a long development within Christianity, whereas in the early gospels like Mark, Jesus is arguing, but he's arguing with the scribes and the Pharisees. So it's a very sort of like he has a, there's a particular group of people that Jesus sort of is beefing with. And that represents probably the early Christians who are also running, running up against the Jewish establishment. And this is a very rife time with all kinds of problems. The Jewish establishment has a lot on their hands. They're, they're staring down the barrel of basically what is going to be a huge insurrection, it's ultimately going to result

and the destruction of the temple. By the time we get to John, you know, 40 years later maybe than the gospel of Mark, it goes from Jesus arguing with the scribes and the Pharisees to it being the Jews, all of them. Right. And so there's this huge explosion that happens. That's also endemic of what happens in John.

There are cases in Mark where Jesus has to make mud with spit and put it in people's eyes to cure them. And by John, he literally can walk past a house and cure people. Jesus' powers grow. it's like, I don't know, I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the States, we all have an uncle who, you know, every time he tells the story of the fish that he caught, the fish gets bigger and bigger. That's the same thing that happened to Jesus' miracles. They go from, he has to put mud in people's eyes so he can just literally, you know, walk past them and

cure them by their faith. So the miracles get exploded, but also the enemy of Christianity gets exploded. And whereas there are legal debates between Jesus and the scribes and the Pharisees and Mark, it now becomes a theological debate between Jesus and his followers, who are the good guys, and the Jews and their follower, the Jews and their God, who is the bad guy. And in this sort of dualistic move, the writer of John makes this rather shocking assertion that the Jews' father is the devil, or depending on how you read the Greek, and the Greek is very tortured there, And there's debate about how it should be read, and there's good evidence and antiquity to say that it was read differently than we read it now. And as you said, it says, in one way of reading, it says, and your father is the devil.

Another way of reading it is that your father is the father of the devil, which is to say the Jews are the father of this other father, and that the devil is in some sense their brother. which is a Yeah so rather than you belong to your father the devil Right You belong to the devil's father Yes you belong to the father of the devil You belong to the father So because like you say the Greek is ambiguous here

And you will see it translated as you belong to your father The devil But it can just as easily be translated as You belong to the devil's father A little bit of a sort of a weird thing to get your head around what we're talking about there, but hopefully people are following. You say that we have some evidence that this is, in fact, how it was read. Yeah, there are at least six different Christian groups. Again, we have evidence of these Christian groups.

There are at least six of these that have been documented. And the great book I should mention here, for anyone who wants to really get into all of this is M. David Litt was the evil creator. It's without any doubt the best book on this topic. and I would highly recommend that people buy it. It's a fantastic volume. Unfortunately, a little pricey because academic publishing is a malevolent Demiurge itself. It's the evil cartel. But it's a bit pricey, but what will worth it.

And also if you're interested in learning more about Marcion, David Littwell also has a fantastic class on Marcyon that I'd really recommend people take. It's inexpensive and college level and wonderful. But what we have is that some early Christians in their individual, writings did accept the idea that the Jews had as their father the devil, or rather, the devil had a father. And it immediately jumps to mind, if you're reading this as an early Christian, well, who in the devil is the father of the devil? And what they have to argue for is, well, the devil must have a creator. Something must have created the devil. And again, this is also to the grist for the middle of the idea that the idea that the devil is a fallen angel. That wasn't universally accepted

by Jews and Christians. There are many etiological stories about where the so-called devil comes from. The idea that the devil is a rebellious angel is just one story. The more common story. For those interested, I just did an episode like a week or two ago with Elaine Pagels on the origins of Satan talking about all of the different ways in which Satan has been conceived of and where he might he may have come from yeah and there are dozens of these my favorite one is the book of enoch where it's just a bunch of horny teenage angels that want to come down and have sex with earth women uh i find that one to be much more somehow hilarious and good uh and the first woman they try to have sex with uh she tricks them which is one of my also favorite

stories that these uh you get the sense they're not malevolent as much as they are you know horny teenagers but because of the fact that the the origin of the devil is unclear one of the things early Christians need to do is sort of figure out where the devil comes from. And it makes perfectly good sense to say, well, the devil must have been created by something. Well, what created the devil? Well, if the world is somehow not good, maybe even bad, which is an easy thing for a persecuted minority to believe, especially when you're a tiny minority of, I mean, imagine the Jews are already a persecuted minority. Imagine being a persecuted minority in that minority. So you're getting it from both the Romans who think your religion's ridiculous, mostly because

it's new and because your leader died by crucifixion. So the Romans had two really good reasons to believe that Christianity was completely balderdash insanity. So you have the Romans who have no interest in your religion or actively persecuting you and the Jews, or actually at least the Jewish leadership is also interested in persecuting you to some degree. You're living in a world in which the world is not good for you. The world is actively hostile to you. And that's difficult for modern Christians to imagine because Christians now have religious hegemony. It's good to be a Christian in most of the world. In fact, if you're a pagan in Italy, your life is probably not so great. It's everyone's Catholic and that's the way that it is. But to put yourself back into this period

where you're a persecuted minority getting it from both sides, from both the Jewish system and from the Roman system, the world is pretty bad and actively hostile to you. And evil is just apparent everywhere. It's endemic. Evil is just endemic to the world. The devil is incredibly real to these people. And it immediately asks the question, invites the question, where did the devil come from? And the answer that these Christians gave was that the devil must be created by somebody. And because the world is actively hostile and malevolent, whoever created the devil must have also created this. And this is bad. And therefore, this is bad.

Whoever created this and whoever created the devil must also be bad. And it's there that we begin to get the origins, probably, going all the way back to the gospel of John, to again, the beginnings of this malevolent demiurge tradition. Yeah, the answer to this mystery then of what is Jesus saying when he says, you belong to your father, the devil? like we don't have the same father, we come from a different place, what does this mean? On potential early reading, you belong to the devil's father, as if to say you're from the same place as the devil, that is, you are of the evil demiurge creator. And like you say, this has had perfectly benevolent and wondrous effects on the history of Judaism and its global perceptions.

But we finally arrived now, I think, at what people might recognize as our typical demiage, especially if they've come at this from the sort of Gnostic Christianity perspective. Now when we're reading these Gnostic texts, and we're hearing reference to this, we're hearing like Jesus. I did an episode on the Gospel of Judas, where Jesus is sort of saying to Judas, like, you know where I've really come from. Oh, but, you know, the disciples over here, they're worshipping their God. this really strange language that doesn't seem to make much sense.

Hopefully this is beginning to sort of elucidate things for people, at least in terms of the history of the idea, this might be where it sort of comes from. So is this sort of the end of the historical story for the demiurge? Are we sort of up to date, as it were? There's one more move, and this is the most mysterious move of all. And I have to admit, this is where we don't really know exactly what the connective tissue is. But what seems to emerge primarily in Egypt, so we're going back to Egypt, the land where Yahweh has been thought of as this god Seth for now for centuries, Christianity enters

the scene, and we don't know if this happens parallel to Marcyonism, or if Marcyonism is influencing it, or if there's some mechanism that we, that's other than that, the simple answer is that we don't know, but at least parallel to Marcion and perhaps indirectly influenced by Marcion, because again, Marcion's churches are primarily flourishing in the east. People may know that Marcion pitched his theology to the presbyers of Rome, donated a bunch of money, and the president of Rome basically said, no, here's your money back. And, you know, he huffed off and started his own church. He used all that money to basically seat his own church. One can even wonder how things would have gone if they had taken the money and run. It could have been a whole different world.

It's a huge amount of money, 200,000 Cistercies or something like that. About 60 years labor, I think. Yeah, I think it's what I tried to do the math. And it's hard to do math with ancient currency, but because you also have the Neuronian debasement and stuff like that. My Roman nerds out there will perk up at the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the Nero kill Christians. That's one thing.

But the Neronian debasement is what doomed the empire for some people. At any rate, Marcy and I churches seem to flourish out east. and the Greek-speaking east. Alexandria is right in the middle of the Latin, what will become the Latin West and the Greek-speaking east. And so we don't know to what degree Marthenism got a foothold in Alexandria or in the Egyptian context. But, and this is where things get quite speculative,

and this is also where I've not made the next episode in the Demyard series, so you'll get a preview of it. Spoilers. Spoilers alert. So for reasons that we don't fully understand, this extremely complex Baroque mythology emerges in literature like the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Truth, in the Gospel of Judas. It's apparent there as well. It's in the Pisdi Sophia, a very unusual text, at least unusual by our accounting. I'm sure it was perfectly

normal to the people that wrote it. But we have this extremely elaborate mythology, and this elaborate mythology wants to explain the next logical question, which is if the demiurge isn't a god and the demiurge created the physical world, then the principle of sufficient reason kicks in and we ask to ask the natural question. Where did the demiurge come from? Yeah, there's a sort of, when we say where did the demiurge come from? There's two senses in which we can mean that. There's the historical question. Like, the idea of the demiurge, where's it come from? Oh, it's a, you know, a butchering of Yahweh as the donkey-headed God, sure, but like if you believe it's true, if you, like, are a Martianite and you believe that there really

is this thing called the demiurge, there's the theological question of where did it come from, not as a historical idea as a character, but like, if he actually exists. Right, because it's not a God. Why is there a demiurge? Why would that exist? Right, because if you wanted to make the move and say, you know, when people ask, well, God made the universe and someone says, where did God come from. Well, God is eternal. And that's, you know, as much as that is a science, a satisfying answer. That's, that is sort of the brute force answer. God just is eternal. You can't use that argument for the demiurge, because the demiurge isn't a God. And so if insofar as the demurege isn't a god, then the demiurge needs a cause and sort of an Aristotelian sense.

So what's the origin of the demiurge? And what seems to emerge? And we don't know Marcion's answer to that, by the way. We just don't know that he, yeah, we don't know what his answer. to that would have been. It's either lost or I'm sure he had an answer. I mean, the Marcy and I church lasted for hundreds of years. I'm sure Marcy and I theologians wrestle with this idea. We just don't have their literature. But what emerges seemingly from this line of questioning is an extraordinarily complex mythology where there is a kind of unknown God that we can know nothing about. And that God is sort of the origin of all being. And some mechanism originates in that God and out of that God flows various other sub-entities. And this region of sub-entities

who are quasi-divine, perhaps, is referred to as the polaroma, the fullness. And at some point, in that fullness, in that cascading out of being, and this is a very kind of folks may recognize this language as something similar to Plotinus or, you know, something like that, although Plotinus is a bit, a bit later. At some point, there's a kind of mistake that gets made. And typically, one of the lower beings that gets generated is this entity known as Sophia, sort of God's wisdom. And Sophia, for a variety of reasons, there's a variety of reasons given in this literature, she attempts to generate being on her own. And when she attempts to generate being on her own, this causes what the Apocryphon of John calls an abortion.

It's a sort of still birth. It's an entity that is existent, but existent in some kind of degenerated way. And that degenerated divinity, as much as it is a divinity, that degenerated entity is outside of the pleroma, outside of that fullness, and is thrown down into the world of Hulae, of matter. And that matter is sort of unconstituted. It is not, it is chaotic and not formed. And that entity in their ignorance, because they don't know where they came from, they don't know that there's a spiritual world above them, ontologically speaking, metaphysically speaking, that entity declares, I am God alone, there is no God but me.

Because from their perspective, they don't know that there's anything else. And this entity begins to generate the physical world as we know it. And that entity is jealous, is rageful. That entity wants to control human beings and generates these. It's, you can, you know, here's the grand reveal. That entity is the entity that ultimately through all of this machinery becomes the entity that we now know as the demiurge, the malevolent demiurge. And what's important to know about this malevolent demiurge is that it's, it's only

malevolent in certain traditions certain traditions have this entity extremely malevolent and in other traditions, for instance the Valentinian tradition, this entity is a bit of a dufous. He's sort of he's ignorant more than

malevolent. But in both cases, this is an entity responsible for the physical world who believes that they are the god of this world and perhaps is the god of this world, whereas Christ is sort of smuggled in as a spiritual entity that ultimately result. in the salvation of human beings, at least some human beings.

And it's in that that we get the malevolent demuregical traditions, as we might call them, are the malevolent demuregical traditions. And those manifest themselves in documents like the Apocryphon of John, which seems to have been popular. And among Christians, I say that because we have three different manuscripts of it, and we have two Coptic translations of it, both translations of it made independent at one another. That is to say one, there was someone who had a Greek text of it, they translated into Coptic, and then someone totally independently translated it a little bit further up the Nile independently of the other one. So that means that there were at least some people, again, you know, who knows to what degree or can we talk about communities, there's a question about that, but at least it sort of was in the air.

And Ironaeus, for his part, felt threatened enough by it to compose this famous book against the heresies in which he details and very excruciating detail, accurately, but quite excruciating, this entire robust mythology. Now, the question is, where do this mythology come from? And the answer is, we don't know. My guess, and I'll put this forward as my speculation in the episode I make, is that I think it's a wedding of indebted. Egyptian mythology, where we have a similar kind of story developing in Egyptian, indigenous Egyptian mythology, where we have Cizage's partners, right, in the classic Egyptian mythology. And it's from those Cizogy, those partners that being ultimately results. I think my best guess is that we have a combination here of Egyptian mythology, and in some

sense, Christianity and the malevolent demiurge being shoehorned into that mythology. because part of what the Christians need is a mythology. They need a reason why all this is happening. And one version of the story is that we fell from grace because Adam ate the fruit, and then Jesus has to come as a kind of great sacrifice to fix it. That's one story, and that's the one that became dominant. There are other stories. There are other stories where Jesus has to go into hell and trick the devil to get all the souls out of hell,

called the sort of great the harrowing of hell, where Jesus is sort of like, Rambo tricking the devil. It's a totally different theology about what Jesus is up to. The Christians need a mythology because they have a Jesus. They have his life. They have his birth. They have his teachings. They have his death and resurrection. They have his ascension. But none of that makes any sense devoid of a bigger mythology. And Christians must develop that mythology. And when Christianity arrives in Egypt, and this is true of every Christianity throughout the world, whether it's the synthesis of the Christianity with African religion or the synthesis of Christianity with European paganism, Christianity always had the great ability to go into a region,

synchronize itself to some degree, and then over the long arc, arc itself toward so-called orthodoxy. I think what we're seeing in this strange, again, strange to us, but in this unusual mythology, Christianity basically shoehorning itself into the indigenous Egyptian mythology. and then developing its own specific version of it that was coming out of Egypt. And it's unsurprising that almost all of these versions of Christianity, these so-called Gnostic Christianity, have their origins in Egypt. And so I think that had that exact same process happened in, I don't know, Germania, we would be talking about Woden and Thor and how they got incorporated into Christianity.

It just so happens that it happened in Egypt where manuscripts are preserved very well, And what we, I think what we're seeing is Christian, again, Christian in the very loose sense of the term, primitive Christian Egyptian syncretism, where the mythology of the Egyptians is being shoehorned into this other story. And what we get in this Pisti Sophia and the Bacchafon of John, the Gospel of Judas are versions of that syncretistic myth building. And that's speculation. Myth building is in, myth building is so interesting because, you know, like it's, I think it's often. thought that what kind of goes on is theological worldviews are put together as the result of reflection. People think, well, how did the universe come to be? The principle of sufficient reason, maybe these emanations and eons, or maybe the Trinity or something. And once they've decided

on that, then they've got their theology. Then they know which God they believe in, what the nature of that God is. And really, it seems historically, what's going on a lot of the time is essentially the sociological development of an idea, something. like this Yahweh character, becoming a bit Egyptian, a bit donkey-headed, sort of becoming connected to Christ, and then condemned by some and others. And wherever you end up landing in that sociological picture, you then develop a mythology to explain the reality of this idea in the same way that it sort of happens in the order that we've just done it.

We've talked about historically, where does the demiurge come from? But then if you believe in the demiurge, where does it like come from in their theology? and I think that's the order in which it kind of happens. The idea develops and people think, well, we've got to explain where this comes from. It's in the same way that people often say, I mean, there's so much theology around the Trinity, for example. People spend countless hours on trying to unpack the mystery of the Trinity, what it all means. Some people suggest that there are like a priori trinitarian arguments. They're like without any revelation, without the Bible, without anything, just by reflection, you could just come to the

conclusion, philosophically, that God must exist in three persons. Yeah, right. You know, like, I just, I just can't, I just can't fathom it, you know? Especially considering that, especially considering that in the same way that this Gnostic mythology seems to be incorporating some degree of Egyptian mythology by necessity, because Christianity needed a mythology, the Trinity also incorporated Greek philosophy to do the heavy lifting of building the Trinity. If the, if Christianity had developed in a Buddhist,

context or a Hindu context in India, they would have used all the philosophical machinery there to make sense of what was going on. Yeah. And so it's the other way around. It's the exact same thing at the level of myth building on the one's hand, but also on the other hand, the Trinity is exactly the result of what happens when you have a belief that there is Jesus. Jesus seems to have a father and there seems to be something connecting them.

Well, how do you figure all that out? you use the tools that you have available to you and the tools that you had that Christians had available to them. And I'm thinking of people like origin and you had the tools of middle Platonism. And so you had a little bit of Platonism, a little bit of stoicism, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And they're talking about Usia. Usia substance, right, homoousios, that debate is fundamentally a Greek debate using Greek terms with Greek parameters that are all downstream of Plato and Aristotle. But if that debate would have happened in, I don't know, say Mayab, in the fourth century of the common era,

they would have used Mayan concepts and Mayan systems to generate whatever they needed to generate. So again, the idea that it's a priori is not just, I think, ridiculous, but it's so thorough-goingly a posteriori by evidence by the very structures, philosophical structures with what it is built. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see what you're saying. It's not just because the idea itself is just like so impossible to just construct, you know, rationally out of nowhere. But because when people claim to be doing so, potentially, they're using the language of their, like, local philosophy to do so.

It's a bit suspicious. Of course, I should mention that there are people who, of course, do believe that you can do this. Richard Swinburne is a previous guest on this very podcast. He is somebody who believes that you can sort of construct the Trinity using reason alone. and without revelation, you know, it's worth noting that that's the case. People can go and read their work and see what they think. But to me, it's clearly the other way around. You don't get the Trinity as a result of a bunch of theological reflection. You get the bunch of theological reflection as a result of the idea of the Trinity. Same with the other way around. Yeah, same with prophecies

and messiah. Prophecies don't get you a Messiah. You believe in a Messiah, then you go find your prophecies. Quite right. And something like that is probably going on. I mean, this is what, you know, atheists like myself are going to believe. Of course, we don't believe in prophecy. What's our account is something like this is going on. And it seems like something like that is probably going to be going on here as well

when it comes to the construction of this weird, Gnostic, demergic theology that we see. I mean, people, listeners to this show might remember in my episode with Bard-Urman, we spoke a little bit about this sort of world. And it is just the most bizarre and fascinating and strange and unrecognizable theological universe to the sort of Christianity that we know and love or know and put up with, depending on your persuasion, today. So we talked about a bit about it then. If people are interested in a bit more of a deep dive, I talked about it, but presumably also in your upcoming episode, we'll get to hear a lot more too. Yeah, and people should know that when Christians are walking around Alexandria formulating this theology, which again, it seems like both the Gnostic and the Puerto Orthodox theology are forged in Egypt. I mean, Athanasius is literally living in Egypt. This is the crucible of this. And it's important to note that these Christians, these early Christians are not doing this in isolation. They are surrounded by philosophers. They're surrounded by people like Ammonia Sakis, who is the teacher of both Platonis and some early Christians. I think maybe just a martyr or something.

So this is a world in which there is, you know, we talk about the marketplace of ideas. I don't think we live in a marketplace of ideas. I think Alexandria had a real marketplace of ideas where you could walk down the street and there would be hermeticists. There would be 15 kinds of Christians. There would be weird Jews living out in the countryside, the so-called therapeutici that Philo mentions. There's Philo. There's a real range of active, live positions, stoics and platonists and every stripe of people.

And the great genius of Christianity, and I've said this about the Trinity, that I could teach a whole class on the history of Greek philosophy just using the Trinity in many ways. The great success of Christianity was that their theologians in some sense were able to instrumentalize all of that into making a mythology that made sense to enough people that it could survive. And everyone's doing that. The Christians are doing it, the hermeticists are doing it, the so-called Gnostics are doing it. And I think that when we look at the Gnostic text, it looks unusual to us because we're not living in a world in which there's already a 3,000-year-old indigenous Egyptian belief system. But I think that the Christians, at some level, when they looked at the Egyptian belief system, the indigenous Egyptian belief system, it's really difficult to look at that and think to yourself, this has been around for all this time.

They built those giant buildings. They have all these giant temples. At some level, they got to be on to something. It would be the height of hubris to look at those pyramids and all the kinds of things and think, ah, this is just rubbish. I think the Christians were the new kids in the big town. And I think that it was completely reasonable for these so-called Gnostics to lean on the Egyptian mythology, the old Egyptian mythology, because at some level, it must have been, you know,

again, they're Romans at some level. They think old is true. And therefore, what is more old by everyone's standards than Egypt? And I think that it was imminently reasonable. I think much more reasonable than what ultimately end up happening in the proto-Orthodoxy, which is to go really hardcore into philosophy. People don't respond to philosophy, frankly. People respond to mythology. And I think that what the so-called Gnostics did was not just reasonable, but I think at every level makes a great deal more sense in some ways. And if you're living in a world where infant mortality rates are 50%, and you're living in the chaos of the third century and all this, to look around up the world and go, this is evil, this is not, this is a trap. This is bad. This is nightmarish.

I want to get out. And the part of me that will live forever is my soul. And this body is just a clay prison. And Jesus taught us the way out. That just strikes me as incredible. incredibly reasonable, so reasonable that other Christians through history will come to the exact same conclusions independently. The so-called Cathars, the so-called Bogomils, everyone watching The Matrix, like, I mean, at some level, even things like Marxism, the idea that this world is fundamentally evil, capitalism is evil, and there's a real world, we just have to like get to it by this apocalyptic battle with forces of evil. I think this, these kinds of ideas are endemic, apocalyptic sort of disbelief in the world around us is just a through

line in the West. And whether it's the utopian speculations of people like Marx or the utopian speculations of people like Jefferson who wanted to come to this empty land and build a paradise, there's something lurking behind all of that. And I think that the Gnostics in some sense represent the most white knuckle, realist, like, let's be honest about the situation. This world's evil. Something's responsible for it. They're evil too. And the whole point of this is the escape. And the fact that we keep telling ourselves that myth, I would say at some level, that myth is maintained currency in a way that if you go ask an average Christian, whether they accept that Jesus is homo usios or homoosios, they're going to look at you

with dumbfounded, you know, what are you talking about, homoousios? But the fact that we keep that story means, I think in some sense, he who laughs, laughs, laughs best, I think the Gnostics are laughing last. I don't think that... I might have been going up to the typical American Christian and saying, what do you think of Homoosius, him saying, what did you call me? Yeah, exactly. It's like I get punched in the head. Yeah. And I think that the fact that, again, like I said, this mythology, this demyurgic mythology, and the fact that it has such currency now in the zeitgeist, I think. think again, like I said, he who laughs last best. And Marcion and those anonymous writers the Apocryphon of John, every time the Matrix plays, I think they're laughing. So much more to talk about, so much more to explore, so much more to discover. I wish we had the space to do

it now. Hopefully we'll have the chance to it again in another podcast. For everyone listening, they have the great luck of being able to do so immediately at your YouTube channel, Esoterra. which will of course be linked in the description. If people listening aren't already subscribed, you know, put it on your to-do list and bump it up to the top. It's a veritable fountain of wisdom. And it's always a pleasure to be able to speak with people

who I enjoy watching the material of. You know, it's so great to be able to sit and listen to something that really does sort of shake the foundations of my knowledge and will inevitably make a wonderful contribution in addition to this series on Gnosticism and early Christian history that I've been doing. So, yeah, I'm really grateful for your time, Dr. Sledge, and I'm hoping that people listening

will go and check out your stuff as soon as they can. Thank you, Alex. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you again. And, yeah, folks should check out Ezzatrica if they're interested in these sort of topics of Gnosticism or even things like alchemy, witchcraft, hermedicism. That's kind of my academic background. So folks are interested in that. I'd love for them to check out EZaterica, and it's great, great talking with you again.

Thank you.