reply to post by gnostician
I've begun to suspect that more than a few Gnostic passages were intentionally littered throughout the edited texts that survived the Nicene Council.
The Gospel of John (for sure), a few of Paul's letters and definitely the Book of Revelations seem like they are packed with coded messages from
Gnostic editors who worked to (it seems) warn the future that something improper was being done to these documents.
The most obvious indication is the blatant timeline and event contradictions between each of the 4 gospels, but only if read "laterally", meaning
that one needs to lay the timelines out side-by-side to easily see the problems. I could very easily see this slipping past the Roman middle managers
(if Rome was like any other bureaucracy that's emerged as a replication ever since) since each gospel would have a different managing editor assigned
to it. And knowing middle managers, none of them would be working with the other middle managers to ensure consistency. If they had, those clumsy
contradictions would have been easily corrected.
They weren't ever corrected, and that has to be noted in the light of how aggressive the effort was - at that time - to stabilize the history of the
religion itself. Imagine allowing so many glaring inconsistencies to survive such a massive effort. Then, for hundreds of years, the book was only
referred to for the purposes of copying, serving mass, and verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter research by monks and others psychologically dedicated
to the belief that this book is the inerrant word of God. It'd be many centuries before uninvested readers would ever be allowed to inspect what the
bible contains. By then, what could be done? Nothing. Hell, even now there are "scholars" who perform intellectual backflips in order to justify
what would otherwise seem obvious. That the bible is riddled with internal inconsistencies that can't possibly be rectified without a wholesale
rewrite of the main events of Jesus' own life and ministry. The Romans weren't idiots, but they did (likely) approach this project in the wrong
manner - employing brute force without suspecting that the conscripted editors might think well beyond the immediate future as they crafted the final
documents for compilation.
And don't get me started on how the Book of Revelations seems to (almost too specifically) warn that the whole Christian thing was in the process of
being hijacked by Rome. It's almost as if the writer of that one got it through by the skin of his teeth, and even slips some fairly direct
references to the "harlot" Rome right by the overseers untouched. That book was a bold move by whoever they were that had infiltrated the editing
effort. Gutsy stuff, that's for sure.


