The Magdalene Mystery.

Originally posted by BlueMule
Sometimes I really wish orthodox fundamentalists would take their apologetics to another forum. I am so sick of their tired old predictable tripe that everyone has already heard a million times.

It's the "Conspiracies in Religion" Forum, for pete's sakes. Where else are we supposed to argue?

reply to post by Minori


I don't know, and to be honest I don't give it a great deal of thought, I kind of consider that to be extraneous, but that said, sexual intimacy can be transformative, and healing, so I certainly don't exclude the probability that such a union would have been mutually beneficial to them, emotionally and spiritually. I don't think their being lovers precludes a master and pupil relationship though, and vice-versa, but if she was as understanding of his teachings as the Pistis Sophia and The Gospel of Mary would indicate, she would not cling to him, or pine for him, she would have transformed that love, energy, into something else, with purpose, just as her male counterparts presumably did. Love is love, and they all loved him, they all suffered a loss and carried on with the task in hand. Sooo...without Hollywooding it up...ya know?

reply to post by adjensen


Another website altogether... maybe one populated by kids who haven't heard orthodox mainstream apologetics millions of times already.

I know, I know. Its a free country and you orthodox conservative mainstream "thinkers" can spread your knee-jerk unthinking dogma anywhere. I'm just sick of it that's all.

Originally posted by BlueMule
I'm just sick of it that's all.

Then maybe you should find something else to occupy your time.

Originally posted by BlueMule
reply to post by adjensen

 

Another website altogether... maybe one populated by kids who haven't heard orthodox mainstream apologetics millions of times already.

I know, I know. Its a free country and you orthodox conservative mainstream "thinkers" can spread your knee-jerk unthinking dogma anywhere. I'm just sick of it that's all.

I'd suggest clicking other forums then. Seems like a simple fix for you.

Originally posted by adjensen

Originally posted by BlueMule
I'm just sick of it that's all.

Then maybe you should find something else to occupy your time.

/yawn

Yeah the mainstream "thought" of orthodox conservative apologists who see satan lurking around every corner is pretty boring and predictable. It would be funny if you guys are all that's left of ATS someday.

Originally posted by BlueMule
Yeah the mainstream "thought" of orthodox conservative apologists who see satan lurking around every corner is pretty boring and predictable.

Kindly point to any post of mine that involves "satan lurking around every corner". To the best of my knowledge, I've never come remotely close to saying that.

All I'm suggesting is that if hanging out in the religious forums is bringing you down, you should probably find something else to do.

Originally posted by KilgoreTrout

Originally posted by Logarock
Nothing against Mary....really. But this is a load of bull. Its a very egregious expansion on what really happened. But alas some need to twist the thing around to fit a modern political flow.

To an extent, but however you view it in relation to the other gospels in terms of what 'really happened', or indeed whether any of them offer a true picture, The Gospel of Mary certainly does record such an exchange...

I wonder what Mary will be doing whiel Peter is judging part of the 12 tribes?

This Mary gospel looks like your typical after the fact fiction. It is certainly gnostic in nature having that wiff of the deep insider with secret teachings the other didnt get. And now that teach is gone its always these type man or woman that make claims to secret teachings the rest didnt get. You can always tell because they, the insider, become the center of attention. Now Peter got a lot of attention but it was the good with the bad. No other person in scritpure but David is stripped down so clear for all to see. Thats something you wont find in these deep insider, we were with him and had a better relationship ect ect. type tall tales folks. Gnostics are great at enticing folks with these notions. Weak minds and hearts that give way to crafty fables.

Originally posted by adjensen

Originally posted by Trafalgar1805
I hope that when the RCC publically warms to the fabricated texts (that secret Mark gospel is it called?) that lies that Jesus was homosexual, which has been the plan all along, you will dismiss them, or will you only dismiss the texts that state he was heterosexual and had sex with women?

I have made something of a career of studying non-canonical texts, and I dismiss the majority of them, written by non-orthodox authors. Yes, it is The Secret Gospel of Mark which implies that Christ was homosexual, but that is a known forgery, almost certainly conjured up by its discoverer, Morton Smith.

There is zero chance that the Roman Catholic Church will "warm up" to non-canonical texts -- they officially closed the canon centuries ago.

You write from studying texts I have never been interested in. I write from personal experience of repeated framing and blackmail to try and turn me into a priest - incidents I won't detail yet - at the hands of the Roman Catholic homosexual mafia. They are vicious bastards. The RCC is homosexual, and it always has been.

Is it so difficult to believe that a society that states that Jesus didn't have sex with women, its clergy don't have sex with women but instead live in a same-sex household and surrounds itself with lace-wearing altar boys, is not driven by homosexual desires? Its agenda is to create a future, same-sex world order, and they are everywhere, not just the RCC.

As for warming up. I qualified the comment with the word "publically." It's already warmed up to it privately.

Since it has come up, I'd like to comment on Secret Mark. First, its Jesus is no more "gay" than John's, and even canonical Mark has that underdressed young man who's almost arrested with Jesus and escapes naked because the flimsiness of his attire allows the arresting officer no purchase on his body.

There really wasn't the constellation of attitudes in the Hellenistic world that makes a modern "gay" worldview a lively possibility for Jesus to adopt. However, I am persuaded that Jesus could well have appreciated the beauty and carnal potential of men. As to what if anything Jesus did about it, believe whatever you wish. All Secret Mark reports is that Jesus showed Lazarus the Kingdom of God. Any interpretation of the scene will necessary say as much about the reader as about the people being described.

If, as many suspect, the letter is a forgery, then I think Morton Smith wasn't the forger. The monastery where the document was found was in operation for centuries, including all the time since the binding of the book in which the letter fragment was found. Over those centuries, the monastery was full of men with a lot of time on their hands and the kind of expert acquaintance with Clement's interests and writing style that in the modern secular world, only the very few, extensively trained people like Smith actually have to any comparable degree.

As to Smith's authentication of the document, I believe that he did fairly apply the standards of schoalrship that bear on the document. The forensic tests which we cannot do because of the misbehavior of the document's custodians would bear mainly on exonerating Smith as a forger (chiefly that the ink wasn't recently compounded and dried), rather than amending his testimony as an authenticator. There is no physical evidence of the copyist's source, and most forensic attributes of what the copyist produced can be established from two independently produced sets of photographs, and an eyewitness that the physical pages actually were, at one time, integrally bound in an antique book, just as Smith testified and the photographs corroborate (from visible "bleed through" of the printer's ink onto the copyist's writing surface). The book itself, with the crucial endpapers excised, still exists, and no question has been raised that its binding is in its original state of wholeness.

Funny how much of this comes down to a matter of faith. I have faith in the personal integrity of Professor Smith. On the other hand, even if I knew for certain that everything he asserted as a fact witness were true, that leaves much uncertianty about the authenticity of the letter. Although what the letter asserts seems to me to be consistent with other, canonical, Gospels, and it's all the same to me whether or not Jesus was "gay" in some suitably pre-modern way, I just can't shake how plausible it is that some monk had a slow afternoon about 150 years ago, and fleetingly indulged in some very high-toned, expertly performed fantasy role playing.

Originally posted by eight bits
and it's all the same to me whether or not Jesus was "gay"

So, you wouldn't mind living in a same-sex society, then? I would prefer to be dead. A same-sex future society, which only homosexuals want, is what this is about. The RCC is intent on destroying heterosexuality.

Jesus was/is not homosexual. However, homosexuals will, over the coming years, increasingly state rather than imply and lie that he was homosexual because they have an agenda to create a same-sex future world order. They are trying to change/break the rules of Ascension. Ultimately, homosexuals and its RCC will fail break Universal Law, but that doesn't seem to stop them trying. They'll cause a lot trauma first before the RCC is put down. Trauma they will pay for with interest applied.

reply to post by eight bits

I may have unfairly impugned Mr. Smith's character in my statement, which was based on the last reference that I saw to Secret Mark, which was a fairly strong condemnation of Smith. It was probably a second hand recalling of Carlson's The Gospel Hoax, which I do not have a copy of.

From someone's amazon.com review:

Carlson avoids any ad hominem investigation; he nicely avoids the too-easy strategy of claiming the work is fake because it's just the sort of thing that a man with Morton Smith's alternative lifestyle would want to find. Instead, all attacks are on the gospel, its manuscript, or the story of its finding, each chapter examining these from a different angle. The first critique is that of handwriting. The manuscript, judging from the few photographs available, shows the "forger's tremor" that is commonly used to convict writers of fake cheques. Linguistically, the work is also suspect. It is *too* reminiscent of Clementine style to be true; every author of antiquity shows some growth in style and variance in lexicon with each new work, but Secret Mark uses only what is attested in the authentic works of Clement.

Carlson even reveals two puns buried in the gospel and the story of its finding that serve as Morton Smith's own confession. In talking about the gospel, Smith claims the existing manuscript was penned by a monk named Madiotes. No such surname exists in Greece, but the word itself is build from a root meaning both "bald" and "swindler". Smith himself lost his hair at a very young age, and in passing off a fake gospel as a legitimate find, he would be swindling the academy. Another pun is that the gospel makes reference to free-flowing salt, yet this did not exist in antiquity. It was created in the 20th century by the Morton Salt Co. When one considers this, one can hardly deny that the gospel is Smith's practical joke. (Source)

Again, not having the book, I don't know whether that's accurate or not. As I recall, Ehrman didn't think that Smith had forged it, and I presume he's familiar with Carlson's book.

Trafalgar

Happily, I already live in a society that tolerates personal choices in sexual expression among consenting adults. I am utterly unconcerned with whom any other grown-up sleeps, so long as everybody is a volunteer.


adj

Morton Smith's involvement is interesting. So long as he lived, he was a powerful person in academia. The accusations against him of fraud have increased since his death, even though all the evidence there is now is the same evidence that there has ever been.

The fly in the ointment for the accusers is that the document itself was always in the custody of somebody other than Smith, either the monastery librarian or the Jerusalem Patriarch's librarian (and for a few hours in transit, a transportation team of priests and scholars, from whom we have our academic witness about the endpapers being bound in the book when it left the monastery). Since Smith had the technical knowledge to be a lively suspect, we can also be sure that he knew that an ink test would out him instantly if he was the copyist.

And yet, after he announced his findings, Smith never had any control over whether and when an ink test might be performed. He knew the Orthodox authorities would welcome the chance to discredit him, and there it was, a loaded revolver sitting on the table, theirs for the taking.

OK, chance favors the bold. We know that if an ink test was performed before the document was "lost," then the results were never made public. Maybe there never was any such test. Either way, it could be that Smith made a long-shot, high-stakes gamble and won. Some people do get off from doing just that.

I doubt it, though. Still, it's a long way from Smith finding a letter just as he said, and Clement actually having written that letter about a now otherwise lost version of Mark. I am especially bothered that Mark would supposedly have known the Lazarus story, but not shared John's insight that this was a key factor in the motivation of Jesus' killers, and Luke missed it, too, even though that seems to be just the sort of thing Luke was looking for.

Originally posted by eight bits
Trafalgar

Happily, I already live in a society that tolerates personal choices in sexual expression among consenting adults. I am utterly unconcerned with whom any other grown-up sleeps, so long as everybody is a volunteer.

I live in a country that has refused, over the past 43 years, to protect me against Roman Catholic homosexual intransigence and its intention to deprive of me heterosexual relations. That country is the United Kingdom, and it's either terrified of the Roman Catholic Church and its homosexual mafia becoming upset, or complicit with homosexuals in this agenda.

No-one passes through the gate to the next level of Ascension, who is not in their own body. That, by definition, means no homosexuals.

Originally posted by Logarock
This Mary gospel looks like your typical after the fact fiction. It is certainly gnostic in nature having that wiff of the deep insider with secret teachings the other didnt get. And now that teach is gone its always these type man or woman that make claims to secret teachings the rest didnt get. You can always tell because they, the insider, become the center of attention. Now Peter got a lot of attention but it was the good with the bad. No other person in scritpure but David is stripped down so clear for all to see. Thats something you wont find in these deep insider, we were with him and had a better relationship ect ect. type tall tales folks. Gnostics are great at enticing folks with these notions. Weak minds and hearts that give way to crafty fables.

I see what you mean, about 'secret teachings', and that may be true of some of the gnostic writings, but with others, Mary's included, though obviously incomplete, I do not see it in that way. You can interpret 'hidden' to mean 'secret' of course, you can also interpret it to mean 'private'. The text while not explicit, is still, fairly clear about the implicit meaning. Since many of these dialogues occured prior to the Ascension, I had assumed that what they were recalling were talks that took place on the Imaginal plane, and therefore, by necessity, were undertaken while the pupils in question were in a state of meditation.

And still, much of the NT refers to a them and us level of understanding. From the Transfiguration 'event', to the Apostles asking Jesus why he speaks to the people in parables. In all things, there are levels of knowing, understanding, comprehending and being. These texts, largely, seem to imply no more than that, they are simply more personal, and perhaps, more importantly, they contradict the need for a rigid doctrine.

What I find most interesting about them, as an observer/reader, is that while these texts were dismissed, suppressed, edited out...whatever...how the later female Christian mystics, such as the author of the Cloud of Unknowing and Marguerite Porete for instance, reflect a strikingly similar body of experience in their accounts of 'divine contact'. It is often uncanny, and yet, they could not possibly, by any stretch of the imagination, have known of those texts.

reply to post by 00777

For them to have chosen a single woman as a witness (deemed uncredible in those times) who had been possessed of 7 evil spirits, would have been madness, unless it was the truth

how about a bigger simple conspiracy...Magdalene is downplayed for the simple reason that to reach Sacred union is only possible with the raising of Kundalini energy and opening the third eye to ascend to heaven.


www.redrandy.com...

Using sexual energy for spiritual awakening has been practiced for at least 5,000 years. The most well-known form is Tantra, which has its roots in Hindu and Buddhist practices of India and Tibet. Similar practices have been developed over the years in China (Taoism), Persia and among East Asian and North American aboriginal peoples. Fundamental to this belief system is that the union of masculine and feminine principles (the opposite forces in all creation - yin & yang, yab & yum) will result in transcendence. Sexual union, the physical manifestation of these yin and yang principles through men and women, is then one way to achieve union with God.

If couples were engaging in sacred sex and realizing their true Divine nature what need of priests?

Like many I find it hard to beleive that Jesus would have been taken seriously with his proclamations if he was unwed as was expected of adult jews

reply to post by 00777

does illuminati, whose core beliefs stem from Gnosticism, paganism, and occult magick

You obviously have not studied Gnosticism or magic/k otherwise you would not lump them together

Therefore, Mary Magdalene is holding the skull as a symbol of her penitence,

Sounds pretty "pagan" to me, talking to skulls


All in all you have failed to mention anything new other than a Pentecostal tract/spiel for the "fallen from grace" that you were brainwashed with in New Converts Uni class 101.

We must use also logic, and think about things and look into what the symbology really means, rather than invent things we wish to 'see'.

Definition of SYMBOLOGY
1
: the art of expression by symbols
2
: the study or interpretation of symbols
3
: a system of symbols

hahaha so you are using logic to put your slant on symbology....you realize what you just did..


hint 1 Logic:
a (1) : a science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration : the science of the formal principles of reasoning (2) : a branch or variety of logic (3) : a branch of semiotics; especially : syntactics (4) : the formal principles of a branch of knowledge
b (1) : a particular mode of reasoning viewed as valid or faulty (2) : relevance, propriety
c : interrelation or sequence of facts or events when seen as inevitable or predictable
d : the arrangement of circuit elements (as in a computer) needed for computation; also : the circuits themselves
2
: something that forces a decision apart from or in opposition to reason

reply to post by Logarock

Its a very egregious expansion on what really happened. But alas some need to twist the thing around to fit a modern political flow

Are you suggesting a feminist agenda?

"what really happened"?
So now the NT is a proven concise history of events around Palestine 2000 years ago?
How about showing me Jesus as a historical fact apart from the one mention in Josephus...see the dilemna

reply to post by adjensen

She was probably a devotee, but the cultural norms of the time would preclude her from being an Apostle -- if she was, there would be quite a bit of that in the Bible, since it would have been so controversial.

www.religioustolerance.org...
"He accepted women in his inner circle: Luke 8:1-3 describes the inner circle of Jesus' followers: 12 male disciples and an unspecified number female supporters (Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna and "many others.") It would appear that about half of his closest followers were women"
"He taught women students: Jewish tradition at the time was to not allow women to be taught. Rabbi Eliezer wrote in the 1st century CE: "Rather should the words of the Torah be burned than entrusted to a woman...Whoever teaches his daughter the Torah is like one who teaches her obscenity." 5 Jesus overthrew centuries of tradition. In Luke 10:38-42, he taught Mary, sister of Martha."


And the cultural norms would also suggest that Jesus would have been betrothed or married otherwise he would'nt be taken serioulsy as was the practise of Rabbis

The texts that claim or imply that there was more to their relationship than is otherwise presented are dated long after he died,

Do some simple research....


Gnostic Gospel of Mary the Magdalene 2nd Century Ad

from en.wikipedia.org...

Gospel of Mark
"According to tradition and some early church writers, the author is Mark the Evangelist, the companion of the apostle Peter.[6] The gospel, however, appears to rely on several underlying sources, varying in form and in theology, which tells against the tradition that the gospel was based on Peter's preaching.[7] The text is a compilation which may include eye witness accounts as well as known apostolic preachings,
and pre-existing written records that do not exist today but can be confirmed from 2nd century commentators.and pre-existing written records that do not exist today but can be confirmed from 2nd century commentators.
Some of the stories in the gospel may have been transmitted orally before being written down"
and you state: "and dated long after he died"


Maybe you are selectively painting your own pictures
You cant have the dating of the Gospels both ways

Heres an interesting thread
All roads lead to Rome
www.abovetopsecret.com...

So you fail to see how a mysogynist like Saul/Paul would downplay the importance of women? Sounds to me how the "Mannish patriarchical" norms of 2000 years ago perhaps are clouding your selective analysis

Well, unfortunately, you're not the determiner of morality, God is, and he's said that sex outside of marriage is a sin.

reply to post by adjensen


this is the same moral Jehovah that allows men to have sex with 12 year old girls and the taking of cannanite women as sex slaves