Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
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Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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The Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, which was known in Jesus’ time, included the books of the Hebrew canon and some additional books as well. Protestants call these additional books the Apocrypha, or more generically the deuterocanonical books (meaning of secondary canonical status). Greek translations of the Old Testament were made in the city of Alexandria, so this larger canon, including the Apocrypha, is called the Alexandrian Canon.
When Christians retained the Old Testament for their own use, they did not settle completely just which books this included. To this day Christians differ over the inclusion or rejection of the so-called Apocrypha (from Greek for “hidden away”) in the Old Testament list of books. The term stands for twelve or fifteen books, depending upon how you group them, that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox accept as canonical and most Protestants reject
The word for the special place these books occupy in Christianity is canon. The term from the Greek language originally meant “a measuring rod” or, as we might say, “a ruler,” a standard for judging something straight.
The Gnostics liked the idea of the good God sending Christ, so they thought that the ultimate deity sent one of his subordinate powers, called Christ, into the world to free people from the chains of matter. Christ, however, could have no real contact with matter, so at the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth, or thereabouts, the Christ descended into him; then at the arrest of Jesus, or thereabouts, the Christ withdrew. What was scourged and slain could not have been Christ.
The basic belief of the Gnostics was dualism. They believed that the world is ultimately divided between two cosmic forces, good and evil. In line with much Greek philosophy, they identified evil with matter. Because of this, they regarded any Creator God as wicked. Creation by a deity, they felt, was not so much impossible as it was indecent. Their own supreme being was far removed from any such tendency to “evil.”
Since the ultimate deity could have no contact with the material world, the Gnostics explained creation by a series of emanations. If we think of God as a kind of sun, these emanations would be sunbeams—extensions of his nature, yet distinct from him. These supernatural emanations (subordinate “powers”), however, were capable of producing other inferior powers until they had fashioned, as Charles Bigg, the Oxford scholar, once said, “a long chain of divine creatures, each weaker than its parent,” and came at last “to one who, while powerful enough to create, is silly enough not to see that creation is wrong.” This, according to the Gnostics, was the Creator God, the God of the Jews.