The Christians Who Thought God Was Evil | Taylor Caron on the Gnostic Gospels

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In this episode of Solomon and Smith, Jack and Milo speak with Taylor Caron about the Gnostics: those strange, alluring, heretical early Christians who believed that the physical world was corrupt, that its creator was not the highest God, and that salvation came through secret knowledge of the divine world beyond this one.

This is the first part of a two-part conversation. In this episode, we begin with the original Gnostics: the lost gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Judas, Valentinus, the Gospel of Truth, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the Epistle to Flora, the Gospel of Philip, and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. In the next part, we turn to American Gnosticism and the strange afterlife of these ideas in modern literature.

What is Gnosticism? Is the material world evil? Was Yahweh the demiurge? Who or what is Barbello? Why does Jesus keep appearing as a child, an old woman, a voice, a double, a robe, a cosmic emissary, or a being laughing from outside the crucifixion? And how did a collection of bizarre early Christian texts found in Egypt in 1945 come to haunt modern religion, literature, conspiracy, pop culture, Harold Bloom, The Da Vinci Code, and the idea of hidden knowledge itself?

Chapters:

00:00 Was Valentinus better than the Bible?

01:10 Introduction

05:47 Taylor enters

07:50 What is Gnosticism?

09:30 Nag Hammadi and the lost texts

11:01 The basic Gnostic worldview

15:18 I. The Gospel of Thomas

20:30 II. The Secret Book of John

23:18 Barbello, Sophia and the demiurge

29:42 III. The Hymn of the Pearl

34:15 IV. The Gospel of Judas

38:38 Crucifixion, flesh and anti-natalism

40:09 V. Valentinus' Fragments

45:24 VI. The Gospel of Truth

52:16 VII. Thunder Perfect Mind

56:20 VIII. The Epistle to Flora

1:01:18 Jesus and the Hebrew Bible

1:05:27 IX. The Gospel of Philip

1:10:46 X. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth

1:15:48 Orthodoxy, heresy and the stakes of the crucifixion