Episode Details

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I would like to compare the Son from the Bible to the Son of the Tripartite Tractate.

A couple of days ago, I was listening to a radio preacher who was railing against people like me and you who are trying to understand Christianity in its most fundamental sense—the original Christianity of the first 300 years after Jesus talked about himself and the Father and Heaven. I want you to realize that the last thing I want to be is a “false prophet” or a “false teacher.” And, of course, that’s what he was railing against. And he said that the only way you can be sure that you’re not falling into heresy and going to hell is if you follow Orthodox Christianity as presented in the Bible. So, I thought it would be interesting to look at a very important passage in the New Testament that talks about the Son of God, and to compare the Son of God of the New Testament to the Son of God of ancient Christian, what we could call, Gnosticism. But I think it was actual Christianity before the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed it to become a means of wielding power and keeping the people under their control.

Well, if you’ve listened to many of the episodes here at Gnostic Insights or to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, you will see that some of the terms that we use, although they sound like the same exact terms, have different meanings. And this was something else that the radio preacher pointed out—Oh, don’t believe them when they talk about the Son or the Christ or God the Father, because that isn’t the God, the Christ, and the Son that we know, he said. And that’s the tragedy of the situation, because there is only one originating source. There is only one Father by definition, and I often talk about that.

The Son in this Gnostic Christianity that I’m presenting is the first encapsulation or the first breakout. It’s the first emanation of the Father. The Father, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, stretched himself out, and it was this stretching out that is the Son that made a space for the heavens and the cosmos and the Earth and all of creation to unfold. Here’s what it says in the Tripartite Tractate, part one, verse 64. It says,

“The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities”… let’s stop here a minute before we go further. The Totalities are also called the Aeons of the Aeons. The Totalities, what I generally call the ALL, and I use capital letters to show that this is a particular type of entity; it’s not just a word like the totality of God. No, the Totality, the Totalities, the ALL, is the Son’s complete Self. He wears them like a cloak and they wear him like a cloak. They are, in other words, coexistent. Just like yourself, if someone sees you and they say, Oh, there’s Mary, right? Well, Mary’s not just a big giant thing. Just like the Son isn’t just the Son. When you see Mary, you see she has brown hair and she is a 5 feet tall and she it looks like this, she has two arms, two legs. She’s got all of this within her. That’s the Totality of Mary. So, Mary’s right foot would be one of the Totalities of Mary. You see what I’m trying to say? So, the Totalities of the Son is a place and it’s an entity, and they all are together in one unity. As the Son is a unity, the Totalities are the Son’s unity, although they’re all broken out and distinguished. But they don’t realize themselves because they sit in perfect coexistence with the Son, who is a unity. So, back to reading from the Tripartite Tractate. It says,

“The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities, being an unknown and incomprehensible one, has such greatness and magnitude, that, if he h