Episode Details

Matthew 6:19

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Lately, people have been asking me to translate Bible verses—to give my Gnostic Gospel version of familiar Bible verses. And, boy, I would love to do that. I mean, I could read for you the entire New Testament from end to end and translate it into the Gnostic Gospel, and perhaps that would be a good book project to do.

I have hesitated doing such a thing here on Gnostic Insights because I don’t want people to misunderstand and think that this is just another Christian radio program. There are particular differences between the Gnostic Gospel and conventional Christianity, yet there is more in common with Christianity when you read it with an open heart and an open mind. So this morning I’ll look at some very famous Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and this is when Jesus was preaching to the multitude. This is out of a long speech by Jesus.

By the way, I really have been enjoying that television series called The Chosen. If you’ve never seen The Chosen, they have their own app. You can download it, for example, on Roku, the Chosen app, and then you can watch all of the episodes. You can catch episodes here and there on various platforms. They’re all really good, and it is yet another depiction of the life of Jesus and the disciples. But this television series, which has four seasons so far, and I think they’re going to go to five seasons, they have a lot of backstory and a lot of historical settings and things that aren’t particularly quoted out of the Bible, yet they are true. And like any screenplay that has been adapted from a book, the narrative isn’t exactly the same as the books. Sometimes characters are deepened or collapsed with other characters in order to carry the story forward, and that is the spirit by which The Chosen has been written, which brings criticism from some evangelical Christians. They don’t like the fact that The Chosen “makes up stuff.” But I feel that that is actually immaterial, because the important part carries on. The important truth of the Scripture is in there and brought to life in such a way that you can relate to it, or you can watch it like a television show or a movie. It’s a very gripping story. So I recommend that you look up The Chosen. You might enjoy it.

Now let’s look at some Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and as I like to do, I am using the translation by David Bentley Hart, which is what he calls a pitilessly accurate translation. He doesn’t change the translation of the New Testament the way so many versions of the Bible do. So let’s look at this. This is out of chapter 6, verse 19.

Do not store up treasures for yourse