the devil worshipper still refuse to answer why the gnostic gospel of Thomas say women are not worthy of life and yes the gnostic view this physical world and matter evil and I would even bother address his quoting of the bible because he does not understand it in the first place
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/re...ries-the-Gnostic-idea-that-matter-is-bad.html
What did the Gnostics believe? Someone asked me that, after I mentioned their intellectual opponent, Irenaeus, who lived in Lyon in the second century.
The answer is that we don’t quite know, for two reasons. One is that their beliefs varied greatly from group to group. More importantly, they enforced a system of secret teaching, the esoteric gnosis or “knowledge” that gave their sect its name.
Why this should matter centuries later is that, in exposing their beliefs, St Irenaeus (pictured) gave an account of early Christianity that is still freshly impressive. The key teaching of Gnosticism that Irenaeus opposes is that material things are bad. Some Christian writers even now unthinkingly say that our being material is a falling away from God, as if it were equivalent to sin.
Reading Irenaeus’s refutation of Gnosticism is no easy task. His treatise Adversus Haereses (“Against the heresies”) argues in the manner of the late classical world, which is foreign to our tastes, and he has no section “New readers start here”.
So it was a pleasure to catch up with a presentation of Irenaeus’s book by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, first published in English in 1990 under the title The Scandal of the Incarnation (Ignatius Press, £9.42). Fortunately, the translator, John Saward, is a theologian in his own right and writes very clearly.
Balthasar arranges passages from Irenaeus thematically. He brings out the Gnostics’ belief that the maker of the world, the Demiurge, is not the highest God. They declare there is a god beyond the Christian God, and he does not communicate with humans nor rule the world. This, Irenaeus argues, is the god of the Greek philosopher Epicurus – a god without the power of providence.
Because the Gnostics’ highest God is unknowable, his followers do not have faith in him, do not believe what he tells them as Christians do. Christians believe Jesus’s revelation, handed down by the Apostles. Gnostics claimed instead a secret mystical knowledge. Irenaeus points out mildly that, while the Gnostics place their secret knowledge above that of the maker of the world (as if they were superior to him), “they cannot make so much as a gnat, nor have they power over their own bodies, which often suffer pain against their will”.
Irenaeus is outraged by the Gnostic teaching that Jesus did not want his followers to seek the Father (since he is not to be found). Christians who seek the Father, he says, do find him.
The Word (who became flesh at an historical date) had, Irenaeus argues, already begun to reveal God through the created cosmos itself. The Incarnation – God becoming a man – is the nub of the question about whether matter is good or bad.
Jesus is God: “He becomes what we are in order to make us what he is.” Jesus’s body was real, not an appearance. He is the second Adam, who was made from the earth, just as Jesus was born from creation, being the true son of a woman. “The soul on its own is not a man,” insists Irenaeus, foreshadowing a famous statement by Thomas Aquinas 1,100 years later: “My soul is not me.”
The actions of Jesus as man are a “recapitulation”, rerunning the development of mankind and putting him back on course by means of a companionship of love, into which love, moreover, mankind is taken.
Speaking paradoxically of God’s eternity, Irenaeus says that “since the Saviour existed already [as the Word, from the beginning], the one to be saved [Adam] had to be brought into existence, so that the Saviour should not be in vain”.
God used his own creation, the world, for the salvation of man. Even the elements that go to make up the Eucharist, the central act of Christianity, are bread and wine, material things from the earth. Irenaeus looks forward to the resurrection of the body, which is no more difficult to God than making mankind from dust in the first place.