Writers and artists of all kinds, from all eras and times, have been fond of symbols, but given that no form of literary art similar to this one exists today, most people find that the book of Revelation is quite impenetrable. The difficulty that New Testament translators have experienced in understanding the Greek text has added to the confusion. And that’s not all, because an analysis of the text at the source reveals that, like the Gospels and the Acts, in addition, it is also a compilation. It is composed of at least two sources, with a number of additional interpolations, one of which could originally be a Jewish revelation, crushed by a later Christian publisher. There is an excellent illustration among the Gnostic writings, of how such “revelations” were written. In the important collection of Gnostic texts known as Nag Hammadi’s codex, there are two documents where it is clear that one is a Christian crush on the other. Eugnostos the blessed, the previous document, begins as a discourse on mystical subjects, and his accent changes to become more revealing as he progresses. The second, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, is a Christian rewrite of Eugnostos the blessed and takes place entirely in the kind of revelation. And it is intriguing to observe, almost first hand, the writing and Christianization of a non-Christian text, as well as the transformation of a speech into a “revelation”, put into the mouth of Jesus and give a setting to a speech Post-Résurrectionnel.
The Book of Revelation is organized as a series of visions given differently by a voice or by several angels, the first vision being the dictation of a letter containing seven messages for the seven Churches of Asia Minor. But the text is too complex to attempt a source analysis here. However, it has an interest in the present context because, despite its quirks and confusions, it contains some salient points of mystical teaching. These seem to come from an earlier stratum of Christian education or the mystical milieu of the time, and it may be that one of the sources of this document was written in an apocalyptic style, but comes from a person who understood the Mystical teachings.
The acceptance by Christianity of the Apocalypse as an integral part of the canon was a matter of youth. The Oriental churches had never accepted the genuine debate and lacked in many old manuscripts of the new Testament. Scholars are also those who have written these different parts. It was pointed out that although it is written in clumsy Greek, the writer thinks in Hebrew, “which provides significant evidence of Jewish origin.” But, like all these writings, the author or authors are assigned to a “John ” which appears in the text, the one who claims or rather the series of visions, no one really knows if he has anything against John the elder or John the disciple, if he was a Jean altogether Inc. Onnu, otherwise unknown to the story, or if John was an unknown pseudonym of the last compiler-editor of this strange character. In its present form, the revelations probably originated the end of the first day, during the period of persecution of Domitian, because the author speaks of his personal persecution. He was probably lucky, because he had only been exiled on the island of Patmos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, off the Asian minor coast, where he used this time to assemble his book.
That its date is after the first Belgian war and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 of our era seems clear, because it is referred by way of prophecy to the events that occurred during this war to the teachings of Jesus from the apocryphal sources. Fortunately, the New Testament is not the only source of information on survivors, but it is largely the Pauline point of view. In addition, the many other primitive Christian groups also produced their own literature, some of which also survived, thus improving the understanding of mystical beliefs on the esoteric side of primitive Christianity.
In particular, a series of acts, written in the form of fictional novels with one or the other of the Apostles as the central characters, offers an insight into the mystical and spiritual teachings attributed to Jesus. Many of these acts are quite foreign to literature and the Western spirit. The present time. Stories often have an allegorical character and the teachings are given in the form of metaphor and parable.
But like the Gospel of John, although the narratives may be allegories, they have historical characters as main characters and the narratives read to some extent as if the events were to be interpreted as real. The closest equivalent in modern literature is probably historical fiction, where the fictitious details of history are made around a historical setting. The difference is that the incidents narrated in these apocryphal writings are often allegories, the author’s main intention being: these books and others like these were censored, if not hated, by orthodoxy especially after Christianity Had conquered political power at the very beginning of the fourth century when Emperor Constantine adopted it as a Roman state religion. Yet the most distant times, the path of inner experience, which it is called mysticism or by any name, was associated with the teachings of Jesus, and these writings are a valuable resource in the search for what Jesus actually taught.
The acts of John and Peter are good examples of this kind, but among all these apocryphal acts, the source of wealth in spiritual material is undoubtedly Thomas’s act.
Like what:
Thomas Act
You are in the temporal life,
and eternal life you know nothing about it.
You are troubled by the marriage of corruption, and you have not become aware of the true marriage.
You are dressed in a dress that ages,
And feel no desire for those that are eternal.
You are proud of this beauty that disappears, and you do not care about the flaws of your eternal soul.
You are proud to own a number of slaves, and your own soul, of slavery you have not liberated.