All right, so we are back in second century Christianity. We have been going through Michael Kruger's book, Christianity at the Crossroads. He's a really good source on all this. And we're in the fourth chapter, the fourth and fifth chapter, so he talks about diversity within the second century and then unity. And this is actually going to be a shorter one, I think. At least it should be according to word count. Somehow these have all gotten pretty long, but this one should be relatively shorter. covering the diversity short enough where I thought about adding the unity part into it and then I looked how long that chapter was and there was just no way of doing that without making this well well over an hour so we will look at diversity within the second century and Unlike other religions in the Greco-Roman world, Christianity was not built or focused on, at least not nearly as heavily on the cult or the ritual, the things that you did necessarily. And I don't mean the way that you act, but the ritualistic aspect of it. It was based on a message, obviously. It was about Christ. There's a degree of ritual that we have, at times, but it's not nearly so much. It can't really be said to be the center of our worship. It's not ritualistic. It's not formulaic near as much. You don't do these things just to do them to please the gods and that sort of thing. So the thing that set Christianity apart, especially in that world, and still today, I would argue, is what we believed. That was the center of our worship. The identity of the faith was the things that we proclaimed. It was because of that that we had Christianity was looked at as a robust intellectual and doctrinal religion. The content of it was looked at as intellectually robust. and doctrinally focused. And then that caused people in the second century to look at it more almost as a philosophy rather than a religion, because their idea of religion was this sort of ritualistic type stuff. So there was a clear distinction there, both now and today, from even false versions of Christianity and other religions of the day. It's a distinctly different religion. other religions in the Greco-Roman world didn't really care so much about the other gods that you worshipped. It generally wasn't a, the exclusivity wasn't really a thing of you worship this god and this god only. That wasn't necessarily even really a thing. It was mostly just concerned with the right rituals you performed or the right recitations that you made, your incense to the right gods of that area, the henotheism that we've talked about, if you're in Rome then worship the Roman gods, that sort of thing, but it didn't care if you had other gods outside of that. They didn't really have creeds and doctoral formulations like we do. They were ill-defined in that way. They weren't like us at all in that way. So it shows the fundamental difference, really, between true religion and man-made religion. That's one of the aspects. Man-made religion says you do these right things and you'll be right with the gods. And then true religion says you believe the right things to be right with God, and as a result, you will then do things that are right as proof of what you believe, which is quite different. So what did the second century Christians believe then? Where is this diversity? We'll talk about unity next time, but where was their diversity in beliefs? Without a doubt, there are some groups in the second century who called themselves Christians, who claimed to be followers of Christ, but held beliefs that we would quickly today identify as heresy. wasn't quite as defined yet in the second century because of how new it was. That's pretty expected. The New Testament hadn't spread everywhere yet. They didn't have the source of the doctrinal content as widely available to every single person. So you're going to have this stuff crop up where they can't look back on 300 years of church history and be like, no, the church has said for 300 years this is wrong. They're doing that then. They don't have the church history to lean back on. They don't all have access to scripture to be like, no, it's right here. You're contradicting this. So there were people calling themselves Christians that started promoting things that we would recognize as heresy. That has caused some to make claims about how the history went. So there's something called the Walter Bauer thesis from Walter Bauer, who is a scholar. And what they do is they look at this diversity or in this arising of these heresies, ultimately, and they say, see, Christianity was diverse, it was ill-defined, there's no real distinction between heresy and orthodoxy. Using those words are nonsensical. It's just this group won, the orthodox won, therefore they declared the people they disagreed with as heretics. And it's all just a mixed thing and it just, you know, history is written by the winners, that sort of thing. So that's what they're saying about the church. They're saying that these are all competing versions of Christianity. There's multiple versions of it, they compete, and then they're all saying that they're original, and what's known as heresy today was just another version of Christianity that was just as popular as the other version. But then orthodoxy won and they declared that. That's the modern scholarly idea of how it went in the first century. It's a standard liberal paradigm, and that is in contrast to the standard historical paradigm that argues that Christian doctrine basically developed, or I wouldn't say developed because it sounds like it's not there, but almost was more defined and more discovered as scripture became more available. Basically, as they had the source of doctrine available, doctrine was better learned and therefore better proclaimed as it became more widespread. So doctrine deepened in definition as it became available to be deepened, and then heresy would arise, and the church would address that doctrine that they were heretical about with more definition to say, no, that's not what we're saying. And then it would lead to greater definition because they're opposing enemies of the faith, people that are claiming, well, Christ isn't a man, well, Christ isn't God, you know, it's all over the place. So the definition deepens as the faith is attacked. That's what actually happened. So orthodoxy was there, it was challenged, and as it was challenged, doctrinal definition became greater and more robust. So because of the newness, there is an expected degree of diversity. It doesn't make those divergent beliefs true, even if real Christians were professing them, because I think a little bit of The diversity comes from real Christians, but a lot of it comes from people that aren't Christians at all, they just use the labels of Christian. So it's understandable in the historical context of the second century that this kind of thing would happen. So as we look at a few of these groups, it must be acknowledged that much of our writing on them comes from Orthodox churchmen that were writing polemically against them. We don't have a lot of their actual writing saying, well, this is what's true and that sort of thing. So we don't have that as available as we would like. And a lot of it has to come from people saying, well, this group says this much, says X, Y, and Z, and here's why that's false. So I don't want to say they've made, we're just dependent on their accuracy, I would say. So I don't think there's intentional misrepresentation. There might've been a degree of miscommunication, but a lot of these groups are, Dangerous enough where it's it doesn't even matter. They're way off. It's not like kind of close. They're way off. So We don't necessarily have really good sources that accurately describe These positions as well as we would like anyway, so one group would be the Ebionites As we see in the first century, there is an ongoing debate about keeping Mosaic law, about circumcision, Sabbath, observance, dietary restrictions. Basically, how Jewish do you have to be to be a Christian? Do you have to first become a Jew to be a Christian? And that's sort of what the Ebionites were like. They're sort of a derivative of the Judaizers in a lot of ways. Very similar in the thought. I'm not saying that the Ebionites are the Judaizers. in the first century we see in scripture, but they're in that line of thought very strongly. First century Paul calls them the circumcision party. Which, I mean, that sounds like a terrible party. It's not the kind of party I'd want to be invited to. I'm not going to go to any circumcision party. So he calls them the circumcision party, and the Ebionites are close to what the circumcision party was basically promoting. By the way, our kids just learned what circumcision was this week at our house, because they've been reading through Genesis on their own. And it came up, and they're like, what is that? We've read about that. And we explained it, and they're like, what? They were like, yeah, that happened to you, Thatcher. And he's like, why did you do that to me? We were like, uh, I don't know. Anyway, the Ebionites, they repudiated the Apostle Paul, which you would think a very pro-Jewish group, a very Judaic, wanting to stay Jewish. They would repudiate the Apostle Paul, and they did. They said that he was an apostate from the law. They believed that they were justified according to the law. They rejected the virgin birth and the divinity of Jesus. So they had an adoptionistic Christology, and this is one thing you'll see with a lot of these groups is their Christology. Their doctrine of Christ is going to be aberrant somehow, almost always. So they had an adoptionistic Christology, which meant that Jesus was just a natural man. He was born of Joseph and Mary regularly, and he was adopted by the Holy Spirit to be the Messiah due to his holy and righteous life. So he was such a good Jew, he was adopted by the Holy Spirit, and he served as the Messiah. So they still called themselves Christians, even though they had a completely different conception of who Jesus was, and believed in a completely different conception, literally. They had their own gospel that they used. It was called the Gospel of the Hebrews, sometimes also called the Gospel of the Ebonites. And they were condemned by nearly everyone as false. So the church almost universally said, no, these guys are wrong. This is not the true Christian faith. There was another group called the Nazarenes that seemed to have a Jewish version of Christianity that was much closer to Orthodox. So there were still debates about how Jewish you needed to be or could you be, I guess. And the Nazarenes were probably Orthodox, even though they remained kind of Jewish. But they kept Jewish customs, but they didn't require that for salvation. So they weren't saying, you have to do this to be saved. And they embraced Paul. They embraced Orthodox Christology. So Nazarenes were probably just a group of Jewish Christians that weren't like the Ebionites. The Ebionites are way off. The Nazarenes are just kind of being more Jewish. There's another group called the Marcionites, and you will hear about them a lot. If you look back and if you say, what are the heresies? In the second century, in the early church, you're gonna hear about the Gnostics, who we'll talk about next, and the Marcionites. These are the two most notorious heretical groups in the ancient church. And Marcionites had a lot of overlap with Gnosticism. They weren't Gnostics necessarily. You could make an argument that it was a brand of Gnosticism, but they were different. but still some similarities with Gnostics. And they were almost the exact opposite in terms of like a mirror image of the Ebionites. How the Ebionites were like super Jewish, they were like as un-Jewish as you could be. It began with a guy named Marcion. He was a rich merchant who showed up in Rome in the second century. You'll see a lot of these guys show up in Rome and kind of try to throw their weight around or get some influence. But they showed up in Rome, or he did, Marcion showed up in Rome, about mid-2nd century, gives a large gift to the church. That's also not too unexpected when you have somebody trying to use their money for influence. But he used his new influence then to spread a heretical doctrinal system. You may have heard some of this because there's people that still make these arguments today, but he viewed the Old Testament God as bad, that he's a vengeful, wrathful God, but the God of Jesus is different. He's peaceful. He's merciful and loving. He's a good God. Old Testament God was law-centered and strict, and the New Testament God is gracious and forgiving. And they regarded the Creator God as a different God than who sent Jesus. In other words, the God of the Jews is not the God of the Christians. So that's why I say it's like the opposite of the Ebionites. The God of the Jews is not the God of the Christians. It's a different God, bad God versus good God. Unsurprisingly, then he rejected the authority of the Old Testament. He still thought it was the authentic word of God, but not the Christian God of Jesus. So it's still written by a God, just not his God. So he said the Old Testament was incoherent, contradicted the New Testament, which is, I mean, is what you still hear in a modern sense, like people don't know how to reconcile the New Testament at all. They always act like this one's all violent and wrathful towards sin and then somehow completely miss the cross in the New Testament and it's, people make this claim about a disconjunction between the two. So Marcion embraced Paul, but he rejected James. He tried to edit out the Jewish elements from the parts of the New Testament that he accepted, which the Marcionites liked the Gospel of Luke and all of Paul's epistles, but then they would try to edit out portions that they thought were too Jewish. And they'd say, oh, those parts got corrupted. So they tried to edit those out. And interestingly enough, one of the earliest list of the 27 New Testament canonical books may have been an orthodox response to Marcion trying to exclude those books. And somebody's like, no, no, here's the list of the New Testament, all of them. And Marcion's like, no, no, we don't take James and those others, they're too Jewish. And they're like, no, we do. And so that might have been where one of those lists came from, likely. So because he thought the physical world was created by an inferior God, he rejected the incarnation. He said that Jesus only seemed to take on human flesh. If you remember this from 1 John, when we went through it, this is one of the things that was starting to creep up the docetic Christology that we talked about, where Jesus only seemed to be a human. He only appeared to have a flesh, but he didn't have real body and flesh. So this was, a continuing heir that came about, and Marcion adopted that, if not reinvented it himself. They said he wasn't even born of Mary, he just appeared on earth as a full-grown adult. He was divine, but he wasn't a man. So he appeared like he was a full-grown human adult in flesh and blood, but he was really just God looking like a human, but not a human, and not actually having a body. They promoted a strict ascetic lifestyle, so they rejected the physical world. So this is kind of expected too. You reject physical things, any of the good of the world that we can benefit from, they would reject. So they regulated anything fleshly, fasting, strict dietary regulations. They refused marriage or sexual activity. That sort of thing. Church of Rome rejected his beliefs. They refunded the big gift that he gave, and then they excommunicated him. So again, the church was pretty much universal in their rejection of Marcion. And for centuries afterwards, even, there were still people writing against Marcion. Everybody writes against Marcion. But this happened for centuries. They rejected his teachings, and there were little pockets of it where it would hang on. but it was rejected pretty much universally. It's not a competing version of Christianity. It's a heretic that had heretical followers that was opposed by the church nearly universally. Now, Gnostics. Let's talk about the Gnostics. Gnosticism is one of those things that's kind of hard to define. And that's because it's a variety of things. It's a variety of loosely related people and movements But they have overlapping themes. And we'll talk about some of those overlapping themes. They have overlapping interests. And they seem to have flourished starting in the second century and then hung on for a while, sort of as a reaction to Christianity. And as we talk about this, you're going to be like, how are these people a version of Christianity? All they do is literally steal some of our words. But the concepts are just wildly divergent from what we would consider Christianity, it's probably the most ancient heresy. Gnosticism in its variety of forms is the most ancient heresy. It says there is a radical spirit matter dualism. So again, that's sort of like the Marcion idea of matter and creation are bad because they were created by a demiurge. So some sort of lesser divine subordinate being who created everything. There was no creation. All there was is the supreme being who was spirit and this spirit has emanations called eons and one of those eons Created and there was no creation before that and he did that and it was bad that he did that because all matter in existence came from Whoever this Demiurge was they called him Elohim, which is just a Hebrew word for God and It's literally gods, but Yahweh is called Elohim And so, there's this hierarchy of beings. And you'll get this idea in Platonism, in Gnosticism, where there's like a ladder of being. And at the very top of that ladder is the supreme being, who is pure spirit. And everybody below it, you want to ascend that ladder of being to the divine. Matter is a bad thing, so you want to get out of the matter, you want to get away from your physical body and ascend that ladder to pure spirit. So everything physical is bad, everything spiritual is good. Which again, this is another idea that's kind of crept into, I would say even outside of religious thought, but into modern thinking in general. And spiritual, not religious, because religious is, you know, it's where you go to a church and you do things, and spiritual is just, what, this ethereal thing, you know, that sort of idea. So this emanation, Elohim, was an emanation of the Supreme Being. He rebelled, he created the physical world. They blame him for all brokenness and all suffering, because there would be no brokenness or suffering if there was no creation. The Gnostics would deny the Old Testament, the God of the Old Testament, and the humanity of Jesus. Again, they have a docetic Christianity, because Jesus was a man, so they say, well, if we want to be Christians, then we'll deny his physical flesh. According to Gnosticism, things that Christians call good, creation, Stuff like that is actually evil. Salvation is from the evil material world, which comes through the acquisition of secret knowledge. So that's how you ascend that ladder of being to the pure spiritual. You ascend that through knowledge. And the Greek word for knowledge is gnosis. That's where you get the term gnostic. It's because of their secret knowledge. That's their thing. Come get the secret knowledge, ascend the ladder of being, escape your physical reality. There's still ideas like this in Christian science, stuff like that. It's basically a modern version of ancient Gnosticism. So, without a doubt, the Christian faith came first and then was attacked by Gnostics who tried to revise it radically. You can see how this is a clear revision. So, their central tenet was that salvation from the physical world, from this creator. There was a demiurge that you're not supposed to like, and you do that through secret knowledge imparted through revelation. So there's no salvation from sin. You're not trying to be saved from the wrath of God. It's a release from the physical onto the spiritual plane. And they'll say things like, and you may have heard this before, everybody has a spark of divinity in them. Have you ever heard that phrase? It's an idiom that's still used today to talk about the goodness of man. And like new age groups will talk about the spark of divinity within us. So they said there's that spark of divinity and you use that to, you know, it goes along with their secret knowledge, whatever there was. So it's an ontological dualism, a spirit-matter dualism, a difference in being. Matter is bad, spirit is good. Being is good, non-being is bad, and the goal is to climb that ladder. So your problem is your lack of being. You're not high enough on that ladder. You need more being, more divine, or more divinity. So you're becoming divine. Again, you might see this in Mormonism. The goal is to become divinity. They were theologically polytheistic, obviously, because if they think the creator was a demiurge that was able to create, then they obviously believe more than one god. And so there's this hierarchy of gods and angels are on that hierarchy somewhere, too. And you climb that through Gnosis. Docetic Christianity we talked about. So he merely appeared to be human. Matter is evil. One version of it claimed that Jesus was a special heavenly emissary. He was one of those eons, an emanation from the supreme being, and he was sent from the supreme being and from the divine realm into the human realm. Other versions made a distinction between the human Jesus and the divine Christ. So they would say things like, well, Jesus was temporarily inhabited in his physical body by the divine Christ. So there's really two beings. Jesus is two separate beings. He's Jesus the band and he's the divine Christ. And the divine Christ entered him at baptism and then it left him on the cross. So when Jesus is saying on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's because the divine Christ had left him. And that's their explanation for it. They obviously divide the Bible between Old and New Testament. They too had an ascetic lifestyle where they would deny all these physical things. But then they also, which is interesting, there were some Gnostic groups who were the opposite than the ascetic lifestyle. So Spirit Matter Dualism, all the matter stuff is bad, all the spiritual is good. So some of them said, okay, don't indulge in any of it because it's all bad. And then others said, well, none of it's real, it's all bad, you can do whatever you want. So they were antinomian, they would indulge in all kinds of perversity and feasting and sexual stuff and all that sort of thing. So they kind of went to the two opposite ends when it came to their behavior with the physical world. The Gnostics were firmly, continually, extensively rejected by the Church. They were never even remotely considered another version of Christianity. This is just a heretical group. Interestingly enough, they didn't start their own churches. You would see like Marcionite churches, but the Gnostics didn't start their own churches. They kind of sought to infiltrate the Orthodox churches and they would subvert the teaching secretly. They would use the same words, redefine them. They would pretend to affirm the creeds, pretend to be Christian, yet hold these Gnostic doctrines and sort of undermine the church. They're slippery like that. There's a lot of different heretical groups. So Gnosticism is kind of like the umbrella term, but there's multiple groups and heretics like Valentius, Cyrinthus, Ptolemy, different groups that had different brands of Gnosticism, but those are sort of the themes that they went along with. They adopted these variations and they all kind of started their own little groups and their own little sects and that sort of thing. But they're not all identical. Another group in the last room that we'll talk about is the Montanists, the Montanists. This one's a little harder because they're not as outright heretical. They're more just heterodox in their practices. And heterodoxy in your practice and beliefs can lead to heresy, but we don't have record of them necessarily affirming heretical doctrines per se. So the Montanists emerged in the late 2nd century, somewhere between 165-170, somewhere around there. I think they showed up in Rome as well. Didn't necessarily stay there. I could be wrong on that. I don't know that it was in Rome. They followed Montanists, and he was originally from Asia Minor, and they rekindled the practice of charismatic gifts and prophecy. So they were we could say proto-Pentecostals in a way. They were rekindling charismatic gifts and prophecy, because by then the church had recognized that prophecies, the charismatic gifts were for the apostolic age. The apostolic age has passed, those things have ceased. The canon had closed. There was no special revelation being received anymore. So we don't practice charismatic gifts and prophecy anymore. We don't expect tongues and gifts of knowledge and prophets. So it was recognized as closed by then. But the Matanists came along, and Matanist says, nope, I'm a prophet. And he was an apocalyptic prophet, and he claimed direct revelation from God. In fact, he called himself a mouthpiece of God, and he said there are records of him calling himself the Pericle. If you don't know that terminology, that is the Greek terminology for the helper, which is a reference to the Holy Spirit. So he called himself the Holy Spirit. He also had with him two prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, who likewise claimed to receive divine revelation. And they wrote down their prophecies and they claimed them in equality with scripture, which, I mean, if they were genuine prophecies, you would expect, that's fine, yeah, because it's from God, it's the word of God, write it down, that's fine. A lot of scripture is prophecy. But obviously, they're making up their own stuff. When they did prophesy, they would do so with ecstatic experiences. They would go into like a trance-like state. They would have frenzies, shaking, convulsions. They would speak really strangely. They didn't necessarily call it tongues, but it sounds like when you read about the descriptions, it sounds like they were trying to speak in tongues. So again, these are the charismatic gifts. They're trying to reinvigorate and use those. Orthodox critics, displayed when they were opposing them. They displayed how that was antithetical to the biblical prophets who were composed. They were in sound states of mind when they received revelation and it was completely different. Almost essentially what we see today with charismatics acting all ridiculous. And you're like, that's just not at all what prophecy looks like in scripture. And they did the same thing in the first century. He was apocalyptic, so he made claims of Jesus's imminent return. And New Jerusalem was going to descend at Papusa, which was a popular monotonous site. And you'll always find that. When apocalyptic preachers are claiming a location, it always tends to be the place where they get the most support. Odd how that works. So this was a popular monotonous site. They, too, practice radical asceticism, strict fasting, celibacy. You'll find in church history that celibate movements tend to die out. Funny how that works. They don't seem to last. And they are one of them. They didn't have a bunch of heretical claims that we look back on, necessarily, on their doctrine. But they followed these weird practices, a weird and dangerous claim to authority, enough so where they are roundly condemned by the church, and they were excommunicated as well. So this is another group. It's not a question. They were all roundly condemned, all of these groups. What you see here in this diversity in the second century is not a bunch of versions of Christianity. These are completely different genres of the faith. Completely different. They're not minor disagreements with the church. These are diametrically opposed, false religions, hijacking the faith, and they're teaching completely new teachings. They're rejecting and refuting the core doctrines itself, including the New Testament, or at least large portions of our canon. Even while the apostles were still living, they're rejecting these things. Things that were written even while the apostles were still living. Whenever you hear this, if you go to college or anything like that, they're going to portray Christianity this way. And you see it today with modern people talking about the large diversity of the Christian faith and they start citing all these heretical groups and you're like, Those aren't Christians, those are just heretical groups. Mormons are not evangelicals. They're not a Christian church at all. It's a completely different faith. You can't just take the words, redefine them, and pretend like you're saying the same thing just because you used the word Jesus or the word grace. If you mean something completely different, that's the substance of it. The content, the doctrine, the ideology is the substance of it. The labels are just shortcuts. So people today make the same error with the church. They want to group us all together. And it happens with scholars with the second century church. There is diversity, but it's just not. And I'm not saying that the church, the true Christians had absolute uniformity on everything. They didn't. But they had uniformity on the essentials, on the important stuff was essentially uniform for a while there. At least within the degree of expectation of a very new religion. They still have to figure out some of the details, obviously. So when you hear that claim about diversity in the second century, know that that's generally what they're talking about. Gnostics, Marcionites, Ebionites, and heretical groups, Martinists, stuff like that. They're just, they're not Christian. They're just wax, and people that hijack the faith. So I think next week will probably be, or not next week, I guess next month, will be more fun to hear about the unity within the church, but You do need to know about the diversity that was there and what the church was up against as they did this too. Any questions? Yes, so if you've heard about the Gnostic Gospels, those were discovered very late in terms of modern times, and they were dug up in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. It was basically a trash jump, and they found tons of all these Gospels. They're still being published today, and there's a bunch of late writings in terms of, you know, 2nd century at the earliest, but generally 3rd, 4th, sometimes 5th century, and these were people that would write Gospels, and they would attach names to them of the Apostles, and so they'd say the Gospel of Thomas. So you could go home and Google the Gospel of Thomas and read it, and people will say, that's a competing Gospel that was around, and then the church just excluded them, and that's their claim. In reality, it wasn't even around yet, and if you read them, They're crazy. They're crazy stories that aren't even remotely on par with genuine scripture. So you'll read this and you'll be like, how could anyone think this is scripture? Some of them have Jesus coming out of the grave with a gigantic head. Like he's literally, literally a giant. A giant person. And there's stories about Jesus' childhood. Things that he did there was a recent movie made about Jesus's childhood I don't know what it was called son of God maybe something along those lines and you know there's a there's a An event in there where he makes clay pigeons and makes him come alive And he strikes one of his friends dead that was mean to him, but then he brings him back to life those all come from Gnostic sources Gnostic Gospels and I've also mentioned before how, because the claim is they're competing, if you analyze them with raw data in terms of the names of the locations, the names of the people, the elevations that it talks about going up and down, you'll see that they're not even close, not even close with the real gospels. They're clearly written after the fact by people that were not eyewitnesses who did not live in the area, and it shows up in the raw data. So all of that stuff is really, really interesting. And yeah, if you hear about Gnostic Gospels, if you hear, if any of you guys go to college and you, well, not you grown-ups, obviously, but you kids, the ones that go to college, you hear any religious class, you're gonna hear from the, the professor, like the Gnostics are going to be treated as the genuine article. They're the real Christians that just lost, they're the underdogs and the church smashed them and crushes their Gospels and tries to, it's a big conspiracy. All the whole, what's that movie with Tom Hanks? Da Vinci Code, all the Da Vinci Code stuff, conspiracy theory stuff, it goes along with the Gnostic gospel theory, the Bower thesis, this idea of the church being this strong power that crushes all dissent in the first century where really they're the underdogs in the world, they're just trying to survive. There was no giant hierarchy of the church. They take the Roman Catholic Church the way it is now, read that back into history and pretend the way that that's always been. There's always been a Pope. He's always had this power and he could always crush all dissents and threaten you with the fires of hell. It's all just a fairy tale. A lot of modern scholarship about the church is a fairy tale, and it comes up with that sort of thing. That's one of the reasons it's important to know what the church was like in the second century. No, the Apocrypha is an intertestamental historical work, so it's written in between the Old and New Testament. Some of them are just historical books. Some of them are a little bit weird, but they're not Gnostic necessarily, at least not Christian Gnostic. There might have been some kind of form of Jewish Gnosticism that played a role with a few, possibly, don't quote me on that, but there are a few books in there that are kind of weird. But most of them are just historical works that don't really say something that bad. They're not pretending to be scripture. The Jews never accepted them as scripture. And honestly, the Catholic Church didn't even declare them as scripture until technically after the Reformation at the Council of Trent. So it wasn't until the 16th century that the Roman Catholic Church even said officially that it's scripture. And when you ask them, well, then why before that could anybody know that it was scripture, they'll be like, well, they just knew. And we're like, well, that's our argument. We just know because Christians know the word of God and that's how we have the canon and you got it wrong. So yeah, that's not Christian Gnosticism though. Most of those are honestly, they're not even like dangerous to read. They're just historically informative. There's a few errors in some of the history, but nothing too significant. They do draw from the Apocrypha things like praying for the dead. There's like one verse in one of the books that they reference, but it's not officially taught in there. It just talks about it very briefly. OK. It seems that people or colleges don't want you to read Gnostic Gospels. They'll make a declaration. Oh, yeah. And even they can quote parts of them that sound similar to stories that are found in the Gospels. But then you read them, and like you said, it comes out with a big head, or you have to change Mary into a man for her to be saved. Yes. That's another one. Yeah. Yeah, there's very, very, if you read them side by side, any Christian that's familiar with the Gospels will read the Gnostic Gospels and kind of like chuckle. It's not even close, it's not even close. It's like when you read the Book of Mormon, it sounds like somebody trying to impersonate the King James in like a way that mocks the King James. That's what it sounds like, somebody just like jokingly telling a story in King James language. And you sort of get that same sense with the Gnostic Gospels like, oh, this is somebody trying to make up a story to like mock the Gospels because it sounds so silly. And the things that happen are so silly. So, yeah. Okay, let's pray quick and then we'll close. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this time to gather together. We pray that our preparation and understanding of church history would help us in how we view the church today, how we defend the church today. We thank you that you rose up men in that early time, in those early generations who understood your word, who were willing to fight for the truth, who opposed error and opposed heresy. We thank you for that. We pray that none of our young people would fall prey to the modern arguments that distort history, read it anachronistically, or misconstrue it, mischaracterize any of the facts about history in the past. Please, Lord, protect them from that, and I pray that they would learn the true faith and true history and true practice and true doctrine here, and that they would be grounded in that so that they would hold fast to the truth and continually follow you and serve your church their whole lives. We thank you. For this time, we pray that you are honored in our desire to learn. We pray all this in Christ's name, amen.