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Dr. Ropp’s Commentary on Bishop Wilson Interview
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. For the last four weeks we’ve been listening to my interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson concerning the Gnostic Union and his interpretation of the New Testament and also some Gnostic texts.
And I want to make comment on it, although it’s very difficult to compose a comment on this long interview. I don’t want to in any way malign or make light of Brother Nathan’s work on translating the New Testament from the original Koine Greek, as opposed to the way most Bibles are handed down, which are just derivation after derivation after derivation of an original translation into Latin, basically.
Brother Nathan’s translation of the New Testament is called The Gnostic Christian Truth Bible—you can take a look at it. It’s free. He’s made it publicly available online, and I’ll put the link here in the transcript.
Brother Nathan’s translation really does restore the flavor of Gnosticism back into the New Testament, because as we know, the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome in the 300s A.D. stripped gnosis and Gnosticism out of the New Testament to the extent that they could, and they changed the translation of many Gnostic words into more vanilla type of language that doesn’t convey the gnosis that is contained within the work.
So his is a very important contribution. But there’s a big however coming up here, and that however is this: Gnosticism is essentially a mystic connection to the Father, and so all of our interpretations of what is written must be processed through that comprehension of our relationship to the Father, and the Father’s originating consciousness—the Father as the Source, the Father as the Father-Mother, if you will.
And when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one; if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father,” he was referring to what we Gnostics call the God Above All Gods. So that’s a very important point. If you study the words of Jesus and don’t meander into the writings of Paul, for example, you will have a much clearer Gnostic understanding of the Father and our relationship to the Father, to Abba God, to the God Above All Gods, as we Gnostics put it. The word for that in Hebrew was El Elyon, and Brother Thomas brings that up in his translation, in his discussion.
I’ve always been very interested in ancient documents, especially ancient spiritual or holy scriptures, not only in the Christian or Jewish tradition, but also in the Chinese tradition, the Tao Te Ching being the primary example in my life, and in the Indian traditions of yogic philosophy. So I wouldn’t say don’t read biblical scriptures, don’t read holy scriptures, because I gained a lot of knowledge, true knowledge, concerning the Father through these scriptures.
But the thing is, you cannot connect with the Father only through reading scripture, or only through hearing preaching about scripture, or only reading people’s books about various books, because then you are filtering your connection with the ethereal realm through human translation, through human interpretation. We need to have a direct mystical connection. I’ve never particularly used that word, mystical, because it kind of implies, you know, woo-woo gypsies, and woo-woo new age and this kind of thing, and you don’t want to go in that direction either.
But what mystical actually means is having a direct spiritual connection to the ethereal realm. And when I say ethereal realm, I’m not talking about channeling—channeling as in the nature of the Urantia book, or channeling as in the work of Edgar Cayce, because in my opinion, channeling while in a trance-like state opens you up to any kind of non-material influence. And you don’t know if those are angels, you don’t know if those are Aeons, you don’t know if that is the Father, you don’t know if that is an archon, or a daemon, or a lesser god. So this applies to the Ouija board just as well. You do not want to open yourself up to those sorts of influences, because we can be easily deceived, and that is a trap.
That deception is part of the imitation. Now those early Catholic church fathers possibly thought they were doing a good thing by throwing the gnosis out, by throwing this idea of mystic out, because they didn’t want people to be deceived and led down the wrong rabbit trails away from God rather than toward God. I’m not sure that was their motivation. We Gnostics generally have a negative view of the church in the 300s and thereafter as being about control, and manipulation, and power. These are not godly attributes. These are human institutional attributes.
So I emphasize a direct connection with the Father exactly, or with the Christ. Now let’s talk about the Christ for a minute.
People get uncomfortable when talking about Christ, or the Christ. People don’t want to believe in Jesus, because, well, it’s too Christian, and you’ve heard too many evangelicals preaching on crazy radio broadcasts, or you were raised in an evangelical church with an unloving leadership, and an unloving congregation, and you would be right to be wary. But what I share with you here at Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation is what I believe to be a true relationship to actual Christ and to Jesus Christ.
So this is another reason why I am not in favor of delving into history and trying to learn about God, or about your proper relationship to God and heaven, and all these kinds of questions through history, or through transcripts that have been funneled through human imagination and human interpretation. This is why you must go directly to the Father. Well, how? How? Prayer. That’s what prayer is. Prayer is talking to the Father, or talking to Christ, or talking with Jesus, and waiting on their answers, waiting on those directions. Yes, it does work, and no, you don’t have to be purified to a certain extent in order to establish that kind of mystical connection. The Bible does promise that God will come to you. God will come to you even before you turn to him. So in order to turn to the Father, you need to turn.
Metanoia. You need to turn. You need to take your eyes off of the world, take your eyes off of your own desires and ambitions, i.e. your ego, and turn your eyes upward to the Father. Now, this is an interesting thing. I’ve been thinking about upward. Why do we keep saying that the ethereal plane is upward? Well, I actually think that that is perhaps a misunderstanding of something we don’t have the word for.
We don’t know exactly where the ethereal plane is, so we say it’s upward because down is the material, and the dirt, and the under the dirt, which is generally considered negative. That’s why I always say onward and upward. I actually think it’s another dimension in the mathematical sense, so we don’t have a word for that. We don’t have a word for appealing to a different dimension. We might as well say upward, or even more profoundly, you know, physics does not claim that this material world is actually substantial. The closer you dial in the microscopes to the lowest, and lowest, and smallest, and smallest so-called particles of our material existence, they disappear. They evaporate. It’s all space. It’s all empty space with vibrations, with energetic movement, but there’s no there there. It probably all reduces to consciousness itself.
The Father is pure consciousness. We derive from that consciousness, so the fallen state is really in its most sophisticated form probably nothing more than stepping out of the essential resonance of the Father’s consciousness. Our vibratory pattern has become locked onto this so-called material pattern, and again, that sounds kind of new age and whatnot, but it’s not. It’s physics. It’s mathematical, and when we’re talking about math, and we’re talking about physics, and we’re talking about reason, and logic, that is, the Word, Logos.
That is the Word of God, that vibratory pattern. So what we’re trying to do is re-establish coherency with the Father, and that’s generally suggested to do through prayer—that is moving your intention off of the world, off of you, and your concerns, and your ego, and moving that intention toward the Father, and expressing your desire to be one with the Father. Generally, what you do is then at that point after prayer, which is your expression of intention, is give glory, because giving glory is the closest way. It’s the direct path to tune into the Father’s resonance, because the Father is the bedrock of glory.
The Father is glorious. The Father is consciousness. The Father is love. The Father is purity. The Father is true knowledge.
Down here where we are, the things we “learn”—that isn’t necessarily knowledge. That is, we could call information. That is, we could call history. That is, we could call language study or philology. Around us in the world, we have everybody else’s patterns going on, everybody else’s vibrations, so to speak. They produce information. They produce output, output, output, output, but not necessarily knowledge, gnosis. The gnosis only comes from above.
The gnosis cannot be mined out of history. So the reason I reject the study of historical Gnosticism is because those were just people practicing what they thought was Gnosticism. That was people way back then, supposedly, because who knows how true our history is, right? There could be mistakes all the way up to today, but when you study history, you’re just studying other people’s notions.
Even St. Paul of the New Testament, those were his notions about God and Christ, because Paul never met Christ. Paul didn’t walk with Christ. He had an encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus after Jesus had already been dead and risen and gone. Well, you can have your own Damascus reckoning with Christ, just like Paul did. See, Paul was a studied Orthodox Jew. He really knew his Torah inside and out, and he was a warrior on behalf of the Jewish traditions against this newly emerging messianic tradition of following Christos, Jesus as the Christ. He rejected Jesus as the Messiah. He was thoroughly embroiled in that battle against Jesus Christ. And that’s why his turning as he traveled the road to Damascus on yet another pogrom of killing Christians, and he had his face-to-face reckoning and came to realize that he was wrong, led him to establish a direct connection with the Father and with Jesus, totally informed by his knowledge of the Torah or the Jewish Bible. So this is why so much of Paul’s writing is expressed in the language of the Torah.
But you needn’t be a Jew to be a Christian, and you needn’t be a modern Christian to be a true Christian, because modern Christianity is thoroughly derived from this watered-down and whitewashed version of Christianity that the Catholic Church allowed to proceed out of the Nicene Councils, having stripped all of the Gnosticism out that they could. Some of it did seep in, because those men of the Nicene Council were not Gnostic. They didn’t have the gnosis, so they didn’t even see the subtleties of what they were leaving in and taking out. They just stripped out the most obvious Gnosticism, and that was the translation then that came down to us as the New Testament.
And these are the words that Brother Nathan rightly recognizes in the original fragments of manuscripts that he has translated, the Gnostic words that are still there but were wrongly translated or purposely mistranslated in order to water down the Gnosticism. Those words that he reinserted back into his New Testament translation—Logos, Kosmos, Zoe, Sophia, Archon, Magus, Damon—he put those back in where they belong, and now we can understand better what the New Testament writers were saying.
But as far as the history behind the changes or all this talk about Simon Magus and why it was they retranslated the word Magus to get rid of Simon Magus, and this talk of Sophia being the feminine wisdom, being the feminine, essentially, aspect of God, and that that’s why the Sethian, well, that’s why most Gnostics speak of Sophia as the fallen Aeon. The Tripartite Tractate does not mention Sophia, and the Aeon that fell is Logos. So to me, if you don’t make a big deal out of gender, because, see, the Father, the Source—it contains all truth. It contains all knowledge. So down here, we are split into genders because we have sexual relations to reproduce, and there are certain personality types that seem to go with one gender or the other, and these are based upon your Aeonic parentage. So there are girly girl Aeons, and there are masculine men Aeons, and there are Aeons that are just neutral, that don’t matter at all about gender.
What is the gender of mathematics? What is the gender of chemistry? See, it’s an irrelevant and nonsensical question. What is the gender of knowledge and reason? What is the gender of wisdom? We’re adding a human interpretation of gender onto these words. What is the gender of happiness? These are things that don’t make sense to me.
Now, I do understand the concept of feminine and masculine. Masculine being, well, the way we think of it generally is strength and output and all this kind of thing, but you don’t have to be a man to be “masculine.” The point being assertiveness does not have to be gendered. Receptivity doesn’t have to be gendered. And so when you focus on this idea of divine femininity, it’s okay, it’s lovely to have an affinity for the divine femininity, for the process of birth and nurturing, for Mother Nature in the forest. This is all good. This is probably fairly accurate because these are traits of certain Aeons that you identify with femininity or that we identify with femininity.
But to say that they came from an Aeon called Sophia who fell from grace and therefore had an illegitimate child, Yaldabaoth, well, now we’re getting into mythology. And mythology isn’t true knowledge. Mythology is a metaphorical or symbolic way of expressing truths. But it is not in itself “true,” if you get my meaning.
So it’s good to love femininity. It’s good to honor women and childbirth and the little woodland creatures. That’s good. But I don’t see the need of identifying them with wisdom, with Sophia. See, the meaning of Sophia—the Aeon’s meaning is wisdom. And the meaning of Logos is knowledge and reason. But they are essentially part of the same basis of gaining knowledge of the Father.
The gnosis that I share here from the Tripartite Tractate is not mythology. That’s what makes the Tripartite Tractate such a unique Gnostic book. The other books, unless they are books of wisdom statements, such as the Book of Thomas, the other Gnostic books, generally in the Sethian tradition, are mythologies passed on from older, pre-existing mythologies—Phoenician, Egyptian, working their way through into what we now call Sethian Gnosticism. There’s no need for those mythologies. They don’t teach you anything. They’re just stories. They’re nice stories. If you want to tell your child a bedtime story, you can tell them a myth. That’s fine. That’s what we do. Humans are storytellers. That’s why we like TV and movies and listen to people’s stories. We’re storytellers. The myths of Gnosticism are stories.
But gnosis is a different thing. Gnosis is the actual knowledge of the Father. It’s not aboutism. It’s knowing.
Now, I want to share with you a comment from one of our subscribers here at the Gnostic Reformation, and his name is Vlad. You can go read it yourself; it was a comment posted to “Understanding Biblical Gnosis, Bishop Wilson’s Perspective” is the name of the episode.
Vlad says,
This is a rich conversation, thank you for sharing it. The distinction between gnosis as intellectual knowledge and gnosis as direct knowing is essential. The bishop’s work on translation, especially the presence of gnosis in Greek text that gets obscured in English, is valuable. It reminds us that early Christianity was not a system of belief. It was a system of recognition, of remembering, of direct experience. The fragment from Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 840 is fascinating. The image of the Pharisees washing in water that, “dogs and pigs have been thrown into,” while the Savior speaks of being “baptized in the waters of eternal Zoe that has come from God,”is a stark distinction between ritual purity and actual coherence. It is the difference between cleaning the outside of the cup and the inside being full [of wickedness, essentially. He just said being full, but I’m adding full of what? Well, it’s full of the opposite of cleanliness.] The point about the Old Testament God of the Sadducees and the Pharisees not having love is the same point that runs through all Gnostic cosmology. The demiurge creates. The father emanates. The first demands worship. The second invites recognition. One operates through control. The other through love. They are not the same.
He goes on to say,
I appreciated the observation about Jesus being a therapist, a healer who spends time with people. That word therapia, being the root of our word therapy, is not small. It points to something that gets lost in the dogmatic versions. The one who heals by presence, by spending time, by simply being with. Thank you for this. I will be following along.
So that was an excellent comment that I just completely agree with. Okay, this commentary of mine is getting long. There’s so much more I could say about everything, but this was the big picture, and I think I’ve said it.
So God bless us all. Turn to God in prayer, and your prayers will be answered with the Father’s presence. It may not be your laundry list of things you want, which is probably ego-generated, but it is what you will need. So you turn, metanoia. You turn to the Father. You relinquish your ego to the glory of the Father. You ask for the indwelling of the Christ, of the third order of powers. And that is how you find gnosis.
That’s it. God bless us all. And onward and upward.
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