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A couple of weeks ago we looked at the idea that we are not saved by our own good works or by being a nice person because no matter how well-behaved we are, it is never going to be good enough to earn a ticket to the perfection of heaven. The name of that episode is Not By Works. I shared how the Tripartite Tractate and Hart’s translation of the New Testament make clear that we are not judged on our behavior but we are redeemed by the Messiah’s actions rather than our own. The question remains, what happens to people who do not accept the redemption of Christ? Are the unbelievers willingly choosing eternal damnation and the tortures of hell?
One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers, (and all living creatures, including us, are Second Order Powers), all Second Order Powers are redeemed by the Anointed emissary of the Father and all will someday return to the paradise of the Fullness. In other words, everyone’s going to heaven. No one is going to hell, not even the fallen angels. The idea that everyone will be redeemed in the end is called Universal Salvation and it directly contradicts what has become Christian orthodoxy.
This week as I was driving in the car, I listened to a radio preacher speak on this very topic. He was preaching a real fire and brimstone sermon and quoting from a passage out of the book of Matthew in the New Testament designed to put the fear of hell and damnation into his unsaved listeners. The set-up for the passage is: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left” (Matthew 25:31, New International Version).
First off, do you recognize the left and right reference? In the Gnostic Gospels the left represents the kingdom of the demiurge and the right is the kingdom of the Fullness of God. The left represents vice and the right represents virtue. The left represents the bottom-up material cosmos, and the right represents the top-down emanations of the Father. The separating of the left from the right is a common theme that runs throughout the Gnostic Gospel. It is gnosis that Jesus would have known.
In the verse that follows, the King says to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world” (Matthew 25:34). The kingdom spoken of by Jesus is the home of the Second Order of Powers, the place from which we came forth. The King is the governing unit of consciousness of our particular location within the Fullness of the Aeons. Our King is our governing Aeon: this Aeon is called the Son of Man because it is the governing consciousness of the emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness that take the form of us humans.
The passage goes on to describe the virtuous activities of those on the right—feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, offering hospitality to strangers, visiting the sick and those in prison. These activities all fall under the purview of the Simple Golden Rule of assisting one another in the same manner as the cooperative spirit of the Aeons of the Fullness. As a reminder, or in case you haven’t heard this because you are a newcomer to Gnostic Insights, the Simple Golden Rule states that units of consciousness reach out to hold hands with their neighbors, offering information, assistance, and love in order to build something greater than any of them could make on their own. You can read all about this principle in my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate.
Going on with Matthew 25, verse 40, the King says, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).
The traditional rendering of Matthew 25:41 continues:
Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
They will also answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life (Matthew 25:41—46).
Hell and damnation and eternal punishment, right? The evangelical Christians believe they have a clear mandate to help as many humans as possible to escape this horrible fate. But, what if these concepts are based upon mistranslations of Matthew’s book that have been repeated in all subsequent editions of the Bible? That’s what David Bentley Hart’s fresh translation of the original Greek sources proposes. In fact, with the corrected translation of this passage, Hart’s New Testament brings Matthew in line with the equally ancient Gnostic Christian scriptures like the Tripartite Tractate. Let’s take a look at how Hart translates this passage from the original Greek.
“And when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory; And all the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the kid goats, And will set the sheep to his right, but the kid goats to the left. Then the King will say to those to his right, ‘Come, you blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the cosmos” (Matthew 25: 31—34, Hart).
Now we can see that the Kingdom prepared for us was from the foundation of the cosmos, not the foundation of the world. As in the Gnostic gospel, the Kingdom pre-exists the Earth. The Kingdom of the Son of Man is from the Aeonic realm that we call the Fullness of God. It is the home of the Second Order Powers, created by Logos and the Fullness as a response to the Fall. We Second Order Powers were created as the means of bringing the life, love, and remembrance of the Aeonic realm into the universe so as to combat the amnesia of the demiurge.
Kingdom indicates a territory and people under one rule or governance. Usually in the Gnostic gospels we refer to pleromas rather than to kingdoms. But one could as easily call the Pleroma of the Fullness of God the Kingdom of the Fullness. And because the Fullness is arranged as a hierarchy, we can see that the pinnacle of the hierarchy is its King. The Aeon known as Logos was the original top of the Fullness, but he deserted his post and left the Pleroma of the Fullness to reunite with the Father in the Father’s realm of glory. That didn’t work out so well for Logos and he fell out of the ethereal realm. The result of that fall was our material cosmos.
The Fullness of God is a nested, fractal hierarchy. As a hierarchy, Aeons are arranged in a pyramidal shape that culminates in a singleton at the top. There is an ultimate King at the top of the Fullness—that would be the original Son of God, who gave birth to the ALL which gave rise to the Aeons of the Fullness. The Son of Man is an Aeon nested within the original pleroma of the Son of God. We human Second Order Powers are nested within the pleroma of the Son of Man. Later we will see that the Third Order Powers are fractals nested within the pleroma of the Anointed Christ.
Jumping to verse 41 out of Hart’s translation:
Then he will say to those to the left, ‘Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Age prepared for the Slanderer and his angels. For I was hungry and you did not give me anything to eat, I was thirsty and you did not give me drink, I was a stranger and you did not give me hospitality, naked and you did not clothe me, ill and in prison and you did not look after me.’ Then they too will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and did not attend to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did not do it one of the least of these my brothers, neither did you do it to me.’ And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age (Matthew 25: 41—45, Hart).
Now let’s compare verse 41 from the NIV version to verse 41 from Hart:
The traditional rendering of verse 41 is: “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Hart’s more accurate translation says, “Then he will say to those to the left, ‘Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Age prepared for the Slanderer and his angels.” Execrable means “appalling, terrible, dreadful, frightful, disgusting, deplorable, reprehensible, abhorrent.” It does not contain the implication of “cursed” which would be “damned, doomed, ill-fated.” So, Jesus was expressing his disgust with the terrible behavior of those on the left, but he was not dooming or damning them.
And how about the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”? This is an example of misrepresenting the Greek adjective “ainonios” derived from the word aion, or aeon to mean eternal. While aeon is generally translated as an age or a long time, it does not mean eternal. Here at Gnostic Insights we find that the word aeon more often refers to those self-aware conscious entities that dwell in the Pleroma of the Fullness of God. Hart typically translates ainonios and aion as a unit of time. The actual meaning of the word is more akin to our use of the word aeonic as ethereal consciousness. I tend to disagree with translating ainios as a unit of time, finding that translating it as a unit of consciousness works just as well and changes the implication of the text.
I propose that the text could as easily be interpreted as Jesus telling those to the left, “Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Aeons prepared for the Slanderer and his archons.” Or, “Go from me, you execrable ones, into the Aeonic fire prepared for the Slanderer and his archons.” Hart admits, in his postscript, that “ainios” “seems clearly to indicate a qualitatively different—rather than successive—frame of reality, the divine sphere rather than the earthly” (p. 541, Hart). Therefore, I don’t think it’s any stretch to think of ainios as aeonic, and ainos as Aeons of the divine realm of the Fullness rather than a unit of time.
The Slanderer, by the way, is the actual translation of the word “devil.” The Slanderer, also called the Accuser, is the demiurge that runs us down and fills us with guilt and dread. And, of course, the Slanderer’s “angels” are not fallen angels from above, but are what we Gnostics call “archons of the demiurge” and they arose from the demiurge after the Fall.
Now, what is this aeonic fire into which the left is sent? Is it the eternal fire of hell? No, we have seen that “eternal” is not part of the formula. Is this then the well-deserved punishment for the disgusting, uncharitable ones on the left? No, it’s actually not a reference to punishment but to instructive chastening.
According to Hart’s translation of verse 45 and 46, Jesus says, “’Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these my brothers, neither did you do it to me. And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age.’”
In the footnote of Hart’s translation of verse 46, he says, “The word kolasis originally meant “pruning” or “docking” or “obviating the growth” of trees or other plants, and then came to mean “confinement,” “being held in check,” “punishment,” or “chastisement,” chiefly with the connotation of “correction.” He says, Classically, the word was distinguished, by Aristotle for instance, from timoria, which means a retributive punishment only.” Hart’s footnote indicates that later, in 1John 4:18, kolasis refers not to retributive punishment, but to the suffering experienced by someone who is subject to fear because not yet perfected in charity” (p. 53, Hart).
Compare this again to the traditional Christian interpretation of this verse: “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Eternal punishment? No. Aeonic chastening? Yes. Punishment? No. Self-engendered fear? Yes.
This is in line with my gnostic insights on this topic. Those on the left, those who have not accepted the forgiveness and redemption of the Christ, do indeed suffer when they pass away from this life. This suffering is not handed down by an angry God but is rather their own recognition and guilt over their sins and shortcomings. The more sinful an unredeemed person is, the more they suffer when they die. The suffering comes from their own conscience as they see clearly the path of their ego-driven life and the true condition of their soul. There is no more confusion. All is clear. The lies and deception fall away and they come face to face with themselves. They can clearly see the huge chasm between their ego and their aeonic Self. There will be suffering, but not eternal punishment. The good news is that the suffering will pass with recognition of their need for salvation. As I described in the podcast episode called Overcoming Death, this hellish place they will find themselves in after what we call death is unbearable. After a period of denying their need for a Messiah to come help them out of this place where they have been set aside for pruning, they will of their own accord call out to the Savior to rescue them. The moment they repent of all that they now see clearly as their accumulated faults, they will be redeemed. The sins will be pruned away and cast into the fire but not their eternal spark of the One Self that was inside of them, unrecognized. Now the Self can move to the throne of their personhood and they will have forgotten all about their past shortcomings. Yes, even someone as awful as Hitler will forget and be redeemed. They will be able to move from the chastening bardo of death into the glorious realm of the Aeons and the Son of Man.
There will be no remembrance of our shortcomings which have been consumed by the Aeonic fire. Only our righteous behavior will be remembered in eternity. Therefore it stands to reason that righteous people who have walked with the Father during their lifetimes and repented along the way, will have many happy memories in heaven. Those who have lived in ego-driven vice and served the demiurge during their time on Earth will have little left to show for it. They will not remember their past deeds or the bad company they hung around with.
It is a very good thing that we may repent during our lifetimes and move our ego off the throne of our lives. It is a blessing and a lightness of heart when we are redeemed by the love of Christ. We are able to love because he first loved us. We do not lose our free will when we give our lives to the Father through the redemption of the Christ. On the contrary, we are freed from the control of the demiurge and are able to express the love of the ethereal plane here below, on Earth. By our love they shall know us as the children of the Aeons.
Let me know what you think of this good news. This is the Gnostic reformation of the gospel that Jesus taught; the proto-Christianity the pope and the emperor of Rome high-jacked from the faith. Fear of damnation and eternal hell is a construction of Rome. It is not the true gospel. Can I get an Amen?
