This post (part 1 of 3) is about the “Lefāfa Ṣedeḳ: Book of Life”, also known as the “Bandlet of Righteousness” with the subtitle “An Ethiopic Book of the Dead.” The book of the dead subtitle is definitely a play on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but is this a similar style text? Actually, …
Author Archives: bP
The Virgin Mary’s Vision of Hell
Here lately I have been going down the rabbit hole of Ethiopic Christianity, particularly the apocrypha texts from that tradition. It has been a fascinating journey and I am only getting started. I am working on a blog entry about the “Lefāfa Ṣedeḳ” but in the meantime, I wanted to post about this text that …
Hymn of the Savior
The Apocryphon of John, The Secret Revelation of John, The Secret Book of John…..whatever you want to refer to it, this particular text, next to the Gospel of Thomas, is perhaps the most well known “Gnostic” text out there. It survives in at least four manuscripts, more so than any other gnostic text. I do …
Christ’s descent into Hell
Holy week passed earlier this month and with this post, I wanted to reference the Saturday between crucifixion and resurrection, that being the “Harrowing of Hell”. I always thought of the idea of Jesus going to Hell on a “rescue” mission to save souls was quite intriguing. So where does one go to read about …
The Gospel of Sophia
To continue with my OpenAI experiments, this time I wanted to see how well it put together a “Gospel” and I decided to do this with Sophia. I had the chatbot use the parameters of it only referencing “The Secret Book of John” for the story (as the Sophia myth does change somewhat amongst other …
Mark, Thomas and GPT
To continue with the chat GPT experiment, I decided to cross check the Gospel of Mark with the Gospel of Thomas. Yes, I realize Mark’s Gospel is pretty much told in Matthew and Luke. That being said, this post will be set up similar to the last one with OpenAI’s chatGPT entries in big bold …
Matthew, Luke, Thomas and ChatGPT
The buzz lately in the technology world is the artificial intelligence chat bots. I like to play around with new technologies (hence the abundance of A.I. art that graces my blog), thus I decided to give OpenAI’s chat GPT a shot. This program is quite interesting. If you have never used it, it’s sort of …
Missing fragment from the Gospel of Philip?
As I continue down the rabbit hole that is the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, I noticed a fragment that I have read before. While describing the Gnostics (Borborites), Epiphanius mentions they use a “Gospel of Philip” and then writes out a saying from said gospel. I have edited the saying (i.e. took out his …
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Norea, wife of Noah
Norea (Noria) is a figure that pops up in various Gnostic texts. The most popular Norea text is titled “The Thought of Norea” and is presented as a prayer in the third person to the Monad. If you haven’t read it, here it is: Father of All, Ennoia of the Light, dwelling in the heights …
Two more readings
I have a video clip of two more readings I would like to share. The first reading is from the Gospel of Philip and it’s about how Jesus appears to everyone. Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not appear as he was, but in the manner in which they would be able …
Culmination of Wisdom 