Talk:Pleroma

I do not believe that Pagels would assert that Paul was a Gnostic and if she would it would be with a great deal of nuance. Without reference, this assertion should be removed. The Gnostics used a wide variety of NT canon to support their theology and Paul was not unique in this regard. If anything, Pagels thesis The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis would highlight the Gospel of John as a centerpiece of Gnostic theology as much as any Pauline work.

Perhaps simply removing "Proponents of the view that Paul was actually a gnostic, such as" would be sufficient.

I'll work on identifying some quotes in the short term. --Olen Watson 16:23, 24 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Your opinion that Pagels does not think that Paul was gnostic is not supported by the evidence, considering she wrote a book titled The Gnostic Paul. --Blainster 23:02, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Also the Apocalypsis of Paul looks pretty gnostic to me. Remember you can't really define gnosticism, it's just like christianity, it has many different points of view. You have to go by the general stuff, and the use of the words "Gohead" or " in bodly form" are quite gnostic. Stratogustav (talk) 00:21, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

I recently bought and read "The Gnostic Paul." The title of Pagels' book does not mean that she thinks that Paul was a Gnostic. It refers to the Valentinian Gnostic exegesis of Paul that she analyzes in this book. She specifically states that she is not proposing that Paul was a Gnostic. Rather, by demonstrating that a coherent Gnostic exegesis existed, and that the Valentinian Gnostics actually cited Paul as the origin of their lineage, Pagels hopes to challenge the received ideas of biblical historians who have largely taken the point of view of the heresiologists and assumed that Paul a priori must be anti-Gnostic. Whether he was or not is not the point Pagels is trying to make. SimonTheSamaritan (talk) 03:11, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Uhh... What about the little caption at the end of the article, under "See Also", which states "However, the Egyptian sage known as Hermes Trismegistus's Pymander gives an interesting account. Hermes states that the divine sovereign showed him that this world is a copy of an ideal world in heaven, created by the darkness to ensnare mankind." Where did that come from? What is it doing there? -Daramane (talk) 21:17, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

"Christian theological contexts: both in Gnosticism generally, and by Paul of Tarsus in Colossians 2.9." Gnosticism, as stated in our article, isn't Christian so much as a preexisting religion that syncretized with Christianity. 128.194.199.41 (talk) 15:04, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Redirect for discussion?
Currently, the word &#8220;fullness&#8221; redirects here. I would imagine that somebody typing &#8220;fullness&#8221; as their search term might know nothing about religion at all. Maybe they meant to look up &#8220;satiety&#8221; instead? I nominated &#8220;fullness&#8221; for RfD, and the consensus was to keep. But one of the commenters mentioned that if I wanted to change it into a disambiguation page then an RfD was unnecessary and that I could &#8220;float the idea on the two Talk pages&#8221;; therefore, if anybody has any further comments, please continue the discussion here. Bwrs (talk) 02:16, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

I think this subject is without sufficient gravity to be a separate entry.
The problem is, it highly inflates the significance of a word into a "universal Christian / Gnostic concept" - which largely is really not true. Most of the time the word is used in a mundane sense, and in the 4 or 5 instances where it implies "all the qualities of God," or "all the qualities of Christ" - the word still has no special or secret meaning. The article is ICONIZING a simple word - perhaps it is sexy and "cosmological" sounding - but it means what it means and that is all. It is incidental to the usage - and that is rarely significant in any theological or theoretical sense.

Thus in order to fix this article - there would be nothing left of it. It is a failed draft at an article - that is all.

--Xgenei (talk) 11:05, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Pagels -- a heretical proponent?
There is no reference on Pagels being a heretical proponent. It seems like Pagels is seen as a heretic by the person who wrote this -- which is not an objective fact. Heresy is relative to every religion. Araph (talk) 10:42, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Removed the text. Araph (talk) 11:07, 30 May 2018 (UTC)