Desert Snake
Veteran Member
However these ideas do not represent the Yahweh found in the Old Testament, who is very personal. Your description of the demiurge, clearly matches Yahweh, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. Your idea requires some sort of gnostic variance, where we don't get that idea from traditional religion. You get that idea, the 'impersonal yahweh', concept, from much later religious morphology, it doesn't fit the scriptures, and even if it was a belief extant at the time, since the scriptures present a totally different yahweh, then you're talking about something abstract. The yahweh that this group believes in even though it isn't the g-d portrayed in scripture, at all.The relationship between God and the demiurge resembles the relationship between Yahweh / the Father and Jesus. The idea that God is pure spirit fits with the author of John's various remarks about 'No man has seen God', leaving Jesus as the mediator:
John 1:18 No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.
John 5:37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness to me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen;
John 6:46 Not that any one has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father.
I can't think of an example of Paul putting it like that. There's:
1 Timothy 6:16 who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
but I Timothy is these days regarded as a pseudepigraph.
Way too theoretical, and even odd for gnostics, who were literal.
Jesus says this, so forth. It's literal representation, not completely non'textual