Addressing Charles Weisman’s What About the Seedline Doctrine? Part 11, Gnostic Heresies

Addressing Charles Weisman’s What About the Seedline Doctrine? Part 11, Gnostic Heresies

In our last discussion Addressing Charles Weisman’s What About the Seedline Doctrine?, which was Part 10 of this series, we discussed the The Nature of Cain, and how it is that when he was challenged by God to do good, but then immediately went out and killed his brother, that also serves to prove the circumstances of his birth, that he could not do good because “sin lieth at the door”. We also discussed how and why both Cain and Abel were making sacrifices in the first place, since Cain’s rejected sacrifice was the catalyst for his having been challenged, and having killed Abel. Weisman imagined that Yahweh was offering Cain acceptance, but that is not the case at all. Yahweh, being God, certainly knew that Cain was going to fail. His challenge to Cain and Cain’s failure are not an exercise in vanity on the part of God, but rather they serve as a lesson to us, that a bastard will always do evil in the end. The fact that Abel was even making a sacrifice to Yahweh after Cain had done so also serves to illustrate the reasons for Cain’s disqualification, once it is examined within the context of later Scriptures and statements made by the apostles concerning the patriarchs Enoch and Noah. By the act of making a sacrifice Abel was asserting his own claim as rightful successor to his father.

Following that, Weisman began to address the statements which Christ had made to His adversaries in John chapter 8, and he cited verses 41 through 44 of the chapter. Doing that, he made the assertion that in those words of Christ the word father does not really mean father. But if he had cited more of the passage, the overall context would have proven Weisman to be wrong. In fact, even the part he did cite proves him to be wrong, as the Jews themselves certainly did understand Christ to have been speaking about their ancestry, where they answered Him in verse 41 that “We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.” Of course they were wrong, because they were Edomites, something which is also established in the overall context, but if the Jews understood the word father to be literal, and Christ answered along those same lines, how does Weisman claim that the word father is not literal, but only figurative?

Christ went on to answer the Jews by saying “If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.” He did come from God, and the Gospel of Luke makes it a point to prove that in the genealogy of Christ by giving His line of descent and informing us that Adam was a son of God. If the Jews are of Esau, and it is historically demonstrable that they were, then in spite of what they believed, they were bastards, and being bastards they are not true children of Abraham or God. That is the overall context of that discussion in John chapter 8, and Weisman insists it is all about belief while the passage itself proves that it is all about the circumstances of birth and one’s true origin. As we also pointed out, later in John chapter 10 Christ had told these same adversaries “But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you”, referring back to this same conversation where once again we see that He was speaking about race, and not about mere belief or profession. The reason they did not believe Him, according to Christ Himself, is because they were not His people in the first place, again proving that they must have been Edomites, as the writings of Flavius Josephus and Paul of Tarsus also help to prove, along with the prophecies of Ezekiel and Malachi, which we had also cited.

When the words of Christ are accepted in the context in which they are given, making perfect sense in conjunction with Scripture and history, only someone with another agenda would insist that they should be interpreted allegorically. In reference to the Covenants of God, for example, if we insist that father, seed, children, and even tribes are allegorical rather than literal, then the word of God has no meaning, and the “promises to the fathers” which Christ had come to confirm are meaningless. So men attempt to nullify the Word of God by their insistence that certain terms are allegorical rather than literal.

It is perfectly evident that many terms expressed in parables and prophecies are intended to be understood allegorically. That is obvious where Christ said things such as those which are found in Matthew chapter 7, where He said “15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. 16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.” In that passage, the references to animals and trees are really references to people of particular races, and must be allegories because they make no sense whatsoever if they must be interpreted literally. The same is true in the parables of the wheat and the tares or the sheep and goat nations which are found in Matthew chapters 13 and 25.

But that does not mean that the plain words of Christ should be interpreted as allegories, when they make perfect sense if they are interpreted literally, and especially if there is no indication that they are allegories. As we have asserted, if the Jews themselves understood the meaning of His words in John chapter 8 in their literal sense, and He responded accordingly, then we ourselves also must accept them in their literal sense.

The concept that such Biblical passages must be understood allegorically, that father really doesn’t mean father, son or child do not refer to genetic descendants, and seed really does not mean offspring, is very old. In the first century, it is found in Greek philosophy, and then it is found in Gnosticism, or in Philo, who I esteem to be a proto-Gnostic. But those worldly philosophies were rejected by early Christians, and only served to corrupt the later manifestation of Roman Christianity.

Now by necessity we are getting ahead of ourselves. Later in this book, Weisman accuses Two-Seedline believers of following Gnostics, Masons, the Kabbalah and the Talmud, and we hope to address that before this series ends. But here we shall take a brief look at the history of allegorical interpretations of Scripture, and we shall see that it is Weisman who is truly the Gnostic.

First, from the Wikipedia article on Allegorical interpretation of the Bible, we read:

Allegorical interpretation of the Bible is an interpretive method (exegesis) that assumes that the Bible has various levels of meaning and tends to focus on the spiritual sense, which includes the allegorical sense, the moral (or tropological) sense, and the anagogical sense, as opposed to the literal sense…. Allegorical interpretation has its origins in both Greek thought and the rabbinical schools of Judaism. In the Middle Ages, it was used by Bible commentators of Christianity.

First, let me state, as I have already shown in relation to other aspects of Medieval Christianity, that many of the early writers of Christian Bible commentary were in fact Converso Jews, namely Nicholas of Lyra and Paul of Burgos, in the 13th and 14th centuries, and that these Jews among others were cited as authorities even by Martin Luther.

Secondly, as I have also demonstrated elsewhere, the early Christian Church ultimately accepted what we call Replacement Theology, rather than the Covenant Theology which was taught by the apostles, and therefore they were forced into interpreting many terms allegorically rather than literally. But Weisman is supposed to have been an Identity Christian, and therefore a believer in Covenant Theology. According to the plain language of the covenants of God as they are repeated in both Old and New Testaments, father must literally mean father, and seed must literally mean offspring, or the covenants are nullified. Of course, in many other ways we can prove that the covenants are true, and that the words are indeed literal.

Therefore it is Weisman who is adopting Gnosticism and the allegorical interpretation of Scripture in his endeavor to try to disprove Two-Seedline, and the adoption of such a position by Identity Christians nullifies any Identity Christian profession. Weisman cannot have it both ways, he is either an Identity Christian, or he is just another universalist eating out of the hand of the 2nd century Jews who promoted Replacement Theology among early Christians, which is reflected in the life and teachings of so-called “Church Fathers” dating back to the time of the supposedly former Platonist, Justin Martyr and the supposedly former Gnostic, Clement of Alexandria, and his followers, Irenaeus, Origen and Eusebius of Caesareia.

Just like the early Gnostics and the Roman Catholics who followed them, Weisman is insisting that father, children and seed do not mean father, children and seed so that he can corrupt and pervert the plain meaning of Scripture, and here he is doing it to make cover for the Jews.

Now, from an article at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy found at the website of the University of Tennessee at Martin (a town in Tennessee), in a discussion of one of the later developments of Gnosticism :

Ptolemy (or Ptolemaeus, fl. 140 CE) was described by St. Irenaeus as “the blossom of Valentinus’ school” (Layton, p. 276). We know next to nothing about his life, except the two writings that have come down to us: the elaborate Valentinian philosophical myth preserved in Irenaeus, and Ptolemy’s Epistle to Flora, preserved verbatim by St. Epiphanius [a late 4th century bishop of Salamis - WRF]. In the former we are met with a grand elaboration, by Ptolemy, of Valentinus’ own system, which contains a complex anthropological myth centering around the passion of Sophia. We also find, in both the myth and the Epistle, Ptolemy making an attempt to bring Hebrew Scripture into line with Gnostic teaching and New Testament allegorization in a manner heretofore unprecedented among the Gnostics….

As an aside, I believe that Philo was a proto-Gnostic, and his primary endeavor was to synchronize Greek Philosophy and Old Testament Scripture. Continuing with our article:

In his Epistle to Flora (in Epiphanius 33.3.1-33.7.10), which is an attempt to convert an “ordinary” Christian woman to his brand of Valentinian Christianity, Ptolemy clearly formulates his doctrine of the relation between the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, who is merely “just,” and the Ineffable Father, who is the Supreme Good. Rather than simply declaring these two gods to be unrelated, as did Marcion, Ptolemy develops a complex, allegorical reading of the Hebrew Scriptures in relation to the New Testament in order to establish a genealogy connecting the Pleroma, Sophia and her “passion,” the Demiurge, and the salvific activity of Jesus Christ. The scope and rigor of Ptolemy’s work, and the influence it came to exercise on emerging Christian orthodoxy, qualifies him as one of the most important of the early Christian theologians, both proto-orthodox and “heretical.”

With this, it may become evident that the Roman settlement on the so-called Trinity was perhaps an attempt to reconcile many of these diverse philosophical perspectives, or at least, to leave space for those who held them. Now, from the same article, discussing the contemporary Christian heretic Marcion, who rejected the entire Old Testament and many books and had excised many portions of the New Testament which showed that Christianity was indeed directly connected to the Old Testament:

While other Christian thinkers of the era were busy allegorizing the Old Testament in order to bring it into line with New Testament teaching [as they had interpreted it - WRF], Marcion allowed the New Testament (albeit in his own special version) to speak to him as a singular voice of authority—and he formulated his doctrine accordingly. This doctrine emphasized not only humankind’s radical alienation from the realm of their birth, but also their lack of any genealogical relation to the God who sacrificed His own Son to save them—in other words, Marcion painted a picture of humanity as a race displaced, with no true home at all (cf. Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism 1992, p. 164). The hope of searching for a lost home, or of returning to a home from which one has been turned out, was absent in the doctrine of Marcion. Like Pico della Mirandola [a 15th Century Italian Rennaisance philosopher - WRF], Marcion declared the nature of humankind to be that of an eternally intermediate entity, poised precariously between heaven and earth (cp. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 3). However, unlike Pico, Marcion called for a radical displacement of humankind—a “rupture”—in which humanity would awaken to its full (if not innate) possibilities.

So here we see that what we call New-Age thiought is not really new at all, as there is nothing new under the sun. Furthermore, here we see that Marcion also believed Replacement Theology, and went to the extreme of discarding the entire Old Testament and everything else which identified with it. Along with concepts from Plato and Aristotle, many elements of Gnosticism were later incorporated into the thinking of those 4th century so-called Church Fathers upon whom the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches founded their universalist version of Christianity. Because the Gnostics grew out of Alexandrian Jewry, they rejected the plain teachings of Covenant Theology and therefore also the literal meanings of the words of Christ, and especially in the epistles of Paul, in favor of a system of alternative interpretations of words. So father ceased to mean father, children ceased to mean children, and seed no longer referred to physical descendants. By that method, the words of Christ and the apostles could be perverted into their universalist doctrines. By that method, Christianity was also made safe for Jewry, and especially with the introduction of the Trinity concept, where it can be imagined that Jews can worship God apart from Jesus. Charles Weisman is the Gnostic, while he projects Gnostic behavior on us, and I have never cited the Gnostics or mimicked their heresies in any of my proofs of Two-Seedline.

Now we will continue to speak of Weisman’s interpretation of John chapter 8, picking up where we left off he wrote:

Page 31:

Thus when Christ said to some of these same Judean [sic] people that they were of their father the devil, He was employing a metaphor. These people were following lies and false doctrines, and this fact made the devil their father. The devil represents lies, falsehoods and ungodly doctrine, and thus is the originator or father of them, as Jesus states: When he [the devil] speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it (John 8:44).

The devil is said to be the father of lies in the same sense that Karl Marx is the father of communism. The inference is not biological or spiritual but rather metaphorical, a type of figure of speech.

Notice that Weisman does not mention the fact here that Christ had said, in John 8:44, “44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth…” He brings this up again later in his book, but he ignores it in relation to his argument here.

Christ was not calling these people children of the devil, but children of Cain who was a devil. Just like the Jews’ response in verse 41, that they were not born of fornication, this observation also destroys Weisman’s entire argument. Now we must ask, would Christ be describing these Jews as allegorical children of Cain, and if so, then where are Cain’s teachings, or of which wicked philosophy is Cain supposedly the father, in order for that to be true? What line in Scripture can be drawn directly back to Cain, besides the genealogical line, which is fully apparent in the Old and New Testaments?

Neither was Christ calling the devil the “father of lies” in this passage. Christ had said, as it is in the King James Version: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” As we have already asserted, only Cain was a murderer from the beginning, and it is demonstrable that the Edomites did indeed descend, in part, from Cain, as the Kenites had mingled with the Canaanites in early times. Cain spoke two lies when he murdered his brother and God inquired of him, where we read in Genesis 4:9: “8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. 9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?”

In the law later given at Sinai, as well as in the words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, it is evident that each of us should be our brother’s keeper. But Cain even lied blatantly by claiming that he did not know his whereabouts, when in fact he had killed him. But Christ is not calling either the devil or Cain the “father of lies” here. Christ is only saying that Cain, being a liar, was the author of his own lies. “When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own”, in other words, his lies came from his own inherent nature, and not from God. The New American Standard Bible has the last clause of John 8:44 to read “and the father of lies”, but that does not represent the original text, and rather, just like Weisman, they are interpolating their own ideas into their translation. Satan, the devil, is not anywhere called the “father of lies” in Scripture, and in any event, Cain is the subject of that statement, and not Satan or the Devil. However Weisman is at least as good a liar as Cain.

There is something else in this passage which even I myself have only recently realized. It has long been taken for granted by translators, and even I myself fell into this trap, that the last pronoun in John 8:44 is neuter. The last sentence in that verse, in the Christogenea New Testament, reads “When he speaks a lie, he speaks from of his own devices, because he is a liar and the father of it!” But the pronoun, αὐτοῦ, may very well be masculine, as the two are spelled exactly the same, and in that case, it may also refer to Cain rather than to lie. So that last sentence may very well read “When he speaks a lie, he speaks from of his own devices, because he is a liar and his father! [… the father of him!]” This is profound, and I wish I had realized it when I translated John in 2006, but I didn’t even yet realize it when I did my commentary on that chapter of John in June of 2019. That shows me the power of indoctrination, how we understand something a certain way in our minds because we have read or heard it so frequently for so long, that we fail to look at it another way and therefore we may never see the truth. Now I hope to be correcting this oversight in the weeks to come. I have yet to incorporate this into my commentary on John, so I am publishing it here for the first time. It will be added to Part 23 of my commentary on John in the near future.