THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA Pages 685 - Gnosticism
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[…] and to be made known that He is the God, the God, the Maker, the Creator, the Prudent, the Judge … that He shall judge… for all belongs to Him. If thy bad inclination assures thee that the nether world will be thy refuge, [know] that thou hast been created and born against thy will, that thou wilt live and die against thy will, and that thou wilt give account before the King of Kings against thy will.” The belief in a “prince of the world” is a reflex of the demiurge. When God said, “I arrange everything after its kind,” the prince of the world sang a song of praise (Hul. 60a). It was be that recited Pa. xxxvii. 25, for it is he, not God, who lives only since the Creation (Yeb. 16b). He desired God to make King Hezekiah the Messiah, but God said, “That is my secret”; God would not reveal to the demiurge His intentions in regard to Israel (Sanh. 94a; comp. Krochmal, l.c. p. 202). The two powers (“shete reshuyot”), a good and an evil, are often mentioned. In order to explain evil in the world the gnostics assumed two principles, which, however, are
The official view, and certainly also the common one, was that founded on Scripture, that God called the world into being by His word (see Ps. Xxxiii. 6, 9: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of its mouth. For he spake and it was done; be commanded, and it stood fast”). According to tradition, however, it required merely an act of His will, and not His word (Targ. Yer. to Gen. translates He willed,” instead of “He spake”). There were materialistic ideas side by side with this spiritual view. The Torah existed 2,000 years before the Creation; it, and not man, knows what preceded Creation (Gen. R. viii. 2). It says, “I was the instrument by means of which God created the world” (Ge. R. i.). This idea is rationalized in the Haggadah by comparing the Torah with the plans of a builder. Rab (200 C.E.), a faithful preserver of Palestinian traditions, refers to the combinations of letters by means of which the world was created (Ber. 58a; Epstein, “Recherches sur le Sefer Yezirah,” p. 6, note 2). The gnosis of the Palestinian Marcus conceived the world to have come into being through the permutation of letters (Graetz, “Gnosticismus und Judenthum,” pp. 105 et seq.). The [Gr.] of the alphabet corresponds to the [Gr.] of the universe (Wobbermin, l.c. p. 128). Epstein calls this view an astrological one, and he expounds it
Curiously enough, the second book of “Jeu”, p. 195, and the “Pistis Sophia,” p. 375 (quoted in Herzog-Hauck, l.c. vi. 734), refer to three kinds of baptism — with water, with fire, and with spirit. It is impossible to say to what extent the Yezirah speculations influenced the Cabala and its principal manual, the Zohar, as well as its prominent adepts, at the close of the Middle Ages and in modern times, as there are no special studies on the subject. Many gnostic elements, as, for example, the syzygy doctrine (in which are found father, mother, and son), have doubtless been preserved in the Cabala, together with magic and mysticism. Gnosis was regarded as legitimate by Judaism. Its chain of tradition, is noted in the principal passage in Hagigah, Johanan b. Zakkai heading the list. Here is found the threefold division of men into hylics,
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