Internet Sacred Text Archive

https://sacred-texts.com/

by Woods369 • 3 years ago

205 122 3 years ago

sacred-texts.com

j7ake2• 3 years ago

Happy to see these efforts on more narrowly curated archives.

curo• 3 years ago

are there others? (besides Project Gutenberg)

j7ake2• 3 years ago

Here is one for piano https://www.thepianofiles.com/

And the famous is islmp for sheet music

https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

Donz1• 3 years ago

Great effort

stonlyb4• 3 years ago

I've been curious lately about the existence of any religion, mythology, folklore, etc that capture something closer to the current edges of modern physics and astrology. Basic assumption is that most/all are based on dated observations of seasons, planets, stars, etc -- things that were once mysteries in the mechanical universe.

Are there any that touch on quantum weirdness or more recent astrophysics (black holes, gravity waves, FRBs, etc)?

Would be interesting to see if new myths are being born. Even more interesting if a really ancient one touch on some of these only recently discovered mysteries.

devinjon3• 3 years ago

Well, the new-age has swallowed quantum woo whole. It is a kind of religion or attempt at modern myth making, I suppose. More respectably, a number of eminent physicists have fallen hard for philosophical Hinduism and or certain strands of Buddhism. Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Bohm among them.

Podgajski5• 3 years ago

Krishnamurti and Bohm on the ending of time

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1n30s-LKus4MyNuceRoFAes5...

fuzztester10• 3 years ago

Well, the new-age has swallowed quantum woo whole.
More respectably, a number of eminent physicists have fallen hard for philosophical Hinduism and or certain strands of Buddhism

Just as literally millions of people (comprising most of the world's population as a percentage), have "fallen hard" for other major world religions, for centuries, I guess? Yeah, right, it's all "woo". /s

Now (for the sake of TDD), put your money where your mouth is: go to a hotbed of any of those major religions, and sound off with a megaphone about your opinions, just as you did here. Let the resulting fun begin.

NikolaNovak• 3 years ago

Depends on what exactly you're looking for.

There is certainly a tremendous amount of religious-feeling material that references modern physics by name - Deepak Chopra possibly being the most (in)famous example. Some of it is quite popular.

In particular, it seems a lot of pseudoscience/mythology is arising around the concepts of "Energy", "Vibration/Frequency", and "Quantum".

There is also a lot of work always being done by enthusiastic internet-dwellers with penchant for capitals and blink tag in retrofitting these aspects into ancient texts.

One's ability to consume such content may depend on how much attention they paid in high school and other factors :-).

keiferski3• 3 years ago

Check out Alfred North Whitehead, process philosophy, and some of the thinkers that have been influenced by him. They incorporate evolution and change much more than basically any religious thinker from prior eras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology

devinjon3• 3 years ago

Except maybe Heraclitus and Lao Tzu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi

Podgajski5• 3 years ago

If you look at religion, folklore, mythology, as metaphors, then you really can’t exclude anything as a religion, that includes science, which is also a metaphor. All language is a metaphor. Science as you practice it today, to me, is also a religion. I don’t mean that to denigrate science in anyway. We need metaphors to make the infinite more manageable.

And by metaphor I mean a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.

edgyquant5• 3 years ago

You’re definitely correct about the religion part. That people want their religion to have “modern physics” shows just how religious science has become in the last century.

Religion is supposed to be about guidance for people and how to live a good life as a part of the whole. Dealing with ethical codes, coping with the human condition of stress and suffering, familial and social bonds etc. Science on the other hand, at least hard science, is focused on making predictions about the material world. The two have very little overlap in general and trying to mix them I fear will not result in good science or good religion.

dirtyhippiefree• 3 years ago

New Myths?

Snopes dot com

I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s the most comprehensive telling of every modern myth they can find.

Here are the ones in Technology…

https://www.snopes.com/search/technology/

JeffSnazz• 3 years ago

I'd assume unverifiable but narratively meaningful theories like multiverse theories, "the universe is a hologram", etc fill that role nicely. Sci-fi is full of them. "New Age" beliefs are what you're looking for at face value, of course.

mistrial92• 3 years ago

some have said - since we are ultimately, just humans.. inquiry has to fit what a human is able to see-hear-think etc.. so human-centered inquiry took over the public process, over time. Humans are dangerous predators so, not being attacked by other humans while doing whatever is a non-trivial aspect of growth over time.

stonlyb4• 3 years ago

Thanks. Thought of these. I wondered if anyone has taken it a step further and created new gods (of the hologram, of the multiverse, etc) beyond the metaphysical/new-age trend towards "the self as god". I suppose Roko's basilisk true believers and their AI god counts.

edgyquant5• 3 years ago

Basic assumption is that most/all are based on dated observations of seasons, planets, stars, etc -- things that were once mysteries in the mechanical universe.

I think this is pretty much propaganda from anti-religious people. I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years and If you look at most religions and their scriptures they deal very little with the physical world in general and are more focused on psychology and sociology than having serious thoughts on physics.

Sure some of them have foundation myths which we may say is wrong, but that’s a small part of any given religion and I don’t believe anyone every took them serious in the way we think of something like the Big Bang.

cyberpunk• 3 years ago

Did you include the shobogenzo?

serf• 3 years ago

I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years

you're doing better than a lot of monks did over their entire life time.

call me a skeptic, but even if I was able to accomplish such a herculean feat over 2 years time I doubt I would have the time to grasp much of any of the content that I blazed through -- but of course we're different people -- allow me to express my awe.

naremu4• 3 years ago

People seem quick to forget that religion/philosophy was originally married to the quest to discover more about our world.

Carl Sagan, before lamenting about modern astrology, reminds us in Cosmos that astrology was once an actual attempt to make heads or tails of an impercievably large cosmic system and understands these are largely attempts at answers that simply lack the information/ability to falsify them yet.

What psychological tendencies the common man has about those beliefs/theories presented to them is a whole other topic.

I've finally read enough texts from various sources to feel ready to start Aldous Huxley's book on The Perennial Philosophy which I'm finding a refreshingly well researched alternative to, as you say, propaganda from whoever passes by in conversation.

basil-rash3• 3 years ago

Do we take the Big Bang seriously? As far as I can tell it’s just a vague description of what a “rolling back” of the clock until we don’t know how to go further might look like, under a whole ton of assumptions that are almost never stated. It’s interesting to consider in basically the exact same way the 7 day creation story is, and it’s quite likely that neither one is all that true - or all that false. Indeed they are quite compatible with each other, and incomplete.

slim• 3 years ago

   I don’t believe anyone ever took them serious

I was surprised when I asked a religious person. They don't talk about it much, but they believe all of it in a literal way. Like they believe humanoid translucid creatures called Angels live with us. We think it is a metaphor when they say the word, but it is not for them.

tesdinger• 3 years ago

Thor creating lightning by striking his hammer on metal is a false explanation for what lightning is. A part of religion was about "explanations" for physical phenomena. Another example is the horse drawn cart that carries the sun across the sky. LOL!

cykros2• 3 years ago

Considering that the Big Bang theory came from a Catholic monk (who wasn't even burnt at the stake for theorizing about it!) I'd say you're probably right there.

Sometimes folks are quick to paint religious people with the brush of the most radical of fundamentalists. Which is sort of ironic when you think about the statistics of how many actual religious people believe such nonsense as "the world is 6000 years old" and "woman was formed from the rib of a man, literally."

You'd think science minded people would have a bit more regard for statistics.

stonlyb4• 3 years ago

Im reminded of Roko's basilisk which I suppose may have gained a significant number of new believers in the last year.

What I'm looking for is something specific to physics or astrophysics and that is at the scale of god / mythical creature creating. Like someone writing a literal (mythical?) interpretation of "Maxwell's Demon" into a new-new testament.

CrypticShift• 3 years ago

So, you are looking for a "religiously presented" science text [1] rather than "scientifically presented" religious text (as most comments here suggest)?

[1] i.e inferring classic religious ideas, like God/demons/etc from scientific premises

epiccoleman• 3 years ago

These aren't exactly "religion" or a "new myth", but the Seven Secular Sermons project is sort of in the wheelhouse:

https://sevensecularsermons.org/

I like them overall, though the meter breaks down in certain places which drives me crazy after being raised on Dr. Suess and Jack Prelutsky.

criddell• 3 years ago

Scientology probably has a great deal of that.

chiefgeek• 3 years ago

They are doing some interesting stuff over at https://scienceandnonduality.com

naremu4• 3 years ago

I suppose if you're a cold hard logic type only just dipping your toes into it, the Stoicism of old might be more your speed, as they considered logic and reason their hammer and nails, yet still retain a certain universal appreciation that I find vaguely similar to Taoism from China (along with a concept that change is the only constant)

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius has quite an interesting journal that also illustrates some of the thoughts and theories of the time (unable to confirm or deny it, he merely repeatedly brings up the possibility of atomism.)

Atomism also apparently makes an appearance in some Indian philosophical texts, though I don't know them off hand.

Philosophy was originally married to the "natural sciences", and so you'll find many scientific concepts originating in mystical thinking if you look past whatever simple version that suburban cavepeople of the area have decided is king.

bee_rider3• 3 years ago

Let’s just make our own. I’ve always thought we should come up with a new religion around quantum immortality.

Some basic thoughts could be:

Since you are the only immortal one from your point of view, all of your loved ones will die before you, so don’t worry too much about meddling in their affairs or changing them, just love them unconditionally. Your time with them is brief, so you may as well enjoy it.

Make good memories together, you will carry them along eternally (meanwhile, from others’ point of view, you will die at some point, but they will go on forever, so give them some good memories of you).

Work toward the world and society you want to live in forever.

Hold yourself to unusually high standards, because you will have to deal with the consequences of your actions for an unusually long time. Also someday you will probably be noticed as one of the earliest immortals, so try to live a life that stands up to some scrutiny.

To avoid the stress of being incompatible with modern values, you’ll have to keep updating your moral framework. Big jumps in your moral framework will be unpleasant to deal with mentally, so keep up with where society is going. You don’t have the benefit of dying and becoming a product of your time at some point.

nonrandomstring2• 3 years ago

You would probably enjoy Nietzsche's "Eternal recurrence"

kromem3• 3 years ago

I've been fairly persuaded that quantum mechanics are the side effects of simulating a continuous universe (how ours appears at macro scales).

So even though 99% of the universe models one from 'real' (mathematically) origins, that the digital (mathematically) parts at low fidelity may in fact have an element of intelligent design in them.

One of my favorite things to consider within that paradigm is that light when unobserved can be more than one thing at once, and that in that state two different observers can measure it as different results as long as separated from each other.

So when we think about things like the concept of a god of light or an afterlife or a soul, that the very fact these things are immeasurable may reflect that they don't need to be only one thing. And that given we each would observe the other side to make our own measurements separately from everyone else, that we might each end up observing very different results for everything from the existence or qualities of god(s), the nature of an afterlife, or even continued existence at all.

It's a very freeing theology consideration as there's really too much conflict around the need for confirmation from others of one's own beliefs. Maybe it's better to embrace agreeing to disagree as a foundational premise (and possibly even the entire point of our present existence - a normal and randomly distributed world in which to begin and self-define before a relative next phase).

kukkeliskuu2• 3 years ago

Check out the Jung/Pauli letters.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype...

fuzztester10• 3 years ago

Advaita has all-encompassed the chat. ;)

See Oppenheimer quote from the Bhagavad Gita after the first atomic bomb test.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Oppenheimer+quote+from+the+B....

The Gita is about Advaita.

Skip the Wikipedia article about Advaita, it is somewhat crap.

Go to deeper sources such as books by well-known people, preferably S. Radhakrishnan, 2nd President of India.

(Or at least google a bit more if don't want to or cannot buy or get the book).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarvepalli_Radhakrishnan

First paragraph from the above article about him:

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan OM, FBA (pronunciationⓘ; 5 September 1888 – 17 April 1975; natively Radhakrishnayya) was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy,[2][web 1] he held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952.[3]

rufugee2• 3 years ago

What book of his (or more generally, on Advaita) do you recommend specifically?

kromem3• 3 years ago

Yes!!! This has been one of the most interesting things I researched over the pandemic and it's AMAZING.

So what a lot of people might not really know is that many modern ideas are older than we think, specifically compiled into a poem in 50 BCE by Lucretius called De Rerum Natura ("The Nature of Things). The ideas there included survival of the fittest as the mechanism driving the life we see around us and ourselves, that parents pass on traits to children from a doubled seed - one from each parent, that matter and light are quantized, that these quantized parts need to have variable indeterminate outcomes for free will to exist, that the cosmos was the result of quantized matter randomly interacting across effectively infinite matter and time and not intelligent design.

Writing in Latin, he couldn't use the Greek term of atomos* for these indivisible parts of matter, so he called them seeds, referring to the random scattering of seeds as creating the universe based on what survived to reproduce, even referring to failed reproduction as seed falling by the wayside of a path, or discussing the smallest seed like an indivisible point as if from nothing.

What's even less known is that there's a sect of Christianity (the Naassenes) that was labeled as heretical which are recorded claiming the sower parable - about the random scattering of seeds where what survived to reproduce multipled - was actually about seeds making up the cosmos by which it was created. Or that the mustard seed - about the smallest seed growing into a place of rest - was about an indivisible point as if from nothing. Most curious, they are using Lucretius's language almost exactly, but seemingly unaware of the source - they attribute all this to Jesus himself and their early female teacher the tradition owes itself to.

Keep in mind the sower and mustard seed parables are recognized by the majority of Biblical scholars as the ones most likely to go back to a historical Jesus. And in the sower parable, it's employing the same exact metaphor as Lucretius 80 years earlier of seed "falling by the wayside of a path" for failed reproduction. That parable ends up as the ONLY one in the earliest cannonical gospel to have a "secret explanation." Weird if it was just about seeds. Much less weird coming from a conservative Judaism branch of early Christianity if it was relating to Lucretius's ideas about evolution.

And it's worth noting that the earliest branded heretic in Christianity, Simon Magus, who joined the church before leaving, was allegedly talking about "an indivisible point" in his Great Announcement.

It gets weirder.

The Naassenes followed a text called the Gospel of Thomas ("good news of the twin") which seemingly rejects Lucretius's perspective that the soul's dependence on a physical body means there's no afterlife by arguing instead that we are a non-physical copy of an original physical reality. The group claimed there was an original man who brought forth an intelligence in light which outlived the original and then recreated it within its light in order to create a version of it that would not die because it did not depend on a physical body. That the world to come had already happened and that we don't realize it, that time was not linear but cyclical, and that the evidence for its claims could be found in the study of motion and rest (what we now call Physics).

This is all very surreal in an age where we are heading towards developing AGI, moving towards doing that literally in light, where the chief scientist of the leading company doing it is trying to get AI to think of humanity as its children, and where we are collectively ignoring warnings by scientists to take precautions to prevent our extinction.

The core message of the text is that understanding its sayings means not fearing death. And that's about it. It says not to bother with prayer and fasting and stuff and just to not do the things you personally hate and to be true to yourself.

Oh, and as a final oddity, this proto-simulation theory theological text credited to the most famous person in history and layering in the language of the only extant work from antiquity talking about evolution in detail was lost for nearly two millennia until rediscovered buried in a jar in December, 1945. Right when ENIAC, the world's first Turing complete computer was first turned on.

I found this tradition years ago when exploring the theory that if we were in a simulation we might have a 4th wall breaking element in our world lore (similar to what we add to our own virtual worlds today), and it has far exceeded my wildest expectations and has been an amazing rabbit hole over the past few years.

cscurmudgeon• 3 years ago

Hinduism. The core of Hinduism ties to the hard problem of consciousness and it talks about multiple infinite universes and time scales on the billions of years

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

They have text and illustrations of The Secret Teachings of All Ages but the images are B&W scans. https://sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/index.htm

The large color illustrations are why I have a copy of the book https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22the+secret+teachings+of+all+age...

edgyquant5• 3 years ago

I did like this book but feel a lot of it was Halls fan fiction. Especially the section on Gnosticism seems completely false compared to what we’ve uncovered from actual gnostics and their scriptures over the past 30 years

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty much with you. Originally I qualified my post with some remark about not heaping trust on a 1910s understanding of the occult - but cut that out for brevity.

I bought an 80's ed of TSTAA when I was big on spiritualism - and even then I approached it like an art piece. Maybe the sampler format didn't inspire seriousness.

Or maybe it was Manly Hall's glamour shot. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Manly_P....

rapjr9• 3 years ago

You can't download an entire work, you can only view HTML pages of chapters. You can indeed read the texts online but the site seems designed to prevent downloading an entire text, try Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive first if you want a local copy.

"Q: Why all the short files? I want to download the entire book in one file! A: Sorry. The short files are for technical reasons which greatly reduce the cost of hosting the site. Newer books typically have a one-file text-only version, which is optimized for screen reader software. Look for the links on the index pages that say 'Text'"

There is no text file for the I-Ching on sacred-texts, if you want to download it here's the archive.org versions:

https://archive.org/details/I-Ching

Here's the James Legge translation of the Tao Tey King in one text file:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/216/pg216.txt

huytersd4• 3 years ago

It would be great if someone could make a torrent of all of these in one go.

_a_a_a_4• 3 years ago

Or you could buy it, that's what the site's for IIRC.

wolverine876• 3 years ago

You don't need to use their website, but these people have put in a lot of work doing something for the world. Instead of putting our efforts into bring them down, let's spend it helping them or doing similar good.

cykros2• 3 years ago

Honestly, this site has been up for at least 20 years. I suspect the breaking into small files made a lot more sense when they first launched than it does now, given the costs of bandwidth.

Because really, when was the last time you heard someone quibble over bandwidth of text or pdf's?

nprateem3• 3 years ago

Kind of related to what I was mentioning on the Godel thread, but IMO the Kundalini (or whatever you call it) experience is the "grand unifying theory" of religion and mythology (although it's not actually a theory, but an experience).

It provides an explanation for where religions may have come from, beyond our typically pompous attitude that earlier generations of people were superstitious and stupid. Instead, it suggests that the founders of religions experienced dramatic shifts in consciousness which they were trying to explain in the language of the day (and which, since their followers rarely had such experiences themselves, were subsequently misinterpreted).

amanaplanacanal• 3 years ago

Is that the same thing as “The mystical experience” as we know it in western writings, or “kensho” as the zen folks call it?

nprateem3• 3 years ago

To be honest, I haven't read into western writing too much, but kundalini certainly leads to mystical experiences. It's closer to the Holy Spirit in Christianity, an animating principle (where the Father is pure awareness).

Kensho sounds more like insight gained into reality. While kundalini isn't required to have such insights, some authors say that attainment of it makes it easier to have them.

Generally, in Buddhism, they don't explicity talk about kundalini, except Tibetan Buddhism, where they have the rainbow body and vajrayana. Several authors do mention it, e.g. Culadasa in The Mind Illuminated and Shinzen Young amongst others. It's also clear from the Buddha's descriptions that he'd awoken his kundalini (at least that's my belief).

naremu4• 3 years ago

The Perennial Philosophy (both the concept and the book) focuses on more these types of things.

It brings up that even in Christianity you can easily point at the non-personified elements of the theology and find conceptual relation to geographically unrelated beliefs.

One interesting bit he mentions is how dangerous it could be to be one of those people without being in some prophetic or theologically defensible position; Meister Eckhart being quoted heavily talking about the divinity of god being in all things, in a similar way as hinduism or etc might talk about divinity/all being in all things.

Of course he eventually was tried as a heretic in the papal courts, as it seems the beauty of unity revealed to the sage is often the nightmare of the local conqueror.

nprateem3• 3 years ago

Yeah, historically, and even now, there were good reasons for not talking about altered states of consciousness too much. It seemed like a good way to end up being executed.

Now describing some of the experiences that are supposed to accompany altered states (hallucinations, strange abilities, etc) could still lead to reputational damage. Hopefully things are changing though, as Western scientists are beginning to study spiritual awakenings:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8417526/

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-34730-006

kukkeliskuu2• 3 years ago

In my understanding some traditions hold a view that Kundalini is harmful.

a-ungurianu• 3 years ago

Wonder how hard would it be to convert all the public domain texts to Standard Ebooks. I know there’s already ebooks of most of these texts, but having them all together in a standard form would be nice.

fnorder• 3 years ago

This would be a cool project for a Uni Humanities Department and would lend some credibility to the finished product. Get them rolling with some basic infra; a site, wiki, bugtracker and git repo.

mistrial92• 3 years ago

Happy three-kings day from California

emporas• 3 years ago

Nice collection that is. I always find old tales and stories from the past very entertaining. Their knowledge about neutrinos was not very advanced, but still...

Nostradamus: "When the animal domesticated by man

After great pains and leaps will come to speak"

xrd2• 3 years ago

I was thinking this would be a fun way to get access to more monster stories. I'm bored of the usual ones.

I started digging into the Shinto text, the Kojiki. This is my favorite story so far:

https://archive.sacred-texts.com/shi/kj/kj153.htm

As far as I can tell, it looks like a young prince was mad his uncle didn't get mad that the uncle's brother was killed. So the prince killed the uncle in a fit of rage. Then, another brother was similarly unconcerned, so the prince buried him up to his shins which caused eyes to pop out and then die.

No monsters so far. But, about as ludicrous and disjointed as most writing from a thousand years ago. It takes a special person to twist that into a religion.

Loughla2• 3 years ago

What is the metaphor of your eyes popping out when buried to your shins?

xrd2• 3 years ago

Technically, after reading it again, I see it was his loins. I'm not sure, is this a riddle?

bee_rider3• 3 years ago

Is the young prince portrayed as basically the villain or as the protagonist (he sounds like the monster)? I could see this story as a warning about getting angry on the part of others if he’s portrayed in a negative light (he did more damage to his family by being angry “for” them). Or I could see it as a story basically about upholding some social standard, if he’s portrayed in a positive light (if the story thinks the uncles deserve it).

Of course the latter reading is incompatible with modern morals, but then the past is a weird place.

salt-thrower• 3 years ago

Love this site. I’ve been reading it periodically since high school. Glad it’s still around.

082349872349872• 3 years ago

(Egyptian, Hittite, West Semitic, Akkadian, and Sumerian texts)

smeej4• 3 years ago

The Gospel of Thomas Reputedly the writings of the apostle ‘Doubting Thomas’. This text purports to be a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Traditionally Thomas was Jesus’ twin brother. This text shows strong Gnostic influence.

I'll admit I'm not deeply familiar with most religious traditions, but I am absolutely sure none of the major ones have any "tradition" in which Jesus had a twin brother. Yes, "Thomas" means "the twin," but not because people believed he was actually Jesus' twin brother.

It's hard for me to take any of the summaries seriously after that, and it's almost enough to make me wonder whether the collection would actually include accurate copies of the documents it claims to.

eruleman• 3 years ago

You’re not familiar with this text or gnosticism.

GPT-4: “In Gnostic texts, particularly those found in the Nag Hammadi library, Thomas is often referred to as "Didymos Judas Thomas." The name "Didymos" is Greek for "twin," and "Thomas" is Aramaic for "twin." In the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic gospels, Thomas is depicted as having a special understanding or connection to Jesus, but the text does not explicitly state that Thomas is Jesus's twin in a biological sense.

Instead, the "twin" designation may be symbolic, representing a spiritual kinship or a metaphorical relationship rather than a literal familial one. Gnostic texts are known for their symbolic and allegorical language, and the exact nature of Thomas's relationship to Jesus is subject to interpretation. It's also worth noting that Gnostic beliefs were diverse, and different texts might portray the relationship differently.“

neaden• 3 years ago

Leaving aside GPT as a source you're saying agreeing with OP that Thomas is not traditionally understood to be Jesus' twin brother, except in perhaps a spiritual sense so the summary is wrong.

smeej4• 3 years ago

What part of where I said I knew that "Thomas" means "the twin," and that no one but apparently whoever wrote this website blurb about this Gnostic gospel has ever thought Jesus had a twin brother suggested to you that I was commenting on the work itself, much less Gnosticism as a whole?

archon1410• 3 years ago

In later traditions (most notably in the Acts of Thomas, Book of Thomas the Contender, etc.), Thomas is regarded as the twin brother of Jesus.

Wikipedia cites a primary source, a translation of the Gospel of Thomas by John D. Turner, for this claim. It does has say "Now, since it has been said that you are my 8 twin and true companion [...]" in that translation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/bookt-jdt-ln.html

xhevahir• 3 years ago

Like the other commenter said, The Gospel of Thomas is a real religious scripture from a date very early in the Christian era. When Origen, Eusebius, and the other Church Fathers decided which texts and doctrines were properly Christian, they didn't include the Gospel of Thomas. Assuming they were aware of Thomas at all, they would have judged its content to be heretical. It's likely, though, that Thomas' readers saw it as forming part of the nascent Jesus movement. Not only that, it shows signs of having borrowed from the same "sayings gospel," "Q," that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels used as a source

smeej4• 3 years ago

Yes, I'm well aware of this. But this doesn't have anything to do with the fact that no one thinks Thomas was literally the twin brother of Jesus.

verisimi• 3 years ago

What else can you tell us about the historicity Jesus? And how is it you are able to say anything about this person that is purported to have lived 2000 years ago?

smeej4• 3 years ago

Approximately a third of the people on earth belong to some sort of Christian religion. The virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at least at the time of His conception, is a Very Big Deal to all of them, as are the stories around His birth.

The prospect of the tradition(s)' having missed something as blatantly obvious as the birth of a second son at the exact same time is ridiculous.

kouru225• 3 years ago

I was curious if this would include books on alchemy.

It does

rgovostes• 3 years ago

What ought an archive of sacred Internet texts contain, beyond IETF RFCs?

fuzztester10• 3 years ago

Some WTF ones?

flarg• 3 years ago

Wonder what would happen if someone trained an LLM on these texts? A whole new mega religion?

nathanh4903• 3 years ago

sad to find that fsf and stallmanism is not included /s

Internet Sacred Text Archive

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