According to some early Christian texts, the creator is a blind, blaspheming, inept abortion. His blasphemy is a declaration of self-deification drawn directly from Jewish scripture: “I am God, and there is no other!” (Isa 45:22). Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon (late second century CE), believed that Christian Gnostics were guilty of blasphemy for positing a God higher than the creator.
Christian Gnostics thought likewise about competing Christian groups
who ascribed the passions of jealousy and wrath to the supreme God. God, according to a Platonic theology widespread in Late Antiquity, can
only be good. It was sinful, therefore, to depict him as the author of
belligerent punishments and the creator of “evils” (kaka) (Isa 45:7,
LXX). The real blasphemy, in this view, is depicting God as jealous of
humanity’s divine qualities and potential.
Gnostic Christians
criticized their opponents by creating a kind of tabloid version of
Yahweh, an exposé via exegesis, a rude unveiling of who the god of
Genesis really is, in their view—an idol. Their new Genesis stories
deconstructed the exculpating theologies of their opponents. The
sometimes angry, autocratic, and jealous god of Jewish scripture is not
hidden under a veil of allegory. Rather, he is depicted in living and lurid colors. His name is Yaldabaoth, aka Samael (“blind god”) and Saklas (“fool”).
Strikingly,
these Gnostic revisionary myths depict Yahweh as a self-deifying king.
The story of self-deifying kings was already part of Jewish mythology.
Jews and Christians would readily think of Helel (Lucifer), the Tyrian
tyrant, or Antiochus IV Epiphanes. These ancient rulers wanted to be
like God, and in their putative vanity and hubris claimed to be divine.
In their poetry, Jews had parodied these putative self-deifiers with
mock dirges. Now the parody of divine folly was turned against the Jews.
Lucifer, who became Satan in Christian mythology, was the main, though implicit, template for Yaldabaoth in Gnostic sources. Satan or Lucifer was widely considered to be the primeval self-deifier who rebelled against the supreme God. In Gnostic mythology, however, the creator himself becomes the rebel
against the real God. In other words, the creator—who is more primeval
than the devil—plays the devil’s archetypal role....<<<Read More>>>....
