DeConick A.D

150
JOHN AND THE DARK COSMOS
humans generally—from their enslavement to the fallen angels who ruled
the world (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.23.1, 3, 5).
The Simonians disparaged the Mosaic law, which they believed had
been created by the autocratic angels to perpetuate human enslavement
(Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.23.3; Hippolytus, Refutation 6.14; Epiphanius,
Panarion 21.4.5). As long as humans remained ignorant of the Father
and instead obeyed laws that made them servants to the fallen angels,
the spirit could not be released. The spirit remained bound to the bodies
and the world in which the fallen angels had incarcerated it.
It is easy to see how the new converts could have applied this mythology
of Simon to Jesus. The Simonians who were converted by the missionaries
from Jerusalem would have transferred large parts of their previous
religious conceptions about Simon to Jesus and would have reconfigured
the rest as they began constructing the foundational mythology of
Johan nine Christianity. Or, to put it another way, they would have come
to understand Jesus by adjusting Simon’s frame. This reframing of Jesus
became the basis for their new Christian community. The understanding
of Jesus as prophet and Messiah, preached by the Jerusalem missionaries,
was blended with the Simonian Gnostic mythology of a universal savior,
the Son sent to earth from a distant, unknown Father to overcome the
sinister forces that had enslaved the human spirit and now ruled the world
with shrewd laws.
The fourth Gospel shows us how a particular Christian community was
founded. It all started in a Samaritan village, when a small team from the
Jerusalem church established a mission among the Simonians who lived
there. According to the book of Acts, the mission was established very
early in the history of Christianity, not even a decade after Jesus’ death.
These new converts were not blank slates. They already had preconceptions
of their world as a hostile place controlled by fallen angels who
had imprisoned God’s spirit within the human body. The teachings about
Jesus the prophet and Messiah, which they received from the Jerusalem
missionaries, were blended into their preestablished Gnostic frame of the
superman, the powerful miracle worker and healer who was God’s son,
sent to reveal the unknown Father and redeem the human spirit, which
was a piece of God trapped in a dark world. This is how, in the fourth
Gospel, the prophet and Messiah Jesus becomes God incarnate. In many
ways, it is a game of Simon Says.