It is said that, before a pivotal battle, Emperor Constantine saw a cross in the sky and took it to mean if he converted to Christianity, he would win the battle. So he did. (Such a wonderful reason for turning to the peaceful teachings of Christ). In 324, he named the Christian religion, which had up until then, to one degree or another, been a reason for persecution by the government, to be the official religion of Rome.
His successor, Julian, didn’t feel the same way. He wanted to return to the old order of pagan gods and Christian persecution. At the Council of Laodicea, Julian and the bishops who were invited (300 out of a thousand) decided that, among other things, any stories of women being of prominence in the religion would be squashed, as would stories of fallen angels taking on human qualities and walking the earth. Other things discarded were the stories of the multiple “gods” who ruled the earth in early times, or their several re-incarnations. Most of what was found in Nag Hamadi and some of what was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls was left out.
What was going on in the Christian religion at the time?
Let’s see, there was Pope Liberius who was exiled by the emperor who then installed Felix II in 355 AD. Felix II was one of the anti-popes. The Council of Laodicea was held in 363 AD and 364 AD to establish what stories would be told in the Christian religion. The emperor Julian died in 363 AD. Then the leadership of the Roman Empire suffered some very quick successions, and between 363 and 366 there were four different Roman emperors, some ruling simultaneously. When Felix II died in 366, the Christian people elected Usinius to be pope.
At the time, however, the people’s choice also had to be run by the emperor for his ratification, and Damasus, who also wanted to be pope, and who had supported the high-born followers of Felix II the anti-pope, hired a bunch of thugs to masacre the followers of Usinius. Usinius was exiled and Damasus became pope.
Strangely, Usinius (the people’s choice) was called the anti-pope. Damasus, (obviously the emperor’s choice,) was now the pope. He decided to solidify the findings of the Council of Laodicea that had been held during the Papacy of Felix II the anti-pope while Liberious (the real pope) was in exile. Those findings decided which books would be entered as the official bible of the Christian religion. The word of God?
Suffice it to say that at this time the scriptures were massaged to closely mirror the patriarchal society of Rome more than the more gender equal structure of the Christian religion.
What if The First Book of Adam and Eve, The Second Book of Adam and Eve, The Second Book of Enoch, The Origin of the World, and The Revelation of Adam and others were all dropped from the scriptures in attempts to make the Christian religion more palatable to Roman society?
These things did happen 364 years after the death of Jesus. If these scriptures weren’t dropped from the canon of the Christian church, we might still believe that Original Sin wasn’t Eve’s fault, or the fault of humans at all?
But back to the story of the offspring of Adam and Eve. We know the name of Seth, but nowhere in the Bible do we see the name of Eve’s third daughter. The name Norea or its variations, Oriea or Horiea, have been said in one early scripture or another to have been either the re-embodiment of Sophia, or the wife of Noah, or the feminine form of Adam, but in The Reality of the Rulers (a scripture that was left out of the modern-day bible) Norea is said to have been the younger sister of Seth. It says that since they are both in the line of the pure race, born of both Adam and Eve, they married and began the propagation of the pure race of humanity.
But to many of the early Christians, the story of Cain and Able was different from the one we have heard, and Seth and Norea were real. And Norea was not subservient, not to anyone, not even the blood-thirsty god of the Old Testament.
The stories left out of our bible explained what was meant when Valentinus and Jesus both said there are three kinds of humans:
- the kind who know from birth what it is to be a good human being, (the pure)
- the kind who can be taught, or at least their children can be taught the truth, (the somewhat pure)
- the kind who will never know. By the way, this purity had nothing to do with the color of one’s skin. It had to do with empathy. It had to do with having a pure soul. The stories also painted a different picture of the story of the flood.
Namaste