Why is this being presented to the HN community?

    He is the Demiurge of this world, the God of Moses described in his creation    
    narrative. Of the Seven archontic demons, the first is lion-shaped; the second 
    is a bull; the third is amphibious and hisses horribly; the fourth is in the 
    form of an eagle ; the fifth has the appearance of a bear, the sixth, that of 
    a dog ; and the seventh, that of an ass named Thaphabaoth or Onoel.

How is this technology related?

Reading the early Christian church leaders was enlightening, as a member of an evangelical church. My church didn't really have any answers when I asked why our practices/beliefs diverged so intensely, which was somewhat disappointing. The writings of the early Christian leaders are filled with Greek philosophy, genuine debates about theology, and a ton of wisdom for both believers and unbelievers.

Personally, i like occasional non-tech links like this ..

Anyone, Christian or atheist, who has any interest in the Science Vs Religion debate as it has existed since Darwin should look at "Against Celsus" by Origen. It provides a fascinating example of a well educated Roman philosopher and a well educated Christian Platonist philosopher arguing with each other.

  I am the knowledge of my inquiry,    
    and the finding of those who seek after me,     
    and the command of those who ask of me,     
    and the power of the powers in my knowledge     
    of the angels, who have been sent at my word,     
    and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,     
    and of spirits of every man who exists with me,     
    and of women who dwell within me.     
   I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,    
    and who is despised scornfully.     
   I am peace,    
    and war has come because of me.     
   And I am an alien and a citizen.

I wonder about the accuracy of critical text methods like the ones that have been putatively used to reconstruct the Q document and to argue about authorship and dates. Have these methods ever been validated against a ground truth that the arguers didn't know about beforehand? Like, have we ever philologically reconstructed a text from other texts, and then found exactly that text buried somewhere? Or even something close to it?

In the case of Q, you could argue that the Gospel of Thomas validates that there were texts of that kind (sayings gospels) floating around, but Thomas doesn't match the content of Q.

Outside biblical scholarship, another area where people have tried to reconstruct what is going on in ancient texts is the Chinese classics, especially the really cryptic ones like the Yijing. But whenever some actual ancient manuscript gets dug out of an old grave or a bog, it seems like it just brings up more questions and complications, instead of validating anyone's theories.

Compare to the philology methods that people use to reconstruct ancient languages. These have been validated pretty well. For example in the 19th century linguists were able to deduce that the Proto-Indo-European language must have had guttural consonants not found in any extant language, and then later when the Hittite language was decoded, the guttural consonants were right there. The theory was validated on held-out data. Has this ever happened for critical methods for discerning authorship and sources and missing texts?

This has been a source I’ve referred to on and off for years. It’s really interesting to read some things that don’t show up in our everyday Bible. Including things that were considered not canon by the early church. I enjoyed reading the translation of the Shepherds of Hermas. It was not the easiest to follow, but in a sense it was a very popular allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress was centuries later!

I started exploring Christianity from an archetypal or psychological lens last year, and have found it really rewarding. I've put in thousands of hours of westernized Buddhist oriented meditation (I think "Pragmatic Dharma" is the term), and ultimately found it and the communities attached to it cultures of avoidance that loses something in its detachment of meditation technology from its larger context. I also grew up vaguely Presbyterian and hated it, so this was a great moment for me to reclaim my heritage on my own terms.

I started with various books of the Nag Hammadi collection, reading the excellent Meyer translations, and started noticing some metaphors that felt like "hidden signposts" in the text (and had some relevance to some ideas in Buddhism). Gospel of Thomas and especially Gospel of Philip felt like they map quite well to non-dual ideas in Buddhism.

I decided after some explorations of gnostic text to jump back into the gospels, wondering if I noticed the same kinds of hidden signposts there. I started this exploration during a trip to London with my wife, where I went and hunted down a copy of Bruce Rogers's amazing Oxford Lectern Bible at the Church of England reading room. What a beautiful bible -- it's so forward thinking that it feels like it was typeset last year, but while it is a beautiful piece, the King James translation of the bible is pretty incomprehensible. This little journey led me to the Sarah Ruden translations of the gospels, and as soon as I read them I felt the same kind of resonance.

This all eventually led me to Cynthia Bourgeault's amazing "The Heart of Centering Prayer," which explores the non-dual kind of ideas in esoteric Christianity and lays out the practice of centering prayer as a basis of Christian spirituality. And I would remiss if I didn't mention Jacob Needleman: Esoteric Christianity was good, but his "Money and the Meaning of Life," really helped me put my own relationship with money in perspective.

This is all a long winded way of saying: Christianity has a rich set of amazing spiritual resources, but they need to be consumed in a sort of non-literal way, where you're meeting the authors in the same mind as they were when they wrote the text. I'd also note that this kind of reading is not scholarly, the point isn't to find the right answer but to impute a larger meeting by meeting the author with your own struggles.

We live in a time that is committed to a materialist reductionist mindset, but I believe that humans are naturally mystical beings, and that we leave a lot of real meaning on the table when we reduce the world down into solely material order.

Rob Burbea explored these ideas (largely inspired by James Hillman's concept of "soulmaking") in his soulmaking dharma (https://hermesamara.org/), the idea being an extension of emptiness: if all is fabrication, why wouldn't we make meaning that is beautiful?

I'm sure I'm coming off quite a bit rambly, but it's very exciting to see such a resource on the HN front page. If you read my comment and feel any similar excitement, please check my profile and feel free to email me!

It’s interesting that they’re organized by date. On an intuitive level, that makes sense. But so many of the dates are hotly debated, and reorganizing the list would produce such a different impression, that it’s a surprising choice.

I am not a scholar of such things, but a quick glance at the documents I am familiar with suggests that the date ranges represent uncertainty within the compiler’s point of view. That’s reasonable, but when it’s linked out of context it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t reflect the range of debate in the broader secular scholarship, let alone secular and conservative religious scholarship taken together. So caveat lector.

That said, the breadth of documents linked here is really impressive.