Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I'm here to share Gnostic Insights with you. I've written a couple of books based upon one of the tractates of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the Great Purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that repackaging of Christianity, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books which were buried in the desert of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, to keep them from the purge. This big jug of scrolls was rediscovered and dug up in 1945, which means they were kept away from almost 2000 years of formal academic study and formal religious theology. So what you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is relatively fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts. I've studied one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote on the subject, called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. That little book is a non-academic approach to the mythology of what can be called early Gnostic Christianity. The Gnosticism presented in the Tripartite Tractate and my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is a very early version of Christianity. The reason I say it’s Christian is that there is a figure called the Christ that runs throughout the Tripartite Tractate. There are also many other overlapping ideas that you can still find in the New Testament and traditional Christianity—the Father, the Son, the Fullness of God, the Fall, explanations of virtues and vices and their effects upon our lives, a need for relationship with our ethereal origins and assistance from the Christ. But the meanings of those words have changed so much during these past two thousand years of formal institutional religion that they hardly resemble their original meanings. The Gnostic Gospels use many of  the same terms as the Bible, but their interpretation and application is not what they originally were. When Jesus of Nazareth spoke of his Father, for example, who was he talking about? When we read of the Fullness of God in the scriptures approved by the church, what does that mean? When the Bible says that Christ will return with armies of angels to battle for our souls, what exactly is that about? My goal here at Gnostic Insights is to reacquaint modern believers and nonbelievers with what I take to be the original intent of the religion that has come to be known as Christianity, in order to return it to the teachings that Jesus shared before the Nicene Council of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed everything to suit their own institutional agendas. To church folks this will initially sound like heresy, while to non-believers it will sound too churchy. To those folks who have fallen away from the church because they can’t reconcile inconsistencies between the Old and the New Testament, it will come as a welcome relief. And to those people who have never believed in God, this version of Christianity may be exactly what they haven’t been expecting and didn’t realize they were hoping for. As I explain these Gnostic Insights to you, I will often use quotes out of the Old and New Testament as well as quotes from the Tripartite Tractate,