@opphunter88 "explained"

Argued, maybe. Apologized. But not "explained." The critiques I've offered aren't exactly defeated. They do not go away.

The bottom line is you must take the Orthodox narrative -- and that's exactly what it is -- basically at face value, uncritically, to arrive at the conclusion that their take is correct. In reality, we do not know which manuscripts they actually were in possession of, which ones they discarded, which ones they kept, how they spliced them all together, and so on. It's all speculation and in the end it rests on source: dude trust me.

It's well understood that Gnostic texts were largely destroyed. They weren't merely forgotten but actively gotten rid of. They were only rediscovered as a fluke millennia after the fact. This places you in a very difficult predicament, intellectually. How do you know the Orthodox version is the correct one, and they didn't simply burn all the manuscripts they regarded they regarded as "heretical" and lie about it? They literally formed councils that were about, in no small part, shutting people down for wrongthink. They were just like those trust the science faggots are today. The censor does not have the benefit of the doubt here.

Show us that they didn't just push a narrative more effectively than the other early Christians like Valentinus and Marcion.

@caekislove