In the Old Testament, the material world is God’s bountiful creation; the human body, God’s image. But in Gnostic scripture, both world and body are soul-killing prisons, and this basic premise anchors its theology. If the body plays no part in the divinity of Christians, then martyrdom—as well as human suffering more broadly—does not advance salvation. If Jesus’s physical body is nothing more than a straitjacket for his divine spark, then nothing about Jesus that was holy died on the cross and no flesh was resurrected. “The one into whose hands and feet they are driving nails is his fleshly
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