Three Embarassing Hippy Myths

There are three myths that hippies believe. Not sure how they got started. But they are not true. While ex-hippies tend to be proud of 'knowing' these 'facts,' they really are a little embarrassing.

Hippy Myth # 1. While there were originally many gospels in the early centuries of Christianity, including gnostic ones, Constantine chose only four of them to become the Bible, and threw out all the gnostic ones at the Council of Nicea.

Fact: The canon was not on the agenda of the Counsel of Nicaea. The main agenda items were choosing the day to celebrate Easter, and resolution about the Arian heracy. The heracy maintained that the Son of God was created by the Father and was therefore neither coeternal with the Father, nor consubstantial. Essentially that Jesus was not God, but only a man. They decided that Jesus was both God and man -- just like Baba teaches about the Avatar.

Hippy Myth #2. Reincarnation was removed from the Bible at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

Fact: This is not true, and the usually included claim that the founding father Origin argued for reincarnation, and that the written works of Origin that included reincarnation were anathematized at the Council is also untrue. Christianity came out of Judaism, which did not include a doctrine of reincarnation. The four books of the canon were the main texts of Christianity well before the Council, a fact attested to in all early epistles.

Hippy Myth #3. In the first four centuries, the Catholic Church, that was threatened by the Gnostics, hunted down and exterminated the Gnostics.  The myth is most recently promoted by Elaine Pagels.

Fact: First of all, there was no Roman Catholic Church in the first centuries. The Roman Catholic Church only developed between 800 and 1000 AD. Second, there is no evidence of a single Gnostic murdered in the first centuries of Christianity. The image is a modern invention. St. Augustine belonged to an Gnostic order before his conversion to Christianity and was highly respected. This was after the Council of Nicea. Also, the Gnostic Arius whose ideas were rejected at the Council, though he was not present, later died of natural causes. If any Gnostic would have been persecuted it would have been him, and he was not.