This edition of The Book of the Laws of Various Countries comes complete with a Bieber Touch-or-Click Table of Contents, and the Bieber Image Collection, a myriad of beautiful religious images.
Bardaisan was an Assyrian gnostic, founder of the Bardaisanites, and an scientist, scholar, astrologer, philosopher and poet, also renowned for his knowledge of India, on which he wrote a book, now lost.
The strong and fervent expressions of St. Ephrem against the Bardaisanites of his day are not a fair criterion of the doctrine of their master. The extraordinary veneration of his own countrymen, the very reserved and half-respectful allusion to him in the early Fathers, and above all the "Book of the Laws of the Countries" suggest a milder view of Bardaisan's aberrations. He cannot be called a Gnostic in the proper sense of the word. Like the Early Christians, he believed in an Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth, whose will is absolute, and to whom all things are subject. God endowed man with freedom of will to work out his salvation and allowed the world to be a mixture of good and evil, light and darkness. All things, even those we now consider inanimate, have a measure of liberty. In all of them the light has to overcome the darkness. After six thousand years this earth shall have an end, and a world without evil shall take its place.
However, Bardaisan also thought the sun, moon and planets were living beings, to whom, under God, the government of this world was largely entrusted; and though man was free, he was strongly influenced for good or for evil by the constellations. Bardaisan's catechism must have been a strange mixture of Christian doctrine and references to the signs of the Zodiac. Led by the fact that "spirit" is feminine in Syriac, he seems to have held unorthodox views on the Trinity. He apparently denied the Resurrection of the Body, but thought Christ's body was endowed with incorruptibility as with a special gift.
Bardaisan apparently was a voluminous author. Though nearly all his works have perished.
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