The Book of Enoch is an apocryphal book of an assumedly prophetical character, to which considerable importance has been attached, particularly on account of St Jude quoting it in the 14th and 15th verses of his epistle. It is referred to by many of the early fathers; it is of unknown authorship, but was probably written by a Palestinian Jew in Hebrew or Aramaic, was translated into Greek, and from the Greek the existing Ethiopic version was made in the 1st or 2nd century BC. Until the end of the 18th century it was known in Europe only by the references of early writers. On his return Bruce, the African traveller, brought with him from Abyssinia two manuscripts containing the Ethiopic translation of it. It has since been repeatedly published, translated, and criticised. Research Book of Enoch
In sculpture, a colossus is a statue of enormous magnitude. The Asiatics, the Egyptians, and in particular the Greeks, have excelled in these works. The most celebrated Egyptian colossus was the vocal statue of Memnon in the plain of Thebes, supposed to be identical with the most northerly of two existing colossi (60 feet high) on the west bank of the Nile.
Among the colossi of Greece the most celebrated was the Colossus of Rhodes, a brass statue of Apollo 70 cubits high, esteemed one of the wonders of the world, erected at the port of Rhodes by Chares, 290 or 288 BC. It was knocked down by an earthquake about 224 BC. The statue was in ruins for nearly nine centuries, when the Saracens, taking Rhodes, sold the metal, weighing 720,900 lbs, to a Jew, about 653. There is no authority for the popularly-received statement that it bestrode the harbour mouth, and that the Rhodian vessels could pass under its legs.
Among the colossi of Phidias were the Olympian Zeus and the Athena of the Parthenon; the former 60 feet high and the latter 40 feet.
The most famous of the Roman colossi were the Jupiter of the Capitol, the Apollo of the Palatine Library, and the statue of Nero, 110 or 120 feet high, and from which the contiguous amphitheatre derived its name of Colosseum.
Among modern works of this nature is the colossus of San Carlo Borromeo, at Arona, in the Milanese territory, 60 feet in height; the 'Bavaria' at Munich, 65 feet high; the statue of Hermann or Arminius near Detmold, erected in 1875, 90 feet in height to the point of the upraised sword, which itself is 24 feet in length; the height of the figure to the point of the helmet being 55 feet;
the statue of Germania, erected in 1883 near Rudesheim, a figure 34 feet high, placed on an elaborately-sculptured pedestal over 81 feet high; and Bartholdi's statue of Liberty presented to the United States by the French nation, and which measures 104 feet or to the extremity of the torch in the hand of the figure 138 feet. It is erected at New York harbour on a pedestal 114 feet, is constructed for a lighthouse with what was at one time was one of the most powerful fixed lights in the world, and stands 317 feet above mean tide. Research Colossus
Gnostics is a general name applied to early schools of speculators, which combined the fantastic notions of the oriental systems of religion with the ideas of the Greek philosophers and the doctrines of Christianity. They nearly all agreed on the points that God is incomprehensible; that matter is eternal and antagonistic to God; that creation is the work of the Demiurge, an emanation from the Supreme Deity, subordinate or opposed to God; and that the human nature of Christ was a mere deceptive appearance.
Certain forms of Gnosticism are mere adaptations of the Persian dualism to the solution of the problem of good and evil; while the pantheism of India seems to have been a pervading influence in others. Simon the magician (Simon Magus), of whom Luke speaks in the Acts of the Apostles, is generally looked on as the first of the Gnostics.
The dogmas of the earliest Gnostics may be reduced to the following heads: God, the highest intelligence, dwells at an infinite distance from this world, in the Abyss, removed from all connection with every work of temporal creation. He is the source of all good; matter, the crude, chaotic mass of which all things were made, is, like God, eternal, and is the source of all evil. From these two principles, before time commenced, emanated beings called aeons, which are described as divine spirits, inhabiting the Pleroma, or plenitude of light, which
surrounds the Abyss. The world and the human race were created out of matter by one aeon, the Demiurge, or, according to the later systems of the Gnostics, by several aeons and angels. The aeons made the bodies and the sensual soul of man of this matter; hence the origin of evil in man. God gave man the rational soul; hence the constant struggle of reason with sense. What are called gods by men (for instance, Jehovah, the God of the Jews) are merely such aeons or creators, under whose dominion man became more and more wicked and miserable. To destroy the power of these creators, and to free man from the power of matter, God sent the most exalted of all aeons, to which character Simon first made pretensions.
The Nicolaitans mentioned in the Revelation of St John, so called from Nicolas, a deacon of the church at Jerusalem, were one of the earliest sects, and are described as forerunners of the Cerinthians. Cerinthus, a Jew, of whom John the evangelist seems to have had some knowledge, combined such reveries with the doctrines of Christianity, and maintained that the most elevated aeon sent by God for the salvation of man, was Christ, who had descended upon Jesus, a Jew, in the form of a dove, and through him revealed the doctrines of Christianity, but before the crucifixion of Jesus separated from him, and at the resurrection of the dead will again be united with him, and lay the foundation of a kingdom of the most perfect earthly felicity, to continue 1000 years.
Carpocrates and the sect of the Ophites (beginning of the 2nd century), to whom the term Gnostic was first applied, saw in the Serpent a wise and good being, and carried to its extreme form the inversion of the biblical story. The later Gnostics have been divided into three schools. The first was the Syrian, founded by Menander, a pupil of Simon. This school emphasizes the conflict between Good and Evil - the Supreme Deity on the one hand, and the Demiurge and his angels or aeons on the other. The second was the school of Alexandria, represented by Basilides and Valentinus; the system of the latter being the most complete and ingenious of all. In that light or plenitude, which all the Gnostics speak of as surrounding the residence of the Supreme God, he has placed fifteen male and as many female aeons. The Supreme God, the Unbegotten, the Original Father, whom he also calls the Deep (Bathos), is the first of these aeons; Thinking Silence was his wife, and Intelligence, a male, and Truth, a female, were their children. These produced The Word and Life, the latter a female, who gave birth to mankind and society. These eight constituted the first class of the thirty aeons.
The second class, of five couples, at the end of which stood the Only Begotten, and the third, of six couples, at the head of which stood the Comforter, were, in a similar manner, descended from Mankind and Society, and consisted, like the first, of personified ideas. The officers of this heavenly state are four male aeons - Horus, who guards the boundaries of the region of light; Christ and the Holy Ghost, who instruct the other aeons in their duties; and Jesus, whom all the aeons of the kingdom of light begat in common, and endowed with their gifts. Man and the world were formed by a demiurge out of matter which was partly material, partly spiritual, partly soul-like. Christ, the Saviour of men, when he appeared on earth had a visible body made of the spiritual and the soul-like substance only. At his baptism the aeonJesus united itself with him, and instructed mankind.
A third school of Gnosticism, whose centre was Asia Minor, was represented by Marcion of Pontus, the son of a Christian bishop, who lived about the middle of the 2nd century. Marcion assigned to Christianity, as the one absolutely independent religion, a complete isolation from the Old Testament revelation, the author of which was, in his opinion, merely a just but not a good being. The true God begat many spirits, among which were the creator of the world, the righteous God, and the lawgiver of the Jews. The last, through the prophets, promised Christ; but Jesus, who actually appeared, and is the true Redeemer, was the Son of the truly good God, and not the Jewish Messiah.
Towards the end of the 2nd century Tatian, a Syrian Christian, adopted Gnostic doctrines, and founded a sect. Bardesanes, a Syrian, and Hermogenes, an African, who, in the reign of the Emperor Commodus, apostatized from Christianity, and established sects, bordered, in their hypotheses concerning the origin of good and evil, upon Gnosticism. There have been no Gnostic sects since the 5th century; but many of the principles of their system of emanations reappear in later philosophical systems, drawn from the same sources as theirs. Research Gnostics
Albert Einstein was a German Swiss mathematical physicist. He was born in 1879, and died 1955. His first job was in a patent office in Berne, where, finding the work undemanding, he turned his attention to problems in theoretical physics and in 1905 successfully used the quantum theory to explain the photoelectric effect, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. In 1905 he also published a paper on molecular motion, and a paper in which he put forward the special theory of relativity, describing the effects of motion on observed values of length, mass, and time. One consequence of his theory is that mass, m, is equivalent to energy, E, a concept expressed by the equation E = mc2, where c is the speed of light. This equation is the basis of all calculations of the energy released by nuclear reactions. He extended his ideas in the general theory of relativity which was published in 1915, and which is concerned with gravitation and the effects of accelerated motion.
The first independent verification of general relativity was obtained in 1919 when the bending of light was observed during an eclipse. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. However, he was unable to accept as final the probabilistic description of physics which quantum theory involved. In 1913 he returned to his native Germany to take up a professorship at the University of Berlin, but as a Jew he experienced Nazi persecution, and in 1932 was forced to leave the country. After a brief stay in Britain he settled in the USA, and eventually became an American citizen. Research Albert Einstein
Apollos was a Jew of Alexandria, who learned the doctrines of Christianity at Ephesus from Aquila and Priscilla, became a preacher of the gospel in Achaia and Corinth, and an assistant of Paul in his missionary work. Some have regarded him as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Research Apollos
The Elcesaites were a sect of Gnostics which arose in the reign of Trajan about the beginning of the 2nd century. They were a branch of the Essenes and resembled the Ebionites. A Jew, named Elxai, or Elkesai, is their reputed founder. Research Elcesaites
Gavarni was the assumed name of Sulpice Paukl Chevalier, a French caricaturist. He was born in 1801 at Paris and died in 1866. Originally a mechanical draughtsman, he began his artistic career in 1835 by designing costumes for theatres and journals of fashion. He then established
Les Gens du Monde; but the journal was a failure, and he spent some time in the debtor's prison of Clichy. On his release he was employed upon the Charivari, the success of which was due in great part to his genius. His best known works are Les Enfants Terribles, Les Reves, Les Fourberies de Femmes, and Impressions de Menages. In 1847 he visited England, and the sketches which he sent from St Giles, London, to L'Illustration created an immense sensation. He afterwards illustrated Eugene Sue's Wandering Jew, Balzac's novels, and other works. Research Gavarni
The Jews are a Semitic race of people also known as the Hebrews and Israelites. Their early history is identified with Palestine, now Israel. The Jewish history is recorded in the Old Testament. Research Jew
John Galt was a Scottish author of stories dealing with Scottish life. He was born in 1779 at Irvine and died in 1839. He went to London in 1804, printed an epic on the Battle of Largs, and tried both commerce and the legal profession; but failing in each, went abroad for some years. On his return in 1812 he published his Voyages and Travels, his Letters from the Levant, a Life of CardinalWolsey, and a volume of tragedies. He then became a contributor to the Monthly Magazine and other periodicals, and wrote a tragedy, The Witness, a life of West the artist, and a romance on the Wandering Jew, His Ayrshire Legatees etc. Research John Galt
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Book of Enoch
