Judas and the Lower, Physical Creation

This next section can be a little confusing. The perfect heaven has already been created, and - while there's no info in this text about how or why it happened - the creating has begun to get out of control. If we use the standard gnostic myth as a lens, we can guess that one of the angels either forgot about the highest God - the Great Invisible - or decided to imitate the highest God's creativity without permission.

Either of these possibilities would explain why this second, lower, inferior creation sounds so much like the first. However, like we talked about last meeting, the name of the physical creator(s) tips us off that something's not right. Keep an eye on the names.

“...after that ... said, ‘Let twelve angels come into being [to] rule over chaos and the [underworld].’ And look, from the cloud there appeared an [angel] whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means ‘rebel’; others call him Yaldabaoth. Another angel, Saklas, also came from the cloud. So Nebro created six angels—as well as Saklas—to be assistants, and these produced twelve angels in the heavens, with each one receiving a portion in the heavens.

“Then Saklas said to his angels, ‘Let us create a human being after the likeness and after the image.’ They fashioned Adam and his wife Eve, who is called, in the cloud, Zoe.”

BTW, Saklas means 'idiot' or 'fool'. Although the text doesn't mention it, that would have been obvious to the reader if he or she had read any other gnostic writings.