Edward Gerwer
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
Gnostic Christianity
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Abstract
Deals with Gnosticism, the early Christian faith that was rejected and regarded as heresy by the Catholic Church and Church Fathers. Deals with Gnostic Scriptures and why they were abandoned from the Canonical Bible.
Related papers
Gnosticism Disputed: Major Debates in the Field
Secret Religion: Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism. Edited by April D. DeConick. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Studies: Religion series. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2016
Lively, sometimes heated, discussion is part of what makes gnostic studies so engrossing. These discussions and debates occur especially whenever gnostic texts are discovered and published, such as the huge discovery of the thirteen Nag Hammadi codices (i.e., ancient books), published in 1977, and the far smaller, but also incredible, discovery of the Codex Tchacos with its copy of the lost Gospel of Judas, published in 2006. The debates happen at academic conferences and on the printed pages of scholarship as well as on webpages such as blogs and online news sources. Understanding the debates is key to understanding the scholarship and situating the work of one expert with respect to that of another, as some specialists may reframe perennial research questions and even seek to replace them with different questions they consider more pressing. Major debates include the issue of how gnosticism is to be defined, and the question of where it came from. They also include the issue of whether its ancient opponents are reliable, and the question of who produced, collected, and owned the Nag Hammadi codices and other gnostic texts surviving in Coptic, the final form of the ancient Egyptian language. Another debate concerns what should be done when the next manuscript is found.
The Gnostic Cults. By Manly P. Hall.
The All-Seeing Eye, 1931
Gnosticism, a philosophical interpretation of Christian mysticism, was a significant heresy in early Christianity. Despite facing opposition from both the church and pagan philosophers, Gnosticism established influential interpretive frameworks. The writings of prominent Gnostics like Simon, Basilides, and Valentinus, preserved in the works of their adversaries, showcase their profound spiritual insight and philosophical understanding of life’s greater realities. Gnosticism, a crucial period in Christianity, presented a philosophical interpretation of the faith, contrasting with the church’s emphasis on isolated infallibility. The Gnostic godhead, comprising the Universal Logos and its emanations, included the Demiurgus, Ialdabaoth, and his six sons, representing the seven planetary spirits. This complex cosmology, influenced by various traditions, depicted the struggle between the spiritual and material realms, with Ialdabaoth, the creator of the physical world, embodying the opposition to the divine. In Gnosticism, Ialdabaoth, a flawed creator, attempts to dominate humanity but is thwarted by Sophia Achamoth, who protects humanity with divine light. This struggle between spirit and matter, a recurring theme in religious systems, is interpreted as the incarnation of Jesus, akin to the Avatara theme in Hinduism. Ultimately, the Sotar Christos descends, collects purified souls, and will destroy the world, reabsorbing spiritual light into the Pleroma. Gnostic Christianity, emphasizing internal adjustment and love, was deemed economically unsound by the church and destroyed to preserve priestcraft.
Gnosticism and the Roman Church
The early Christian church leaders had to deal with the task of settling in on what texts were divinely inspired, and therefore allowed into the official canon, and which were not. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in Egypt in 1945 shed light on an underground movement now known as Gnosticism. This essay briefly explores the history and the beliefs of Gnosticism, and discusses the reasons why the early Christian leaders labeled the movement "heretical"
Gnosticism from Thought to Religion
Religious Inquiries- University of Religions and Denominations (URD), 2021
The origin of Gnostic thought and its evolution is a controversial topic. By critically examining Gnostic sects and analyzing the opinions of experts, this article will answer the following questions: What are the components of Gnostic thought? What are the sources of Gnostic thought? Were there any sects known as Gnostics before Christ? This research shows that most of our knowledge of Gnosticism is based on controversial Christian works and the Qumran manuscripts. According to these works, no group or sect was called Gnostic before Christ. Although some of the components of Gnostic thought, such as the originality of knowledge and the exile of the soul, date back to the pre-Christ era, and especially to Plato, some other components, such as the distinction between the Christian and Jewish gods, belief in the multiplicity of the eternal Christ, the primacy of knowledge over faith, are products of the period of the formation of Gnostic sects and their conflict with the Church Fathers in the first centuries of the common era.
Gnostic Literature and the Bible
Gnostic literature is the conventional designation for an assortment of early Christian writings, originally written in Greek in the second and third centuries of the Common Era but preserved for the most part only in late antique Coptic manuscripts—among others, in the famous " Nag Hammadi Library " and the recently published Codex Tchacos. Texts included in this collection have often been distinguished from other forms of early Christian literary production by their complex myth of origins, their philosophically intoned semiosis, and their focus on a special kind of revealed knowledge as a way to spiritual reawakening (gnosis). Current scholarship tends to avoid such essentialist generalizations and rejects the very idea of a homogenous corpus of " Gnostic literature " —a constructed category that obscures a wide variety of theological positions and ethical orientations found in the individual writings. Yet in spite of their undeniable doctrinal variations, the majority of these texts appear to share the same model of reality understood as a multiple-tiered hierarchy derived from a single transcendent divinity; and they also propose the same revisionist program of simultaneously adopting and reconfiguring the normative narratives of Greek and Jewish culture, of exposing their irreparable gaps, and of challenging the prevailing norms of their interpretation. This poetics of fragmentation, displacement, and intertextual substitution characterizes the Gnostic approach to the Bible—a text not to be read and scrutinized, but to be reinterpreted or rewritten.
THE TWO DIFFERENT AND OPPOSED THESES WITHIN THE GNOSTIC CHRISTIAN TEXTS
This paper was a special presentation to the New Testament and Early Christianity (NETC) network at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia] "The Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the most learned, and the most worthy of the Christian name."-Gibbon (Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire) The Gnostic Christians held a "conviction that direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings, and, moreover, that the attainment of such knowledge must always constitute the supreme achievement of human life." Stephan Hoeller (2002 "One of the striking features of Christian Gnosticism is that it appears to have operated principally from within existing Christian churches, that Gnostics considered themselves to be the spiritually elite of these churches, who could confess the creeds of other Christians, read the Scriptures of other Christians, partake of baptism and Eucharist with other Christians, but who believed that they had a deeper, more spiritual, secret understanding of these creeds, Scriptures, and sacraments." Bart Ehrman Lost Christianities (2006 p. 126). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
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