A. K. Chidgzey

I think this topic if fascinating. But there’s one major problem: most of what we know about this early Christian ‘heresy’ (see the episode on heresiology) comes from the opponents of Gnosticism – the early Christian apologists. So those accounts are hardly unbiased. Most Gnostic writings were destroyed.

That is, until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library.

In 1945 some Egyptian boys discovered a large jar, which they smashed to find 13 leather-bound codices. After avenging their father’s death (seriously) they were worried the police would come and discover their discovery, so they gave the codices to a local priest, who lent one to a local teacher, who sold it on the black market.

A one-eyed fugitive (again, seriously) managed to get the collection and sold them to an antiques dealer in Cairo, who passed them off to an Italian collector. The Egyptian government confiscated the collection, and the codices were lost in years of legal battles.

A Belgian collector smuggled a copy into America, but no one would buy it. He put it in a safe deposit box and…died. His widow sold it to a historian in the Netherlands who realized just what these texts were. Eventually, they were published and made available and now we know something about the Gnostics – in their own words.

The word ‘gnostic’ comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. Simply put, Gnosticism was a movement that believed that the Judeo-Christian tradition was distorting and perverting the true knowledge of the spiritual world and state of humanity. Jesus brought the true knowledge which was handed on to his disciples, but the authors of the New Testament twisted and distorted this knowledge for their own ends. But this secret knowledge from Jesus was passed on through the various Gnostic schools. This is the knowledge of true salvation.

The Gnostic myth:

There was one God, and from this one God came many emanations. These were called aeons and the final one was called Sophia, which is wisdom. They existed in the spiritual realm known as the pleroma. She grew discontent and fell from the pleroma. She gave birth to a distorted aeon, known as the demiurge, named Ialdabaoth. Jews and Christians know this aeon by another name: Yahweh (i.e. the god of the Old Testament).

Ialdabaoth believed himself to be the only god, and created the physical world. He thought it was good, but it was bad. He could only create by stealing some of the light of the pleroma from Sophia, which is the ‘soul’.

The supreme god – the monad – sent redeemers to teach humanity the truth of the spiritual world. Physical matter is evil and Ialdabaoth is not good. These redeemers brought knowledge (gnosis) of true reality, and this knowledge would bring enlightenment and access into the pleroma. The first redeemer was Seth, but the ultimate one was Jesus. It wasn’t Jesus’ death that brought salvation, but the knowledge that he imparted.

Unfortunately, this knowledge was distorted by the Jewish and Christian authors, deceived by Ialdabaoth.

However, these days, many contemporary scholars argue that the category ‘Gnosticism’ was a catch-all phrase used by the early apologists to refer to a diverse array of early movements and so is not especially helpful. No single movement held to that Gnostic myth in its fullness. There may well have been a small movement called Gnosticism, but it is helpful to refer to the various movements that have historically come under the banner of ‘Gnosticism’: Sethianism, Valentianism, Basilideanism, Manichaeism, Marcionism, Catharism, Mandaeism, among others.

Gnosticism was one of the largest movements in the early centuries and some historians have said that it posed the biggest threat to nascent Christianity. Or was it? Because it seems it might not have actually existed, at least not as a unified, single movement.