Rather than a specific heresy (from the Christian point of view), the term covers a wide range of notions, and scholars are not agreed as to the limits of the concept, though it is generally agreed that the central tenet was that the world was the creation of an evil deity and they, the gnostics, possessed the secret knowledge (gnosis) that could enable the believer to escape from his/her material imprisonment of this world into the bliss of the spiritual world beyond. The early church knew of gnostic versions of the Christian faith, and thoroughly condemned them.
Fundamental to the outlook of gnosticism is dualism, i.e., the opposition between the spiritual world of good versus the evil material world. It is not known whence the movements originated and, until the 19th Cent everything we knew about gnosticism in the ancient world came from descriptions of them found in the writings of the Church Fathers. An original source of ancient gnostic teachings was discovered in a cache of Coptic documents in Nag Hammadi, on the banks of the Nile in Egypt, in 1945; these included the Gospel of Thomas, a gnostic work suffused with Christian ideas.
Because of John the Evangelist's habit of contrasting darkness and light in his Gospel, scholars was at one time fond of thinking that the Gospel of John was gnostic in orientation. Gnosticism, however, was thoroughly condemned as a heresy by the Church Fathers.
Though the Mandaean communities in southern Iraq and Iran are the only sole surviving remnants of the ancient gnostic believers today, gnostic ideas can be detected in many modern writers, e.g., in the conspiracy theories of Dan Brown.
"Th[e] stress on the events of the gospel history as making a difference, as a revelation of new light from God, was not an easy concept for the Gentile world to assimilate. Sophisticated pagans were accustomed to reinterpreting the myths of the gods allegorically, either as an imaginative picture-language describing the natural order of the world or as a projection of human psychological states. To treat the Christian story in this way was to produce the phenomenon of Gnosticism in which a claim to disclose secret revelation is combined with a mixing of myths and rites drawn from a variety of religious traditions. Gnosticism was (and still is) a theosophy with many ingredients. Occultism and oriental mysticism became fused with astrology, magic, cabbalistic elements from Jewish tradition, a pessimistic reading of Plato's doctrine that man's true home does not lie in this bodily realm, above all the catalyst of the Christian understanding of redemption in Christ. A dualism of spirit and matter, mind and body, was joined with a powerful determinism or predestinarianism: Gnostics (or 'people in the know') are the elect, their souls fragments of the divine, needing liberation from matter and the power of the planets. The huge majority of humanity are earthly clods for whom no hope may be entertained." (Henry Chadwick, "The Early Christian Community," in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, ed. by John McManners (Oxford: OUP, 1992), 26.)
Media Resources:
The New Testament Canon by Michael Kruger. Ligonier Ministires. This is a series of 6 studies. Video N
Print Resources:
☰ Edwin M. Yamauchi, "The Gnostics and history," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 14.1 (Winter 1971): 29-40.
☰ Edwin M. Yamauchi, "Gnosticism: Has Nag-Hammadi Changed our View?" Evangel 8.2 (1990): 4-7.
☰ John W. Drane, "Gnosticism and the New Testament 1," TSF Bulletin 68 (Spring 1974): 6-13.
☰ John W. Drane, "Gnosticism and the New Testament 2," TSF Bulletin 69 (Summer 1974): 1-7.
☰ William W. Combs, "Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and New Testament interpretation," Grace Theological Journal 8.2 (Fall 1987): 195-212
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