What we can say with a certain degree of certainty is that the Gnostics were a very real challenge for what would become the reigning understanding of the Christian faith. They developed philosophies and doctrines that help people understand possible (and plausible) explanations for how and why the world came into being, why there is suffering and tragedy in this world, to even some very deep and mystical teachings of scripture that were paralleled only in writings such as the Zohar and the Talmud.
The Gnostics were probably destined to the “has-beens” of Christian history until the discovery at the Nag Hammadi. This cache of books brought to life some writings we had only heard of in reference, and it also accomplished two more things; It proved that the books the early church fathers had eluded to actually existed in history and secondly, that the early church fathers had taken some liberty in quoting and explaining these writings.
This degree of journalistic license caused Christian and non-Christian scholars alike to re-examine the evidence concerning the Gnostics. Gnosticism was every bit as diverse as the rest of Christianity, but did share a coupe of common threads.
Before I get more in depth about the Gnostics, there is a point worth making here; Gnostics by all means would consider themselves Christians. The Gnostic Christians were not exempt from the persecutions that came upon the Christian community, they were hated and challenged by the pagan religious groups and from an outsider’s perspective, were considered Christians in every way, shape and form. It was not only within Christian circles that they faced their greatest opposition.
This also means that when we address those that suffered for their faith, for their willingness to die for their faith, Gnostics were tortured, killed, relieved of their property and treated as a social disease right along side the Christians we believe had a more “correct” view of the faith.
One area we could all focus on improving is our thoughts and actions towards fellow Christians that posses very different views and practices than ours. I find it easy to look down on them or at least, develop a sense of less than appreciating their heritage and beliefs. We all need to work on understanding that regardless of where our differences may be, in the end, we will all suffer and be cast out of public life because of our faith in Jesus. This means our Gnostic brothers as well.
Gnosticism regained scholarly interest right after the famed finds at Nag Hammadi. Here were books that previously where only known in legend and in the works of heresy hunters some 1900 years earlier. Most of these books have come to be known as forgeries, primarily because of how they are attributed. Chances are the authors that are claimed by the books never knew about these writings.
But even though they are thought of as forged, these books were written seriously and where meant to be taken seriously, as a guide to providing the truth. They covered a broad range of teachings, including several different and internally diverse mystical reflections on how the divine realm came into being.
Most of the Gnostic writings assumed that there was not simply one God over all who had created the world and made it good. Some of them were quite explicit: This creation was not good, not in the least. It was the result of a cosmic catastrophe, brought into being by an inferior and ignorant deity who erroneously imagined he was God Almighty.
For us today, this view seems simply heretical and evil. It appears to demean God and raise the possibility of him being a cosmic failure, which does not fit in too tightly with most Christian doctrine. But as we will see, the Gnostics were trying to address a problem that has plagued and will continue to plague humanity for all of recorded time; how do we explain tragedy and suffering.
Many of these texts (from Nag Hammadi) preserve and present the view known to be held by groups of the early Gnostics, that saving knowledge is knowledge of who we were and what we are to become, of where we were and where we have been made to fall, of where we are hastening and from where we have been redeemed, of what birth is and what’s rebirth.
Worth noting is that most of Gnostics identified that there was faith and saving faith. It was not just a belief that passed for faith, but the knowledge of what that faith encompasses and what that faith will eventually deliver. For them, it is truly what you know over whom you know.
No wonder these expressions of Gnostic religiosity have struck a resonant note among the modern readers, many of whom also feel alienated from this world, for whom this world does not make sense, readers who realize, in some very deep and significant way, they really do not belong here. For some groups of early Christian Gnostics, we in fact do not belong here.
The Gnostics believed that if the knowledge necessary for salvation were simple and straightforward, we would have all figured it out long ago. It also meant that we would have all been in agreement with each other long ago. But this is secret knowledge reserved for the elite, for the few, for those who really do have a spark of the divine within them, a spark that needs to be rekindled and brought to life through the gnosis (knowledge) from on high, brought from one who has come down from the divine realm to remind us of our true identity, our true origin and our true destiny.
One of the challenges in deciphering the original materials found at Nag Hammadi is they are both hard to understand individually and in relationship to one another. Scholars have concluded that there are numerous religious perspectives represented in the various Gnostic documents surviving from antiquity and that these perspectives are not always consistent with each other. Probably different documents come from different communities with different worldviews, mythological systems, beliefs and practices.
Much of the attack against the Gnostics by the early heresy hunters presented an almost universal and united belief among the Gnostics, regulating them all to the class of discontented believers known as “heretics”. But later, as it often does, historical discoveries disproved the idea of such a unity of beliefs. The Gnostics were every bit as competitive and every bit as divided as the proto-orthodoxy was.
Here is where the Gnostics took a turn off the beaten path and headed down the road paved with good intentions, but would become the “line in the sand” between them and all other forms of Christian practice. It was the issue of suffering, why the world was such a mess with such a loving God running it. Employing teachings and traditions from the Hebrew Bible, their own writings, Kabalistic thought, and a dose or two of mythology and blend it up, they came to an understanding of the suffering and tragedy in a way unheard of before: God must be an inferior deity.
This did not endear them to any group of religious people, especially their Christian brothers. And, much to that point brought many volumes of written works against their teachings. But worth repeating, the Gnostics never saw themselves as non-Christians, anti-Christians or heretics. The believed that the issue of tragedy and suffering must be addressed, as did many groups before them.
Jewish apocalypticism arose in a context of intense suffering, some two hundred years before Jesus, when the Syrian ruler who had control on Palestine, the Jewish homeland, persecuted Jews precisely for being Jewish. For example, circumcision- the central sign of covenant union with God-was forbidden on pain of death.
They moved to the idea that God could not be behind this type of suffering, which at the time was largely against the ideas taught by the prophets before them. The Biblical prophets believed that the suffering the Jews endured was a God-directed punishment for their disobedience. Jewish apocalypticists argued the concept that God must have a personal adversary who was responsible for this suffering, that there are cosmic forces in the world. This opponent, later to be named the Devil, Asatan, the Destroyer, was believed to be causing this suffering on God’s people as a way of hurting God.
But for the Gnostics, this was just not enough of an explanation. How could, they reasoned, God allow his enemies to overtake his people as some kind of retribution? Would not this same God offer his protection? For the Gnostics, they needed to understand why he was seemingly not equipped to protect his interests.
Maybe the god of this world is not good. Maybe he is causing suffering not because he is good and wants people to share in his goodness, but because he is evil, or ignorant, or inferior (all Gnostics conclusions by various groups) and he wants people to suffer or does not care if they do, or maybe he can not do anything about it. But if the Gnostics were right, than the god of this world could not be the one true God.
The final piece of their doctrine was this: there must be a non-material God unconnected with this world, above the creator God of the Old Testament (slight spin on Marcion’s thinking) a God who neither created this world nor brought suffering to this world. But, He has another world free of all this pain and He seeks to redeem people from this world by delivering them out of it, liberating them from their entrapment in this material existence.
I have told you that it can become very dangerous to start with a conclusion and build your beliefs around it. I believe that this is what the Gnostic believers did. Now that we have the basic premise of Gnosticism, it explodes from here into a multi-directional belief system that seems to point to the idea that the “false” gods of this world began a cosmic battle to rule over the first human, Adam. This led to separation of deities that caused the filtering process to become even more diluted until we had a whole collection of inferior deities running the show.
Many of the beliefs of the Gnostics in this vein could be comparable to the Middle Platonists who had a similar line of thought about deities running around and creating havoc upon humanity. But eventually the Gnostics enter the true and living God, the God of Jesus, who enters human history, to help us obtain the knowledge it will take to escape this world.
At the same time, other Gnostics taught of a catastrophic destruction of the first world, in which pieces (shards) of divine light fell to the earth we now know. These pieces are to be brought out by the divine interaction with other divine shards or sparks. This may have a familiar ring for those who have studied Kabbalah.
But one the amazing thoughts of Gnostic Christians was how they explained the different levels of humanity. It was obvious that some people were just meaner and nastier than others. Some could kill, rape, destroy and steal freely with seemingly no thought for the effect or the consequence.
They maintained that there were three kinds of humans. Some are creations of the Demiurge (the catastrophic event of creation) pure and simple. Like other animals, they have no spirit within; like animals, when they die, their entire existence is annihilated. Other people have a soul within, but not a spark of the divine spirit. Such people have an opportunity for an afterlife, if they have faith and do good deeds. These are in fact regular Christians, those who believe in Jesus but do not have the full understanding of the secret knowledge that leads to ultimate salvation.
The third group of people has this knowledge. They are the Gnostics, those “in the know”, who have the divine spark within them, who have learned who they really are, how they got here and how they can return.
One of the more striking features about the Gnostic Christians is that these were not a separate denomination that met down the street from the proto-orthodoxy. These were committed Christians meeting right inside the churches that were establishing themselves in the various communities. This makes the warnings of the Apostle Paul more understandable. He was addressing situations that were organically happening inside the church fellowships. I would also suggest he never meant his words of caution and warning to be applied to those outside the fellowships.
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