Gnosticism

Gnosticism (from Greek gnosis, knowledge) designates a diverse cluster of religious movements in the 1st–4th centuries A.D. that taught salvation through secret, esoteric knowledge of divine mysteries, typically accompanied by a dualistic cosmology in which the material world is evil (created by a lesser or malevolent demiurge), the true God is utterly transcendent, and salvation consists in the spirit's liberation from material entrapment and return to the divine Pleroma (fullness). Gnostic systems produced elaborate mythologies featuring divine emanations (aeons), a Sophia figure whose fall generates the material world, and a revealer figure (often Jesus reinterpreted docetically — appearing to be human but not truly incarnate) who delivers the saving gnosis. The Nag Hammadi library (discovered 1945 in Egypt) greatly expanded scholarly knowledge of Gnostic texts: the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Truth, and Apocryphon of John are among the most significant. Whether a fully developed Gnosticism pre-dated Christianity and influenced the NT (a thesis associated with Bultmann and the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) or whether Gnosticism developed as a Christian heresy from the 2nd century onward (the traditional view) remains debated. The NT warns against proto-Gnostic tendencies (Col. 2:8, 18; 1 John 4:2; 1 Tim. 6:20).