What Is Gnosticism?

The word comes from the Greek gnōsis, “knowledge.” It names a cluster of second-century movements that read the Bible's story upside down, and the church fathers spent a great deal of ink answering them.

The basic idea

The movements grouped under “Gnosticism” disagreed with one another about a great deal, but most shared a core picture. The true God is remote, perfect and unknowable. The material world was not made by that God but by a lesser, often ignorant or arrogant being, commonly called the Demiurge (Greek for “craftsman”). Human beings carry a divine spark trapped inside a physical body, and salvation means waking that spark up through knowledge (gnōsis) of where it came from, not through faith in a God who made the world and called it good.

The main schools

The Sethian texts, such as the Apocryphon of John, tell an elaborate myth in which the divine Wisdom (Sophia) falls, gives birth to the Demiurge, and he creates the world and its rulers (archons). The Valentinian school, founded by Valentinus, who taught in Rome around AD 140, is more philosophical and more sacramental, and stayed closer to ordinary church life. Basilides taught in Alexandria in the same period. Marcion, whom the church also rejected, is often listed with them, but he was more of a radical editor of the Bible than a teller of cosmic myths.

How the church answered

Our best-known critic is Irenaeus of Lyon, whose five-volume work Against Heresies (around AD 180) describes the Valentinians and others in detail, and it was for centuries our main source for what they taught. Hippolytus and Tertullian wrote similar refutations. Their central objection was the same each time: if the world was made by a lesser, flawed being, then the God of Genesis and the Father of Jesus Christ are not the same, and the physical world, the body and the resurrection all lose their meaning.

Traces inside the New Testament

Scholars are cautious about reading a fully developed Gnosticism back into the first century, since the great gnostic systems are second-century. But several New Testament writers clearly confront ideas that look like early relatives of it: a teaching that valued esoteric “knowledge,” that treated genealogies and speculation as spiritual advancement, or that denied Christ came in the flesh.

A category scholars still argue about

In recent decades some scholars, notably Michael Williams and Karen King, have argued that “Gnosticism” is too neat a label, invented largely by its opponents, and lumps together movements that shared only a few themes. Others defend it as a useful shorthand for the cluster of texts that share the Demiurge, the fallen Sophia and salvation by knowledge. Either way, the practical point for a reader is the same: check what a particular text says before assuming it teaches the myth.

On this site

The Gospels of Thomas, Philip, Truth, Mary and Judas, the Secret Book of James and the Pistis Sophia are carried in full (as far as each survives) on the Nag Hammadi and Gnostic Writings shelf, labelled as not scripture in any church's canon. The Gospel of Judas is a Sethian text and the Gospel of Truth probably Valentinian.