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GNOSTICISM, GNOSIS

Gnosticism as a term originated in the 18th century and has functioned as the label for an ill-defined category in history of religions research. Both the term and the modern category today are under heavy criticism. The prior Greek terms gnṓsis (“knowledge”) and gnṓstēs (“knower”) are employed in ancient sources where they are naturally free from the modern construct “Gnosticism.”

In its classic scholarly presentation, now increasingly discredited, the term Gnosticism was used as the label for what was variously described as a mostly unified protest movement against the prevailing political, religious, and philosophical structures of late antiquity. This proposed “gnostic religion,” in its admittedly various forms, was said to be promoted by elitists, was parasitic of other religions, and radically dualistic in its anticosmic and antibody attitudes. Humans were understood to be in a state of blindness, sleep, and drunkenness. The inner spirit was prisoner to the fleshly body, which was prisoner of the material cosmos, both created by an inferior lower God (Gen. 1–6) sometimes said to enslave his creation with time, laws, and lust. The human story traces the attempt to transcend one’s material limitations by returning to the highest and true God in the highest heaven (plḗrōma). This return was achieved through the individual’s receptive experience of knowledge (gnṓsis) which informed her of her true spiritual nature and origins in the highest heaven, her tragic fall into matter (hýlē), and her eventual restoration with the true God. Attendant to this model was the idea that Gnostics were involved in a variously described “social crisis” which exhibited itself at both the textual and mythological levels in a subversive hermeneutical revolt, a protest exegesis directed against orthodox Jewish and Christian political mythologies, often with a Jungian twist. This rebellion was characterized in texts by an exegetical value inversion of the early chapters of Genesis. On the ethical side, Gnostics were described as either ascetic or libertine. Some of these features were emphasized, deemphasized, or even absent from some heresiological reports and supposed gnostic texts, while other features were added as the complex evidences demonstrate.

This classic characterization of Gnosticism is a modern construct which has attempted to describe a social phenomenon which never existed in the ancient world, but in its failure to describe a social movement it constructed a faulty category. Scholars are divided whether the term should be retained and the category revised, or whether both the term and the category should be abandoned.

Recent studies suggest that one could instead describe the social phenomena under consideration as a varied assortment of new religious movements. These movements drew from a large pool of discrete traditions, many of which have been traced back to earlier texts and movements. Depending on its particular constellation of traditions, each movement can then be identified as to its type. The failed classic search for the origins of Gnosticism, often argued to have begun among disgruntled intellectuals (Jews, Christians, or others), has attempted to explain too many diverse phenomena in too narrow a category. This suggests that source analysis might better focus on the origins and development of individual traditions and clusters of traditions. With this emerging new model, both the term “Gnosticism” and its attendant modern category have lost all relevance to the subject at hand, and now function only to alert us to the problem of their existence.

The historical evidences which have been the focus of the modern term and category “Gnosticism” divide into two groups: ancient manuscripts and heresiological reports. Concerning manuscripts, there have been four major discoveries of Coptic papyrus codices antedating 400 c.e. including, in order of their discovery, the Askew Codex containing four texts (published in 1896), the Bruce Codex containing three texts (1891), and the Berlin Codex containing four texts (1955). In 1945 13 Coptic papyrus codices containing 52 different texts and dating to the mid-4th century were discovered in Upper Egypt near the modern village of Nag Hammadi. The books appear to have been copied and read by Christian monks. The origins mostly date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, with some of their sources going back to the 1st century. This single discovery provides 40 new texts, 30 of which are fairly complete, but 10 highly fragmented. Many of the texts recovered from these four discoveries were placed into the category “Gnosticism” because they were seen to be similar to the texts refuted by the heresiologists. These manuscript discoveries have increased our knowledge of the breadth and diversity of the religious movements once forced into the faulty category “Gnosticism.”

Heresiologists span the 2nd through 5th centuries, beginning with Justin Martyr (d. 165), the influential Irenaeus of Lyon (d. 200), Clement of Alexandria (d. 215), Tertullian (d. 225), Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235), Origen (d. 254), Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403), Augustine (d. 430; a one-time Manichean), and Theodoret of Cyrrhus (d. 466). Heresiological evidences can be divided into reliable verbatim quotations (totaling less than 60 pages) and various descriptions. The naturally biased and sometime derivative nature of the heresiological reports is well known. Generally, these reports argued that the groups they were describing had deviated under demonic influence from the true line, and that the error had come through an earlier Jewish source (Justin and Irenaeus), a Greek philosophical source (Hippolytus and Clement), or a variety of Greek and Jewish sectarian sources (Epiphanius).

The heresiological reports evidence the existence of discrete religious movements (often called schools). Basilides of Alexandria (d. ca. 150) and his student Isidore began a successful movement which existed until the 4th century, though confined to Egypt. Valentinus of Alexandria and Rome (d. ca. 175) saw his teaching explode on the international scene during his own lifetime with the development of distinct Eastern and Western Valentinian traditions. Some of his students became influential figures in Valentinian Christian history, most notably Ptolemy, Heracleon, and Markus. Marcion of Sinope (d. ca. 160) also built a successful international movement with students like Apelles (d. ca. 200) which endured until the 4th century in the West (a target of Constantine’s state persecution) but even longer in the East, where Arab authors still referred to the Marcionites in the 10th century.

Some modern researchers suggest that several NT and related texts evidence contact with “Gnosticism” in various stages of its development. Texts that especially stand out are Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, Colossians, Ephesians, the Pastoral Epistles, Jude, 2 Peter, and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (d. ca. 115) and Polycarp of Smyrna (d. ca. 165) among others. But even here the issues discussed are diverse, demonstrating a complex assortment of competing new religious movements, but no evidence of “Gnosticism.”

Bibliography. H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston, 1963); G. Quispel, Gnostic Studies, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1974); J. M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. ed. (San Francisco, 1988); K. Rudolph, Gnosis (San Francisco, 1984); D. M. Scholer, Nag Hammadi Bibliography, 1948-1969 (Leiden, 1971); Nag Hammadi Bibliography, 1970-1994 (Leiden, 1997); M. A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism” (Princeton, 1996).

Paul Mirecki

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

GNOSTICISM, GNOSIS

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)