For centuries Gnosticism was known mainly through the people who hated it
Early Gnostics believed the material world was built by a flawed lesser god and that salvation came through secret, personal knowledge of a hidden higher one. Church leaders branded them heretics and destroyed their books so effectively that, until a jar of texts surfaced in Egypt in 1945, their enemies did most of the talking.
Gnosticism is not one religion but a modern umbrella for a family of movements that had matured by the middle of the second century, mostly among early Christians. They shared a preference for gnosis, a Greek word for knowledge gained through direct experience, over the authority of church institutions. Many taught that a hidden, perfect supreme being stood above a defective demiurge who made physical reality, sometimes identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible. Their texts speak less of sin and repentance than of illusion and awakening, with Christ as a divine figure who came to remind humans of their own divinity.
The label itself is late. Irenaeus, writing around 185, mocked the school of Valentinus as the heresy called learned, and the English philosopher Henry More coined Gnosticisme in the seventeenth century. For most of history, scholars relied on hostile summaries by Irenaeus and Hippolytus. That changed with the Nag Hammadi library, found in Egypt in 1945, which includes the Gospel of Thomas and the Apocryphon of John and reveals a far messier early Christianity than church histories suggested.
Origins remain disputed. Some scholars, such as Simone Petrement and David Brakke, see an internal Christian movement growing from tendencies in Paul and the Gospel of John; others root it in Second Temple Judaism, citing Gershom Scholem and Gilles Quispel. James M. Robinson noted that no Gnostic text clearly predates Christianity. Since the 1990s some researchers have asked whether the category is useful at all.
The ideas proved durable. Manichaeism, which took up Gnostic dualism, briefly rivalled Christianity in the third century. Gnostic thought hung on in the Near East into the sixth century or later and reached as far as China before fading in the late ninth. Medieval Cathars and Bogomils revived similar themes, and Mandaeism survives today as a living Gnostic tradition.
Source: Gnosticism
