Gnosticism from Thought to Religion (original) (raw)

Gnosticism's Origin, History, and Influence on Christianity

2018

It is a short essay on the origin and development of Gnosticism in and outside Christianity. The essay explores the Gnostic teachings that base the possibility of achieving freedom from the prison of the material universe on the salvific role of knowledge, "gnosis." It is a brief essay, which does not get into details while touching upon any area of Gnosticism and only briefly discusses major aspects and ideas of the quasi-independent Gnostic spiritualism. The essay also hints at the Gnostic characteristics found in Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam.

Gnosticism Disputed: Major Debates in the Field

Secret Religion: Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism. Edited by April D. DeConick. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Studies: Religion series. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2016

Lively, sometimes heated, discussion is part of what makes gnostic studies so engrossing. These discussions and debates occur especially whenever gnostic texts are discovered and published, such as the huge discovery of the thirteen Nag Hammadi codices (i.e., ancient books), published in 1977, and the far smaller, but also incredible, discovery of the Codex Tchacos with its copy of the lost Gospel of Judas, published in 2006. The debates happen at academic conferences and on the printed pages of scholarship as well as on webpages such as blogs and online news sources. Understanding the debates is key to understanding the scholarship and situating the work of one expert with respect to that of another, as some specialists may reframe perennial research questions and even seek to replace them with different questions they consider more pressing. Major debates include the issue of how gnosticism is to be defined, and the question of where it came from. They also include the issue of whether its ancient opponents are reliable, and the question of who produced, collected, and owned the Nag Hammadi codices and other gnostic texts surviving in Coptic, the final form of the ancient Egyptian language. Another debate concerns what should be done when the next manuscript is found.

Review of Gnosticism and the History of Religions by David G. Robertson

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2022

American Academy of Religion 89:4) presented a roundtable on "Theosophy and the Study of Religion" that shed light on the extensive intermingling of scholarship with Theosophy as the study of religion coalesced into an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such archaeological work is essential to the functioning of our field as a self-reflexive, critical discipline, because it provides opportunities to reassess too-long-settled consensus, change theoretical boilerplates that have outlived their utility, and-most urgently-expose the hidden complicity of our field in projects of (ideological and physical) domination of subjugated peoples and cultures. David G. Robertson's Gnosticism and the History of Religions joins in on this disciplinary digging, focusing upon the travels of the concepts of gnosis and Gnosticism. Robertson seeks to present a narrative history of religious studies that connects the category critiques of Michael Williams and Karen King with the intellectual histories of mid-century European historians of religions, such as those by Steven Wasserstrom and Benjamin Lazier (6). Over the course of the story, Robertson argues that an ancient religious tradition that never existed (Gnosticism) became essentialized into an ahistorical universal current (gnosis) that persists today as an inherently problematic, theoretically vacuous category of analysis. "Gnosticism is sui generis religion par excellence" (3). The book covers a lot of ground at high altitude and high speed. Chapter 1 surveys the polemical deployment of "Gnostic" in early Christian heresiography before pivoting to a brief history of early scholarship on "Gnosticism" from the term's first emergence in the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 traces discourses of Gnosticism in nineteenth-century Theosophist and occultist movements, highlighting G. R. S. Mead's Theosophist scholarship on Pistis Sophia and other ancient "gnostic" sources. Chapters 3-7 form a continuous intellectual history of mid-twentieth century Europe, focusing in turn on Hans Jonas's emergence from the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; Carl Jung's intellectual formation and the eventual coalescence of the Eranos circle; the scholarly milieu (overlapping with Eranos) in which the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) were first announced and interpreted; shifting valuations of Gnosticism, among Jonas and others, in the aftermath of Nag Hammadi (but, more pertinently, in the aftermath of Auschwitz); and, finally, the formation of the International Society for the History of Religions, leading up to the 1966 Messina colloquium on "The Origins of Gnosticism. " Chapter 8 then takes a hard turn into contemporary Gnostic groups, drawing on

Beware of the Gnostics (a change paper)

Rather than an organized church, Gnosticism or Docetism in antiquity were broad dualistic ways of thinking held as expressions of reality within Greco-Roman society. A codified body of literature did not exist. The Pistis Sophia was a major work and is available here, and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts also constitute literature with gnostic ideas. Carpocrates and Valentinus were gnostic leaders in the second century A.D. Marcion founded celibate churches in Syria where monasticism also developed, and Tatian, also a gnostic, developed the first canon or list of inspired books. Origen in 248 A.D. shows signs of gnostic thinking in his writing, e.g. . “Every soul that is born into flesh is soiled by the filth of wickedness and sin…..” – Homily on Leviticus. Origen was prolific, and one may think he wrote too much. Irenaeus was a second century Christian writer and counsellor who advised Pope Victor.. Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics still hold the view that every human conception is separated from God because of sin inherited from Adam and Eve. The teaching is that Jesus died to save even infants from original sin. By tying the sacrifice of Jesus to original sin, the latter seems validated by the former. Definition: Evangelical Gnosticism is a dualistic world-view that believes salvation from sin is attained only by an unseen spiritual approach, i.e. internal mental assent alone; excluding physicality. In this way, the idea of “spiritual” has been hijacked or claimed by the evangelical gnostics. The insidious nature of gnostic thinking is that one may not realize that their ideas are gnostic.