When I was in the seminary I was on the New Testament Honors Track. To qualify you had to have a BA in Theology and pass the Greek entrance exam, I met both criteria (I actually tied for third place on the Greek entrance exam) so I did it, or at least started on it. What it meant was rather than taking a handful of pre-selected New Testament courses that would have been redundant with what I took in my undergrad, I had free reign on 500 level (masters) and 600 level (masters and doctorate) NT classes. The one course I took before dropping out was a 600 level New Testament backgrounds seminar on Gnosticism.

For those of you who haven’t been in a graduate program, a seminar is a class where each student writes a paper (or more) and presents it in class. For this seminar, we each took one of the Gnostic scriptures and presented it. In effect, the students teach the class.

In this small course, there were a few more doctoral students than masters students, but what was surprising is that I grasped the material much better than anyone else. Numerous times I found myself explaining things to the professor and presenter, this is in spite of the fact that the professor had been teaching this course for 30 years and the presenter was supposed to have a much deeper understanding of each passage than the rest of us. For a while I even picked up the nickname of “The Gnostic,” which is ironic since at that time I would have been more accurately described as an agnostic. The difference was that I went into this study of a  “heresy” with a desire to understand what they believed and why, while everybody else compared it all against the Bible and more orthodox Christianity to prove it wrong. To put it simply, I had an open mind, theirs were all closed.

I really don’t see the point in arguing against a school of thought that has been dead for more than 1500 years, but they seemed to. Before anybody corrects me here, yes I do know that there is a Gnostic church in California, but no body takes neo-Gnosticism seriously.

So now I’m going to give you a crash course on Gnosticism. It was an early Christian heresy that started in the first century CE, and there is good support for the idea that the gospel and epistles of John where written to counter Gnosticism. It combined Neoplatonic philosophy (strong dualism), Jewish asceticism, and what was beginning to become mainstream Christianity.

The basic Gnostic premise was that spirit is good and matter is evil. As such, Gnostics would generally practice asceticism to punish the evil material body. There were a few groups (and I got to present their scripture) that were known as Libertine Gnostics who didn’t care what the wicked material body did, so they had elaborate orgies, that was a fun class period.

Both groups believed that having children created matter (evil), so that was forbidden. In the case of the ascetic Gnostics this would be accomplished by celibacy, and the libertines would practice the pull out method (they did a little more than that, but it’s pretty twisted). When a libertine Gnostic woman would get pregnant they would perform an abortion and eat the fetus, thus eliminating the newly created matter. Yes, abortion was around in the second century CE.

Gnostics were not evangelical. They believed that you either had the gnosis (secret knowledge) within you, or you didn’t. If you did then you would seek them out and join them in their enlightened life. If you didn’t have the gnosis then you would find their ideas to be foolish, so there was no point in bothering. At a few points the Gnosticism threatened to become the dominate force in Christianity, but in the end they were destroyed by the church.

That destruction meant the torture or death of all Gnostics and the burning of all their books. A few fragments have been found here and there, but the largest cache of Gnostic texts was found in Egypt a few decades ago, it had been intentionally buried in the mid fourth century, to save it from being burned.

In spite of Gnosticism’s demise in the fourth century, elements of it popped up throughout the middle ages in various “heresies” throughout Europe and the dualism that if found in most of Christianity most likely came via the Gnostics.

On Sunday we’ll cover the one thing the Gnostics had right.