What Did Gnostic Christians Believe?

if you know anything about ancient Christianity you might have heard of Gnosticism for Christians Gnosticism is the arch heresy of all heresies it is an esoteric mystical cult in opposition to a more authentic Orthodox Christianity traditional Christian scholars such as NT right think it is a particularly troubling heresy rather than believing in a bodily resurrection of the Dead or a Jesus that actually lived and died and rose again as a human Gnostics they say are disgusted by the material world and see Jesus more as a spiritual being the Gnostic conception of the afterlife therefore is an incorporeal existence away from this dirty and corrupted planet outside of Christianity Gnostics sometimes are painted as countercultural Mavericks fighting against stodgy Orthodox doctrine Gnostics even made front-page news back in 2006 when the newly discovered Gospel of Judas was first published in English like other so-called Gnostic Gospels the Gospel of Judas pays special attention to secret knowledge unlike the Gospels where Judas Iscariot betrays Jesus and the Gospel of Judas Jesus and Judas share a secret conversation away from the other disciples only Judas knows the secret mission of Jesus and all his other disciples you know they're just deluded by a false God but what really is Gnosticism when we cut through the hype from both sides of this discourse and why has it played such a big deal in discussions of Christian orthodoxy and heresy to this day now from the start it is important to say that Gnosticism did not really exist well by that I mean there wasn't a religion called Gnosticism in the same way that Christians and Jews called their religions Christian East most knew dies most in antiquity in other words there was no Church of Gnosticism of course authors such as patinas and irenaeus talked about people called Gnostics or Gnostic oi for you Greek village is out there but Gnosticism as a term as an ism was invented by modern scholars to account for a family of writings persons and beliefs that all reflect a similar so when we use the term Gnosticism it is better to think of it as a school of thought rather than a religion or a discrete unified social group so what did these nos decoy really think well if you've watched any of my other videos you won't be surprised to hear that it's complicated you see most of what we know about Gnostics comes from polemics what we would call anti Gnostic writings it would sort of be like asking a Democrat to write an essay called what is a Republican rest assured it would not be completely unbiased with exaggerations and half-truths thrown in there throughout so for example a friendly neighborhood bishop by the name of epifanio Salamis writes the Gnostics are a blasphemous assembly full of enormous recklessness and the filthy perversity of their beggarly obscenity truly pollutes the ears harsh words for sure but he goes even further according to epifanio's the Gnostics are a filthy and promiscuous Bunch holding orgies instead of church services and eating babies instead of bread and wine for the Eucharist and if you think eating babies can get even worse it does I'm just really interested in keeping this video blog pg-13 if you want the r-rated version just go read Epiphanius okay epifanio's is an extreme example but I hope it'll astray --tz-- how difficult it is to reconstruct an ancient theology using writings written by guys that absolutely hated that theology these accusations are obviously slander instead of historical portrait of the ancient Gnostics I don't really think they were eating babies a better way to find out about the ancient Gnostics is to read their own texts we have a large collection of Gnostic texts called the NAG Hammadi library a collection of Christian texts discovered in Egypt in the 1940s making it one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time along with the Dead Sea Scrolls comparing the NAG Hammadi library with the polemics of the Church Fathers scholars have been able to reconstruct a stereotypical Gnostic theology what I call a list of Gnostic cliches for reasons that we'll get into later the first gnostic cliche is that they believed in a dualistic anthropology this means that they sharply delineated between the material body and the spiritual realm they valued the soul as something send an inharmonious trapped within a dirty corrupted body the ideal afterlife therefore is for the soul to escape from this body and enter the spiritual realm since this world is so messed up and corrupted this means that it must have been created by a messed up and corrupted God therefore the second gnostic cliche is that they believed in a dualistic theology one that states that there are two main gods one higher perfect God called the monad and a lower inferior almost evil God called the Demiurge the one that created this material reality the non Hammadi texts called the apocryphon of John is probably the best example of this dualistic theology the apocryphon of John reinterprets the creation myth that we find in the book of Genesis instead of God being the Supreme Being that creates Adam and Eve he is a jealous and lesser God that traps Humanity on a corrupted planet hiding the keys to divine knowledge in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil Jesus and this reinterpretation is a savior sent from the Monad to save humanity from the Demiurge he encourages Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit to attain divine knowledge and therefore eternal life this leads into the final Gnostic cliche a premise II for secret knowledge this is what we talked about earlier with the Gospel of Judas how only Judas had a special monopoly on the secret mission of Jesus that the rest of the disciples were ignorant about the problem with defining Gnosticism as a typology or as a list of characteristics is that it emphasizes certain characteristics at the expense of others so for example how many Gnostic texts do you think match the typology that we just created dualistic anthropology dualistic theology and a premise II for secret knowledge let's take the Gospel of Thomas for example which is commonly understood as the most famous Gnostic gospel we certainly see a concern for secret knowledge the first line of the Gospel of Thomas reads these are the obscure sayings that the living Jesus uttered and which Thomas wrote down and he said whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not taste death eternal life itself depends on secret knowledge here other passages throughout the Gospel of Thomas talked about the individual embarking on a journey of inward but does this concern alone warrant calling the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic there is no wicked Demiurge there is no hatred of the material world and if you start going through every text of the NAG Hammadi library you'll find that none of them quite fit this typology that we've created the gospel of truth for example written by the arch gnostic valentineís himself has no wicked Demiurge it has practical moral values and valentineís talks about an earthly jesus that actually died and rose again from the dead terribly earthly things to do for a theology that supposedly hates material existence and this is why I use the term Gnostic cliches they are stereotypes that are certainly evident in ancient Gnostic texts but we should be careful not to think of Gnosticism as a set of beliefs with boundaries as rigid as these cliches some scholars want to throw out the term Gnosticism entirely thinking it's just too blunt of a tool to do such precise historical work the jury is still out on these debates but if you're not a scholar it's good enough to recognize that the Gnostics believed a variety of theologies that fall within one of the stereotypes that we just talked about of course epifanio and Irenaeus never use a term quite as polite as variety instead for these church fathers Gnosticism represented a heresy but why so much vitriol and why does this matter for today heresy was viewed as dangerous or invited exile precisely because it involved outsiders trying to become insiders or insiders that other insiders were trying to push out this infighting exemplifies a phenomenon called the narcissism of small differences an unnecessarily complicated term that means when closely related communities whether religious ethnic or political engage in near constant warfare because their small differences are more threatening than some distant foe so for example although Gnostic theology sounds kind of weird to modern Christians Gnostic and Orthodox Christians have a lot more in common than say Christians and ancient Celts both gnostic and orthodox christians affirm the existence of jesus they both think jesus had some major role to play in world history and salvation but their differences spark anger and suspicions while there are differences with ancient Celtic religions doesn't exactly spark a thriving genre of anti druid polemics the point of all this is to show that you can't talk about Gnosticism without talking about heresy the two are almost synonymous both in antiquity and in Christian churches today but this position doesn't exactly help when we are trying to place Gnosticism into its historical context we're essentially siding with the baby-eating perspective of epifanio's when we do we can't exactly take orthodoxy for granted when we study ancient Christian texts a time when the delineation between orthodoxy and heresy was a lot more fluid and there was a surprising diversity of theology within Christianity itself this concept of the narcissism of small differences the idea that we fight our religious neighbors a lot harder than we fight anyone else that concept is alive and well today it not only can help us see what ancient Gnostics really were like 1,500 years ago but it also might help us cut through religious conflict today recognizing slander when it happens and achieving a more nuanced perspective of the opposing party even if they seem like terrible people to you as always thanks for watching and please subscribe you

Channel: ReligionForBreakfast

Views: 445,202

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Keywords: Gnosticism, Christianity, Ancient Greek (Human Language), New Testament (Religious Text), Gnosticism In Modern Times (Religion), Religious Studies (Field Of Study), What is Gnosticism?, What did Gnostics believe?

Id: Iuvk2bLCzwM

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 21 2015