What Was Gnosticism?

"Gnosticism" turns up in novels, documentaries and online arguments as the name for a lost, more spiritual Christianity that the bishops crushed. Such uses tell us more about modern tastes than about the second century.

The real question is historical. Who were the teachers Irenaeus of Lyons attacked around 180, what did they teach about God, Christ and the body, can we still call them "Gnostic," and why did the Church, which loves the language of light and union with God, refuse their account of salvation?

In brief

"Gnosticism" is a modern umbrella term for a range of second-century Christian teachers and groups who claimed a saving knowledge (gnosis) above the faith of ordinary believers. Some of them called themselves "Gnostics"; others, such as the Valentinians, adapted similar ideas while still claiming a place in the Church. Common features included a supreme God far above the world, a lower and ignorant creator (the demiurge), a divine spark trapped in some human beings, and a Christ who brought knowledge rather than redemption of the flesh. Our sources are the Church's opponents, chiefly Irenaeus, and the Coptic texts found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and in the Berlin Codex. Scholars debate whether the category is useful at all. The Church rightly condemned these systems as heresy, because they denied that the one God made a good world, that the Word truly became flesh, and that the body will rise.

Thesis: Whatever we call them, the teachers Irenaeus opposed offered a different God, a different Christ and a different salvation. Their teaching was heresy and is false, and the Church answered it by holding to the Creator, the Incarnation and the resurrection of the flesh.

What does "Gnostic" mean?

The Greek word gnosis simply means knowledge. Elaine Pagels, whose The Gnostic Gospels (1979) brought these texts to a wide public, notes that Greek distinguishes reflective knowledge ("He knows mathematics") from knowledge by acquaintance ("He knows me"), and that gnosis in these writings is closer to "insight," a knowing of oneself that is at the same time a knowing of God.¹ Christians had no quarrel with knowledge of God as such. The quarrel was over what was claimed to be known, who could know it, and what it did to the gospel.

Irenaeus wrote that these teachers drew people away "under a pretence of [superior] knowledge, from Him who founded and adorned the universe," as if they had "something more excellent and sublime to reveal, than that God who created the heaven and the earth."² His title echoes Paul's warning to Timothy against "what is falsely called knowledge" (1 Timothy 6:20, NKJV).³

Is "Gnosticism" even a real category?

This is the first thing a reader should know: the word "Gnosticism" (with the "-ism") is modern, and its usefulness is debated. Michael Williams's Rethinking "Gnosticism" (1996) argued, in the publisher's summary, that "the modern construct 'gnosticism' is not justified by any ancient self-definition," and proposed a more accurate way to describe the groups involved.⁴ Karen King's What Is Gnosticism? (2003) argues that historians have been "misled by ancient Christian polemicists" who presented Gnostics as a "dark double" against which their own faith could be defined.⁵

Others think the critics went too far. David Brakke's The Gnostics (2010) grants that the category "is flawed and must be reformed," but argues for gathering the evidence more carefully for a real "ancient Christian movement known as the Gnostic school of thought."⁶ Part of his case is that the name was not simply pinned on these people by enemies. Irenaeus says of the followers of Carpocrates, one of whom, Marcellina, came to Rome, "They style themselves Gnostics." He says Valentinus "adapted the principles of the heresy called Gnostic" to his own school, and he describes a "multitude of Gnostics" springing up "like mushrooms growing out of the ground."⁷

The fair conclusion is that "Gnosticism" is a convenient label for a family of related but different movements, not a single church with a single creed. This article uses "Gnostic" in that loose sense. {{strong: Some second-century groups called themselves "Gnostics," but the modern category "Gnosticism" groups together movements that differed a good deal from one another.}}

Where our evidence comes from

For centuries almost everything known about these groups came from opponents such as Irenaeus and, later, Epiphanius. That changed with two finds. A Coptic book now in Berlin (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502), bought in Cairo in 1896 but not published until 1955, contains the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John.⁸ Then in December 1945 a peasant near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt found a jar of leather-bound Coptic books. Pagels counts some fifty-two texts, and dates the manuscripts by the papyrus in their bindings and their script to about 350 to 400.⁹ That find is described in our article Why Were the Gnostic Gospels Left Out of the Bible?.

Two main families

The Sethian myth: the Apocryphon of John

The Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John presents itself as a revelation of the risen Christ to the apostle John. It describes a perfect, unknowable Father, from whom a series of divine powers comes forth. One of them, Sophia (Wisdom), acts without her partner and produces a misshapen being, whom she names Yaltabaoth. In Frederik Wisse's translation, this ruler "is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, 'I am God and there is no other God beside me,' for he is ignorant of" the power he came from. He then makes the world and its rulers, and says, "I am a jealous God, and there is no other."¹⁰

The point is unmistakable. The God of Israel's Scriptures, who says "I am the Lord, and there is no other; There is no God besides Me" (Isaiah 45:5, NKJV), is here a lesser, ignorant power, and his words are quoted to show his blindness. Human beings are made by these rulers, but a spark of the higher power is breathed into them without their maker's knowledge, and salvation is the awakening and return of that spark. Irenaeus describes the same mythology, with its figure "Barbelos," in Against Heresies 1.29.¹¹ Modern scholars often call this family "Sethian," because texts such as this one give a special place to Seth, the third son of Adam, and to "the seed of Seth."

The Valentinians

Valentinus was a Christian teacher who, Irenaeus says, "came to Rome in the time of Hyginus, flourished under Pius, and remained until Anicetus," three successive bishops of Rome in the middle decades of the second century.¹² His followers, among them Ptolemy, did not simply leave the Church; they saw themselves as its spiritual elite.

Irenaeus gives a detailed account of Ptolemy's system. Above is the Pleroma (fullness) of divine Aeons; below, the Demiurge, formed from the passion of the fallen Wisdom (here called Achamoth). This creator "imagined that he created all these things of himself"; "he fashioned man, yet knew not man," and "imagined himself to be God alone."¹³ Humanity falls into three kinds. Material people perish. "Animal" or "psychic" people, who are ordinary Church members ("We of the Church, they say, are these persons"), can be saved by faith and good works. The spiritual, who are the Valentinians themselves, will be saved "not by means of conduct, but because they are spiritual by nature," like gold that keeps its beauty even when "submersed in filth."¹⁴

Not every Valentinian writing sounds like that summary. Ptolemy's Letter to Flora, preserved word for word by Epiphanius, is calm and careful. It argues that the Law of Moses was not given by "the perfect God the Father," nor by the devil, but by an intermediate god who "is neither good nor evil or unjust, but can properly be called just." Ptolemy even appeals to "the apostolic tradition which we too have received by succession."¹⁵ Such teachers used the same Scriptures and vocabulary as the Church; the disagreement lay underneath, in the doctrine of God.

Other teachers

Irenaeus also describes Saturninus and Basilides. In his report of Basilides, Christ "did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene," was crucified in his place, "while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them." Anyone who "confesses the crucified" is "still a slave."¹⁶ Marcion, who also taught a second God but did not share the Gnostic myths, is treated in our article Who Was Marcion?

Shared ideas

Across these systems the creator of the visible world is not the highest God. He may be wicked, as in the Apocryphon of John, or merely "just," as in Ptolemy's letter, but he is not the Father of Jesus Christ in the full sense. This idea, more than any other, separated these teachers from the Church.

A Christ who only seemed to suffer

If matter is the problem, a Saviour cannot truly have flesh. Irenaeus reports that the Valentinians "deny that He assumed anything material [into His nature], since indeed matter is incapable of salvation."¹⁷ Writing earlier, at the start of the second century, Ignatius of Antioch already insisted that Christ "suffered truly, even as also He truly raised up Himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that He only seemed to suffer."¹⁸ This view, called docetism (from the Greek "to seem"), may lie behind 1 John 4:2-3: "every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God" (NKJV).¹⁹ Not every Gnostic text is fully docetic, but the tendency runs through many of them.

The body and ethics

Irenaeus accuses some Valentinians of feasting at idol festivals, attending gladiator shows and seducing women, on the ground that "carnal things should be allowed to the carnal nature."²⁰ Some of this may be true of some people; it may also be the kind of charge ancient polemic routinely made. Several Nag Hammadi texts point the other way, toward a severe rejection of the body. The Book of Thomas the Contender, for instance, says, "Woe to you who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish!" and "Woe to you who love intimacy with womankind and polluted intercourse with them!"²¹ Both attitudes, indulgence and contempt, start from the same place: the body does not matter to salvation.

Thomas, Judas, Mary and Philip

Several of these writings call themselves gospels. The Gospels of Thomas and Judas are treated in the article on the Gnostic gospels linked above; Irenaeus already knew a group that honoured Judas as the one who "accomplished the mystery of the betrayal."²² Thomas's last saying has Jesus promise to make Mary "male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males."²³

The Gospel of Mary survives incomplete in the Berlin Codex, with pages 1 to 6 and 11 to 14 missing, and in two small Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus. In it Mary Magdalene comforts the disciples and shares a vision of the soul's ascent past hostile powers. Peter objects: "Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us?" Levi defends her.²⁴ The Gospel of Philip, a collection of meditations found at Nag Hammadi, twice calls Mary Magdalene the Lord's "companion"; the second passage has gaps in the manuscript.²⁵ These texts show groups using the figure of Mary to claim a private revelation that bypassed the apostles. They are not evidence about the historical Mary or about any marriage of Jesus, and they come from the second century or later, well after the canonical Gospels.

Why the Church rejected it

One God, the Maker of heaven and earth

The first answer was the doctrine of God. Irenaeus summarised the faith that "the Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world," received from the apostles: "one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them."²⁶ The Creed the Orthodox Church sings at every Divine Liturgy opens the same way: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible."²⁷ There is no second god behind the Creator. The world was made by the one good God, and Genesis says that "God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good" (Genesis 1:31, NKJV).²⁸

The Word became flesh

The second answer was the Incarnation. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14, NKJV).²⁹ Ignatius asked the docetists a sharp question: if Christ's sufferings were "only in appearance," why was Ignatius himself in chains and on his way to the beasts?³⁰ For the Church the Cross is not a misunderstanding of a phantom; it is the Son of God, who took real flesh from the Virgin, trampling down death by death.

The resurrection of the flesh and the Eucharist

The third answer joined the body, the sacraments and the last day. Irenaeus called "vain in every respect" those who "disallow the salvation of the flesh." If the flesh cannot be saved, he argued, "then neither did the Lord redeem us with His blood, nor is the cup of the Eucharist the communion of His blood." Our bodies, nourished by the Eucharist and laid in the earth, "shall rise at their appointed time."³¹ See also our article Why Does the Body Matter in Christianity?

A public tradition for everyone

The fourth answer concerned authority. Gnostic teachers claimed secret teaching passed to a few. Irenaeus replied that the apostles taught openly in churches whose bishops could be named in order; his argument is set out in our article on Irenaeus of Lyons and in Did the Early Church Believe in Apostolic Succession? Salvation, in the Church's teaching, is not reserved for those who are "spiritual by nature." It is offered to all, to be received by grace and free response.

The Orthodox position

At the level of dogma, the Orthodox Church confesses in the Creed one God, the Maker of all things visible and invisible, the true Incarnation of the Son, and the resurrection of the dead. Every Gnostic system that denies these is heresy: false, and contrary to the apostolic faith. At the level of the Church's common tradition, the Fathers treat matter as God's good creation which can carry grace: water in baptism, bread and wine in the Eucharist, oil, wood and paint in icons. St John of Damascus, defending icons in the eighth century, put the anti-Gnostic instinct memorably: "I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake," and "I will not cease from honouring that matter which works my salvation."³²

Orthodox spirituality, with its language of illumination and union with God (theosis), is sometimes mistaken for a kind of Gnosticism. But theosis is participation in God's life by grace, for the whole person, body and soul, and it comes through the Church's public sacraments and commandments, not through a secret myth for a spiritual elite. Our article What Is a Human Being? The Orthodox View of Body and Soul develops this.

The strongest objections

"The Gnostics were the original Christians, suppressed by the winners."

Pagels argued that "early Christianity is far more diverse than nearly anyone expected before the Nag Hammadi discoveries," and she notes that after Constantine, possession of books denounced as heretical became a criminal offence.³³ The diversity is real, and so is the later use of state power. But the dating evidence does not make Gnostic systems the earliest form of the faith. The developed myths of Valentinus and the Apocryphon of John appear in the second century, while Paul's letters, the Gospels and 1 John, which already insist on Christ's flesh and the Creator's goodness, belong to the first. {{strong: The developed Gnostic systems are attested in the second century, later than the New Testament writings that already oppose docetism.}}

"The category is a polemical invention, so 'the Church rejected Gnosticism' is meaningless."

Williams and King are right that "Gnosticism" is not a single religion. But the Church did not reject a label. It rejected identifiable teachings: a second creator god, a Christ without real flesh, salvation by nature for a few. Those teachings are found in the surviving texts themselves, not only in reports about them.

"Irenaeus misrepresented his opponents."

He was hostile, and his moral charges deserve caution. Yet where we can check him, the myth he describes matches texts written by his opponents; Pagels notes that he "does use the same source" as the Apocryphon of John.³⁴ {{moderate: Irenaeus's accounts of Gnostic teaching are broadly confirmed by Nag Hammadi texts, though his charges about their conduct cannot be checked.}}

"Orthodox asceticism is just Gnostic body-hatred."

The difference is in the goal. Gnostic texts such as the Book of Thomas the Contender call the body a perishing prison. The Church fasts so that the body may be healed and share in the resurrection; she anoints the sick, blesses marriage, and venerates relics because the body belongs to the person God saves.

What we can say confidently

• Second-century Christian teachers, some of whom called themselves "Gnostics," taught that the world was made by a lower, ignorant or merely "just" god, not by the highest God.
• Valentinus taught at Rome under the bishops Hyginus, Pius and Anicetus; Irenaeus wrote against his followers and others about 180.
• The Nag Hammadi codices (copied about 350 to 400) and the Berlin Codex preserve Gnostic texts in Coptic, including the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary.
• Ignatius of Antioch, early in the second century, already opposed those who said Christ "only seemed to suffer."
• The Church's answer rested on one God the Creator, the real Incarnation and the resurrection of the flesh, as the Creed still confesses.

What remains disputed

• Whether "Gnosticism" should be used at all, replaced, or narrowed to a "Gnostic school" (Williams, King and Brakke disagree).
• Whether any Gnostic ideas existed before Christianity, in Jewish or pagan circles, or arose within the Church.
• How reliable Irenaeus and the other heresiologists are on particular details, especially moral charges.
• Who owned and buried the Nag Hammadi books, and why.
• The dates of individual texts such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip within the second and third centuries.

Conclusion

The teachers we call Gnostics were often serious and sincere. They felt the weight of evil and the sense that human beings are strangers in the world, and they wanted a God untouched by it. But their answer, which separated the true God from the world and the Saviour from the flesh, was false. The Church's answer was harder and more hopeful: the one God made this world good, his Son took our flesh from the Virgin and died and rose in it, and the Holy Spirit makes ordinary bread, water and human bodies the place where God is known. The knowledge Christians seek is not an escape from creation but communion with its Maker, offered openly to everyone, "visible and invisible" alike.

Notes

1. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), introduction, as reproduced by PBS Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/pagels.html.
2. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1, preface 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103100.htm.
3. 1 Timothy 6:20 (NKJV).
4. Princeton University Press, description of Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (1996), https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691005423/rethinking-gnosticism.
5. Harvard University Press, description of Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism?, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674017627.
6. Harvard University Press, description of David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674066038.
7. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.25.6, 1.11.1 and 1.29.1, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103125.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103111.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103129.htm.
8. The Gnostic Society Library, archive notes to "The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene," http://gnosis.org/library/marygosp.htm.
9. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, introduction (PBS).
10. The Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1), trans. Frederik Wisse, in The Nag Hammadi Library, http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html.
11. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.29.1.
12. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.4.3, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103304.htm.
13. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.5.3-4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103105.htm.
14. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.6.1-2, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103106.htm.
15. Ptolemy, Letter to Flora, in Epiphanius, Panarion 33.3.1-33.7.10, Gnostic Society Library translation (translator not named), http://gnosis.org/library/flora.htm.
16. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103124.htm.
17. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.6.1.
18. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 2, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm.
19. 1 John 4:2-3 (NKJV).
20. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.6.3.
21. The Book of Thomas the Contender (NHC II,7), trans. John D. Turner, http://gnosis.org/naghamm/bookt.html.
22. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.31.1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103131.htm.
23. The Gospel of Thomas, saying 114, trans. Thomas O. Lambdin, http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html.
24. The Gospel of Mary (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502), Gnostic Society Library text (translator not named) and archive notes, http://gnosis.org/library/marygosp.htm.
25. The Gospel of Philip (NHC II,3), trans. Wesley W. Isenberg, http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gop.html.
26. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.10.1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103110.htm.
27. Orthodox Church in America, "The Symbol of Faith," https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/prayers/symbol-of-faith.
28. Genesis 1:31 (NKJV).
29. John 1:14 (NKJV).
30. Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 4; To the Trallians 10, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0106.htm.
31. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.2.2-3, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103502.htm.
32. St John of Damascus, On Holy Images 1.16, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas Baker, 1898), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/johndamascus-images.asp.
33. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, introduction (PBS).
34. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, introduction (PBS).

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut; Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans and To the Trallians.
• Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English: the Apocryphon of John (trans. Frederik Wisse), the Book of Thomas the Contender (trans. John D. Turner), the Gospel of Thomas (trans. Thomas O. Lambdin), the Gospel of Philip (trans. Wesley W. Isenberg); texts at the Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org.
• The Gospel of Mary (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502). Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org.
• Ptolemy. Letter to Flora, in Epiphanius, Panarion 33. Gnostic Society Library, gnosis.org.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• John of Damascus. On Holy Images. Trans. Mary H. Allies. London: Thomas Baker, 1898.
• Orthodox Church in America. "The Symbol of Faith." oca.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• King, Karen L. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.
• Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.