Yesterday, we spoke about the Gospel of Mary, a Gnostic Gospel that was found in the town of Nag Hammadi with a large collection of early Gnostic writings. This place then became known as the Nag Hammadi Library. In both that post of the Gospel of Mary and the couple of sentences above, I have used the word ‘Gnostic’ repeatedly. I had a reader ask me what ‘Gnostic’ is and what makes it different than the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Within the first two centuries A.D., two divisions of Christianity developed. They were called the orthodox and the Gnostics. The orthodox Christians held the books of the bible that we currently hold now and their traditions became Christianity that we know today. The orthodox belief was backed by the four Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John and the words of Jesus Christ.
The Gnostics, on the other hand, had very different views on just about all major aspects of Christianity. The word Gnosticism means “to know” in Greek. The Gnostics believed that they claimed a higher knowledge, and so the name, that was granted to them, not from Jesus and the bible, but from a high plane of existence. They considered themselves the Christian elite and wanted an elevated status due to their better knowledge of God.
The second major difference is their belief that there is a definite divide between matter and spirit. With this divide, life only existed in the spirit realm. The spirit was considered good and the body was inherently pure evil. Since the two were divided, anything we did in our mortal or matter realm did not corrupt the spirit. So, according to the Gnostics, we could do any sin we wanted and that was just our bodies doing it, not the spirit so they were still pure and could go to Heaven. As you can see, this clearly flies in the face of what Jesus taught and His purpose for being on this earth.
The Gnostics began to lose the ‘belief war’ due to the fact that they really didn’t have anything to back to their beliefs like the orthodox had. So to remedy this, they began to create their own gospels to combat those of the Bible and swing believers their way. They used the names of prominent biblical figures to try to make their gospels carry more weight with the reader. The problem was that, due to their beliefs, they did not fully understand Jesus as a human; they spun his tale in outlandish style making him appear to be God on earth with all of His powers or spirit more than man.
Soon the Gnostics fell from the radar as the early church refused to believe their forgeries and tossed out all of their gospels as heresy. In today’s terms, it would be like David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas writing his own version of the gospels to make himself appear as the second coming of Jesus and trying to push it out on the world. Not going to work for him or the Gnostics.
In His knowledge,
Hunter
