Gnosticism
Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (sometimes associated with the Hebrew Bible deity Yahweh)[1] who is responsible for creating the material universe.
Consequently, Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil, and held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity, attained via mystical or esoteric insight.
Going further than this, other contemporary scholars such as Michael Allen Williams,[11] Karen Leigh King,[12] and David G. Robertson[13] contest whether "Gnosticism" is a valid or useful historical term, or if it was an artificial category framed by proto-orthodox theologians to target miscellaneous Christian heretics.
[33]: 15–16 Within early Christianity, the teachings of Paul the Apostle and John the Evangelist may have been a starting point for Gnostic ideas, with a growing emphasis on the opposition between flesh and spirit, the value of charisma, and the disqualification of the Jewish law.
[30] Other modern scholars hold that Gnosticism arose within Judaism and later incorporated stories about Jesus into pre-existing speculation about a cosmic Savior and Philo's Jewish interpretation of Middle Platonic thought about the demiurge and the logos.
[45][38][39][note 14] Ethel S. Drower adds, "heterodox Judaism in Galilee and Samaria appears to have taken shape in the form we now call Gnostic, and it may well have existed some time before the Christian era.
[48] However, scholars specializing in Mandaeism such as Kurt Rudolph, Mark Lidzbarski, Rudolf Macúch, Ethel S. Drower, James F. McGrath, Charles G. Häberl, Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, and Şinasi Gündüz argue for a Judean–Israelite origin.
[71][note 16] The influence of Buddhism in any sense on either the Gnostikos Valentinus (c. 170) or the Nag Hammadi texts (3rd century) is not supported by modern scholarship, although Elaine Pagels called it a "possibility".
[99] The demiurge typically creates a group of co-actors named archons who preside over the material realm and, in some cases, present obstacles to the soul seeking ascent from it.
[95] According to Origen's Contra Celsum, a sect called the Ophites posited the existence of seven archons, beginning with Iadabaoth or Ialdabaoth, who created the six that follow: Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaios, Elaios, Astaphanos, and Horaios.
[123] According to James Dunn, the Gnostic emphasis on an inherent difference between flesh and spirit represented a significant departure from the teachings of the Historical Jesus and his earliest followers.
[125] According to Raymond Brown, the Gospel of John shows "the development of certain gnostic ideas, especially Christ as heavenly revealer, the emphasis on light versus darkness, and anti-Jewish animus.
[130] Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have expanded upon this idea of Paul as a Gnostic teacher;[131] although their premise that Jesus was invented by early Christians based on an alleged Greco-Roman mystery cult has been dismissed by scholars.
[5] Their religion has been practiced primarily around the lower Karun, Euphrates and Tigris and the rivers that surround the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, part of southern Iraq and Khuzestan province in Iran.
[63][136] Jorunn J. Buckley and other scholars specializing in Mandaeism believe that the Mandaeans originated about two thousand years ago in the Judean region and moved east due to persecution.
[169] Roelof van den Broek notes that "Sethianism" may never have been a separate religious movement, and that the term refers rather to a set of mythological themes which occur in various texts.
[187] Marcion was a Church leader from Sinope (a city on the south shore of the Black Sea in present-day Turkey), who preached in Rome around 150 CE,[188] but was expelled and started his own congregation, which spread throughout the Mediterranean.
This dualistic teaching embodied an elaborate cosmological myth that included the defeat of a primal man by the powers of darkness that devoured and imprisoned the particles of light.
The Paulicians, an Adoptionist group which flourished between 650 and 872 in Armenia and the Eastern Themes of the Byzantine Empire, were accused by orthodox medieval sources of being Gnostic and quasi Manichaean Christian.
If their critics are reliable the basic conceptions of Gnostic cosmology are to be found in Cathar beliefs (most distinctly in their notion of a lesser, Satanic, creator god), though they did not apparently place any special relevance upon knowledge (gnosis) as an effective salvific force.
A human being captured by its animal desires, mistakenly claims autonomy and independence from the "higher God", thus resembling the lower deity in classical Gnostic traditions.
However light metaphors and the idea of unity of existence (Arabic: وحدة الوجود, romanized: waḥdat al-wujūd) still prevailed in later Islamic thought, such as that of ibn Sina.
[211] Given that some of the earliest dated Kabbalistic texts emerged in medieval Provence, at which time Cathar movements were also supposed to have been active, Scholem and other mid-20th century scholars argued that there was mutual influence between the two groups.
[213] Found today in Iraq, Iran and diaspora communities, the Mandaeans are an ancient Gnostic ethnoreligious group that follow John the Baptist and have survived from antiquity.
[59] J. Horn and Ernest Anton Lewald proposed Persian and Zoroastrian origins, while Jacques Matter described Gnosticism as an intrusion of eastern cosmological and theosophical speculation into Christianity.
[55] Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), who belonged to the History of Dogma school and proposed a Kirchengeschichtliches Ursprungsmodell, saw Gnosticism as an internal development within the church under the influence of Greek philosophy.
Broadly, King's book traces elements of the history of research, arguing that the term and its typical connotations do injustice to the diversity and breadth of early Christianity.
Thus, in King's reading, it is not precisely the category of Gnosticism that is flawed, but the way in which it was conceived and applied, a form of self/other rhetoric that rendered the remaining portion of Christianity less diverse for centuries to come.
However, scholars such as Kurt Rudolph, Mark Lidzbarski, Rudolf Macúch, Ethel S. Drower and Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley argue for a Palestinian origin for Mandaeism.
[238] In light of such increasing scholarly rejection and restriction of the concept of Gnosticism, David G. Robertson has written on the distortions which misapplications of the term continue to perpetuate in religious studies.
