Gnosis

[13] The terms do not appear to indicate any mystic, esoteric or hidden meaning in the works of Plato, but instead expressed a sort of higher intelligence and ability analogous to talent.

[19] Episteme, like Gnosis, is a Greek word for "knowledge," but they represent distinct kinds of understanding—though not necessarily exclusively.

While episteme deals with objective truths and verifiable facts, gnosis is more concerned with personal insight, inner transformation, and an engagement more ineffable than explicable.

[20] Gnosticism originated in the late 1st century CE in non-rabbinical Jewish and developed further within early Christianity.

[3][7][8][23] The Gnostics considered the most essential part of the process of salvation to be this esoteric knowledge, in contrast to God's grace as an outlook in their worldview along with faith in the ecclesiastical authority.

[3][7][8][23] In Gnosticism, the biblical serpent in the Garden of Eden was praised and thanked for bringing knowledge (gnosis) to Adam and Eve and thereby freeing them from the malevolent Demiurge's control.

[23] Gnostic Christian doctrines rely on a dualistic cosmology that implies the eternal conflict between good and evil, and a conception of the serpent as the liberating savior and bestower of knowledge to humankind opposed to the Demiurge or creator god, identified with the Hebrew God of the Old Testament.

[3][7][23][24] In the Archontic, Sethian, and Ophite systems, Yaldabaoth (Yahweh) is regarded as the malevolent Demiurge and false god of the Old Testament who generated the material universe and keeps the souls trapped in physical bodies, imprisoned in the world full of pain and suffering that he created.

[31][32]: 15  Mandaeans formally refer to themselves as Nasurai (Nasoraeans) meaning guardians or possessors of secret rites and knowledge.

[39][40] Boston College Catholic philosopher Dermot Moran notes that ...even in early Christianity, matters were complex, such that an anti-gnostic writer like Clement of Alexandria can regularly invoke the notion of gnostike theoria in a positive sense.

[47] Gnosis, as the proper use of the spiritual or noetic faculty plays an important role in Orthodox Christian theology.