GNOSTICISM, a term derived from Gr. γνῶσις, G1194, knowledge, and variously applied to movements within, or in relation to, early Christianity.

1. Connotations. Until fairly recently the term was generally applied collectively to the majority of those 2nd cent. movements which called themselves Christian or borrowed heavily from Christian sources, but which were rejected by the main stream of Christian tradition (represented in such fathers as Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius). Neither the fathers nor the groups themselves, however, apply the title in this sense, the former using it only of certain groups and designating the whole simply “the heresies,” the latter using the distinctive name of the particular group. There are, however, certain common features, among them a dominating concern with knowledge. Since these common features (indicated below) appear in some other forms of contemporary Hel. religion, and since a concern for knowledge is evident in the NT, there is now a tendency to use the term more widely. Some employ it of any form of dualistic teaching with sharply opposed principles of good and evil which offers knowledge as a key to the struggle, and others apply it to the myth of a supramundane Redeemer found in some forms of Hel. religion apparently derived from Eastern, prob. Iranian, sources. From different points of view, therefore, the term has been applied to the Qumran sect, Paul, the fourth gospel and the Alexandrian fathers. It seems best for the moment to use the term of the 2nd cent. Christian and post-Christian movements, without prejudice to the question of their significance for Christian origins.

2. The common features of Gnosticism. Anyone who reads through the books of Irenaeus or Hippolytus against heresies will be struck by the wide variety of these movements. There are Gnostic systems which make testing intellectual demands, others which depend on mumbo-jumbo and sleight of hand. There are Gnostic leaders who are (it comes through most reluctantly) high-minded ascetics, and others who are licentious charlatans. Nevertheless, they all offer knowledge—and in a form or degree not to be found outside their own teaching. This concern for knowledge links the higher and the lower forms of Gnosticism. At its lowest, the knowledge offered related simply to power and secrets of the future—the same sort of things as those for which people consulted astrologers and fortune tellers, but put into a religious setting. In its higher forms, it is related to abstract speculation, grappling with problems which had long been obstacles for educated pagans: how came good and evil into the world, and how do they relate to God? Sometimes, too, it is special knowledge about Jesus which is proffered, on the basis of secret, closely guarded sources. The essential content of the knowledge offered in many of the systems we know of is summarized in a passage preserved in Clement of Alexandria: “who we were, and what we have become, what we were, where we were placed, whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed, what birth is, what rebirth” (Excerpta ex Theodoto 78.2). Implied in this is the thought of the individual soul entering the world from the outside, and passing from it: and the Gnostic sought the key both to the origins of an evil world, and to his salvation from it.

Knowledge and salvation were keynotes of much 2nd-cent. religion: this is what people wanted from the mystery religions and explains their contemporary popularity. The Gnostic teachers sought to provide for these longings in a way which was both Christian and compatible with the basic assumptions about God and the world held by most people of the day. These assumptions might be formed by contemporary philosophy, by mythology, or by astrology; and in different Gnostic systems, these factors appear in differing degrees. What they have in common is a desire to be contemporary.

There was nothing peculiarly Gnostic about the common assumptions: these can be found in, e.g., the anti-Christian writer Celsus, whom no one would call a Gnostic. Celsus believed that God is so utterly transcendent that He can have no direct contact with the world; that matter is inherently evil and can have no contact with God; and that men, or at least some men, have within them a spark of the divine which is now incarcerated in the material prison of the body. Man is thus a creature of mixed origin, a mixture of incompatibles (Origen, Contra Celsum, passim). It is for such reasons as these that Celsus regards Christianity as self-condemned: the claim that God became man is impossible, since God and matter could not mix. (The old myths talked of the gods appearing in human shape: no one suggested that they were human while in it.) The Gnostics, however, are trying to square Celsus’ assumptions with the Christian proclamation. Not surprisingly, both have to give something: the proportions, and thus the degree of closeness to traditional Christianity, vary in the different systems. In some, such as the system of Valentinus (who was at one time a serious candidate for the bishopric of Rome), a fairly orthodox Christian confession could be made, though there was little room for it in the system itself; in others, such as (apparently) the Ophite sect, all pretense at continuity with mainstream Christianity was given up, though this did not prevent large scale borrowings from the Bible and Christian tradition. And, of course, the movements evolved and changed; Basilides, for instance, seems to have held a reasonably orthodox view of Christ (Hippolytus Refutation 7. 26); but within fifty years, Irenaeus tells us that followers of Basilides believed that Jesus was never crucified (Against Heresies 1. 19. 11f.).

Of the movement as a whole, however, we can say: (a) It is rationalistic. It is seeking to answer questions outside the scope of the OT and the apostolic witness, and to do so on wholly non-Biblical assumptions. (b) It is mystical, in the sense of seeking identification with and absorption in the divine (see, e.g., the spectacular Ophite liturgy quoted by Origen, Contra Celsum 6.31). (c) It is mythological, employing a system of mythology to express truth, as an essential supplement to (or in some cases substitute for) the Biblical tradition.

3. The Gnostic crux. The collision of Christian and Gr. assumptions directed attention to the origin of evil in the world. For those reared on Gr. assumptions this might be formulated as, How does the divinely originated soul become imprisoned in matter, and how can it escape? For teachers believing in the love and goodness of God these posed particular problems. The general answer is to give a mythological scheme, in which redemption becomes a drama played out among cosmic forces—the “principalities and powers” of the NT—the astral forces in a good deal of contemporary religion.

4. The revision of Christian theology. The central Christian tradition represented in the apostles maintained the peculiar features of the Jewish faith in which it had been born: monotheistic, historical, eschatological, ethical, and exclusive. The Redeemer continued to be styled “Christ,” a direct tr. of the Heb. “Messsiah.” The Jewish concern with God’s interventions in human history was retained and enlarged—preaching concentrated, indeed, on the historical events of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Though the law was abandoned, the idea of a moral commitment directly watched over by God remained. The peculiarly Jewish belief in the resurrection and last judgment was retained, and the Jewish Scriptures continued to be read. And though the idea of a people of God defined by physical descent disappeared, the solidarity of a single “Israel of God,” in continuity with the OT Israel, meant the continuing consciousness of a single worshiping community, a “third race” alongside Jew and Gentile. Gnostic reformulation was bound to collide with all these elements.

The doctrine of God. God is conceived as remote from all the material creation. The gap between is filled by a hierarchy of intermediary beings, in a descending order of magnitude. These are aeons, usually linked in pairs or syzygies (usually male and female), and are collectively given the name “the pleroma” (fullness). The earliest may be the result of God’s creative act; the others emanate from them. There are different myths as to the origin of our world; but all agree that it was a mistake, an accident, the work of an ignorant being or the mischief of an antigod. One picture of the material universe is that of an abortion self-generated by the inordinate desire of a female aeon (Sophia, “wisdom”); and some systems attempt to reconcile this view with such passages as John 1:3 by describing the Logos in creation as giving form to the misshapen abortion, which thus combines the principles of good and evil. In other systems, of which the most influential was that of Marcion, creation is the work of a Demiurge, an inferior divinity.

The Old Testament. Clearly such a scheme does not reflect the Creator/Vindicator God of the OT. Accordingly, teachers like Cerdo and Marcion frankly abandon the OT, and regard themselves as liberating the Church from the fetters of the Judaizers. Since one can only be really radical with the OT by being really radical with the NT, many of those who wished to keep contact with the apostolic writings were forced to try to accommodate the OT. A long, thoughtful letter from the Valentinian theologian Ptolemy (in Epiphanius, Panarion 33) offers a tripartite division of the OT: part is from God, part from Moses acting as law giver, part from the elders; part is eternal, if incomplete; part was temporary and is now abrogated; part is symbolical, and is now transformed.

Nature of authority. The Ptolemy already mentioned tells his correspondent, “You will learn the order and the begetting of all these [aeons] if you are deemed worthy of knowing the apostolic tradition which we have received from a succession, together with the confirmation of all our words by the teaching of the Saviour.” That is, he is claiming access to a superior source of secret knowledge. Valentinian and other “right wing” Gnostics paid lip service to the same authority as the mainstream Church: the Lord and His apostles. They had to show that they possessed reliable knowledge conveyed by the apostles (and thus ultimately from the Lord) which other Christians did not. The Valentinians claimed a tradition from a disciple of Paul called Theudas; the Basilidians from Peter via one Glaukias, and from Matthias. More exotic groups often chose James the Lord’s brother as their source, or Thomas (Didymus, “the Twin,” being taken to be the Lord’s twin) as being very close to the person of the Savior. The now famous Gospel of Thomas (Logion 12) insinuates that Thomas is a source of tradition superior to Matthew and Peter, the apostles associated with the first two gospels.

Incarnation and atonement. If God’s transcendence implies the impossibility of His contact with matter, how could God take a human body, still less suffer in one? There are several Gnostic answers, depending on the degree of closeness to the central Christian tradition. Some reject the idea of incarnation altogether: Christ was only an “appearance” of God in human form, He only seemed to suffer. Others spoke of the divine Logos resting on the righteous but human Jesus—but being withdrawn at the Passion (the cry of dereliction, Mark 15:34, was held to be evidence of this). Others again used the traditional language, but emphasized not the historical events of the incarnation, but the relations between the disordered elements of the Pleroma, which the incarnation righted. For Basilides the important fact seems to be that Jesus had within Himself all the elements of creation; His passion is related to the ordering of its confusion (Hippolytus Refutation 7.27). He is basically interested in the question, Whence comes evil? rather than the question, How is sin forgiven? Likewise Valentinus in the Gospel of Truth (discovered at Nag Hammadi) uses traditional language about the cross without finding a clear place for this very mundane event in his complex drama of redemption among the aeons.

Sin and salvation. Evil is associated with matter, ignorance, formlessness, distortion. Consequently salvation is to slough off defilement rather than to receive forgiveness for offenses. Salvation comes as illumination dispelling ignorance, triumphing over the material. The Gospel is principally a means of men knowing the truth; the cosmic bodies receive the same instruction.

Judgment and resurrection were a constant source of difficulty for those who sought immortality in escape from the body. Resurrection, and the whole eschatological dimension associated with it, is noticably missing from Gnostic schemes.

The Church and Christian life. Some schools divided mankind into three according to the predominant element in their constitutions—the material (who were unsalvable), the “psychic” who could receive some purification, and the spiritual, the elite capable of receiving the deep mysteries. Naturally the third class were the Gnostics, the mass of Christians forming the second class. The church becomes the club of the illuminated not the society of the redeemed. The view that the material is the seat of evil, leads to asceticism, celibacy and vegetarianism in some systems, and paradoxically to license in others, where “liberation” from matter meant its effects were inconsequential.

5. The origins of Gnosticism. Continental scholars have often argued that Gnosticism is of pre-Christian origin, the figure of a cosmic redeemer being taken over from Eastern, specifically Iranian, sources, which are also the prime source of its dualism. Some would even see the essence of Gentile (indeed, Pauline) Christianity as the superimposition of the Gnostic Redeemer on the historical Jesus. No one has yet shown, however, that the Gnostic Redeemer existed before Christian times, and the Qumran documents have shown that Pauline and Johannine language about knowledge was firmly rooted in Jewish tradition. R. M. Grant has even suggested that Gnosticism itself is of Jewish origin: the fruit of unorthodox speculation working upon an apocalyptic framework which the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 had caused to be re-evaluated. Certainly the Nag Hammadi documents suggest the effect of Jewish speculation. The “Colossian heresy” combined Jewish and ascetic features, philosophical activity, and veneration of astral powers (Col 2:16-23), and when Paul speaks of the whole pleroma dwelling in Christ (Col 1:19), it is tempting to see him taking the word which the Gnostics used of their scheme of intermediary beings, disinfecting it and replacing it, as it were, by Christ. But neither the Colossians nor the Corinthians, nor the groups attacked in the Pastoral epistles or 1 John, display a Gnostic system of the type reflected in the 2nd-cent. movements. The Corinthians delighted unduly in knowledge (1 Cor 8:1; 13:8) and wisdom (1 Cor 1:17ff.), were unhappy about the thought of resurrection (1 Cor 15), included both those who questioned whether a Christian could marry (1 Cor 7) and those whose “liberation” left them indifferent to their bodies’ actions (1 Cor 6:12-18). Others possessed “gnosis falsely so-called” (1 Tim 6:20), had mythologies and genealogies (1 Tim 1:4), spiritualized the resurrection (2 Tim 2:18), played with “Jewish fables” (Titus 1:14), and knew both severe ascetism (1 Tim 4:3) and sexual laxity (2 Tim 3:6). The elder feared the teachers of a docetic, “phantom” Christ (1 John 4:1-3). All these show what fertile soil the Early Church provided for Gnostic teaching; but show no sign of the systematized Gnosticism of the 2nd cent.

The Hermetic lit., some of which is pre-Christian, with its mystical quest for illumination and rebirth, also often reminds one of some Gnostic documents; and the mystery religions (with the notorious problems of dating material which they present) afford other parallels. All this simply reflects what was indicated earlier, that Gnosticism was a natural fruit of the 2nd cent. of religious quests of the Hel. world, with its Gr. assumptions, Eastern religion, and astrological fatalism. These tendencies did not together constitute a system: but, coming into contact with a system or articulated preaching they could form one. Coming into contact with Christianity, they took the Christian Redeemer and gnosticized Him, took the Christian preaching and tore it from its OT roots, took the Biblical tradition and sought to make it answer the problems of Gr. philosophy, took the Christian convictions about the end and purged away such offensively Jewish features as resurrection and judgment. Gnosticism was parasitic, and took its shape from the system to which it attached itself. Looked at from another point of view, it was cultural, an outcome of the attempt to digest and “indigenize” Christianity. It need not surprise us, therefore, that some of the same tendencies appear in other 2nd-cent. Christians, even among those who brought about the eventual defeat of Christian Gnosticism. It may be hard for us who have been formed in another thought world, who do not have the same inbred assumptions, to understand either the attractions of the Gnostic systems, or the agonies and difficulties of many mainstream Christian theologians. It is the measure of their greatness that, sharing so much with the Gnostics intellectually as they did, by faithfulness to the historic Christ and the Biblical tradition they produced an “indigenous” Greek-Gentile Christian thought which retained the primitive preaching and the whole of the Scriptures.

Being a phenomenon arising essentially from a particular historical and cultural situation, Gnosticism was not likely to outlast that situation long. The crisis for Gnosticism prob. came with the emergence of the genuinely Iranian, radically dualistic religion of Mani (d. a.d. 277), which was spreading in the Rom. empire from the 3rd cent. onward. Manicheism must have faced many Christian Gnostics with a crucial choice: it could not long be possible to occupy a middle ground between mainstream Christianity and the books of Mani.

6. The sources of Gnosticism. Until recent years the Gnostic writers were known almost entirely through the writings of their antagonists. Of these Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies, and Epiphanius, Panarion, provide extracts, often sizable, from Gnostic works. The last twenty years have seen the gradual publication of items from a Gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and containing Coptic tr. of works of very diverse character. These include as well many works further from the Christian tradition, and some Manichean ones, the Gospel of Truth of (prob.) Valentinus and a Gospel of Thomas consisting of sayings attributed to the risen Lord and including a number of Gnosticized variants on synoptic sayings. While there is much still to be done in the study of these documents, the conclusion which emerges so far is that the early fathers, for all their trenchancy of language, hardly give a misleading impression.

Bibliography H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth (1954); R. Bultmann, Primitive Christianity in its Original Setting (Eng. tr. 1956); R. McL. Wilson, The Gnostic Problem (1958); R. M. Grant, Reader in Gnosticism (1961); H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (1963); R. M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (1966); R. McL. Wilson, Gnosis and the New Testament (1968); W. Schmithals, The Office of Apostle in the Early Church (Eng. trs. 1971) 114-230.