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Page from the Gospel of Judas Mandaean Beth Manda in Nasiriyah, southern Iraq, in 2016, a contemporary-style mandi. Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός, romanized: gnōstikós, Koine Greek: [ɣnostiˈkos], 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among early Christian sects.
The retention of the Hebrew form shows that their beliefs may represent the earliest stages of Gnosticism. The Philosophumena's author regards them as among the first to be called simply "Gnostics", alleging that they alone have sounded the depths of knowledge.
For some time, his study The Gnostic Religion: The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity published in 1958, was widely held to be a pivotal work, and it is as a result of his efforts that the Syrian-Egyptian/Persian division of Gnosticism came to be widely used within the field.
In Gnosticism, Sophia is a feminine figure, analogous to the human soul but also simultaneously one of the feminine aspects of God. Gnostics held that she was the syzygy , or female twin, of Jesus , i.e. the Bride of Christ , and the Holy Spirit of the Trinity .
In Gnosticism, the divine spark is the portion of God that resides within each human being. [1]The purpose of life is to enable the Divine Spark to be released from its captivity in matter and reestablish its connection with, or simply return to, God, who is perceived as being the source of the Divine Light.
The Sethians (Greek: Σηθιανοί) were one of the main currents of Gnosticism during the 2nd and 3rd century AD, along with Valentinianism and Basilideanism.According to John D. Turner, it originated in the 2nd century AD as a fusion of two distinct Hellenistic Judaic philosophies and was influenced by Christianity and Middle Platonism. [1]
In it, Irenaeus identifies and describes several schools of Gnosticism, and other schools of Christian thought, whose beliefs he rejects as heresy. He contrasts them with orthodox Christianity. Until the discovery of the Library of Nag Hammadi in 1945, Against Heresies was the best surviving contemporary description of Gnosticism.
Gnosticism is identified as an early form of syncretism that challenged the beliefs of early Christians. [citation needed] Gnostic dualism posited that only spiritual or invisible things were good, and that material or visible things were evil. Orthodox (mainstream) Christians have always insisted that matter is essentially good because they ...