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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.
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.
Gnostics identified the God of the Hebrew Bible as this demiurge. Secret knowledge (gnosis) was said to liberate one's soul to return to the true God in the realm of light. Valentinus and other Christian gnostics identified Jesus as the Savior, a spirit sent from the true God into the material world to liberate the souls trapped there.
In the Gnostic Christian tradition, Christ is seen as a wholly divine being which has taken human form in order to lead humanity back to the Light. [2] The Cathars of medieval Europe also shared the belief in the divine spark. [3] They saw this idea expressed most powerfully in the opening words of the Gospel of St John.
Sophia (Koinē Greek: Σοφíα "Wisdom", Coptic: ⲧⲥⲟⲫⲓⲁ "the Sophia" [1]) is a major theme, along with Knowledge (γνῶσις gnosis, Coptic: ⲧⲥⲱⲟⲩⲛ tsōwn), among many of the early Christian knowledge theologies grouped by the heresiologist Irenaeus as gnostikoi (γνωστικοί), "knowing" or "men that claimed to have deeper wisdom".
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 ...
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.