Join us as we explore the intriguing doctrine of Gnosticism, one of the early church’s most significant heresies, and its impact on Christianity today. Discover how Gnostics viewed matter as evil and sought salvation through mystical knowledge, challenging traditional beliefs about the body and spirit. We’ll also reflect on contemporary parallels that may exist within modern church practices and culture.
Watch Now
Transcription
Hi, friends. A little note before this episode. I am sick and so are all of my kids. And so in this episode, I’m gonna sound a little bit stuffy, maybe a little bit rough here and there. I can tell you I look a little rough too.
So thanks for your patience with the sound and with my voice on this episode, and hopefully, you can still receive some great takeaways. Hi, friends, and welcome back to Verity podcast. I’m Phylicia Masonheimer, your host and the founder of Every Woman a Theologian, the ministry and organization that supports Verity podcast. We have just started a new series on false teachings in the church, historical false teachings that are reemerging and false teachings that are in operation today. And today, we’re gonna be talking about Gnosticism. Now you may have heard of Gnosticism if you’ve ever done any study of early church history. It’s a fascinating study because it was the predominant false teaching at the time that the early church was coming together and expanding into Gentile or non Jewish areas. And so as Christianity was expanding, there was this equal and opposite reaction or ideological shift and growth in the gnostic direction.
Now we could talk in-depth about all of the things that were debated and studied and talked about by the early church fathers, and I hope to get into that more in our next episode on gnosticism. But just in this episode, I’m going to introduce to you what it is and was, what the main beliefs are, and allow you to think about, is there a modern gnosticism that you have observed in church context or in our culture that lines up with some of the teachings that were being circulated in the early church? We’re going to be looking at some amazing resources today, which I will put in the show notes. These are books that I refer back to time and time again that I keep in my library on church history, on theology, on the Trinity, and a compilation of documents from the early church. So all of these resources are what I’m using as I share this information with you and as we learn about what Gnosticism was and what this theology did to the early church. To start out, I’m going to be reading from The Story of Christianity part one by Justo Gonzales. This is my favorite church history book. And if you are in Verity Book Club, my annual book club that studies fiction and theology, we have a church history track, and we are reading this book right now. We actually study gnosticism as a group just this past month.
And so we’re gonna be looking at a short section that Gonzales has listed here, to describe kind of what Gnosticism was teaching in that era of the early church. Quote, the name Gnosticism is derived from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. According to the Gnostics, they possessed a special mystical knowledge reserved for those with true understanding. That knowledge was the secret key to salvation. Although the writings of the heresiologists, so this would be the early church fathers who were fighting heresy, give the impression that gnosticism was mostly a collection of idle speculations about the origins of all things, both spiritual and material, salvation and not speculation was the main concern of the gnostics. Drawing from several sources, the Gnostics came to the conclusion that all matter is evil or at best unreal. A human being is in reality an eternal spirit or part of the eternal spirit that somehow has been imprisoned in a body. Since the body is a prison to the spirit and since it misleads us as our true nature is it is evil.
Therefore, the gnostic’s final goal is to escape from the body in this material world in which we are exiled. This image of exile is crucial for gnosticism. The world is not our true home but rather an obstacle to the salvation of the spirit, a view which, although officially rejected by Orthodox Christianity, has frequently been part of it, end quote. So what Gonzales is describing here is a thought process that was seeking to wrestle with the evil of the world, seeking to reconcile how we could be living in bodies in this world needing salvation in a world that is so absolutely corrupt corrupt and contains so much suffering. Like most false teachings or really any religious, framework, you’re looking at the problems of the world, problems of pain, problems of suffering, and trying to come to an understanding of how to reckon with that. And the gnostics are doing the same thing. Now the gnostics, though, look at the world, and they come away with the idea that matter, so anything visible, physical, material is evil. And the only true good thing is spiritual.
So we need to be freed from that material existence, and we need to reach this higher dimension or this, access to a reality that is truly spiritual, a higher level of spiritual attunement, if you will. Now the problem with this, when you line it up with the Judeo Christian teachings, is that the physical body in the Bible in the Christian Bible, Old Testament and New, is extremely important and valuable. And the conservative interpretation of Jewish law according to the Pharisees, who, ironically, Jesus actually agreed with more theologically even though he disagreed with them on their attitudes and their hearts. The conservative approach is that the body is deeply valued by God. In fact, the body is consecrated and seen as holy by God when it can be cleansed, when it is walking in holiness. This is why when we go all the way back from the New Testament where Jesus talks about the resurrection of the body and he affirms the resurrection of the body, we go back to the Old Testament in Leviticus. All of the laws for the people of Israel include their bodies. If God hated human bodies so much, why would he create a way for Israel to purify their bodies and to live in his presence? It’s not because he thinks bodies are bad but because he thinks bodies are good.
That he believes they can be consecrated. That they can be cleansed. And he believes they can and should be resurrected after death. We will be in physical bodies when we are with Christ in heaven. And Christ himself is in a physical resurrected body. This difference between Christianity and gnosticism is one of the most significant and important and we have to get it out of the way immediately because the gnostics could not and would not believe that material bodies could be good. And we’re gonna look a little more at that in a moment. Now one of the accusations that comes to Christianity from scholars from modern gnostics is that Christianity was actually heavily influenced by gnosticism and that gnosticism predated Christianity.
So it came before and Christianity was simply an updated, mode or model of Gnosticism with Jesus Christ being the savior who saves us out of our evil material bodies. Because remember, Gnosticism was its own thing, but then the threat to the church was that people were combining in the early church period. Those first few centuries, they were combining Christianity and gnosticism and saying that Jesus was going to give them access to this gnosis, to this higher knowledge, this higher access to God that would allow them to be freed from whatever was limiting them. Now I’m going to be reading to you from A Theology of the New Testament by George Eldon Ladd. This is another favorite of mine, a fantastic systematic that goes through the New Testament and the different theological issues we encounter. This is in his chapter on the book of John. So the book of John, the fourth gospel, is extremely unique. It’s unlike the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
It’s written completely differently, has a very different approach. And if you read the prologue, John one, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God, even the way that John begins this book is extremely unique. And he even states that his intention is really to to bring the gospel, the story of Jesus to people who are doubting him, basically, to to make a case for the deity of Jesus. And in this chapter on the fourth gospel, Ladd actually notes that this was the gospel of the Hellenists. It was written by a Greek thinker for the Greeks and, quote, it marks a decisive point in the Hellenization of the Christian faith. So what that means is Matthew, Mark, and Luke really had a Jewish context. And while, of course, they’re applicable to non Jewish readers, they really had power towards Jewish believers because they were convincing them based on, look, this is the Jewish Messiah but John’s different. John is a Greek thinker to the Greeks.
He’s writing to the Gentiles, the non Jews and so he uses language and verbiage that is more persuasive in that context in the book of John. But that said, it does make some people wonder, is it possible that this book of John is just copying or riffing off of these gnostic gospels? And we’re gonna talk about the gnostic gospels that were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt Nineteen Forty Seven because that’s where some people pull this from. But I wanted to first, read this to you. This is a quote from the section on the fourth gospel chapter, the critical problem in lads systematic. Quote, a vigorous debate has been carried on by scholars as to whether this gnostic theology and to dated Christianity and influence the theology of the preexistent incarnate and ascending Christ. It must be emphasized that while this gnostic theology can be found in second century AD Gnosticism as a Christian aberration, the theory that it was a pre Christian syncretistic movement that helped mold Christian, especially John’s, Christology is a critical reconstruction based upon post Christian texts. While tendencies toward Gnostic thinking can be found in Judaism and Hellenism, the figure of a heavenly redeemer cannot be found in any pre Christian documents, end quote. What lad is saying here is that there is no evidence that gnostic thought influenced Christianity or came up with this idea of a heavenly redeemer.
This is a very very unique idea, specific, of course, to the idea of the Jewish messiah, but then through Judaism to the other side becoming Christianity. Gnostic thought adapted itself to the Christian construct, but it did not shape Christianity. It did not form Christianity. There is no evidence for this. Now once Christianity was at large in the world and we’re looking, you know, hundred and twenty AD, hundred and ’50 AD, and gnosticism is now intertwining with it, this is where you start to see the apologist, the early apologist of the church who are thinking Clement and Irenaeus and Ignatius later on who are debating this issue. We’re starting to see that intertwining. Now where did we find this gnostic writing? Like, where did we find the information? Well, most of the information that we have, direct sources, is from a discovery of a Gnostic library in 1947 in Egypt. And there were 13 manuscripts containing 49 different documents.
So this was a massive discovery because these are primary sources on this Egyptian discovery because these are primary sources on this Egyptian gnosticism. But I wanna read you this quote because this is really important. This is from AD Nock who was an authority, the greatest authority in Hellenistic religion. Here’s what this says. He expressed the conviction that the new text from Nag Hammadi vindicate completely the traditional view of Gnosticism as Christian heresy with roots in speculative important? It’s important because the leading scholar on Hellenistic religion is saying that there is no evidence that Gnosticism shaped Christianity or that Gnosticism birthed Christianity. There is no Christ figure in Gnosticism. Eventually, there is Christianity that has been melded with Gnostic thought, and this is what the early church fathers were fighting so hard against and why they started to say, hey. Wait a minute.
No. That’s not what we believe. No. That’s not who Jesus is. No. That’s not the truth. We are we’re not talking about that here. Let’s define our parameters.
Because of the falsehoods that were being circulated in the early church, the early church fathers, the leaders, the bishops, the teachers started to write and say, no. Wait. That’s not what Jesus said. Let’s look back at what the gospels say. Let’s look back at these epistles. Let’s look back at the Old Testament as evidence. Now I want to read a direct source here. Let’s go back to the early church for a moment.
This is written by the early church father, Irenaeus. And if you have bought from our shop our little church history matching game, then you might have seen his face. He is listed in the early church set of our little matching game. We have the early church, the medieval church, and the reformation era in this little game, and we have different church fathers and mothers who were in it. He’s in there. And in this section, this is a little bit of a wordy section. It’s a direct, directly taken from the work of Irenaeus where he’s talking about this man named Bacillus. And Bacillus was a Gnostic teacher, and then his work was then reproduced by Valentinus who lived around January.
He was one of the most influential Gnostic teachers, and some of his writings were found at in the Egyptian discovery in 1947 of the Gnostic documents. So, basically, what Irenaeus is talking about here, he’s describing Gnostic thought in this section. And he’s refuting it. But what he’s refuting is by someone whose work was built on by Valentinus. So all of this is kind of just giving you some historical context to what was going on in the first and second centuries AD. So here’s what the our early church father says about facilities. He says this, quote, facilities that he may seem to have found out something higher and more plausible vastly extends the range of his teaching, declaring that the mind was first born of the unborn father. Then reason from mind.
And from reason, prudence, and from prudence, wisdom, and power. And from wisdom and power, the virtues, princes, and angels, whom he also calls the first. By them, the first heaven was made, and afterwards, others were made, derived from these, and they made another heaven, like to the former, and in like manners, others, in all, 365 heavens. That’s a lot of heavens. He goes on to say later on that the unborn and unnamed father sent his first begotten mind. So the first creation that he made. Does this remind you of Arianism from our past episode? This they call Christ for the freeing of them that believe in him from those who made the world. So to free the people of the world from those who made the world.
Because remember, world matter is evil. So God, the original God, the first mind, has to free us from this other entity that is material and evil, and he’s sending Christ to do it. He appeared to the nations of them as a man on earth. Note that he said he appeared. Not that he was a man but that he appeared as a man. And performed deeds of virtue. Wherefore he suffered not but a certain Simon, a Cyrene, was impressed to bear his cross for him. And Simon was crucified in ignorance and error, having been transfigured by Jesus, that men should suppose him to be Christ, while Christ himself took on the appearance of Simon and stood by and mocked them.
If any therefore acknowledge the crucified, he is still a slave and subject to the power of them that made our bodies. But he that denies the one that made their bodies is freed from them and recognizes the ordering of the unborn father. End quote. Again, this is from the early church. This is probably right around January written by Irenaeus. What’s he saying here? Okay. He’s describing the ideology before he refutes it. So what he described here is that there’s this original unborn mind, so eternally existing, and he then creates the first the first mind, which is Christ.
But remember, it’s all mind, mind, reason, wisdom. K? And this entity is all spiritual. But then there’s this other evil entity that creates the material world. Here’s what he says about that. So those angels who hold sway over the later heaven, which is seen by us, ordered all things that are in the world and divided among them the earth and the nations upon the earth. So, like, demonic angels that divided the material world. Their chief is he who is held to be the God of the Jews. Do you know what this is saying? The chief of the demonic angels is Yahweh.
The chief of the demonic angels is the God of the Old Testament. And that’s who we need to be set free from. He wished to subdue the other nations beneath his own people, the Jews, and therefore, all the other princes resisted him and took measures against him. Then the unborn and unnamed father, so the true God, sent his first begotten mind, Christ, to free all those who believe in the true God from the God of the Jews. Do you know where you’ve seen this before? You saw this on Instagram. Many of you reached out to me asking about this exact ideology on Instagram from a very well known wellness influencer who’s talking about this exact ideology, how Yahweh was actually Satan, actually the evil one, and how we needed to be truly freed from the God of the Jews, the God of the Old Testament by encountering the true Christ. And this was written, what I just read you, in January. There is nothing new under the sun, my friends.
There is no new ideology. It’s just repackaged and made more marketable. Creating a division of the trinity. First of all, there is no trinity in this concept because Christ is created by God. He’s not equal with God. He’s not God. He’s the begotten of God. Same thing as an Arianism in our in last week’s episode but then secondly, you now have the consistency, the continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament completely eradicated.
There is no consistency because Jesus is no longer fulfilling everything God said from the Old Testament. He is now a completely different spiritual reality entity. Eon is what they’re called in Gnosticism, ancient Gnosticism. And the Old Testament God is this evil, you know, spiritual, demonic entity that is controlling us and keeping us from true freedom. Let’s move on to a couple of the other effects of gnosticism. Some fascinating effects. I want to share this book with you. Any of you who are really wrestling with the concept of the trinity, you’re really wondering why it matters, what it means, how to understand it.
This book, Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves. He has a PhD. He’s at King’s College. Amazing man. This book is exactly what you need to read because it’s approachable. It’s not too scholarly. Has a sense of humor to it. It’s not super thick, and it is an excellent resource if you want to understand why the Trinity matters.
So he has a section in here on Gnosticism. I’m not gonna read the whole thing even though it’s so good and would be so helpful. But one thing he points out is that Gnosticism in its modern ideation actually began to receive more notoriety through the Da Vinci Code. Here’s what he says. A stark example can be seen in a rather odd collection of second and third century beliefs we call Gnosticism. If you’ve ever read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or seen the film, you will have come across Gnosticism. In the world of Dan Brown, Orthodox Christianity is an authoritarian, chauvinist, intolerant religion. That, apparently, is what God of Christianity is like, and so that is how his servants are.
But on the sidelines of history, persecuted and chased into hiding, are the Gnostics. And in Dan Brown’s mind, the Gnostics were the open minded, tolerant, protofeminist goodies. Well, no. Let’s see. In Gnosticism, everything started with the one. That is, there was a spiritual realm and nothing more. Everything was fine and divine. Imagine the room you are in being that realm.
In the room, there is peace and a really good book you’d recommend to your friends. Outside the room, absolutely nothing exists. But then something goes wrong. A disturbance. The dog starts throwing up on the carpet. Of course, you want to keep reading the really good books so the disturbance in its mess must be thrown out. But now, as soon as a disturbance is thrown out of the room, something troublesome and obnoxious exists outside the room. And that is narcissism account of creation.
Once there was only the spiritual realm, something went wrong. The problem got thrown outside, and now something exists outside the spiritual realm and that became the physical universe, end quote. This is from his chapter on creation. So, again, affirming this idea that matter and material is is lesser than, the spiritual. The spiritual is more important. It’s more pure. It’s what we need to focus on. Whereas the Bible teaches that the body and the soul are equally important to God and that what we do in the body affects the soul and what we do in the soul affects the body.
God sees bodies as a beautiful thing and that they are an echo of his image. We are made in his image, body and soul. And so because of this totally different outlook on creation and on the goodness of the human body. But Michael Reeves notes something fascinating, an impact of Gnosticism that I wasn’t aware of until I read this book, and I want to read this section to you. It has to do with how Gnosticism impacted the view of women and how different this was from Christianity. It is not good for the man to be alone. If that was how the Gnostics rearranged Genesis one, inserting a not into every God saw it was good, just imagine how they read Genesis two and the story of the creation of Eve. For them, the chapter starts quite positively.
The man is alone. There is only one. That must be good. But then horribly and just as the physical realm was excreted from the spiritual, Eve comes out of Adam. Now, there are two. And just as the existence of two realms, spiritual and physical is bad, so the existence of two sexes is bad. More specifically, the existence of women is bad. Thus, the final verse in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas reads, Simon Peter said to them, let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life.
Jesus said, I, myself, shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. That verse does not come across as jarring or awkward at the end of the gospel of Thomas. It is the natural child of gnostic thought. The existence of two realms, two sexes, of the physical and the feminine is a tragedy But such must be the case with a lonely and solitary supreme being. Intolerant of the existence of anything else, it is only natural that he should prefer to hide both the physical and the feminine away, or use them if he can only for his own self gratification. And so for women at least, gnostic salvation would mean gender bending. Dan Brown’s insinuation that the gnostics were the tolerant protofeminist sounds very hollow indeed.
And those chauvinist Christians, believing that God is not lonely, it made perfect sense to say that it is not good to have men alone. As God is not alone, so a human in his image should not be alone. They therefore upheld creation and the physical, femininity, relationship, and marriage, all as being intrinsically good, created reflections of a God who is not lonely. Without the trinity, it is hard to see how such things could be ultimately affirmed. Of course, one could simply argue that men and women are equal because they’re both human, but that is an entirely loveless affirmation and gives no grounds for seeing those things as absolute goods to be reveled in. The apostle Paul wrote in first Corinthians eleven three that as the head of Christ is God, so the head of a wife is her husband but if the son is less of God than his father, is a wife less human than her husband? Without belief in God the father and the son, one in the spirit, why should a husband not treat his wife as a lesser being? Yet, if a husband’s headship of his wife is somehow akin to the father’s headship of the son, then what a loving relationship must ensue. The father’s very identity is about giving life, love, and being to his son and doing all out of love for him, end quote. So this got into a little bit more about, like, headship, and that’s a whole other different conversation.
But notice his angle on that is saying that the only way that the the headship or authority of a husband as would have been understood in that early Christian context, that early church culture context, the only way that could be good is if there’s absolute equality between the son and the father who are the basis of what is said about men and women. That’s the only way I can be good is if there’s absolute equality and not domination, which is what he’s arguing for here. And that does not exist in gnosticism. In gnosticism, it is not good to have this these two. It was good to have one. There has to be this authority structure. Now one thing we do know is that there were these eons that were operating in this ideology, and these eons could be male or female in gnosticism. And we do know that gnostic women could take these kind of prophetic roles in their kind of church structure.
And this was actually a huge, danger in the early church that you had these women who were infiltrating into the early church potentially, teaching and prophesying, which we know women did. We know that Philip’s daughters did and Anna did and there’s instructions for women to prophesy in first Corinthians. Prophesy, preach, ex extrapolate the scriptures. So you have women coming in who deceive others with gnostic theology. Women who are abusing the gift of prophecy. And Gonzales actually says in the story of Christianity that there’s a good possibility that one of the reasons that women’s roles began to be restricted in the second and third century in the church, no longer seeing them in maybe more elder, deacon, bishop, apostle type roles is because of this, because of the abuse of the prophetic role by gnostic women, which is fascinating. Now could we have fixed that earlier in church history? Probably. But humans make human decisions, and things, you know, continue down the line and need to be remedied.
But one of the things I think we can take away from this is that this gnostic teaching is now, today, being perpetuated by women. Women who claim to be Christian or claim to formerly be Christian and who are now taking this gnostic teaching or this gnostic adjacent teaching into their circles and parading it as Christianity or true Christianity. Same pattern as the first and second centuries. Alright. I hope this was interesting to you all. We will do a second half of this that talks more about modern Gnosticism and how we can discern and navigate this and talk about it more clearly. I will put a list of these books in the show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on iTunes or comment on our YouTube channel.
It helps other people to find us, and we so appreciate every one of our listeners. You can also email me and my team at phylicia@phyliciamasonheimer.com. We try to go through our emails once a week and get back to you as soon as we can. We appreciate all of you for listening, and we hope that this is helpful to you on your own journey to learning and discerning the faith of our fathers.