often called rulers or archons; they are evil and try to block the soul’s escape
from this world after death. The soul or spirit is divine, belonging to the
other world, which is why it wants to escape this world and all bodily things,
where it is not really at home.
Gnosticism’s disdain for the physical world is linked to a profound rejection
of Judaism. The God of the Jews is the creator God, maker and ruler of
this physical world, which means he is at best ignorant, and probably evil.
He forbids humans to eat from the Tree of Knowledge (gnosis) because he
wants them to stay ignorant and under his power. He is also described as an
arrogant archon who boasts of being the only God, ignorant of the divine
realm above him.
The Gnostics’ view of Christ ¿ ts with their other-worldly view of divinity.
The divine world or Pleroma consists of spiritual principles called “aeons.”
According to some Gnostics, the physical world originates from a disruption
in the Pleroma when the lowest of the aeons, Sophia or Wisdom, gets in
a passion. Christ is an aeon sent into this world to bring saving knowledge
of the world above, the Pleroma. Because matter is evil, he is never really
embodied: Either he dwells in the man Jesus
only for a time or his body is an illusion, a
mere appearance (which is the view now
called Docetism). The God of the Jews is not
Jesus’s Father but his enemy.
The “lost Gospels” in the news lately are
mainly Gnostic. The most important were
found in a cache of buried books in Nag
Hammadi, Egypt. The Nag Hammadi library
is very important for our understanding of ancient Gnosticism but, with one
possible exception, is not an important source for the life of the historical
Jesus. The possible exception, the Gospel of Thomas, is a “sayings Gospel.”
The sayings are all attributed to Jesus, though many are actually much later.
The later sayings are in a broad sense Gnostic, in that salvation consists of
the soul’s awakening to the knowledge that it does not belong to this world.
Among the earlier sayings, most are similar to those found in the New
Testament, and some may be closer to what Jesus actually said—though
Early orthodoxy was
characterized by
belief in the goodness
of the Creator, the
God of the Jews.