Gnosticism Explained: The Demiurge, Sophia and the Christianity That Lost
Gnosticism is the name for a set of second-century movements that blamed the material world on a lesser god and offered escape through knowledge of where the soul came from. This guide covers the demiurge, the pleroma and Sophia's fall, the meaning of gnosis, the schools of Valentinus and Basilides, the Nag Hammadi discovery of 1945, and how the movement was suppressed.
What is Gnosticism, and what did the Gnostics actually teach?
Gnosticism is the modern name for a group of religious movements, most active in the second and third centuries, that taught the visible world was made by a lesser god and that a divine spark inside some human beings could return to its true home through saving knowledge. There was no Gnostic church and no council that settled anything. The closest thing to an institution was a teacher with a room of pupils, and the sources show a family of such teachers, mostly working inside or beside early Christianity, who agreed on a rough shape of the story and disagreed about almost every detail of it. The shared shape runs like this. Beyond the cosmos is a God the cosmos does not know. Something went wrong inside the divine fullness, and the accident produced a craftsman who built the material world in ignorance of anything above him. Human beings, or some of them, carry a fragment of the higher world sealed in flesh. A revealer descends to tell them so, and the telling is the rescue. The Greek word for that telling is gnosis. It means knowledge, though not the kind you could be examined on: knowledge of what you are and where you came from. It arrives as recognition, not as a conclusion you reason your way toward.
The word Gnosticism is a seventeenth-century coinage, not a label anyone in antiquity wore. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180, attacked what he called knowledge falsely so called, borrowing the phrase from the First Letter to Timothy, and he treated the groups he described as a single monstrous family descended from Simon Magus. Modern scholarship has spent thirty years arguing about whether that family exists. Michael Allen Williams, in Rethinking Gnosticism, proposed dismantling the category as a container too loose to hold anything. Karen King, in What Is Gnosticism, traced how the term was assembled by heresy hunters and then inherited by historians who believed they were being neutral. Others, including Birger Pearson and David Brakke, keep a narrower version, on the grounds that one identifiable group, the Sethians, had a coherent myth of its own, a ritual of its own and a name of its own for its people. This article uses the loose sense and says so at the points where it stops working.
Was Gnosticism one religion or many?
Many. The surviving sources describe schools whose cosmologies do not fit together at all. Irenaeus reports Valentinians counting thirty aeons; on the account he gives of Basilides, the number of heavens is three hundred and sixty-five, hidden in the name Abrasax. Valentinian Sophia falls inside the fullness and is restored by a power called Limit, while the Sethian Sophia produces the craftsman alone and hides him in a cloud. Treating all of this as one religion is a convenience inherited from their opponents, who had every reason to present a single enemy rather than a scatter of independent teachers.
Did the Gnostics call themselves Gnostics?
A few did. Irenaeus refers to a group he says called themselves gnostikoi, and Epiphanius uses the name for one particular sect. Valentinus and his followers did not use it as a party label, and neither did Basilides. Applying the term to everyone in this literature is a modern habit, and it is precisely the habit that Karen King and Michael Allen Williams both set out to break.
What did all Gnostic systems have in common?
Three things recur across nearly all of them: a highest God who is unknown to the world and did not make it, a lower power responsible for the material cosmos, and something divine trapped inside human beings that knowledge can wake. Everything else varies wildly. Even those three points are stated so differently from text to text that some historians consider the family resemblance too thin to be useful.
Who is the demiurge, and why did Gnostics call the creator of the world a lesser god?
The demiurge in Gnostic teaching is the craftsman god who made the material world, and Gnostic writers called him a lesser god because he built it without knowing that anything existed above him. The word is Greek, demiourgos, meaning a public workman or artisan, and it enters this literature from Plato. In the Timaeus the demiurge is good; he looks at an eternal model and shapes the cosmos as well as matter allows. Gnostic writers kept the word and reversed the verdict. Their craftsman has no model and no permission. In the Sethian texts he is named Yaldabaoth, and also Saklas, which is Aramaic for fool, and Samael, glossed as the blind god. He is described with the face of a lion and the body of a serpent, and in the Apocryphon of John he announces that he is God and that there is no other beside him, a line lifted from Isaiah. In the Gnostic reading, that sentence is not a claim of authority. It is the boast of someone who has never looked up. A voice from above corrects him immediately, and the correction begins the plot.
Under the demiurge sit the archons, the rulers, usually seven of them, matched to the seven visible planetary spheres of ancient astronomy. They administer the world he made, and in several texts they also administer the barriers a soul must pass on the way out of it. Their names and seals vary from system to system, which is one reason the surviving accounts contradict each other so freely. The move behind all of this is a reading of Genesis against its own grain. If the God of the opening chapters is jealous, unable to find Adam among the trees, and anxious about a fruit that confers knowledge, then perhaps he is exactly what he sounds like. Some Sethian texts go further and cast the serpent as the instructor. The dualism this produces is antagonistic, spirit set against matter with no reconciliation intended. For the other kind of dualism, the complementary sort where each pole requires the other, see Yin and Yang: The Real Meaning Behind the Symbol.
What is the difference between the demiurge in Plato and in Gnosticism?
Plato's craftsman works from a perfect model and wants the cosmos to resemble it as closely as matter allows, so whatever goes wrong is a limitation of the material, not a fault in the maker. Strip out the model and the permission and you have the Gnostic version: a builder with no blueprint and no authorization, who mistakes his own workshop for the whole of reality. Plotinus, who had read both sides, complained in the ninth treatise of his second Ennead that these people had borrowed a Platonic figure, made him a villain, and never explained what entitled them to the change.
Who are the archons in Gnostic cosmology?
The archons are the rulers who govern the material world under the demiurge, usually seven of them, mapped onto the planetary spheres. The rosters do not agree. Origen, reporting on the Ophites in Against Celsus, lists Ialdabaoth, Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaios, Astaphaios, Ailoaios and Horaios, several of them Hebrew divine titles turned into jailers. In ascent literature the archons hold checkpoints between the earth and the fullness, and the soul gets past them by knowing the right names.
Is Yaldabaoth the God of the Old Testament?
In Sethian texts Yaldabaoth speaks lines drawn from the Hebrew scriptures and is plainly identified with the creator of Genesis. That is what made the teaching intolerable to the church. It is a hostile reading of Jewish scripture rather than a report of Jewish belief: Jewish tradition does not treat the God of Genesis as a lesser or blind power, and the Sethian authors knew they were rewriting a text rather than describing anyone's faith.
What is the pleroma, and how did Sophia's fall produce the material world?
The pleroma is the fullness of the divine world in Gnostic myth, the total population of aeons who exist with the unknown God before anything material exists, and Sophia's fall is the accident inside it that leaves the material world behind as wreckage. Valentinian teaching gives the pleroma both a population and an architecture. It begins with an unbegotten Depth and his Silence and proceeds by pairs, each emanation issuing a matched couple, until thirty aeons stand arranged in groups of eight, ten and twelve. Sophia, whose name is simply the Greek word for wisdom, is the last and youngest of them. Her fall is described as overreach rather than sin. In one version she wants to comprehend the unknowable Father directly, without passing through the ranks between. In another she tries to produce offspring alone, without her partner. Either way she generates something formless, and the fullness expels her passion along with it. A power called Limit reestablishes the boundary. What she produced outside it hardens into the raw material of soul and matter, and her offspring is the craftsman who will build a world from them.
The Sethian version in the Apocryphon of John is blunter. Sophia conceives a thought and brings it forth without the consent of her consort and without the approval of the invisible Spirit, and the result is Yaldabaoth, whom she hides inside a luminous cloud because he is misshapen. The story does not end in condemnation. Sophia repents, the fullness hears her, and she is restored, though to a station above her son rather than to her original place; the texts put her in the ninth rather than the eighth. Her fragmented power, scattered into what her son made, is the divine spark that gnosis wakes. So the myth is a rescue operation run by the one who caused the accident, which is a stranger and more interesting theology than the summaries usually allow. The Sophia many people work with today as a devotional and archetypal figure is a much later development, covered in Divine Feminine: Meaning, Archetypes and Practices.
What are the aeons in the pleroma?
The aeons are the powers that populate the divine fullness, produced in pairs and named for qualities such as Mind, Truth, Word, Life, Church and Wisdom. Valentinian accounts count thirty of them: an ogdoad of eight, a decad of ten, a dodecad of twelve. The arithmetic was load-bearing. Irenaeus reports Valentinians proving the thirty from the thirty hidden years of Jesus's life, and the dodecad from his appearance in the Temple at the age of twelve. Aeons are less like angels than like the internal articulations of one God, described as though each were a person with a will.
Why is Sophia female?
Sophia is female because sophia is a feminine noun in Greek and because the figure inherits the personified Wisdom of Jewish scripture, who speaks in the first person in Proverbs and appears again in the Wisdom of Solomon. Gnostic authors took an established literary character and handed her a catastrophe. The gendering is grammatical and scriptural before it becomes theological, which is easy to forget in modern retellings.
Was Sophia punished for her fall?
Not in the sense the word punished suggests. The fullness expels what she produced and restores its own boundary, and she is separated from her original station, but the texts describe repentance and restoration rather than damnation. In the Apocryphon of John she is set above her son and left with the long work of recovering the power that leaked out of her into his world.
What did gnosis mean, and how did it differ from faith in the early church?
Gnosis meant saving knowledge of your own origin, and it differed from faith in the early church by being a recognition rather than a trust. The Greek word covers ordinary acquaintance, the sort you have with a person rather than with a proposition, and Gnostic writers used it for one specific act of self-recognition. A formula preserved in the Excerpts from Theodotus states the content precisely: knowing who we were and what we have become, where we were and where we have been thrown, what we are being rescued from, and what birth and rebirth are. Nothing on that list is a doctrine to assent to. It is an answer to the question of what you are doing here. The church's alternative was pistis, faith, meaning trust placed in a person and in the public teaching handed down through the bishops. Both sides used both words, and both sides claimed to have knowledge. What divided them was rank. Valentinians treated faith as the appropriate response for one class of person and gnosis as a higher grade available to another. Irenaeus read that ranking as an insult aimed at his own congregation, and he was not wrong about the insult.
Valentinian teaching sorted humanity into three kinds. Pneumatics carry spirit and are saved by recognizing it. Psychics have soul and free will and can be saved by faith and moral effort. Hylics, also called choics, are made of matter and have no destiny beyond it. Irenaeus attacked the scheme as a doctrine of fixed natures, arguing that it made salvation depend on what a person was born as rather than on what they did, and the charge stuck for eighteen centuries. Valentinians in practice look less rigid than the summaries suggest. Heracleon, in the fragments of his John commentary that Origen preserved while arguing with it, reads the official whose son is healed in the fourth chapter as a figure for the craftsman and the son as a psychic who is rescued anyway, which sits awkwardly beside a scheme of fixed and hopeless natures. Rank was one difference. Delivery was the other. The bishops' teaching was preached in public to whoever walked in, and its content was the same for everyone in the room. Gnosis moved by initiation and by private exegesis, so a Valentinian could sit through the same sermon as the man next to him while holding a second reading of it that the man next to him would never be offered. Gnosis as a first-person experience of the self coming apart is a separate subject, taken up in Ego Death: What It Means, What Triggers It and How to Integrate It.
Is gnosis the same as ordinary knowledge?
No. You could memorize an entire Valentinian cosmology, every aeon in the correct order, and still not have gnosis; the texts say so themselves. What changes is the knower rather than the inventory of things known. The Gospel of Truth describes it as waking out of a nightmare, the terrors of the dream turning out on the instant to have been nothing at all, which is closer to how the sources talk than any account built on information.
What were pneumatics, psychics and hylics?
The three terms come straight from Greek: pneuma is spirit, psyche is soul, hyle is matter. Valentinians did not invent the vocabulary. Paul had already contrasted the psychikos man who cannot receive the things of the Spirit with the pneumatikos man who judges all things, and Valentinian exegetes hardened that contrast into a taxonomy of persons. Ordinary churchgoers were filed as psychics, savable by faith and effort. Valentinians filed themselves one grade up, and then sat in the same pews as the people they had classified.
Did Gnostics practice secret initiation?
Several groups did. Irenaeus describes Marcus conducting an initiation with a long invocation spoken over a cup, and Sethian texts preserve baptismal formulas and lists of names attached to a rite called the Five Seals. The teaching was also secret in a milder sense, as an inner interpretation of the same scriptures everyone else was reading, given only to those judged ready to hear it.
Who were the major Gnostic teachers and schools?
The major Gnostic teachers are Valentinus and Basilides, both working in the second century, alongside the anonymous authors of the Sethian texts, with Marcion of Sinope and Mani just outside the category as parallel cases. Valentinus was Egyptian, taught at Rome from roughly 136 to 165, and was much the most successful of them. Tertullian reports that he had expected to be made bishop there and turned to heresy after being passed over, which is a hostile source and should be read as one. His pupils built the systems we know best. Ptolemy wrote the Letter to Flora, a careful argument about which parts of the Law come from God, which from Moses and which from the elders. Heracleon produced the earliest known commentary on the Gospel of John, surviving only because Origen quoted it while arguing against it. Marcus ran an initiatory practice built on letters and numbers that Irenaeus describes with open disgust. Basilides taught at Alexandria a decade or so earlier, and the two ancient accounts of his system disagree so completely that scholars still cannot reconcile them.
The Sethians left no named founder. Their texts, including the Apocryphon of John, the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Gospel of the Egyptians and the ascent treatises Zostrianos and Allogenes, share a myth in which Seth, the third son of Adam, is the ancestor of an immovable race, and they are heavy with baptismal language. Marcion belongs in the story as a contrast. Excommunicated at Rome around 144, he rejected the God of the Hebrew scriptures as a lesser and legalistic power and assembled the first fixed Christian canon, a shortened Luke plus ten letters of Paul. He had no emanated aeons, no fallen Sophia, no divine spark and no gnosis, which is why most historians decline to call him a Gnostic at all. Mani, born in Mesopotamia in 216, built a religion instead of a school, with a dualist myth of Light invaded by Darkness, a scripture written by the founder himself, and a mission that reached from North Africa to China.
What did Valentinus actually teach?
The primary evidence for Valentinus himself is thin: a handful of fragments quoted by Clement of Alexandria and, if the attribution holds, the Gospel of Truth. Those pieces are lyrical and pastoral rather than systematic. The elaborate thirty-aeon machinery usually called Valentinian comes from his pupils, particularly Ptolemy, and Irenaeus is describing their version rather than anything we can securely trace to the founder.
Was Marcion a Gnostic?
Most historians say no, because Marcion argued from texts rather than from a myth. His lost Antitheses set passages of the Hebrew scriptures beside passages of Paul and let the mismatch carry the argument. Adolf von Harnack, whose 1921 book on Marcion still frames the debate, read him as a biblical theologian who had drawn a hard conclusion from Paul. Marcion also did what no Gnostic teacher managed. He built a rival church with its own bishops, and it was still being legislated against in the fifth century.
How is Manichaeism related to Gnosticism?
Mani drew on Christian, Zoroastrian and Buddhist material and built a dualist religion in which particles of Light are mixed into Darkness and released through the discipline of the elect. The structure resembles Gnostic teaching closely enough that many scholars treat Manichaeism as its most successful branch. But Mani founded a church. It had clergy, a canon he wrote himself, and an annual festival, the Bema, that commemorated his death in a Sasanian prison in the 270s. Valentinus left pupils. Mani left an institution that outlived him by a thousand years.
What is the Nag Hammadi library, and what did the Gnostic gospels turn out to say?
The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of thirteen papyrus codices found in Upper Egypt in December 1945, and the Gnostic gospels inside them turned out to contain revelation dialogues, cosmological myth and sayings rather than the hidden biography of Jesus that popular accounts kept promising. The find was accidental. Local men digging for soft soil to use as fertilizer near the cliffs of the Jabal al-Tarif struck a sealed jar. What came out of it was fifty-two tractates in Coptic, copied in the fourth century from Greek originals, roughly forty of them previously unknown in any language. The manuscripts scattered through the antiquities market before being reassembled, and one codex was bought for the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1952 and is still called the Jung Codex. A complete English edition did not appear until 1977. The contents are more varied than the Gnostic label implies. Alongside Sethian and Valentinian works there is a fragment of Plato's Republic, a set of moral maxims called the Sentences of Sextus, and Hermetic material including part of the Asclepius. Whoever assembled the collection had wide taste.
The named gospels are why the find reached newspapers. The Gospel of Thomas is a list of one hundred and fourteen sayings with no birth, no miracles and no crucifixion. The Gospel of Philip is a set of dense reflections on sacraments and on the slipperiness of religious language. The Gospel of Truth, a meditation on error and on the Father who ends it, may be by Valentinus himself. The Apocryphon of John appears three times in the collection and once more in a codex bought in Cairo in 1896 and held in Berlin. That Berlin codex also carries the Gospel of Mary, which was therefore known before Nag Hammadi and did not come from it, a point popular retellings get wrong constantly. The disappointment is structural. Anyone who opens these codices looking for suppressed biography finds no narrative at all but revelation dialogue: the risen Christ answering questions in private, at length, about where the world came from and how a person gets out of it.
Who found the Nag Hammadi codices?
Muhammad Ali al-Samman, a farmer digging for soft soil with his brothers, is the name attached to the find. He told the story decades later to James Robinson, wrapped in a blood feud and a mother who burned loose pages for kindling, and Nicola Denzey Lewis has since argued that the whole narrative is unreliable and shaped by what its collectors wanted to hear. Nobody disputes that the jar existed. Who opened it is another question.
What condition are the manuscripts in?
Uneven. Some tractates are complete and legible; others have lost whole leaves or break off mid-sentence into gaps that editors fill with brackets and guesses. At least some material was reportedly burned as fuel before anyone understood what it was. The texts are also Coptic translations of Greek originals, so the wording available to us has already passed through a fourth-century translator.
Are there Gnostic manuscripts outside Nag Hammadi?
Yes, and some of them were in print long before 1945. Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt pulled Greek papyrus scraps out of the rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus in 1897 and 1903 and published sayings of Jesus that nobody could place. Once the Coptic Gospel of Thomas became readable, those scraps turned out to be pieces of it. The Askew and Bruce codices had sat in European libraries since the eighteenth century, and the Gospel of Judas surfaced much later, published in 2006.
How was Gnosticism suppressed, and what did its opponents write against it?
Gnosticism was suppressed by argument first and by law afterward, and its opponents wrote the most detailed accounts of it that anyone had before 1945. The campaign opens with a book nobody can read: Justin Martyr compiled a treatise against heresies around the middle of the second century, and no copy of it survived. Irenaeus of Lyon wrote the book that mattered. Against Heresies, in five volumes, begins with a long and cold summary of the Ptolemaean version of Valentinian teaching, on the principle that setting the myth out in full would refute it without further help. Tertullian followed at Carthage with a treatise against the Valentinians, a five-book demolition of Marcion, and a procedural argument that heretics have no standing to appeal to scripture in the first place. Hippolytus at Rome produced a refutation attempting to trace every heresy back to a Greek philosopher. Epiphanius of Salamis assembled the Panarion around 375, a medicine chest against eighty heresies, and quoted his sources at length. Their motives were polemical and their accuracy is uneven, and yet Nag Hammadi vindicated Irenaeus more than it embarrassed him.
The opposition was not confined to Christians. Plotinus devoted a treatise, later placed in the second Ennead, to attacking Gnostics who had turned up in his own lecture room, objecting that contempt for the visible cosmos was both bad philosophy and bad manners toward the gods. Porphyry, introducing his teacher's works, names apocalypses those people circulated under the titles Zostrianos and Allogenes, and Nag Hammadi contains texts bearing exactly those names. Legal pressure arrived with imperial Christianity. Manichaeans had already been targeted by a rescript of Diocletian around the year 300 that ordered their leaders burned along with their books, and the fourth and fifth centuries brought a widening series of edicts against named heresies carrying exile, confiscation and disqualification from inheritance. The Nag Hammadi codices were buried during this period. One popular hypothesis links the burial to the festal letter of 367 in which Athanasius of Alexandria listed the acceptable books and condemned apocrypha, though the monastic connection is argued rather than proven.
How accurate were the heresiologists?
More accurate than most people expected. When the Nag Hammadi texts became readable, Irenaeus's account of the Ptolemaean system matched primary sources closely enough that his reporting is now treated as usable evidence. His framing is another matter. The genealogy tracing every group back to Simon Magus is polemical construction, and Epiphanius repeats rumors of ritual immorality that nothing in the surviving Gnostic texts corroborates.
Were Gnostics persecuted by the Roman state?
Not as Gnostics, at least while the empire was pagan. Rome prosecuted Christians without much interest in which kind it had caught, and the Manichaeans it did single out were treated as a Persian security problem rather than as heretics. That changed once the emperors were Christian. The Theodosian Code collects the resulting laws under one heading on heretics, and they work by disability rather than by execution: a condemned group loses the right to assemble, to ordain, to inherit and to make a will.
Why were the Nag Hammadi codices buried?
Nobody knows. The bindings were stiffened with scrap papyrus that includes dated documents from the middle of the fourth century, and Pachomian monasteries stood nearby, which has led many scholars to connect the burial with a tightening of what monks were permitted to read. Others argue the collection was a private library and that the monastic link is circumstantial rather than demonstrated.
Where did Gnostic thought survive after the fourth century?
Gnostic thought survived after the fourth century most durably in Manichaeism and among the Mandaeans, patchily in a chain of medieval dualist movements whose connection to it is disputed, and then as a modern intellectual and spiritual revival built on rediscovered manuscripts. Manichaeism outlasted every Gnostic school in the Roman world. Augustine spent nine years as a Manichaean hearer before his conversion. The religion traveled east along the trade routes, held on in Central Asia for centuries, and lasted in coastal Fujian in China into the fourteenth. Mani's own writings were lost in Latin and Greek. The twentieth century recovered pieces of them from the Turfan oases in western China, from Coptic codices found in Egypt in 1929, and from the Cologne Mani Codex, a parchment book roughly the size of a matchbox. The Mandaeans are the exception to the entire story: a living Gnostic religion, Aramaic-speaking, rooted in southern Iraq and southwestern Iran, who honor John the Baptist, reject Jesus as a false messiah, and preserve scriptures including the Ginza Rabba.
The medieval line runs from the Paulicians in Armenia through the Bogomils in Bulgaria to the Cathars of Languedoc, and every link in that chain is contested. Older histories treated it as a single underground tradition surfacing again and again. Mark Gregory Pegg and R. I. Moore have argued that the Cathar church was substantially an invention of the inquisitors who described it, assembled from imported categories rather than from observed belief. The Albigensian Crusade that began in 1209 killed people either way. The modern revival is textual before it is devotional. Hans Jonas read the sources existentially in The Gnostic Religion, Elaine Pagels turned Nag Hammadi into public property with The Gnostic Gospels in 1979, and Carl Jung had already written his Seven Sermons to the Dead in 1916 and attributed it to Basilides, with Abraxas at its center. Whether any of this counts as continuity or as reinvention depends on how much weight a reader gives to structure over descent.
Who are the Mandaeans?
The Mandaeans are the only Gnostic religion that never died out, an Aramaic-speaking community whose priests still perform masbuta, full immersion in flowing water, repeated many times across a lifetime rather than once. Their own name comes from manda, the Mandaic word for knowledge, which is the Aramaic counterpart of the Greek gnosis rather than a relative of it. Fewer than a hundred thousand are thought to remain, and war and displacement since 2003 have pushed most of them out of Iraq.
Did Gnostic ideas influence Islamic thought?
Henry Corbin read Ismaili cosmology and Iranian Shia esotericism as continuous with the Gnostic material of late antiquity, and built much of his life's work on that reading. Heinz Halm, working through the early Ismaili sources themselves, traces the emanation scheme to Neoplatonic philosophy arriving in Arabic translation rather than to anything inherited from the second century. The documentary chain is missing either way, which is why the argument has never closed.
Do modern spiritual movements repeat the Gnostic pattern?
Structurally, yes, and usually without knowing the source. The story of a spark that originated elsewhere and is stranded in a hostile world reappears in the material covered by Starseeds: The Types, Traits and Origin Stories People Describe, and the idea of being awake among the unawakened runs through Lightworker: What the Term Means and the Roles People Claim. Neither claims descent from Valentinus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gnosticism a form of Christianity or a separate religion?
Most of what gets called Gnosticism was a form of Christianity, or rather several competing forms of it, arguing inside the same congregations before the boundaries hardened. Valentinians attended ordinary churches and thought of themselves as the mature members. Sethian material is a harder case: it contains layers that look Jewish and Platonist with Christian elements added later, and some scholars read it as a non-Christian tradition that was Christianized afterward. Manichaeism is the clear instance of a separate religion. Mani presented himself as the seal of the prophets and expected his church to replace the ones already in the field rather than to reform them from inside.
Why were the Gnostic gospels left out of the Bible?
The Gnostic gospels were left out because the churches that shaped the canon judged them late, pseudonymous and incompatible with the teaching they had received, and because there was never a single meeting that voted on the question. The criteria that hardened between the second and fourth centuries favored texts believed to reach back to an apostle, read aloud widely in public worship, and consistent with the rule of faith the bishops taught. Most Nag Hammadi texts fail all three tests. Usage had settled the matter before any list was written down.
What did the Gnostics believe about Jesus?
Gnostic teachers agreed that Jesus came to deliver knowledge rather than to make a sacrifice, and disagreed sharply about his body. Docetic positions held that he only appeared to have flesh and therefore only appeared to suffer. Cerinthus is credited with a separationist version: a divine Christ descends on the man Jesus at his baptism and leaves before the crucifixion, so that what dies on the cross is a man. Irenaeus reports that Basilides taught Simon of Cyrene was crucified in his place while Jesus stood by and laughed. Valentinians split the difference and gave him a body of special substance.
Is the Gospel of Thomas a Gnostic text?
The Gospel of Thomas is probably not a Gnostic text, although it was found among them and gets filed with them constantly. It has no demiurge, no aeons, no fall of Sophia and no cosmological myth of any kind. What it has is a sayings list, many of its entries with close parallels in Matthew and Luke, opening with a promise that whoever finds their meaning will not taste death. The dating is a real fight. Helmut Koester and Stephen Patterson argued for an early, independent sayings collection; Mark Goodacre and Simon Gathercole have argued that it knows Matthew and Luke and is therefore later.
Did the Gnostics believe in reincarnation?
Some Gnostic and Manichaean schools taught that souls pass from body to body until the spark inside them escapes the archons, and other schools said nothing about it at all. Irenaeus attributes a doctrine of transmigration to the followers of Carpocrates, and Manichaean texts describe rebirth as the fate of anyone who fails to release the light they are carrying. There is no single Gnostic position. For the comparative picture, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
Is Gnosticism the same thing as Hermeticism or Kabbalah?
No. Hermetism is a Greco-Egyptian body of philosophical and technical writing attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and its cosmos is usually something to admire rather than a prison to escape, though the Nag Hammadi collection did include Hermetic tracts. Kabbalah is a medieval Jewish mystical tradition that emerges in Provence and Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Gershom Scholem argued that early Kabbalistic material such as the Bahir preserves older Gnostic motifs, a genealogy that other specialists have contested ever since.
Were the Cathars Gnostics?
The people called Cathars held a dualist theology with real structural similarities to Gnostic teaching, including a rejection of the material world and of the power that made it, but a direct line of descent from the second-century schools has never been demonstrated. The intermediate links usually proposed are the Paulicians of Armenia and the Bogomils of Bulgaria. The name itself is an outsider's. Eckbert of Schonau applied Cathari to them in sermons written around 1163, and they appear to have called themselves good men and good women. Mark Gregory Pegg has pressed the harder case, that the inquisitors largely invented the organized church they claimed to be uncovering.
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