Preface, The Gnostics: classic Christian wheat or tares?

 

THE GNOSTIC-PATRIPASSIAN

CONSPIRACY AGAINST

THE HOLY SCRIPTURES

 

A book about: Gnostic-Patripassian Christians, who they were, their school of thought, the legacy they left behind and the conspiracies they were engaged in.

 

The Gnostics: classic Christian wheat or tares?

 

Matthew 13:24Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.”

 

From the Wikipedia about Gnosticism and Gnostic-Christian sources (Greek: γνῶσις gnōsis, knowledge) refers to a diverse, syncretistic religious movement consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect god, the demiurge, who is frequently identified with the Abrahamic God.

The demiurge may be depicted as an embodiment of evil, or in other instances as merely imperfect and as benevolent as its inadequacy permits. This demiurge exists alongside another remote and unknowable Supreme Being that embodies good. In order to free oneself from the inferior material world, one needs gnosis, or esoteric spiritual knowledge available through direct experience or knowledge (gnosis) of (this unknowable) God. Within the sects of gnosticism, however, only the pneumatics or psychics obtain gnosis; the hylic or Somatics, though human, are doomed.

Whereas formerly Gnosticism was considered mostly a corruption of Christianity, it now seems clear that traces of Gnostic systems can be discerned some centuries before the Christian Era. Gnosticism may have been earlier than the First Century, thus predating Jesus Christ. Then continuing in the Mediterranean and Middle East before and during the Second and Third Centuries. Gnosticism became a dualistic heresy to Judaism, Christianity and Hellenic philosophy in areas controlled by the Roman Empire and Arian Goths (see Huneric), and the Persian Empire. Conversion to Islam and the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) greatly reduced the remaining number of Gnostics throughout the Middle Ages, though a few isolated communities continue to exist to the present. Gnostic ideas became influential in the philosophies of various esoteric mystical movements of the late 19th and 20th Centuries in Europe and North America, including some that explicitly identify themselves as revivals or even continuations of earlier Gnostic groups.

In the gnostic book of The First Thought which is in Three Forms (or The Three Forms of the First Thought, in original The Trimorphic Protennoia) appears to have been rewritten at some point to incorporate Sethian gnostic beliefs, when originally it was a treatise from another Gnostic sect. Unusually, the text is in the form of an explanation of the nature of cosmology, creation, and a docetic view of Jesus, in the first person. That is, the text is written as if the writer is God, the three-fold first thought. Like most Gnostic writing, the text is extremely mystical, more so for being in the first person. Like the more familiar gnostic book The Apocryphon of John, to which it is similar, it is thought to be from the mid-second century.