Decoding Gnosticism: Secrets of a Heretical Christian Belief

Episode Outline:
0:00 What is Gnosticism, and why is it so hard to define?
0:45 Bart and Megan on Epicurus, death, and unexpected philosophy
3:22 Why “Gnosticism” is an umbrella term, not one single religion
5:28 The big common thread: spirit is good, matter is bad
6:48 The Gnostic myth of the unknowable God, Aeons, and the Pleroma
10:10 Sophia, Yaldabaoth, and why the creator god is not the highest God
13:19 How salvation works in Gnosticism: secret knowledge and escape from the material world
16:46 Did Gnostics use different scriptures, or the same ones as other Christians?
20:20 How proto-orthodox writers tried to fight Gnosticism
23:25 How Gnostics claimed authority and secret apostolic teaching
26:01 Gnostic views of the afterlife and spiritual return
28:33 How widespread Gnosticism may have been in the ancient world
31:32 Key Gnostic texts: Thomas, Judas, Mary, and the Nag Hammadi writings
33:57 Did Gnostics believe Jesus’ death brought atonement?
35:17 The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter and the laughing Jesus above the cross
55:01 Final summary: why Gnosticism mattered in early Christianity

Episode Description
By far the most mysterious, intriguing, and widely-interesting ancient "heresy" was Gnosticism. But what exactly is it and why does it matter? In this episode we consider the basic ideas that lay behind the Gnostic religions and explore just how radically different they are from the views that came to be regarded as orthodox. How could these religions be considered Christian if they didn't think Jesus' death mattered? How could they consider the God of the Old Testament to be a lower level and inferior divinity, and this material universe to be a cosmic disaster? Did Gnostics have their own Scriptures? Did they use the books that later became the New Testament? If so, why didn't they just admit their views were wrong? We will address these and other issues in this exploration of the highly unusual world of Christian Gnosticism.

Also watch these episodes:

Hidden Wisdom or Heresy? The Enigma of the Gospel of Thomas
Hidden Wisdom or Heresy? The Enigma of the Gospel of Thomas

How Wild Can it Get? The Diversity of Early Christianity
How Wild Can it Get? The Diversity of Early Christianity

This week, Bart and Megan talk about:

-What are some of the commonalities we see in different Gnostic groups?

-How does Jesus feature in this dualistic, spiritual/material world, and does it play into his identity as divine-human?
-xWhere does YHWH, the god of the Hebrew Bible, come into this? Is he the divine being, an Aeon, what is he?

-You said it’s the goal of the Gnostics to get back to the Pleroma, how is this to be done?

-Did the Gnostics use different religious texts from the proto-Orthodox?

-How did the proto-Orthodox groups go about combating the Gnostics?

-How did the Gnostics try and claim that they were correct, versus the proto-Orthodox?

-How does the afterlife work for Gnostics? Gnostics already see the material world as being “hellish”, so are there gradations of heaven?

-Do we know how they went about identifying which people had the spark of Sophia?

-Do we have a sense of how widespread gnosticism was in the ancient world?

-Do you think that the potential widespread nature of Gnosticism owe anything to the mystery cults of the Classical world?

-Did the Gnostics hold to the theory of atonement, or do we just not know?