Gnosticism and the Gnostic challenge

Overview

Christology did Gnostic teaching produce and three Gnostic teachers and say what is known of them.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the term Gnosticism describe?

   Model answer

   Gnosticism is the name given to a family of second-century movements teaching that salvation comes through gnosis, a saving knowledge of the divine origin of the self. Most of them combined this with a sharp dualism between spirit and matter and a denial that the supreme God made the world.

2. 2

   Why do many scholars now question the category of Gnosticism itself?

   Model answer

   Michael Williams and Karen King have argued that the label lumps together very different texts and teachers, and that it was constructed largely by their opponents. Critics of their position reply that the sources do share a recognisable pattern of ideas and that abandoning the term makes the second-century debate harder to describe.

3. 3

   What accounts have been given of the origins of Gnosticism?

   Model answer

   Adolf von Harnack described it as the acute Hellenising of Christianity, while the History of Religions school looked to Iranian dualism and to oriental myth. Other scholars trace its roots to Jewish apocalyptic and wisdom speculation or to popular Platonism, and many now hold that it arose from several of these at once.

4. 4

   How was Gnostic teaching known before 1945, and what changed?

   Model answer

   Knowledge came almost entirely from the writings of its opponents, principally Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian and Epiphanius. The discovery of a collection of Coptic codices at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 provided Gnostic texts in their own words for the first time, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth and the Apocryphon of John.

5. 5

   What is the demiurge?

   Model answer

   The demiurge is the lesser being who, in most Gnostic systems, fashioned the material world in ignorance or malice. Many of these systems identified him with the God of the Old Testament, so that the creator and the Father of Jesus Christ were two different beings.

6. 6

   How did Gnostic systems explain the origin of the material world?

   Model answer

   The supreme God was said to be utterly beyond the world, from whom a series of divine beings called aeons emanated within the fullness. A fall or error, often ascribed to Sophia, the last of these, produced the demiurge and through him the material order, so creation is the result of a catastrophe rather than of a good will.

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