Well, Freddy, Jesus's sayings from the Gospel of Thomas seems decidedly Gnostic, and some believe they also reflect a Buddhist sense of religion being inside the self. In regard to Gnosticism and the other early Christian factions all essentially duking it out over several centuries, I took my information from the tract I quoted in the post I wrote. Why would a Gnostic tract be the original source of Jesus' words if the Gnostics were not followers of Christ?
In the first century of the Christian era this term, Gnostic, began to be used to denote a
prominent, even if somewhat heterodox, segment of the diverse new Christian
community. Among these early followers of Christ, it appears that an elite group
delineated themselves from the greater household of the Church by claiming not simply a
belief in Christ and his message, but a "special witness" or revelatory experience of the
divine. It was this experience, this gnosis, which--so these Gnostics claimed--set the true
follower of Christ apart from his fellows. Stephan Hoeller explains that these Gnostic
Christians held a "conviction that direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic
truths of existence is accessible to human beings, and, moreover, that the attainment of
such knowledge must always constitute the supreme achievement of human life." 2
What the "authentic truths of existence" affirmed by the Gnostics were will be briefly
reviewed below. But a historical overview of the early Church might first be useful. In the
initial decades of the Christian church--the period when we find first mention of "Gnostic"
Christians--no orthodoxy, or single acceptable format of Christian thought, had yet been
defined. During this first century of Christianity modern scholarship suggests Gnosticism
was of many currents sweeping the deep waters of the new religion. The ultimate course
Christianity, and Western culture with it, would take was undecided at that early moment;
Gnosticism was one of forces forming that destiny.
That Gnosticism was, at least briefly, in the mainstream of Christianity is witnessed by the
fact that one of the most prominent and influential early Gnostic teachers, Valentinus, may
have been in consideration during the mid-second century for election as the Bishop of
Rome.3 Valentinus serves well as a model of the Gnostic teacher. Born in Alexandria
around A.D. 100, Valentinus had rapidly distinguished himself as an extraordinary teacher
and leader in the highly educated and diverse Alexandrian Christian community. In the
middle of his life, around A.D. 140, he migrated from Alexandria to the Church's evolving
capital, Rome, where he played an active role in the public life of the Church. A prime
characteristic of the Gnostics was their propensity for claiming to be keepers of secret
teachings, gospels, traditions, rituals, and successions within the Church -- sacred matters
for which many Christians were (in Gnostic opinion) simply either not prepared or not
properly inclined. Valentinus, true to this Gnostic penchant, professed a special apostolic
sanction. He maintained he had been personally initiated by one Theudas, a disciple and
initiate of the Apostle Paul, and that he possessed knowledge of teachings and perhaps
rituals which were being forgotten by the developing opposition that became Christian
orthodoxy.4 Though an influential member of the Roman church in the mid-second
century, by the end of his life some twenty years later he had been forced from the public
eye and branded a heretic.
While the historical and theological details are far too complex for proper explication
here, the tide of history can be said to have turned against Gnosticism in the middle of the
second century. No Gnostic after Valentinus would ever come so near prominence in the
greater Church. Gnosticism's secret knowledge, its continuing revelations and production
of new scripture, its ascetheticism and paradoxically contrasting libertine postures, were
met with increasing suspicion. By A.D. 180, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, was publishing his
attacks on Gnosticism as heresy, a work to be continued with increasing vehemence by
the orthodox church Fathers throughout the next century.
The orthodox catholic church was deeply and profoundly influenced by the struggle
against Gnosticism in the second and third centuries. Formulations of many central
traditions in orthodox theology came as reflections and shadows of this confrontation with
the Gnosis.5 But by the end of the fourth century the struggle with the classical
Gnosticism represented in the Nag Hammadi texts was essentially over; the evolving
orthodox ecclesia had added the force of political correctness to dogmatic denunciation,
and with this sword so-called "heresy" was painfully cut from the Christian body.
Gnosticism, which had perhaps already passed its prime, was eradicated, its remaining
teachers murdered or driven into exile, and its sacred books destroyed. All that remained
for scholars seeking to understand Gnosticism in later centuries were the denunciations
and fragments preserved in the patristic heresiologies.
Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library
It was on a December day in the year of 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper
Egypt, that the course of Gnostic studies was radically renewed and forever changed. An
Arab peasant, digging around a boulder in search of fertilizer for his fields, happened that
day upon an old, rather large red earthenware jar. Hoping to have found buried treasure,
and with due hesitation and apprehension about the jinn, the genie or spirit who might
attend such an hoard, he smashed the jar open with his pick. Inside he discovered no
treasure and no genie, but books: more than a dozen old papyrus books, bound in golden
brown leather.6 Little did he realize that he had found an extraordinary collection of
ancient texts, manuscripts hidden up a millennium and a half before (probably deposited
in the jar around the year 390 by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius) to
escape destruction under order of the emerging orthodox Church in its violent expunging
of all heterodoxy and heresy.
How the Nag Hammadi manuscripts eventually passed into scholarly hands, is a
fascinating even if too lengthy story to here relate. But today, now fifty years since being
unearthed and more than two decades after final translation and publication in English as
The Nag Hammadi Library7, their importance has become astoundingly clear: These
thirteen beautiful papyrus codices containing fifty-two sacred texts are the long lost
"Gnostic Gospels", a last extant testament of what orthodox Christianity perceived to be
its most dangerous and insidious challenge, the feared opponent that the Patristic
heresiologists had reviled under many different names, but most commonly as Gnosticism.
The discovery of these documents has radically revised our understanding of Gnosticism
and the early Christian church.
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