Nothing Comes of Nothing
I'd like to make a clarification for the class: Gnosticism has nothing to do with the Bible.
How can I make such a statement? Simple. The Bible is defined by the Christian or Hebrew religion and which books the leaders of said group decided to include. I won't discuss the Hebrew canon here because Gnosticism is primarily (at least to the modern mind) associated with Christianity.
Up until about the year 350 there was no single canon of Christian Scripture. Most every major Christian Theologian had there own canon. Included in these were all the books currently in the Christian Scripture (though James and the Apocalypse were less common). There were also a collection of books that appeared in some canons but were not accepted as inspired, and therefore did not appear in the final canon. They included such works as the Shepherd of Hermes, the Didache, and the epistles of Clement. None of this books, however, were Gnostic. They are in fact still used by Christians as the writings of the Fathers.
The only references to Gnosticism in the early Christian writing are in works written against heresy, such as St. Iraenus' work entitled, unsurprisingly, Against Heresies. This work, written around AD 190 denounced such works as 'The Gospel of Judas.' Gnosticism therefore can only be seen as an example of early non-Christian beliefs loosely related to Christianity and not something which can validly be considered as part of the early Christian belief or the early creation of the Bible.
On a unrelated note, I've noticed a lot of you are writing long entries. One thing I've learned that really helps the reading of those is to separate each paragraph from the previous one by a double space, since Blogger seems incapable of recognizing tabs. This will make your work much more readable and you'll get more comments.
How can I make such a statement? Simple. The Bible is defined by the Christian or Hebrew religion and which books the leaders of said group decided to include. I won't discuss the Hebrew canon here because Gnosticism is primarily (at least to the modern mind) associated with Christianity.
Up until about the year 350 there was no single canon of Christian Scripture. Most every major Christian Theologian had there own canon. Included in these were all the books currently in the Christian Scripture (though James and the Apocalypse were less common). There were also a collection of books that appeared in some canons but were not accepted as inspired, and therefore did not appear in the final canon. They included such works as the Shepherd of Hermes, the Didache, and the epistles of Clement. None of this books, however, were Gnostic. They are in fact still used by Christians as the writings of the Fathers.
The only references to Gnosticism in the early Christian writing are in works written against heresy, such as St. Iraenus' work entitled, unsurprisingly, Against Heresies. This work, written around AD 190 denounced such works as 'The Gospel of Judas.' Gnosticism therefore can only be seen as an example of early non-Christian beliefs loosely related to Christianity and not something which can validly be considered as part of the early Christian belief or the early creation of the Bible.
On a unrelated note, I've noticed a lot of you are writing long entries. One thing I've learned that really helps the reading of those is to separate each paragraph from the previous one by a double space, since Blogger seems incapable of recognizing tabs. This will make your work much more readable and you'll get more comments.
posted by J.M.R. Burgard @ 10:43 AM
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