Gnos?ti?ism [nest size's]
n
early religion: a Prue-Christian and early Christian religious movement teaching that salvation comes by learning esoteric spiritual truths that free humanity from the material world, believed in this movement to be evil.
a religious orientation advocating nosies as the way to release a person's spiritual element; considered heresy by Christian churches
The doctrines of certain Prue-Christian pagan, Jewish, and early Christian sects that valued the revealed knowledge of God and of the origin and end of the human race as a means to attain redemption for the spiritual element in humans and that distinguished the Demiurge from the unknowable Divine Being.
Anak summed it up pretty good. I actually answered this at length earlier today in another question. Here's what I said:
The gospel of Judas, for example, promotes a Greek philosophy called "Gnosticism," which basically says that matter is "evil" (for lack of a better word) and everything immaterial is good. Therefore, Gnostics denied the full humanity of Jesus, saying He only appeared to be human. This contradicts the Christian understanding of who Jesus is, as well as resurrection and the belief that God desires to save us completely-body, soul, and spirit. Christians are not to look forward to the day they die and are finally "free" of their earthly flesh, but to the day they are resurrected and live forever. Like it or not, you get your body back someday, the Christians would say.
"Gnostic" comes from the word for "knowledge." (Hence and "a-gnostic" is someone who does not know, with 'a' meaning "no" or "without"). Gnosticism teaches that the goal is to attain transcendent knowledge, to have the proverbial "inside scoop."
This says it quite well: "The term 'gnostic' derives from 'nosies,' which means 'knowledge' in Greek. The Gnostics believed that they were privy to a secret knowledge about the divine, hence the name." (taken from http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/gn... )
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Hope that helps answer your question as well.
Gnosticism was a belief that appeared about 250-300 years after the resurrection of Christ. It brought in some ideas from Greek philosophy. It taught that the material world and everything in it is evil. That only the spirit world was real. It claimed that salvation came through a special knowledge or revelation from God. The word "gnostic" means "knowledge" in the Greek language.
The Gnostics taught that Jesus Christ was not human, and did not have a physical body. He was only a spirit. He only "appeared" to have a body. His death was not real, because spirits can not die.
The Gnostic teaching was one of the issues dealt with at the Nicene council (the first official group to confirm Christian beliefs) in the early 300's. They rejected the gnostic teaching, reaffirming the Christian creed that Jesus was both completely man and completely God in one.
The Gnostic's believed that a special kind of knowledge, or "nosies", could be understood only by a sort of being-essence moment, what I'd call a bone-deep truth, an understanding so certain it becomes rock-bottom solid and unshakable within the person, because it is not a mere intellectual understanding, but has become a living, breathing WORK. There were many different forms of gnosticism, and the best reference books would be the "Nag-Hammadi Library" which is now in a modern English translation, which was discovered in the 1940's just outside a little town in Egypt, ancient scrolls from what apparently were a community of Coptic-Gnostic Christians(?)perhaps. A little known fact, the great gnostic Christian, Valentinus, was almost elected to be the very first Pope, and what a significant turn that would have been for Christianity. In the Nag-Hammadi Library, some of my favorite books are, "The Hypostasis of the Archons"(or "reality of the Rulers"), "The Tri-Orphic Protenoia", and "The Concept of Our Great Power."
Many ancient and modern gnostics have no problem with Paul's and John's writings in the new testament. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus is just such a bone-deep gnostic moment that I referred to earlier here. Thanks for a great question. UCSteve
what is Gnosticism?
