We know very little about the Gnostics except what documents they left behind, most of which were fraudulent.
The only other thing we can say about them is that they were a group of people living in central Turkey contemporary to Paul.
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I use the existence of the Gnostics to prove the validity and existence of Jesus and the gospels.
This is how I do it:
The Gnostic manuscripts were written in Turkey between 50 and 70 AD., approximately.
The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were written in Egypt around 50 AD.
It is a physical impossibility for Jewish culture as specific as this to have spread in two different directions without the passing of time, and it therefore had to have started at a common central point in earlier decades (how long before is impossible to tell).
Therefore a tradition of a gospel story MUST have existed long before 50 AD.
(I always get thumbs down when presenting evidence like this. Atheists really hate data and facts. It pisses them off and frustrates all their attempts to belittle Christians.)
Gnosticism is absolute knowledge, or claiming to have absolute knowledge, while agnosticism is admitting that one does not.
An agnostic atheist makes no claim of absolute knowledge of gods existence, but doesn't believe pending legitimate, empirical evidence. (MOST atheists are of this variety, also known as "weak" atheism)
A gnostic atheist claims they know for a 100% certain FACT that there's no god or gods. (Very few atheists claim this, as it's a logical fallacy to claim absolute knowledge in the first place, it is also known as "strong" atheism)
An agnostic theist makes no claim of absolute knowledge, but believes there is a god or gods pending the refutation of the god or gods they believe in. (Most theists are like this, it's sort of the "common mans religion")
A gnostic theist makes the claim that they know for 100% certain FACT that a God or Gods exist. (A few theists CLAIM to be this, but cannot prove their claim with any kind of legitimate evidence)
Of course, some will say that absolute knowledge is not only impossible, but that any believe either way is presumptive, these are militant agnostics.
There are some theists that attempt to claim that their faith and their holy text is all the evidence they need. These theists are hypocrites, as they do not accept other religions holy texts and the faith of members of other religions as proof.
If evidence A (faith and holy text) is proof of claim B (a given religions truth), it should be proof of claim B each and every time, or else you have a double standard, which is both illogical and dishonest.
You're having a hard time understanding it, because it is a large blanket label covering "know ledges"
(it's from the Greek word for "to know") as disparate as Manichaeism and Catharism, faiths separated by thousands of miles and almost as many years. It's sort of like trying to define theism as anything more than a belief in God or Gods. Christians and Hindus are both types of theists. Gnostic faiths are those that believe there is a secret knowledge or wisdom to be gained, either encoded within texts or from an ascended master to a student, and that this one must do or must discover, in order to be fulfilled.
Gnostics believed the body and soul are separate. What is done in the body does not have any effect on the soul. The first if if feels good do it belief.
First, gnosticism is NOT the opposite of agnosticism. The Gnostic's believed that the god of the Jewish scriptures was not the true God but an inferior sub-deity who mistakenly created the material world. For them, Jesus, an offspring of the true God, entered the material world not to "redeem" people from "sin", but to teach them the enlightening knowledge to transcend the world of the flesh and enter the world of pure spirit. Gnostics believed that Christ was a pure spirit who took over the body of the flesh and blood man Jesus, teaching his disciples this esoteric knowledge, then abandoning Jesus just before his arrest. Also, the "Holy Spirit" was actually "Sophia" ("Wisdom"), another pure deity seeking to return Christ to the realm of spirit.
The knowledge was not obvious but secret. The Gnostic's taught that the writings of the scriptures were allegorical and that one had to seek a deeper meaning to understand them correctly. They wrote their own scriptures that enlarged on other gospel stories, giving them new, secret meanings that only deep initiates could gain access to. While ordinary Christians underwent a baptism of water, gnostic initiates looked forward to deeper, elite initiations like the "baptism of air" and the "baptism of fire" (smoke) in secret rituals.
The object of all this secret learning was not just to know more but to reach a state of "nosies" or enlightenment, when one could perceive the world of the spirit easily and see the world of the flesh as the corruption it was. (There are actually gnostic traces in the gospel of John and the letters of Paul, although they obviously put the "correct" interpretations on them.) Gnostics also avoided heavy foods, alcohol and sex, which they considered damaging to their spiritual quests.
Although they did meet at times, gnosticism was apparently an individualistic religion, since each aspirant had to achieve nosies on his own. Because members were leery of sex and considered themselves superior to grubby, ordinary Christians, their was business was not a successful one.
Gnosticism is the pancreatic, speculative cosmologies and subsequent sacramental practices of a specific philosophical and literary movement in the Eastern Mediterranean c. 200 BCE - c.400 CE
Gnosis means "insight"; a specific kind of intimate knowledge, the way lovers know one another. The root of nosies hides in the more familiar words recognize, cunning, nobility and narrative. For spiritual seekers, nosies is deep understanding of the Divine and our relationship to it.
Gnosticism is a Prue-Christian religious tradition that fuses Judaism, Greek philosophy and the Mystery Schools of the ancient world. Originating in the intellectual circles of Alexandria around 200 BCE, the original Gnostics were Greek-educated Jews, living in Egypt, on the doorstep of the Roman Empire.
At the core of Gnosticism is nosies, and the idea that enlightenment is a necessary and natural step of human experience. Early Gnostic texts are identified by four principal characteristics:
- that it is nosies, not faith, that saves us from deception ("Gnostic Soteriology");
- that the universe "flows out of" God, the way ripples emanate from a stone dropped in water ("Emanations Cosmogeny");
- that the "Spark" of Divinity is immediately present in the world and constantly available to us, even if it is obscured by illusion and ignorance ("Immanent Pneumatology"); and
- that this Spark's origin in the Infinite is revered by sacramental Mysteries, such as baptism and the eucharist ("Sacramental Theology").
Gnosticism is NOT the same as satanism, and it is NOT mentioned in the Bible (despite this pastor's claim).
It does NOT claim that the God of the Bible is the same as the Demiurge (a literary character used as a metaphor, created by Plato) but it does suggest that a lot of things humans mistakenly attribute to God are in fact the work of an inferior set of forces.
I am having a hard time understanding what Gnosticism is....?
