I always heard the term Gnostic's but I am not sure they are Christians or also they present in Judaism, Islam and other religions?
and what is it? what do they believe? like everybody has part of the divinity inside?
Gnostic's can be of any religion. However, it's mostly used as a title for a sect of early Christians in the second and third centuries, mostly in Egypt. Look up the gnostic gospels. If you read them, you'll see that they aren't very coherent and don't really make any sense. That's kind of why the religion has been dead for so long.
Gnostic is Greek for "having knowledge". Since much of early Christian texts were written in Greek, Gnostic just kind of stuck.
An equivalent in Judaism would be fabulists, and in Islam, it would be the Sufi's.
The Gnostic's were kind of all over the place. Persian, Egyptian, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, you name it.
Gnosticism was essentially a product of Hellenic philosophy (Platonic and Neo-platonic, especially) and started out as essentially "pagan." It became popular in Syria, from which it ingrained itself in Judaism. Christianity inherited it, and made it its own.
The only way to insert Gnosticism into Judaism is to use a definition so broad that it's meaningless. That doesn't stop people from doing it of course.
Gnosticism is a philosophy turned religion which holds a heavily dualistic world view (antithetical to Judaism's radical monotheism) and believes that salvation from evil (again, not Jewish) comes through certain esoteric knowledge more than the actions of a dying/rising Savior deity.
So you get doctrines like a belief that the Jewish G-d is one of several evil arc hons who have imprisoned humanity. Jesus is then an eon sent by the Palermo (good heavenly entities) to share the proper knowledge (nosies) which frees those who believe it.
The various Gnostic sects plundered many Prue-existing religious traditions and appropriated whatever they wanted without regard for the original meaning. Judaism was one of their sources, which is what confuses so many.
Short answer for a definition of Gnostism - several pancreatic salvation-oriented religious sects based heavily on philosophy which claim to provide salvation through their particular esoteric knowledge.
As such, it is very much part of the pagan milieu in which Christianity arose. It lost the battle to be accepted as the normative interpretation of Christianity, but it was very much part of the debate.
I've been interested in how Christianity became so fixated on being the one and only way, that approach doesn't fit with either Judaism or Hellenic synergism. I wonder if it didn't carry over from philosophical arguments. In that case, Gnosticism may have left its mark on normative Christianity regardless.
gnosticism is christianity or judaism?
