GNOSTICISM

What Is Gnosticism?

Gnosis is a Greek noun which means "knowledge" or "insight." It is often used for personal knowledge compared with intellectual knowledge). A related term is the adjective gnostikos (cognitive) a reasonably common adjective in Classical Greek.

Gnosticism, being a form of esoteric knowledge, is considered to be a form of occult knowledge (occult meaning "hidden"). Gnosticism does not focus on concepts of sin and repentance, but on the concept of illusion and enlightenment.

Before you research on Gnosticism, you need to put aside perceptions of what you have learnt in the past.

True Gnosticism is:

Not the Tanakh (Old Testament)
Not the Torah
Not the Talmud
Not the Kabbalah
Not Roman Catholicism
Not (Protestant) Christianity
Not the New Testatment
Not Jesusism (basically a Jesus cult or fan club)
Not Paulism (modern Christianity that is based more on the teachings of Paul than Jesus)
Not Macionsim (Marcion's version of Gnosticism based on teachings of Paul)
Not Christian Gnosticism

The Gnostic teachings are what the representative of the Pleroma, the avatar Isa the Kristos, taught the world, before it was branded as heretical by the Roman Catholic palpacy, and corrupted, hijacked into their own version of Jesus Christ.

The Nag Hammadi Library

Nag Hammadi is a city and markaz in Upper Egypt, located on the west bank of the Nile in the Qena Governorate, about 80km north-west of Luxor.

Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945, the Gnostic view of early Christianity had largely been forgotten. The teachings of Gnostic Christianity—vilified especially since they were declared heretic by orthodox Christianity in the fourth century—had been virtually erased from history by the early church fathers, their gospels banned and even burned to make room for the view of Christian theology outlined in the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Nag Hammadi library (also known as the Chenoboskion Manuscripts and the Gnostic Gospels) is a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.

Thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local farmer named Muhammed al-Samman. The writings in these codices comprise 52 mostly Gnostic treatises, but they also include three works belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation/alteration of Plato's Republic. In his introduction to The Nag Hammadi Library in English, James Robinson suggests that these codices may have belonged to a nearby Pachomian monastery and were buried after Saint Athanasius condemned the use of non-canonical books in his Festal Letter of 367 A.D. The Pachomian hypothesis has been further expanded by Lundhaug & Jenott (2015, 2018) and further strengthened by Linjamaa (2024). In his 2024 book, Linjamaa argues that the Nag Hammadi library was used by a small intellectual monastic elite at a Pachomian monastery, and that they were used as a smaller part of a much wider Christian library.

The contents of the codices were written in the Coptic language. The best-known of these works is probably the Gospel of Thomas, of which the Nag Hammadi codices contain the only complete text. After the discovery, scholars recognized that fragments of these sayings attributed to Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1898, and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources. Most interpreters date the writing of the Gospel of Thomas to the second century, but based on much earlier sources. The buried manuscripts date from the 3rd and 4th centuries.

The Nag Hammadi codices are now housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt.