Gnostic

Central Belief

Generally speaking, the Gnostics were Egyptians, Essene Jews, and early Christians, ‘heretics’ who practiced mystery cults based on the idea of ‘knowing’ the divine. Gnosis is now preferred to the term to Gnosticism – a religion of its own – as a label for this loosely connected group.

Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other), but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance — whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities — is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.

History

Thirteen of the books of the Christian New Testament are the epistles (letters) of St. Paul, and Paul is the earliest and first Christian author for which we have historical writings21. Seven were probably written by Paul himself and six others have been written in his name by (anonymous) followers, some up to 80 years after his death. Was Paul himself a gnostic and a teacher of the Jesus Mysteries, or was he a literalist? The scholars T. Freke & P. Gandy in The Jesus Mysteries compiled a large quantity of historical evidence that St. Paul was a Gnostic. (source: The Human Truth Foundation).

The two principal branches of the Gnostic Church are the French and the English. Of these, the French is the older and more widely disseminated. Gnosticism has seen something of a resurgence in popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This may be related, certainly, to the sudden availability of Gnostic texts to the reading public, following the emergence of the Nag Hammadi library. The Nag Hammadi library is known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Inspiration

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Special Days

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Additional Information

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Gnosticism refers to a number of religious groups from the early centuries of Christianity that emphasized the importance of secret knowledge to escape the trappings of this material world. The name Gnostic itself comes from the Greek word for ‘knowledge,’ gnosis. Gnostics, then, are the ones who are in the know. And what do they know? They know the truth that can set them free from this world of matter, which was created not by the one true God but by lower, inferior, and often ignorant deities who designed this world as a place of entrapment for elements of the divine. Gnostic religions indicate that some of us have a spark of divinity within us, a spark that longs to be set free from the prison of our bodies. These religions provide the secret knowledge that allows us to transcend our mortal, material bodies to return to the heavenly realm whence we originally came, where we will once again live with the gods.

Generally speaking, the Gnostics were Egyptians, Essene Jews, and early Christians, ‘heretics’ who practiced mystery cults based on the idea of ‘knowing’ the divine. Gnosis is now preferred to the term to Gnosticism – a religion of its own – as a label for this loosely connected group.

Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other), but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance — whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities — is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.

Gnosticism embraces numerous general attitudes toward life: it encourages non-attachment and non-conformity to the world, a “being in the world, but not of the world”; a lack of egotism; and a respect for the freedom and dignity of other beings. Nonetheless, it appertains to the intuition and wisdom of every individual “Gnostic” to distill from these principles individual guidelines for their personal application.

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