What Did Gnostics Believe In?

#63: “What did Gnostics Believe In?” by Brendon Wahlberg
You hear about the ancient Christian Gnostics every once in a while. For example, you might have read that there is a “Gospel of Thomas” that contains secret sayings of Jesus not found in the canonical gospels, and that this gospel was written by Gnostic Christians. Or, you might have seen a news report about the newly published “Gospel of Judas”, which was also written by Gnostics, and which contains the secret revelation that Judas was a hero who helped Jesus shed his unwanted body. Or, you might have seen or read “The DaVinci Code”, and heard one character (misleadingly) say that there were once many competing Gospels, written by such figures as Philip or Mary Magdalene. You may have learned that these books were also written by Gnostics, and that some claim to contain information kept secret from Jesus’ disciples. “Gnostics” were named for being “knowers” (from the Greek word gnosis, knowledge) of this sort of secret religious information.
If these books ever made you curious enough to actually read one or two of them, you probably experienced a rather rude surprise. Knowing that the Bible is basically readable by the average person, you may have picked up a Gnostic text expecting it to be readable also. Then you found the book to be incomprehensible, a confusing and rambling tract full of alien terms, names, and concepts. How could this be? Aren’t these the writings of a type of early Christians? How can they make so little sense to Christians today?
The reason we can pick up the Bible and understand it is that we have the cultural and religious background and education we need in order to make sense of it. If you knew absolutely nothing about the Bible, if you had never heard of God, Israel, or Jesus, then the Bible would seem like quite a bewildering story. In the same way, the average Bible reader just doesn’t have the background to understand the writings of the Gnostics. Gnostics had their own cosmology, their own view of reality, their own creation story, their own divine figures, and their own vocabulary. They claimed to have secret knowledge that, if you knew it, would free you from this corrupt world and bring you to eternal life. Now think about it: if your group has such valuable secret knowledge, it actually makes sense to have your writings be cryptic and hard to understand. That way, you keep outsiders from readily learning your secrets, and you make insiders have to work to understand the secrets; in working hard to grasp them, the insiders will value the secrets more highly.
In short, to understand anything the Gnostics wrote, you need to have a basic sense of what they believed in. And so the topic this month is a brief summary of Gnostic beliefs. Gnostics 101, if you will. This can serve two purposes. First, if you ever want to try to read some of those Gnostic gospels, this information will help you to make sense of them. They were apparently written with the assumption that the reader already understood the belief system, taking it for granted that the reader already knows about such things as “Barbelo”, “aeons”, “Sophia Pistis”, “Yaldabaoth”, and “demiurge”. Well, once you learn these terms, you too can follow what the Gnostic writers are trying to say (maybe!). Even if you have no such interest, the second purpose of this primer can be to show what a bizarre set of beliefs the Gnostics had, and how alienated from the world they must have felt. You have to admit, they were strange; perhaps today, only the beliefs of the Scientologists can come close to what the Gnostics were once all about.
First, though, we need a little background. For a long time, no one really knew for sure what the Gnostics believed. We didn’t have anything written in their own words, and they had long ago vanished as a religious group, stamped out as heretics by the growing Orthodox Church. In fact, all we knew about them came from the writings of their heresy-hunting enemies in the church, men like Irenaeus who wrote about Gnostic beliefs only in order to ridicule them and denounce them. Imagine for a moment that there were no more copies of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) in the world because long ago, the alternate universe Muslims had stamped out Judaism and Christianity as heresy. All we had were a few writings of scholars trying to prove that these older religions were twisted nonsense. We would only have a biased, fragmentary, and warped view of what those lost groups once believed. And so it was with the Gnostics, until one day in Egypt, in 1945, a cache of fifty-two actual Gnostic writings was found. Known as the Nag Hammadi Library, this buried collection dates back to around 400CE, and contains copies of books written in the second century. It opened our eyes to the actual beliefs of the Gnostics.
Gnostics didn’t all believe in the same myths. There were different groups of Gnostics, who followed different founding leaders, such as Valentinus or Basilides, or who revered different teacher figures, such as Seth or Cain, the sons of Adam, or Thomas the disciple. These groups all had their own writings and followers, and the smaller details of their beliefs were sometimes different. But it is still possible to describe a general Gnostic world view, just as we can describe a general Christian theology today, even though there are many branches of Christianity.
For Gnostics, there was a time and a place before the universe of matter was created. The immortal realm, called the Pleroma, was home to divine figures, including a mother goddess named Barbelo, a father god called the Great One, or the great invisible spirit, and their offspring, Autogenes the Self-Generated. Autogenes populated the realm with other beings called aeons. These aeons paired up and generated other beings. The Pleroma was full of light and wisdom. The creation of our own universe, however, was a cosmic disaster. One of the aeons, named Sophia Pistis, who was supposed to be wisdom itself, did an unwise thing. She wanted to create an offspring on her own, without a partner and without permission of the Great One. The result was a misshapen, deficient, imperfect creature, who came into being outside the Pleroma, and who did not even know about the immortal realm at all. This inferior being, known as a demiurge, was named Yaldabaoth. He stole a part of his mother, a part of her power or substance, leaving her incomplete and outside the Pleroma. Then the demiurge went on to create our universe. He took the stolen part of Sophia and imprisoned it as sparks within living beings in his newly created world.
So ignorant and arrogant was this demiurge that he thought he was the most powerful god in existence. He created beings called Archons and Angels, and also humans, and told them he was the only god. By now you realize what the Christian Gnostics were driving at with this story. They were saying that the God of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, was really this demiurge. Because Yaldabaoth was corrupt, so was the entire universe he created. All matter was evil, in fact. The universe was full of pain and suffering because of who made it. Really, the only good and pure things in the entire universe were the remaining sparks of Sophia, which were trapped inside some people (but not all people).
The goal of salvation, then, is to allow those sparks to escape the material world, to reunite them, and to return them to the divine realm. That can only happen if select people learn the truth that they have a spark of Sophia inside them. People have to learn the truth about who they are, where they came from, and how to return to where they belong. This truth is the secret knowledge of the Gnostics. And it cannot be learned from the world around us, for that world is inferior and corrupt. No, the truth can only come from the realm of truth. For people to learn the truth, a divine being from the Pleroma must come down and tell it to us. Gnostic Christians believed that the one who did that was Jesus, and that Jesus was really Autogenes the Self-Generated.
At this point, it is important to realize that there were Gnostics who were not Christian at all. Some Gnostic writings have nothing Christian in them. They may have Gnostic ideas like aeons in them, but they do not mention Jesus at all. What does this mean? Well, modern scholars still argue over the origins of the Christian Gnostics. Did they arise within Christianity as a splinter group of Christians who started to believe something very different from the apostolic tradition? Or, were they basically pagan philosophers from outside Christianity who encountered Christianity and adopted Jesus as the knowledge-giving savior they were looking for? There is a strong case to be made for the second view. Some Gnostics adopted Jesus as their savior who gave the secret information they needed. They fit him into their cosmology as the one who could release them from the evil world of matter. And some Gnostics had no need for Jesus.
But adapting the Jesus of existing Christian tradition to a role as a Gnostic savior was problematic. To come down to earth, an aeon had to exist in an evil material body. Why would any aeon do that when the whole idea was to escape the material world? Gnostics had two solutions. Some thought that Jesus’ body was an illusion, and that he was only here as a spirit who looked human. And some thought that he did take on a body long enough to teach the necessary secret knowledge, but that he then shed his body to return to the Pleroma. In the “Gospel of Judas”, Judas helps Jesus to do just that.
Gnostic Christians must have felt that they were special, because only a select few people had a divine spark, and only they could receive this truth. But they also must have felt profoundly separate from the world. They were ascetic in their lifestyle, abstaining from sex, wine, and fine food. Trying to escape the body meant not giving in to its desires. They probably kept to themselves, but it was inevitable that they came under attack anyway, for the effect they had on some mainstream Christians. Gnostics could not be allowed to lure people to their side. They really earned their label of heretics. They rejected God and his creation, denied that Jesus was a real human being, and claimed that it was secret information, not faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, that brought salvation.