Gnostic School of Ancient Greek Philosophy Texts

Across the Mediterranean world of the late first century CE, and above all in Alexandria, a cluster of early Christian sects gave shape to what is now called Gnosticism. No single founder stood at its origin; the movement emerged from a blend of Jewish-Christian ideas, Middle Platonism, and possibly Zoroastrian and Jewish apocalyptic traditions, perhaps beginning as an intra-Christian current that drew on Pauline and Johannine themes and set an opposition between flesh and πνεῦμα.

The various Gnostic systems centred on γνῶσις, esoteric knowledge or insight, held to be the means of salvation. Through it a person recognises their own divine origin and learns to transcend the material world. The systems built this insight into an elaborate dualistic story of the cosmos. The material world was the creation of a lesser, flawed divinity, the δημιουργός, often identified with the Old Testament Yahweh and portrayed as jealous or ignorant. Beyond this defective cosmos stood a remote supreme God and a divine realm of light, the πλήρωμα.

Within this story Christ figured as a divine emissary, a λόγος sent from the higher realm, whose task was to impart γνῶσις and so redeem the divine spark, the πνεῦμα, trapped in human bodies and ruled by inferior cosmic powers called ἄρχοντες. Salvation was accordingly an escape from the material cosmos and its rulers, not a bodily resurrection. Gnostic teachers typically rejected Jewish law as the product of the worldly creator and prized πνεῦμα over flesh, while borrowing and reworking Platonic terms such as ὑπόστασις and οὐσία and pressing them into the service of their mythologies.

The most prominent teacher was Valentinus (c. 100–160 CE), who considered himself Christian and constructed complex accounts of the πλήρωμα and its emanations, called aeons. Basilides, active in Alexandria in the early 2nd century CE, taught a scheme of 365 heavens under an unknowable supreme God; other teachers of the mid-2nd century claimed to possess inner truths handed down from Jesus.

From the late second century the movement was condemned as heresy by proto-orthodox Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, and it declined amid the instability of the Roman Empire, though it spread through Roman, Persian, and Gothic territories, persisted in the Near East until the sixth century, and left traces as far east as China until the ninth. Most Gnostic writings were suppressed and lost until 1945, when a library was discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and the movement's own texts became readable again.