It’s scandalous to say, because so much pop theorizing about early Christianity is anchored to it, but it turns out, Gnosticism was never actually a thing. It was an invention of modern scholars; an interpretive category, it turns out, that refers to no actual thing that existed in antiquity. Or worse, when defined vaguely enough to actually encompass anything real, it refers to every sect of Christianity and thus distinguishes none of them. The word is therefore useless and ought to be abandoned. I find myself having to point this out a lot, so clearly this memo hasn’t made it to the public yet. So I am writing this article to get you up to speed.

I came to this conclusion on my own, from my extensive postdoc research project on the historicity of Jesus. Which is why (in case readers didn’t notice) the words “Gnostic” or “Gnosticism” never appear anywhere in my book On the Historicity of Jesus (except incidentally as the title of a couple of books I cite, but not on that subject). I never use Gnosticism as an interpretive category there, or as an explanation of anything. And yet, as soon as that was published, the Westar Institute (best known for The Jesus Seminar, and of which I am now a fellow) published a report declaring the same thing, and on the same basis. That a large group of prestigious Biblical scholars independently came to the same conclusion I did, and for pretty much the same reasons I had uncovered on my own, is fairly powerful evidence we are correct about this. The odds of that all happening by coincidence are pretty low.

The Westar Report on Gnosticism

You can read Westar’s Fall 2014 Christianity Seminar Report on Gnosticism yourself. There is also a whole issue on it in the Spring 2016 edition of Forum. This is a segment of their Christianity Seminar, which will eventually become a book on leading new perspectives on the origins and early development of Christianity (part of which I participated in). As the report puts it:

The Christianity Seminar took votes of historic proportions, collectively setting aside what had been assumed for the last five generations and opening up a new collaborative path forward. With at least twenty-five internationally known scholars in attendance, the Seminar voted with substantial majorities to rule “gnosticism,” the reigning boogey man of early Christian history, out of order.

Indeed, there was not much disagreement: the votes were all solid red (which means, almost every single scholar concurred, without any significant doubt in the matter); except for on two minor points that came up pink, the more significant one being whether the decision to eliminate the concept “removes a confusing category” from further discussion. The pink vote on that likely is because some scholars thought discussing the non-existence of Gnosticism could still be valuable to the seminar’s future work, or that it should be eliminated because it is merely false, and not because it was “confusing.” But that’s a nitpick. There was no significant disagreement on several other points voted on, including the central finding that “the category of Gnosticism needs to be dismantled” because it “no longer works” to describe any ancient religion or sect. Consequently, “the idea that such a thing as ‘Gnosticism’ even existed is simply off the table.” And all this is due to “cutting-edge scholars,” including Michael Williams, David Brakke, Denise Buell, and Karen King, “who, over the past fifteen years or more, have made a thorough case against the existence of Gnosticism.” Thorough enough, indeed, to persuade a representative majority of mainstream scholars. And they’re right.

They also voted “pink” the idea of reserving the word Gnostic for one specific sect associated with the Gospel of Judas, but confusingly, in that use the word does not mean what Gnostic has traditionally meant, so in my opinion that is just confusing. Even scholars who voted the possibility of reassigning the word that way, agreed the traditional definition and category has to be abandoned altogether. So it’s time to stop talking about Gnosticism. Purge it from your vocabulary. And abandon every idea linked to it. It was all a construct of modern scholars, one with zero utility in explaining ancient Christianity.

Their Reasoning (and Mine)

To exemplify the problem, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy still has an entry on Gnosticism that says, “Gnosticism (after gnôsis, the Greek word for ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight’) is the name given to a loosely organized religious and philosophical movement that flourished in the first and second centuries.” That’s a pretty typical statement. But the Westar Institute scholars have concluded, as I did, that no such “movement” existed. What was mischaracterized as some sort of sectarian pedigree is really just a random collection of “ideas” shared by numerous diverse philosophers and theologians and sects, in varying degrees. “Gnosticism” was no more a distinct “movement” than “dualism” or “henotheism.” In fact, less so; as those at least are real coherent things that developed and spread in antiquity; Gnosticism as a whole isn’t. Only individual pieces of it.

Hence when the IEP claims, for example, “certain fundamental elements serve to bind these groups together under the loose heading” of Gnosticism, there actually is no group that possesses all of the usually-attributed features, and nearly every group possesses one or more of them, or some modified version of them, and there was no particular relationship among any set of groups one could distinguish as “Gnostic” as if in opposition to some other set of groups. For instance, every sect of Christianity on which we have any information on the point believed in a separate Logos who created the universe at God’s behest; likewise, believed some kind of secret knowledge (“gnosis”) was essential to ensuring one’s salvation; likewise, had a dualist view of the cosmos in which the lower world was corrupted by meddling divine beings and the upper world’s God was awaiting a chance to destroy it and start over, and help us escape our corrupt bodies and locations by fleeing into celestial ones.

Hence the paradigmatic “Gnostic” sect is a fiction; no such thing existed. Nearly all religious sects shared one or another Gnostic idea, including what we anachronistically call “orthodox” sects. So in fact there was no such thing as Orthodoxists against the Gnostics. In fact there was no ancient discussion of any such “group” as the Gnostics, neither calling them that, nor describing them in any of the ways modern scholars imagine it, nor conceiving any “grouping” of sects in such a way. Every sect claimed it was “orthodoxy” and every other “heresy,” and what Christianity ended up looking like in the later fourth century corresponded to no sect prior to that century. And the sects usually categorized as “Gnostic” actually bear no consistent or coherent relationship to each other, and differ from each other as much as any of them differs from the sects that eventually merged to become the ascendant “orthodoxy” of the fourth century. So there were just “sects.” Not “Gnostic” and “non-Gnostic” sects. The term “Gnostic” thus leaves us with no meaningful distinction to make with it.

I came to this realization when trying to see, in my research for On the Historicity of Jesus, if Gnosticism would be a useful category for explaining the origins of Christianity and whether Gnostic sects could be shown to be closer to the original teachings of Christianity. What I found was no sect matching what historians had come to call “Gnosticism,” just diverse sects, each having some elements of it, and no sects with no elements of it, nor all of them. Moreover, I found that anything that was being distinguished as “Gnostic” either had zero evidence of existing in the first century, or if evidenced, was evidenced as a component of what later became orthodoxy; in other words, the Christians who supposedly were attacking Gnostic sects as heretical, were from “Gnostic” sects themselves, just with their own evolved and modified ideas; which describes every sect. Every sect we find in the late second century was an evolved, modified, and different version of the original sect; and there is no way to “group” them in any meaningful sense along Gnostic lines; nor any real way to call one “orthodox” and the others “heretical.” As I wrote in OHJ, “I believe all sects deviated from the original religion and innovated freely and in equal measure, and the victorious Churches of the early Middle Ages looked nothing at all like the original faith of Peter or even Paul” (p. 64).

Hence I found the term “Gnostic” to have no explanatory utility. And let me be clear: I’m not saying that I found “no Gnosticism” in the first century, but rather, that anything called “Gnosticism” after the first century is just an evolved or elaborated version of the originating sect, launched by Peter and modified by Paul, which also evolved into so-called “orthodoxy.” In other words, everything simply evolved from that—each sect modifying in its own way what Paul meant by gnosis, or how his cosmic dualism was to be explained, or how he imagined the task of creation was delegated or corrupted, or the specific names used for that corruptor or delegated creator, and every other peculiar thing—and there was no coherent “pattern” of evolution in this that could be called “Gnostic” as distinct from “not” Gnostic. Every teaching usually listed as “Gnostic” is actually found, in some form, in nearly every Christian sect, including those now deemed “orthodox” or “proto-orthodox.” There are just different sects, each as divergent from the original sect as from each other, and with no particular pattern of change to group them by.

The Docetism Analogy

To illustrate by analogy, I also think this same fate will eventually befall another made-up category, Docetism, the supposed existence of sects that claimed Jesus only visited earth in a fake, illusory body. I think this is bogus for much the same reasons. As I discuss in OHJ (pp. 317-20; and see my more recent discussion here), I found no evidence that that actually existed as a distinct movement. Though (unlike Gnosticism) ancient authors did use the label, they imagined it was a distinct “sect,” yet used the word to label anything they thought “denied the humanity of Christ,” no matter how; and all of the texts categorized by modern (or indeed even ancient) scholars as “Docetist” are so divergent from each other and modern definitions of Docetism as to render the category completely useless. It is largely a fiction modern scholars made up, and then imposed on diverse texts it does not actually correctly or demonstrably describe. Consequently I suspect we should do away with it as well.

There were sects that taught something like what scholars mean by “Docetism,” but no two of those teachings is the same in what they teach, and most diverge significantly from how the term is usually intended. For instance, the Gospel of Peter was originally called “Docetic,” and indeed Serapion’s epistolary condemnation of it in the second century (quoted by Eusebius in the fourth century) is our earliest surviving record of that label, yet that Gospel contains nothing Docetic in it—a point scholars keep trying to point out: the body of Jesus in it is real, is mortal, actually is crucified, and Jesus rises in it. The entity that “leaves” that body upon its death on the cross is self-evidently the Holy Spirit, since the line about “he was taken up” corresponds with the line in the Synoptics that “the spirit left him” or “he exhaled the spirit” (probably the same spirit that entered him at his baptism), which the Gospel of Peter simply interprets as the soul of Jesus, which leaves (as souls always do upon death), and then returns on the third day to reanimate the corpse it left behind, just as all other Christian sects taught.

The term “Docetae” thus meant something else to Serapion than modern scholars think, who for example mistake Ignatius speaking of Christian heretics (whom he does not call the Docetae) claiming Jesus only “seemed” or “was imagined” to live and die as speaking of the same thing Serapion was, or Clement of Alexandria a half-century later (who gives us our next mention of “Docetae” as a sect that, Clement imagined, “denied the true humanity of Christ,” a notion Clement never clearly explains). But there is actually no evidence these authors were referring to the same thing at all, much less to what modern scholars think Docetism means.

Likewise, scholars will claim the Apocalypse of Peter is Docetic, but in fact it is not. In that text, as I wrote before, “there is not one Jesus in heaven and another on earth, but the real Jesus is the same person the villains seize and crucify as occupies the fleshly body they drive nails into,” it simply imagines soul and body as separable, which every Christian believed (that text is also reporting a vision, not represented as a real event anyway). Nor is the Second Treatise of the Great Seth Docetic, as it portrays Simon of Cyrene being sneaked in to be crucified in place of Jesus, which is not Docetism either, nor at all what Ignatius, Clement, or Serapion were talking about.

Conclusion

The more you dig, the less you find Docetism to have been a distinctive thing at all, much less the thing modern scholars claim. So, too, Gnosticism. Which concept not even ancient authors had invented. As King wrote, “the variety of phenomena classified as ‘Gnostic'” today “simply will not support a single, monolithic definition, and in fact none of the primary materials fits the standard typological definition” (What Is Gnosticism? p. 226; italics hers). In other words, Gnosticism simply didn’t exist. The collection of ideas claimed to be Gnostic was a random hodgepodge of notions scattered across all Christian sects, most shared in some form by all of them, and the complete collection held by none of them.

Even the proto-typical Gnostic myth (about demiurges and what not) was fabricated by modern scholars by lifting ideas found in diverse sources from completely different sects. It did not exist in that form in any ancient sect. Yes, each idea did, somewhere (some sects introduced the notion of an incompetent Demiurge being delegated the task of creating the universe and screwing it up), but the entire collection of features, nowhere. And even those ideas have counterparts in every other sect so far as we know. The Demiurge story, for example, is just a reimagined evolution of the original Satan’s Fall story, where the incompetent or evil “sub-god” ruins creation after the fact, rather than from the start—a distinction of barely any relevance. Otherwise, the idea that this creation is corrupt and evil and we have to escape it is not only entirely orthodox, it’s canonical (2 Peter 3, 2 Peter 2, 1 Thess. 4, Jude, Romans 8, Galatians 4, 1 John 2, 1 John 5, Ephesians 6, Colossians 2, 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 4-5). It is thus not distinctive of any such thing as “Gnosticism.” Likewise, the role of secret knowledge (literally, gnosis) in ensuring salvation—a fact which many orthodox authors speak of approvingly as actually a component even of so-called orthodox Christianity; as we see from Paul and Hebrews, to Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen (see OHJ, Elements 11 & 13, Ch. 4).

So the bottom line is, “Gnosticism” and “Gnostic” sects and texts has been a phantom, a fabrication of modern scholarly “interpretation” that turns out to be wrong about almost every single thing. The individual beliefs that were cobbled together and “claimed” to be Gnostic existed; but all together in no sect we know, and in part in every sect we know enough about. There was thus no such distinctive category of Christianity, no movement. Ancient authors never mention it. And there is no ancient evidence of it. Time to drop that concept and move on.

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