Sources: Nag Hammadi library (52 texts, discovered 1945); Irenaeus, Against Heresies (~180 AD); Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies; Epiphanius, Panarion; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata.

Gnosticism is the umbrella term for a family of religious movements (~1st–4th centuries AD) sharing core themes: a radical dualism between spirit (good) and matter (evil); a deficient or malevolent creator god (demiurge) distinct from the supreme God; divine sparks (pneuma) trapped in human bodies; salvation through gnosis (experiential knowledge of divine origin); and a redeemer figure who descends to awaken the sleeping divine sparks. The Nag Hammadi library (13 codices buried ~367 AD, discovered 1945) transformed our understanding — instead of relying solely on hostile heresiological summaries, we now have the texts themselves. Major Gnostic systems: Valentinian (the most sophisticated, with 30 divine aeons and a complex account of Sophia’s fall); Sethian (Seth as ancestor of the spiritual race; Yaldabaoth the demiurge); Thomasine (sayings tradition, Gospel of Thomas); Basilidean (365 heavens, Abraxas). The orthodox response to Gnosticism — Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen — forced the church to articulate: the goodness of creation, the bodily resurrection, the unity of the God of both Testaments, and the authority of apostolic succession and canon. Gnosticism is not dead: it recurs in every generation under different names, and its core intuition (the material world is prison, gnosis liberates) is perennially attractive.

“I am a jealous God and there is no other god beside me” (Exod 20:5) is read as a self-betraying lie revealing his ignorance of the higher God; (3) Merkavah mysticism (chariot mysticism, based on Ezekiel’s chariot vision, Ezek 1) develops independently in Jewish circles, featuring heavenly ascent, the divine throne, angelic hierarchies, and the dangers of approaching the divine — the Talmud’s famous warning about four who entered Paradise (Hagigah 14b) reflects the dangerous reputation of this practice. The Jewish Gnostic / Merkavah tradition is the matrix from which both early Jewish mysticism and Christian Gnosticism draw.