During the restless rule of Emperor Tiberius, a Jewish Nazarene by the name of Yeshua bar-Joseph began teaching and preaching in Palestine. He was but one of many whose messages were variously political and religious, challenging the depth of people's faith as well as prophesying the end of the Roman empire under whose yoke they laboured.
The Romans thumbed their noses at these prophecies and flattened Jerusalem.
One of the Jewish sects that survived centered around this Nazarene whose Greek name was Jesus. The era of Jesus' life and the first few centuries after his death saw a great commingling of beliefs in the Middle East. Greek and Roman philosophy mixed with Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and a host of other religions.
From among these grew a number of groups who eventually became known as Gnostics. The moniker comes from the Greek word for knowledge (gnosis) that frequently in Greek and other ancient Indo-European cultures refers to special, spiritual knowledge.
Central also to almost all Gnostic thought is dualism: the struggle between light and darkness, matter and spirit and, ultimately, between two divine powers.
What has come down through the ages as orthodox Christianity was often sharpened against Gnostic grist. As late as the fifth century, the great St. Augustine was a dualistic Manichee. As late as the twelfth century, another Gnostic group, the Cathars or Albigensians, became so powerful in France that a genocidal crusade against them was launched by the church for nearly 50 years followed by an Inquisition that all but wiped them out.
Still, aspects of Gnosticism persisted among the Knights Templar and eventually made their way into some Protestant sects.
In the years following Jesus' death, numerous histories of his life were written and circulated in and around the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. Many of the texts were lost or deliberately or accidentally destroyed. Some texts have been known primarily through polemical Christian references.
In 1945, a collection of 13 codices (early books) containing more than 52 texts was discovered near the town of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt. The documents, mostly in Greek, date from the third and fourth centuries, although it is believed they are translations from first and second-century Coptic originals. Most of the letters, treatises and gospels contained in the Nag Hammadi Library are Gnostic in origin. They have helped scholars understand far better what was happening in the religious and philosophical world during this formative period in Christianity when the central doctrines of the Trinity and Jesus' humanity and divinity (Christology) were developed.
In the 1970s, another ancient codex began circulating in the world. Although its origins are uncertain, it likely also came from Egypt and dates from the same period as the Nag Hammadi codices. Written in a Coptic dialect, it contains the recently translated and published Gospel of Judas. Despite the flap and fury it caused in popular media, the text does not provide any new information about Jesus and his followers and its general thesis fits with other Gnostic texts from the period.
Each of these gospels name a different one of Jesus' close followers as his favourite to whom he entrusted certain secrets. And despite the institutional church's long history of involvement in politics, secrecy and subterfuge, mainstream Christianity has consistently argued that there are no theological secrets required for salvation.
The best known of the Gnostic gospels are The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Sophia and The Gospel of Judas. (English translations of all these books are readily available online.)
