Yes, I woulddavidbrainerd wrote:I wonder if you would say the same about the canonical Johanine material.iskander wrote:There is nothing of any value in the ' Gnostic' literature. The Gnostics hated the physical world of the living and preached extreme ascetic practice.rakovsky wrote:I see that there are a huge volume of gnostic writings from 100-150 AD.
What do you think the value would be in me studying them?
I can think that they may include some real stories about the apostles that didn't make it into the canonical gospels.
But I am skeptical of how much that would happen. It seems like much of the gnostic writings that differ from the mainstream church of the time are the result of the gnostics' own inventions and aren't something that the apostles taught that was lost by the mainstream church.
And then, supposing that some stories in the gnostic writings did come from the apostles themselves, it seems it would be hard to filter those legitimate stories out.
Marcion provides entertainment for imbeciles.
1st John 2:15-16 "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."
Sounds like he "hated the physical world of the living".....
"For all that is in the world...is not of the Father, but is of the world"--Marcion, is that you?
Gnostic knowledge is what feeds the imagination of the spiritual people. It is an exuberant manner of thinking and it is also a primitive tool for making religion.
Perhaps you may find this post answers your question:
Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge (in the nominative case γνῶσις f.). In Christian, Islamic, or Jewish mysticism, mystery religions and Gnosticism gnosis generally signifies a spiritual knowledge or "religion of knowledge", in the sense of mystical enlightenment or "insight".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosis
Every religion is a Gnostic product. The people writing about the gods, angels, hells, paradise., what souls do after the body dies etc are using a process to acquire knowledge that we now identify with Gnostics. It is an invention applied to religious literature in general.
Harnack equates allegorical interpretation with gnosis , and said that it was applied to the Hebrew Bible by the Jewish philosophical teachers.
Christianity's theologians were Gnostic from the beginning of the that religion, Harnack writes .
The Torah ,the Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of Thomas are examples of Gnostic literature from different cultures and different times , but all of them sharing in the ability to acquire knowledge of the invisible.
This necessary allegorical interpretation, however, brought into the communities an intellectual philosophic element, γνώσις, In this γνώσις, which attached itself to the Old Testament.,
What a wealth of relations, hints, and intuitions seemed to disclose itself, as soon as the Old Testament was considered allegorically, and to what extent had the way been prepared here by the Jewish philosophic teachers!
“Nothing was what it seemed, but was only the symbol of something invisible.
From this point of view the position to be assigned to the Gnostics in the history of dogma, which has hitherto been always misunderstood, is obvious. They were, in short, the Theologians of the first century.305 They were the first to transform Christianity into a system of doctrines (dogmas).
History of Dogma - Volume I, by Adolf Harnack
Christian Classics Ethereal Library page 190
Gnostic authors as post Nicene dissidents
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/chris ... 09-20.html