Can you give an example how the Nag Hammadi made the summary outdated?andrewcriddle wrote:Although a good article at the time this is about 100 years old.John T wrote:.
I find the history/origins of Gnosticism complicated but very revealing in how people saw their geocentric universe.
Modern science, i.e. astronomy, has all but debunked any remaining doubt that Gnosticism is pseudo-intellectual and trusts exclusively in magic.
We can argue later the real motives of gnostics in their attempt to graft into Christianity but they got caught and exposed (as wolves in sheep clothing) by Irenaeus and others.
Perhaps the best short summary (if you call one hour of reading short) I have read in many years can be found here and seems to answer most of your questions.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06592a.htm
It is out of date. E.G. It was written before the Nag Hammadi documents were discovered.
Andrew Criddle
What little I have read of the Nag Hammai (Valentinian Exposition, Apocryphon of James, On the Origin of the World, etc,) it still follows the general themes outlined in the summary.
The ploy by the gnostics remains the same. Take the scriptures of a existing religion and rewrite the arching themes and characters to fit Gnosticism. That is to say, secret knowledge of the different levels of heavens (hebdomad, ogdoad, pleroma) leads to salvation. The con is almost as old as the Egyptians who paid for their own personal copy of the Book of the Dead in order to safely navigate a path to heaven after they died.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html