ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

- CONTENT--
Gnostic Christianity is a branch of Gnosticism in which elements of Christianity are present, which distinguishes it from Persian and Kurdish Gnosticism. This is a religious and philosophical doctrine that arose in the I-II centuries A.D. on the basis of the unification of Christian ideas about the divine incarnation for the purpose of redemption, Jewish monotheism and pantheistic constructions of pagan religions. Gnosticism was a form of connection of the new, Christian religion with the mythology and philosophy of Hellenism.

Gnosticism is a rather conventional name proposed in the seventeenth century by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More as a derivative of (knowledge) to designate some early Christian heresies.

Gnostic Christians and Roman Theology

In the seventeenth century, the term Gnosticism was proposed to designate some areas of early Christianity recognized by orthodox theologians as heretical.

According to early Christian orthodox theologians, Gnostic Christianity was a negative phenomenon, and his writings after ecumenical councils were destroyed by the victors when the Gnostics were officially declared heretics. At the same time, early Christianity, in contact with Gnosticism, was not universally marginal, but a form of early Christian philosophy. According to Mircea Eliade, the Gnostics were the worst of heretics precisely because they rejected, in whole or in part, the principles of Hebrew thought. [...] As to the causes of heresies, Irenaeus and Hippolytus found them in a distorting influence on the Scriptures of Greek philosophy. In 1934, Bauer came to the conclusion that the three main centers of Christianity - Edessa, Alexandria and Asia Minor - during the first two centuries were heretical, and orthodoxy came there later. From the beginning, the only orthodox center was Rome, that is, the victory of orthodoxy in antiquity is equivalent to the victory of Roman Christianity. Thus, in the era of early Christianity, with its numerous and unstable forms, numerous, diverse and sometimes contradictory tendencies, Rome managed to fix and establish a certain form of Christianity, called orthodoxy, against which all other trends were called heresies. However, as Andre Benoit observes, Bauer’s explanation remains in the realm of pure history; it does not take into account the content of the teachings relating to orthodoxy and heresies. [...] In short, orthodoxy is defined by: (1) fidelity to the Old Testament and the apostolic tradition recorded in the documents; (2) rejection of the excesses of the mythologizing imagination; (3) respect for systematic thinking (and thus Greek philosophy); and (4) the importance attached to social and political institutions, that is, legal thought. Each of these elements produced significant theological works and contributed more or less to the triumph of the Church. At certain points in the history of Christianity, however, each