“Gnosticism”
is one of those key words in early Christian history because it refers to a
movement that one has to understand in order to get a good sense of how Christianity
developed in the formative centuries of its history.
I
suggest the following links (particularly to my students) as aids to accomplish this:
Link #1 is New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman's brief
description of Gnosticism. Link #2 is N.T. Wright’s (another important New Testament
scholar) more extensive description of the movement. Wright, I should add,
seems to be more negative in his evaluation of the movement. This probably
reflects his more “conservative” leanings (I know, that’s not entirely a correct
description of Wright). Link#3 is the Westar Institute’s series of blogs on
Gnosticism that highlights important aspects of the research conducted over
several years about the movement. Westar’s research is arguably on the
cutting-edge of recent research done about Gnosticism, hence, it deserves close
attention.
I also think that Gnosticism is one of
those movements that could serve as a test case in order to illustrate how we
(even those of us in the academy!) try to understand any phenomenon. We have to
begin with generalizations which, we have to be well aware, are basically simplistic and even unfair
caricatures of the phenomenon. This stage, although not imbued with
scholarly rigor, is (I would say) still necessary in the quest to grasp practically
anything. What we should not do is:
remain in that simplistic stage. We have to go further: deepen our knowledge by
more research with the result that the first basic and simplistic caricature of
the phenomenon is deconstructed, transcended and/or further nuanced.
The links I have provided above about Gnosticism might also serve to illustrate this process of starting with generalizations and going deeper into more nuanced understandings of the phenomenon (provided by the Westar Institute’s research).
