Gnosticism
/ˈnɒstɪsɪzəm/noun
A range of early Christian and related movements that taught salvation through secret knowledge.
The Greek roots
Literally: “the way of knowing”
The story of the word
The groups gathered under this label claimed a saving knowledge withheld from ordinary believers, often paired with the view that the material world was made by a lesser and hostile god. The English label is a seventeenth-century scholarly coinage, not a banner any of them raised over themselves. Until 1945 they were known almost entirely through the writings of the bishops refuting them; then a farmer near Nag Hammadi dug up a jar of their own books.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1660s
Same family
In a sentence
Gnosticism keeps resurfacing in novels because the secret-knowledge plot never gets old.
The lecture traced Gnosticism from Valentinus to the Cathars, with warnings about how loose the line is.