What Is Gnosticism?

by Karen L. King

Paperback, 2005

Status

Available

Collection

CHURCH HISTORY

Description

A distinctive Christian heresy? A competitor of burgeoning Christianity? A pre-Christian folk religion traceable to "Oriental syncretism"? How do we account for the disparate ideas, writings, and practices that have been placed under the Gnostic rubric? To do so, Karen King says, we must first disentangle modern historiography from the Christian discourse of orthodoxy and heresy that has pervaded--and distorted--the story. Exciting discoveries of previously unknown ancient writings--especially the forty-six texts found at Nag Hammadi in 1945--are challenging historians of religion to rethink not only what we mean by Gnosticism but also the standard account of Christian origins. The Gospel of Mary and The Secret Book of John, for example, illustrate the variety of early Christianities and are witness to the struggle of Christians to craft an identity in the midst of the culturally pluralistic Roman Empire. King shows how historians have been misled by ancient Christian polemicists who attacked Gnostic beliefs as a "dark double" against which the new faith could define itself. Having identified past distortions, she is able to offer a new and clarifying definition of Gnosticism. Her book is thus both a thorough and innovative introduction to the twentieth-century study of Gnosticism and a revealing exploration of the concept of heresy as a tool in forming religious identity.… (more)

Publication

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press (2005), Edition: Revised ed., 368 pages

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Genres

Rating

½ (18 ratings; 3.5)

User reviews

LibraryThing member worldsedge
This book was more a review of the academic controversies surrounding Gnosticism than an actual discussion of Gnostic beliefs. On that basis it went way over my head. Still, it was very well researched and took a great many other authors to task for repeating what this author considered the same
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 falsehoods about Gnosticism time and again.
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LibraryThing member William345
This is sort of wonderful. King follows the ancient polemical and modern scholarly views of Gnosticism down through the ages. Her main point is that the late 19th-early 20th century scholars for the most part accepted and reinforced the views of the early church polemicists (Irenaeus, Tertullian,
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 etc.). She gives detailed example after detailed example. We look at the work of Harnack, Reitzenstein, Bousset, Bultmann, Bauer, Jonas and others. She then undertakes a review of shifting scholarly positions after the astonishing discovery in 1945 of a trove of ancient mostly Gnostic manuscripts near the Upper Egypt village of Nag Hammadi. These manuscripts, written in Coptic, were hidden in a jar under the sand and estimated to be 1,600 years old. They threw much light on the formation of the early church and raised many questions. Does King belabor her point a bit? Yes, she is nothing if not thorough, but it's such a fascinating overview, requiring only minimal googling for the general reader, that one is borne along. Her writing is clear and free of jargon save for the first chapter or so where she pays the requisite obeisance to scholarly argot. Though she isn't the writer her peer Elaine Pagels is, King nevertheless does a rock solid job which is to be commended. Her approach is chronological for the most part. She wants to follow the sequence of ideas and compare and contrast them as she goes along. Just the sort of treatment of the subject matter I was looking for. Thorough and admirable.
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LibraryThing member starcat
Pretty good. She doesn't actually define Gnosticism, but rather delves into the history of the way it has been defined. Frequently, it's been defined in a way that serves a prevailing opinions on religion, Christianity, Orientalism, and the practice of history. It seems that there never really was
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 any single movement or religion that could go by the name "gnostic", just a collection of heresies that have very little in common.
She does indicate two main branches of gnostic thought, based largely on similarities of Nag Hammadi texts to what we are told various heretics believed - Sethian and Valentinian gnosticism. Seth here refers to the son of Adam, and the school of thought focuses on the joy of learning from all that wisdom has to offer, regardless of where it is to be found (note: crazy sex orgies don't seem to belong to this category). Valentinian refers to the teachings of Valentinus, who taught that there was a secret teaching revealed by Christ to those who seek and are initiated into the mysteries.
Mostly though the focus is on past scholars of Gnosticism, what they believed, how it influenced others, and how they may have gone wrong.
The last part of the book concerns historical methodology, particularly the methods she used in researching, evaluating, and writing this book. She acknowledges her debt to Foucault and Bourdieu, and how she differs from their methods.
4 stars on completion, mostly because I like the thoroughness and transparency of her method.
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