IV. INFLUENCE ON EARLY CHRISTIANITY
It is often claimed that Gnostic teachers and teach-
ings flourished in the primitive Christian communities;
traces of Gnostic thought have been found in some of
the letters written by Paul or later ascribed to him,
as well as in the Johannine literature and the letters
of Saint Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 110). Probably, how-
ever, what is being opposed by the early Christian
writers should be called “Gnosis,” for no developed
Gnostic system has been convincingly recovered. One
cannot read Valentinian exegesis of Paul, for example,
back into the first century and assume that either he
or his opponents meant what the Valentinians said they
meant.
On the other hand, it is clear that Christian theology
owed much to the Gnostics. At first the borderline
between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” was by no means
as clear as it later seemed to be; in addition, without
the impetus proved by the Gnostic systems as such,
Christians would probably not have turned to philo-
sophical theology as, for good or ill, they did. They
would not so soon have tried to develop systematic
teaching in theology and ethics. The syncretistic
aspects of Gnosticism also probably provoked Christian
teachers to insist upon the exclusively apostolic origins
of their faith and practice.
The basic difference between both Christianity and
Judaism, on the one hand, and Gnosticism, on the other,
seems to lie in their contrasting views of human nature
and history. For the Gnostic, man was essentially a
spiritual being whose goal was reunion with his divine
source. For Jews and Christians, man was composed
of body and soul together, and his goal was both
worldly and otherworldly. Insofar as there was an elite,
it was not constituted “by nature” but by adherence
to a community in this world, a community which
would ultimately be raised from the dead and vindi-
cated by the God who made the world.
Gnosticism as a phenomenon of the early centuries
of the common era no longer exists, although it is
sometimes used by modern theologians as a term of
opprobrium for the ideas of their opponents. Gnosis,
on the other hand, is present in almost every kind of
theosophical movement, and ideas related to it seem
to flourish in esoteric or “underground” groups today.
It remains possible that out of such Gnosis new expres-
sions analogous to Gnosticism can arise.
