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Doctrinal Foundations Column

This is also the first in a new series of articles based on Church History. Topics and themes in this series were partially directed by the book, The History of Christian Doctrines by Louis Berkhof. A current copy is available from Banner of Truth publishers  which graciously provided the author a review copy.

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 04 (2026).

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Gnosticism is one of the most ancient and yet most enduring heresies. Its second- and third-century manifestation, with all of its metaphysical complexity and speculation, may seem foreign to most readers. But its fundamental assertion, that deep within the self lies a spark of spiritual luminescence and divinity, suppressed and obscured by the body within which it resides, thrives and flourishes still today. When, for example, the modern person refers to his or her “sex assigned at birth,” as if the biological realities of the body hinder and obstruct the inner truth of the realized self; when the spiritual seeker is told to search for personal enlightenment by discovering the god or goddess within rather than to receive God’s grace through Word and Sacrament, you can be sure that the specter of Gnosticism has arisen. At the very heart of the Gnostic heresy resides the most ancient of lies, that through the pursuit of hidden knowledge, “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5).¹

In the Know. The term “Gnosticism” comes from the Greek word gnosis or “knowledge.” The Gnostic teachers, despite the diversity of their teachings, all claimed to be in the know, to possess knowledge that the ordinary Christian person could not access apart from being initiated into the Gnostic mysteries. The origins of Gnosticism are debated.² Was it a Christian heresy, originating in the church? Did it pre-exist or exist alongside Christianity as a variant of Jewish mysticism? For centuries, early Christian anti-Gnostic apologetic works remained the primary sources for understanding Gnosticism, Irenaeus of Lyon’s Against All Heresies³ being the most prominent. Then in December 1945, Egyptian farmers digging for fertilizer found a large, sealed clay pot containing a number of papyrus codices. This was the first discovery of what has come to be known as the Nag Hammadi Library, a large collection of second- and third-century Gnostic writings.⁴ The content of these documents has largely confirmed the accuracy of Irenaeus’ descriptions of Gnostic belief.⁵ And it has added weight to the argument that Gnosticism originated within the church, since most of the Gnostic works seek to undermine trust in the already commonly accepted apostolic Gospels and the writings of what is now known as the New Testament.⁶

Whatever the case, by the late second and third centuries various Gnostic teachers and sects claimed to possess the secret teachings of Christ over and against the catholic apostolic faith. These sects seem to have become prominent enough that some secular historians claim that there was not, from the beginning, one Christianity but many Christianities.⁷ Judging by the voluminous orthodox writings against them, it may well be true that the Gnostic teachers had gained wide notoriety by the late second and third centuries. However, the derivative nature of their writings, contending with and against an already existing mainstream or common Christian belief, and their decidedly Hellenized philosophical content suggest that Gnosticism arose as a challenge to a historically established Christian church and tradition rather than as just one of many legitimate Christian options at the time.⁸ While the claim that there were many Christianities is dubious, the evidence from both Christian apologists and the Gnostic sources themselves indicates that there were many Gnosticisms with varied emphases, beliefs, and practices — a network of networks.⁹ The outline below, therefore, is necessarily generalized.¹⁰

The Cosmos, the Flesh, and the Demiurge. Gnostics begin with the assumption that the material cosmos, including the physical human body, is inherently evil and ought to be held in contempt. The inner self, the spirit or soul, is by contrast inherently good, a spark of the divine flame. The physical world is not, within Gnosticism, the good creation of the good God, but the fumbling, evil work of a capricious being called the “Demiurge.” Matter is evil, not in the moral sense, but it is evil because it is transitory and subject to change. Every inanimate material thing, if it is not destroyed by some sudden cataclysm, eventually decays and passes away. Animals and human beings, likewise, are subject to hunger, need, suffering, and pain because of their physicality. The biological processes requisite for human life — eating, drinking, digestion, excretion, and sexual reproduction — bind spirits to the material world and enslave souls to bodily needs and longings. One might recognize in this radical dualism of flesh against spirit the influence of the earlier Docetists, who taught, for similar reasons, that Christ did not have a material body and that he was never truly incarnate. All of the Gnostic Christian sects adopted this view of Christ’s body in one form or another.

How did spirits come to be entrapped in bodies? The answer to that question requires a brief discussion of Gnostic cosmology. There is not, again, one Gnostic cosmology. There are many cosmologies, but there is broad enough agreement to summarize. The greatest being — the uncreated, immutable, inscrutable, and, for the Gnostics, incomprehensible God or Monad who exists eternally on the highest plain of the heavenly realms — has nothing whatsoever to do with the material world, nor can he or will he draw near to the material world. The Monad, therefore, is not the creator of the heavens and the earth. Rather, from the Monad issued a vast myriad of emanations called “aeons.” These are usually deified and personified attributes of the supreme God. God’s attribute of love, for example, becomes the Aeon Love. Compassion, Justice, Grace, Mind, and most importantly for our purposes, Wisdom (Sophia) are all likewise divine aeons or emanations. There are hundreds of these aeons from the great Monad — three hundred and sixty-five, according to one sect¹¹ — in descending spiritual hierarchy, usually in pairs, such as Love and Compassion or Justice and Grace. The whole pantheon of aeons is called the “pleroma,” or the “fullness.”

According to the Sethian¹² account of creation, the Apocryphon of John,¹³ one of the lower aeons, Wisdom, driven by passion for knowledge, sought to create an emanation deceitfully and without the assistance of the aeon to whom she was paired. The result was a marred and malformed being called the Demiurge. Wisdom cast the Demiurge from her presence.¹⁴ The Demiurge used his power to create a host of beings the Apocryphon calls demons to whom he denied all knowledge of the pleroma and claimed, “I am a jealous God and there is no God but me!”¹⁵ He then created the material world and, ultimately, entrapped Light and Power, the sparks or seeds of the divine essence which he inherited from Sophia, in physical human bodies. That was not his own idea. Sophia, seeking to recover the fullness of her divinity, some of which she had passed into the Demiurge, fools him into breathing his spirit, the divine spark, into Adam, which is then passed on to some (not all) of his descendants. The creation narrative in Genesis and the entirety of the Old Testament is the Demiurge’s own ignorant account of creation and his dealing with his enslaved spirits.

In this story, the human condition is one in which some human beings, the spiritual or “pneumatic,” possess the divine spark within. Others, the soulish or “psychic,” have souls but not divinity. These may experience reincarnation after death or some other lesser kind of blessedness but will never be able to transcend to the divine plane of the pleroma. Still others, the gentiles or “hylic,” are more like brute beasts without souls for whom death represents annihilation.¹⁶ For the spiritual, the great task is to escape the flesh and ascend to the divine plane and union with Sophia or even the Monad. This requires knowledge. One must know that he or she is spiritual and then learn the secrets by which the soul might escape the body and make its ascent. And the need for this secret knowledge is the reason the Christ was sent.¹⁷

Who Do You Say That I Am? The Gnostic Christ is not Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is, for the Gnostic, either the tangible costume (able to touch and be touched but not an actual human body) worn by the Christ or an apparition with no physicality at all. The divide between those Gnostics who believe that the Christ inhabited a tangible body and the more docetic Gnostics who believe that he had only the appearance of a body was one of the major divides within the Gnostic metanetwork.¹⁸ Sent by Sophia with the cooperation of the entire pleroma, the Christ descends to the earth. He does not come to take up human nature or to become incarnate and die as an atoning sacrifice for sin. There is, for the Gnostics, no “sin” as the Bible defines that word.¹⁹ There is, therefore, no need for a sacrificial atonement. The Christ does not die or suffer pain or endure any hardship since he is not actually incarnate. He does not rise bodily from the dead. The Christ, rather, escapes the body of Jesus (whether tangible or ghostly) before the crucifixion. That escape is his “resurrection.” The Christ comes to enlighten not to atone, to reveal the true gnosis, the true knowledge of the pleroma and the secrets necessary for the spiritual people to transcend the flesh and escape their bondage to the Demiurge’s creation.²⁰

This is where the various Gnostic “gospels” become relevant. Gnostic teachers did use the four first-century canonical Gospels, but they denied the plain reading of them. Whereas the average reader would understand the accounts of Jesus’ birth, baptism, teaching, miracles, suffering, and death in a straightforward way, the Gnostic initiate would be taught that the plain reading served only to fool the unspiritual reader. The real meaning, highly allegorized, could be understood by only the spiritual person initiated into the Gnostic mysteries.²¹ But to bolster the veracity of their claim to possess secret knowledge from the Christ, it was necessary to produce their own “apostolic” gospels. The Gnostic Christ gave the simplistic version of the faith publicly to Peter, John, Matthew, and later Paul and those evangelists and teachers who authored the books of the New Testament. But he secretly passed on the hidden mysteries of the pleroma to some of the less prominent of his followers, for example, Philip and Thomas, and even Judas who, far from betraying him, helped him escape the prison of his flesh.²² The books bearing their names (there are several others as well) are today commonly called the “lost gospels,” suggesting that they ought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But a brief perusal of any of them gives away their being both utterly foreign to first-century Galilean and Judean historical contexts while quite at home in the far-removed speculative context of late second- to early third-century Gnosticism.²³ Nevertheless, they provide the veneer of much needed apostolic pedigree for those who claim that their secrets come directly from the Christ himself.

If You Know Better, You Do Better. Beyond the cosmological myths described above and the alternative version of who Christ is and what he has done, there were other secrets given to initiates enabling them to escape the material realm. There seem to have been passwords revealed to devotees at various stages of their ascent. What these passwords may have been we do not know, but James Papandrea speculates that they were the names of the various aeons ruling the various levels of the pleroma.²⁴ Knowing their names would empower a spirit to pass through the pleroma and ascend all the way to the Monad. Perhaps these passwords, assuming they existed, were passed on during liturgical rites adapted from the catholic sacraments. A Gnostic devotee would undergo numerous baptisms, probably linked to attaining deeper levels of knowledge and/or receiving higher passwords. Anointings were considered more significant than baptisms since to become an anointed one was to become a Christ. Various Gnostic groups also practiced a kind of Eucharist, though the elements were bread and often water rather than wine. This is due to the widespread asceticism among Gnostic groups. The highest Gnostic “sacrament” was the “bridal chamber” reserved for the pneumatics alone who had reached full union with his or her counterpart within the pleroma.²⁵

As mentioned above, one of the primary divisions within Gnosticism had to do with the nature of Christ’s body. Some Gnostics believed that the Christ’s body was to a greater or lesser degree tangible (so that he could touch and be touched) but not truly human by nature. Others, the more docetic Gnostics, believed that his body was only an intangible facade. The two beliefs carried implications for spiritual practice. The docetic Gnostics tended toward extreme asceticism. Severe fasting, lifelong celibacy, vegetarianism, and a strict rejection of all bodily pleasure. Since Christ’s body was intangible and ghostly and, therefore, he did not eat or drink or touch anything, the devotee must seek to become completely detached from bodily needs or desires.²⁶ By contrast, those Gnostics who believe Christ had a tangible, though not human, body emphasized the radical disconnect between spirit and flesh. What one does bodily has no bearing whatsoever on the life of the soul. These Gnostics often gave themselves over to fleshly passion, engaging in orgies and feasts as part of their worship.²⁷ Alternatively, Irenaeus reports that one Gnostic sect taught that one could transcend the flesh only after engaging in every fleshly experience.²⁸ All Gnostic sects firmly rejected childbearing, since to bear children would only risk imprisoning more spiritual souls in more bodies.

The Joy of the Inner Ring. What was the appeal of Gnosticism? Why would a person choose to devote himself or herself to what seems to be such a complex, esoteric, otherworldly pursuit? This is not a great mystery. There is, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, a deep human desire to belong to the “inner ring.”²⁹ Gnosticism’s appeal lies in the elite status bestowed upon those who are initiated into the secret knowledge. While regular Christians go about their regular Christian lives, the spiritual person knows better. Not only does he know better, he is better. He is, he is told, a member of the divine pleroma whose true home transcends everything his ordinary neighbors could possibly know or care about.

Likewise, the Gnostic can do away with the sense of being a helpless, dependent, creature rescued by his infinite creator. There is a rescue of sorts. The Christ brings enlightenment to the spiritual people. But what the Christ is, so also is the spiritual person. The “good news” is not that Jesus Christ has come to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). The good news is that you are a god and the Christ has come to give you the knowledge necessary to actualize your true divinity.

The Gnostics were not evangelists in the sense that we use that term. It would not do to invite everyone into the inner ring, or the ring would cease to be inner and elite. The truly spiritual would be drawn in by their spiritual nature. The rest would tend to themselves. The Gnostic, therefore, was absolved of the need to consider the spiritual well-being of others.³⁰ Likewise, Gnostics were not known for their works of charity. They did not clothe the naked or feed the hungry. What use is there in caring for bodies which were created by an evil craftsman and which have no ultimate value?³¹ The Gnostic is therefore free to think only of his or her own self and spiritual path.

The explanatory value of Gnostic cosmology and the reasonableness of the Gnostic Christ would be satisfying to many. The Old Testament with its strict laws, bloody wrath, and exclusivistic claims (“I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God” — Isaiah 45:5), alongside the religious exclusivity of orthodox Christianity (“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” — John 14:6), cuts against second- and third-century Greco-Roman culture in much the same way it does ours.³² The Gnostic could explain away the Old Testament as the sentiments of the malformed and evil Demiurge and allegorize away the New Testament and settle more peaceably into a pluralistic religious environment.

Finally, the Gnostic myth also provides shelter for the conscience. The problems of sin and judgment are swept aside along with personal guilt or any need for absolution and atonement. The real problem is ignorance, not lack of virtue. The real solution is enlightenment, not repentance and faith and a bloody cross. For the ascetics, the purpose of their asceticism is not to put sin to death, but to kill off every desire connected to the body, even those Scripture reveals to be good; not to please God, but to serve the cause of self-exaltation. The more hedonistic Gnostic, by contrast, might indulge the darkest desire and feel smug while doing so because only the unspiritual people believe that the body has any meaning.

And, Behold, It Was Very Good. It is impossible, Irenaeus rightly argued, that the God who inspired the Old Testament and created all things is the Gnostic Demiurge from whom Christ came to deliver us since the Old Testament books are filled both with direct prophecies fulfilled by Christ and typologies to which Christ provides the only real anti-type.³³ Adam, Joseph, Noah, Moses, Joshua, David, and Solomon all stand as prefigurements of Jesus and His work. The Tabernacle, the festivals, the priesthood, and the sacrifices were shadows of the coming.

As for His bodily sufferings, there are vividly realistic Old Testament portrayals of Jesus’ crucifixion in such passages as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, to name two of the clearest examples, both of which are taken up in the New Testament and applied to Jesus’ death. Isaiah laments, “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5–6). And in his first epistle, Peter takes up that lament when he writes, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1 Peter 2:24–25). Psalm 22 begins with a cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning” (Psalm 22:1). Jesus applies these words to Himself, reciting them from His cross before giving up His spirit. “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:34). Both Old Testament passages highlight not only the bodily sufferings of the Christ, but the redemptive value of His suffering. In Isaiah 53, the suffering servant bears “the iniquity of us all” as an atoning substitute. Likewise, the consequence of the suffering of the forsaken one in Psalm 22 is that “The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord! May your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Psalm 22:26–27).

As for Christ and His relationship to the Old Testament and to the God of the Old Testament, the Lord bears witness Himself. “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life,” He says to the Pharisees, “and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40). To the same Pharisees in the same chapter of John’s Gospel He says, “Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me” (John 5:45–46). Later, also in John’s Gospel, Jesus claims to have known and to be known by Abraham. “Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). He goes on a sentence or two later to take up the divine covenant name God gives to Moses in Exodus 3. “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at him” (John 8:58–59). The Jews to whom Jesus was speaking tried to stone Him because they understood well enough that Jesus’ use of the “I Am” formula represented His claim to be the God who spoke to Moses from the burning bush. Jesus says so directly to Philip on the night before His crucifixion. “Show us the Father,” Philip asks, “and it is enough for us.” Jesus answers, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:8–9).

Far from coming to enlighten entrapped spirits so that they might escape the evil Demiurge who imprisoned all things in flesh and matter and ascend to some higher disembodied plane, Jesus, Paul writes to the Colossians, is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn³⁴ of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15–17). Nothing emanated from a Monad. There is no Monad. There is one God who made all things through and for His Son Jesus Christ. As John puts it, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1–3). The Word, the Son, is distinct from the Father and is God with regard to His Person or subsistence, but He is not of a different substance or essence from the Father but one and the same. And this same divine Son, the Christ, the Word, does not hold His flesh in contempt. For “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14 KJV). That is, He took on the entirety of human nature “to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews 2:17).

Moreover, as Irenaeus also argued, this same gospel has been preached since the beginning. The eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection written down by the apostles in the four canonical Gospels and the implications of His work expounded in their epistles and by John in Revelation were publicly proclaimed in an unbroken line of apostolic teaching from the time of Christ Himself to Irenaeus’ day.³⁵ Irenaeus, being a student of Polycarp, and Polycarp being a student of John the apostle. This same gospel has been proclaimed by every generation since that time without fail in an unbroken chain of teachers teaching. Why should anyone believe that a secret gnosis was passed on to just a few of the apostles down to the present, when none of the bishops of the early church taught anything close to it?

The True Story Is Better. The Christian faith, from the very beginning, has been visceral and fleshy. God formed Adam from the dust and breathed life into his nostrils and then formed Eve out of his body, and this was very good (Genesis 1:31, 2:7). “Be fruitful,” God said, “multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Evil is not bound up in material things nor is the body inherently evil. Suffering, hunger, evil desire, and death, these are all products of the first sin when Adam ate the fruit God had forbidden him to eat (Genesis 2:16–17; Romans 5:12–21, 8:18–25). Eating, in itself, was not the sin, but it was the fruit he took for himself that God had not given him. That fruit was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3:1–7). It represented the human desire to determine and know for himself what is good and what is evil, apart from trust in and communion with his Creator, to be like God. It is no coincidence that the first major heresy of the Christian era comes packaged in the first lie told by the first liar, that you can be like God if only you cast aside what God has said and take hold of the “true knowledge.”

That the material world is full of trouble and suffering and death does not mean that God has created a bad thing but that His very good creation has fallen into ruin. The Scriptures promise that the great ruin will one day be raised up and its destruction will be eclipsed and undone by the radiant glory of its full redemption, the new heavens and the new earth, wherein pain and sorrow will be banished and death will be no more (Revelation 21:1–7; cf. 2 Peter 3:10–13). On that day, our bodies which are in the present age subject to sickness and pain and death because of sin will be raised up immortal from the dead and made like Jesus’ own glorious body never to die again (1 Corinthians 15:12–58). And this is because

Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5–11)

What is left but to turn your heart and mind away from the inner self. There is no light and divinity there. What is left but to thank God for your body, with all its present frailties, because it will be for you the means by which you taste the everlasting joys of the new world and the heavenly Jerusalem that Jesus will bring when He comes (2 Corinthians 4:16–18; 5:1–4). What is left for you but to turn from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and its false gnosis (Genesis 3:1–6) to that great tree where Jesus the Christ gave up His life and poured out His true blood so that to all who look to Him and believe He will give eternal life and the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the good body that He has given us (Romans 5:6–11; 1 Corinthians 15:1–4).

The Reverend Canon Matthew M. Kennedy (MDiv, VTS) is the rector of The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York, and Canon for Preaching in the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word.

NOTES

1. Bible quotations are from the ESV, unless noted otherwise.
2. ZA Blog, “Gnosticism: Where It Comes From, What It Teaches, and How Christians Should Respond Today,” adapted from Justin S. Holcomb, Know the Heretics, Zondervan Academic, July 9, 2019, https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/gnosticism.
3. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), rev. and ed. for New Advent by Kevin Knight, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm.
4. BAS Staff, “The Nag Hammadi Codices and Gnostic Christianity,” Bible History Daily, Biblical Archaeology Society, July 28, 2026, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/the-nag-hammadi-codices/.
5. Gustaf Wingren, “St. Irenaeus,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, March 10, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Irenaeus.
6. Craig Blomberg, “Do the Gnostic Gospels Hold Up Under Scrutiny? — Gospel Reliability | Session 13,” posted by Michael Patton, May 30, 2026, YouTube, video 27:54, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XABZiQ03pMc.
7. Bart D. Ehrman, “Lost Christianities,” The Bart Ehrman Blog, July 14, 2024, https://ehrmanblog.org/lost-christianities/.
8. Blomberg, “Do the Gnostic Gospels Hold Up Under Scrutiny?”
9. Alan Maben, “Gnosticism,” Modern Reformation 3, no. 1 (January/February 1994), https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/gnosticism.
10. For the general description below, I used a number of different sources: Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines (Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 45–50; James Papandrea, “4.5 The Heresies — Gnosticism: Christ as Cosmic Mind,” January 24, 2024, in Way of the Fathers, produced by Catholic Culture, YouTube, video 50:27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYeyevLBF4I; Filip Holm, “What is Gnosticism?” October 3, 2021, Let’s Talk Religion, YouTube, video 40:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ockwMVE7PgM; Ryan M. Reeves, “Gnosticism and the Early Church,” January 29, 2015, YouTube, video 24:41, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXc-vvCivp4.
11. The Gnostic sect led by Basilides according to Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.3.
12. The Sethians were one of the more prominent Gnostic sects. The other major account from the Valentinian sect differs in minor details.
13. The Secret Book of John (Apocryphon of John), trans. Stevan Davies, The Gnostic Society Library, Gnosis Archive, 2005, http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn-davies.html.
14. “Because she had unconquerable Power; Her thought was not unproductive. Something imperfect came out of her; Different in appearance from her. Because she had created it without her masculine counterpart; She gave rise to a misshapen being unlike herself. Sophia saw what her desire produced. It changed into the form of a dragon with a lion’s head; And eyes flashing lightning bolts. She cast him far from her, Outside of the realm of the immortal beings; So that they could not see him.” Davies, Secret Book of John.
15. Davies, Secret Book of John.
16. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrines, 48.
17. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrines, 48.
18. Papandrea, “Gnosticism: Christ as Cosmic Mind.”
19. Daniel McCoy, “Gnostic Ethics,” Gnosticism Explained, January 16, 2021, https://gnosticismexplained.org/gnostic-ethics/.
20. Douglas Groothuis, “Gnosticism and the Gnostic Jesus,” Christian Research Journal 13, no. 02 (1990), https://www.equip.org/articles/gnosticism-and-the-gnostic-jesus/.
21. David Brons, “Valentinian Scriptural Interpretation,” Gnostic Society Library, Gnosis Archive, accessed October 21, 2026, http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Valentinian_Scriptural.htm.
22. Christ says to Judas in the Gospel of Judas, “But you’ll do more than all of them, because you’ll sacrifice the human who bears me.” The Gospel of Judas, trans. Mark M. Mattison, Gospels.net, https://www.gospels.net/judas.
23. Mark A. Pierson, “Gospels, Gospels Everywhere?,” Modern Reformation 19, no. 3 (May/June 2010), https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/gospels-gospels-everywhere.
24. Papandrea, “Gnosticism: Christ as Cosmic Mind.”
25. “Gnostic Initiation: The Five Seals, Bridal Chamber and Archon Names,” GnosticWay, updated June 5, 2026, https://gnosticway.com/gnostic-initiation/.
26. Papandrea, “Gnosticism: Christ as Cosmic Mind.”
27. Papandrea, “Gnosticism: Christ as Cosmic Mind.”
28. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.25.4.
29. Saul Munn, “The Inner Ring by C. S. Lewis,” LessWrong, April 24, 2024, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y8rEA4e4DxafmeAbW/the-inner-ring-by-c-s-lewis.
30. Michael J. Kruger, “Was Gnosticism Tolerant and Inclusive? Debunking Some Myths About ‘Alternative’ Christianities,” Canon Fodder (blog), April 23, 2018, https://michaeljkruger.com/was-gnosticism-tolerant-and-inclusive-debunking-some-myths-about-alternative-christianities/.
31. McCoy, “Gnostic Ethics.”
32. Blake Hartung, “Back to the Future,” Modern Reformation 26, no. 6 (November/December 2017), https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/essays/back-to-the-future.
33. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.33–36.
34. “Firstborn” here refers not to the Son’s origin in time (He has none) nor to His human birth, but to His authoritative status as heir and ruler over all creation. As Paul goes on to explain, “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent” (Colossians 1:18).
35. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.