Gnosticism

Plato's dualistic contrast between the invisible world of ideas and the visible world of matter formed a substratum of first-century Gnosticism, which started to take shape late in the first century and which equated matter with evil, spirit with good. Out of this equation came two opposite modes of conduct: (1) ascetisism, the suppression of bodily passions because of their connection with evil matter, and (2) libertinism or sensualism, the indulgence of bodily passions because of the transcience and consequent unimportance of matter. In both modes, Oriental religious notions mixed with Platonic philospy. Physical resurrection seemed abhorrent so long as matter was regarded as evil. Imortality of the spirit seemed desirable, however, attainable through the knowledge of secret doctrines and passwords by which at death one's departing spirit could elude hostile demonic guardians of the planets and stars on its flight from earth to heaven. Under this view the human problem does not consist in guilt, which needs forgiveness, so much as in ignorance, which needs replacement with knowledge. In fact, Gnosticism comes gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. To keep the realm of supreme diety pure, later Gnostics separated it from the material and therefore evil universe by a series of lesser divine beings called "aeons." Thus an elaborate angelology developed alongside demonology.

Gnostic ideas seem to stand behind certain heresies attacked in later New Testament literature; but the contents of a Gnostic liberary discovered in the 1940s at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, give evidence that full-blown Gnostic mythology did not yet exist at the time Christianity arose. In the first century, Gnosticism was still developing out of an aggregate loosely related philosophical and religious ideas and had yet turn into a highly organized system of doctrine.