The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden Teachings of Jesus

It would be impos­si­ble to under­stand West­ern civ­i­liza­tion with­out under­stand­ing the his­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty. But in order to do that, it may serve us well to think of it as the his­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ties, plur­al. So sug­gests Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny in the new video above, which explains the Gnos­tic Gospels, the “for­bid­den teach­ings of Jesus.” As a sys­tem of beliefs, Gnos­ti­cism is a fair­ly far cry from the main­stream forms of Chris­tian­i­ty with which most of us are famil­iar today. But its sur­viv­ing texts may sound uncan­ni­ly famil­iar, despite also involv­ing out­landish-sound­ing ele­ments that seem to belong to anoth­er civ­i­liza­tion entire­ly. Gnos­tic teach­ings have long been con­sid­ered heresy by Chris­tians, but do they real­ly rep­re­sent just a dif­fer­ent evo­lu­tion­ary branch of the faith: anoth­er Chris­tian­i­ty?

Reli­gious schol­ars of many stripes have con­cerned them­selves with few mat­ters as inten­sive­ly as they have with theod­i­cy, that is, the mat­ter of how to square the notion of a good, omnipo­tent deity with the obvi­ous exis­tence of evil down here in the world. Since its loose coali­tion of beliefs came togeth­er in the late first cen­tu­ry, Gnos­ti­cism has pro­posed an ele­gant solu­tion: that the deity is not, in fact, good, or rather, that under the tran­scen­dent, unknow­able God is a much more poor­ly behaved “demi­urge” who dis­plays an indif­fer­ence, at best, to the lot of human­i­ty. In this view, our result­ing world is less a per­fect cre­ation than a cos­mic mis­take — a propo­si­tion that would account for cer­tain of its qual­i­ties we expe­ri­ence on the day-to-day lev­el, even if we have no par­tic­u­lar reli­gious pro­cliv­i­ties.

Thanks to the dis­cov­ery of Egyp­t’s Nag Ham­ma­di library in 1945, we can direct­ly access many of the teach­ings of the so-called “Gnos­tic Gospels.” They tell us, to make a few grand sim­pli­fi­ca­tions, that our real­i­ty is illu­so­ry and that we can only come to grasp the true nature of both it and our­selves through eso­teric learn­ing, gno­sis being the ancient Greek term for knowl­edge. This world­view may bring to mind that of cer­tain Greek philoso­phers, or indeed that of The Matrix, a near-oblig­a­tory ref­er­ence for a video like this. A quar­ter-cen­tu­ry on from that movie, it’s not hard to under­stand why it res­onat­ed with the siz­able-enough pro­por­tion of human­i­ty who feel alien­at­ed from who they real­ly are or what the world real­ly is — and who, any mil­len­ni­um now, would make rea­son­ably promis­ing can­di­dates to bring about a Gnos­tic revival.

Relat­ed con­tent:

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to The Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Man­u­script in the World

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

The Ancient Greeks Who Con­vert­ed to Bud­dhism

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

How Our Depic­tion of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actu­al­ly Looked Like

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.