Lead Article

Pick up almost any commentary of the previous generation and you will find its author pointing to Gnosticism whenever the biblical author warns of opponents threatening the church (except when the opponents are Judaizers). The Gnostics have been vilified as the bad guys behind nearly every bush of heresy in the New Testament. They have been seen as the heretics at Colossae, the opponents at Corinth, the Nicolaitans in Revelation, those who deny that Jesus came in the flesh in John’s writings, and elsewhere.

Liberal scholarship has taken this an enormous step further by arguing that many of the NT writers themselves had been profoundly influenced by Gnosticism. The so-called “History of Religions School” of thought assumed that a pervasive pre-Christian Gnosticism indelibly marked the worldview of many of the biblical writers. In his Theology of the New Testament, Rudolf Bultmann spoke about a combination taking place between Gnosticism and Christianity in the first century to such an extent that one could term “Hellenistic Christianity a syncretistic structure.”¹ One needs to look no further today than any one of the ten volumes of Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament to see this approach worked out in the exposition of the theologically significant terms of the NT. For example, in his study of “head” (kephalê), Heinrich Schlier devotes a substantial portion of his article illustrating the use of the term in Gnostic texts. When he turns to explaining its NT usage in Colossians and Ephesians, he concludes, “We are in the sphere of the Gnostic redeemer myth as a development of the aeon conception.”²

When Did Gnosticism Begin?

In this brief essay, I will contend that whereas it is important to know about Gnosticism for understanding the history of the church in the second, third, and fourth centuries, it is actually quite irrelevant for interpreting any of the NT documents.

It is important to point out that this is not an idiosyncratic idea that I have come up with in the spirit of scholarly creativity. There has been a growing recognition by historians and NT scholars that Gnosticism developed later than was initially thought. This has led many commentators on the NT to begin using the expressions such as “proto-gnosticism” or “incipient gnosticism”—which are rather meaningless expressions since Gnosticism is so syncretistic that virtually any first-century religious tradition could be termed “proto-Gnostic.”

When I began my doctoral work in 1983 at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) on Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, I had to face the issue of Gnosticism head-on. I discovered that not only did many historical-critical scholars think that Paul did not write those two letters, but that whoever wrote them late in the first century was Gnostic in worldview and orientation. In fact, one famous German scholar argued that the wonderful poetic praise to Christ in Col 1:15-20 was actually a portion of a Gnostic redeemer myth hymn that had been incorporated into the letter.

Fortunately, I was pointed in a different direction by a landmark volume written by Edwin Yamauchi, an evangelical scholar from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), titled Pre-Christian Gnosticism.³ Yamauchi raised many serious questions about the entire scholarly edifice that assumed Gnosticism existed before or even at the time of Jesus and the Apostles.

What is the Essence of Gnosticism?

Before arguing its irrelevance for interpreting the NT, I should be careful to clarify precisely what I am talking about when I speak of Gnosticism. Rather than term it a cult of Christianity, which begs the controversial question of its origin, it may be better simply to refer to it as a religion of redemption in Roman antiquity. There is no doubt about the highly syncretistic nature of this religion; it combines elements of Platonism, Greek and Roman mystery cults, Persian religion, magic, astrology, Judaism, as well as (in its later forms) Christianity. Gnosticism became the principal opponent of the church in the second through fourth centuries with most of the church fathers speaking out against it, with some writing voluminously.