As you listen to The Bible Answer Man, you've probably heard Hank Hanegraaff talk about gnostic gospels and gnostic teachings, and you may wonder what gnosticism is. The term gnostic comes from the Greek gnōsis (γνῶσις), which means knowledge.
Mind/Body Dualism
For Gnostics, God didn't create the universe. Instead, the universe was fashioned and shaped from eternal matter by a Demiurge (demi-urge), which is eternal but not God - and eventually becomes the eternal opponent of God.
Gnosticism believes that matter is evil and unspiritual, and the way to be purified from its influence is through knowledge. Some trace the origin of this kind of thinking to Plato, and it certainly fits with his philosophy. Plato taught that we are composed of two parts, the material body and the non-material soul, which is the essence of life, the seat of reason, and eternal. The body weighs down the spirit and demands that we satisfy its physical needs and desires; the soul strives toward eternal spiritual truths. Body and soul are intermingled on earth and in many ways at odds with each other, but after death the soul is free from the demands of the flesh.
This kind of thinking has strongly influenced Western Christianity, although it is alien to the Old Testament mindset, which sees the breath of life permeating our physical bodies. We are designed as a unity, a being with body and soul. As we read in Genesis 2:7, "then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." (ESV) To the Hebrew mind, the body is not evil, and in the New Testament, the body of a believer is called a temple for the Holy Spirit. (1 Cor 6:19)
Just as good and evil, righteousness and sin, right and wrong are contrasted in the Jewish and Christian faiths, gnosticism makes similar distinctions, but with a different emphasis. For gnostics, the physical world is the source of evil; for people of the Book, the physical world is something that God created and called good. (Genesis 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, and 1:31) Evil comes from rebellion against our Creator, not from creation itself.
Yes, sin now permeates all parts of creation, from our very souls to our bodies, weather patterns, political situations, disease, and everything else that is part of creation or human society. That doesn't make creation evil; evil only infects is since the Fall.
Gnosticism began to infect the Christian church in the first century as some people tried to reinterpret biblical truths to line up with gnostic beliefs, and some of its teachings are addressed in the New Testament.
Secret Wisdom
In addition to believing that the physical world is evil and that only mind allows us to transcend and in some ways escape that evil, Gnostics also have "secret" teachings shared with initiates; it claims to know "secret" truths hidden in Scripture. there are also gnostic gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary (attributed to Mary Magdalene), Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Philip, and Gospel of Judas. These are mostly collections of wise sayings, like the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, and they are generally dated after 100 CE - after the books in the New Testament were written.
One teaching necessitated by the gnostic view of matter is that Jesus did not truly take on human flesh but was instead a spirit who appeared to have physical being. This is the kind of heresy the Apostle John addresses in 1 John 4:1-3:
"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already." (NLT)Christianity is not a religion of secret teachings. Although Paul writes of God's secrets in 1 Corinthians, he tells us those secrets were hidden in earlier times but have been revealed to us through Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
The Bible teaches us that God created the heavens and the earth, calling them into being by the power of his words, that creation is good, that Jesus came in human flesh, and that everything necessary for our salvation and understanding of God's truths is contained in Scripture.
Gnosticism teaches that a demiurge took existing material and crafted the universe, that matter is evil, that Jesus only appeared to be human, and that there are secret truths not contained (or at least not readily discerned) in our Bibles.
"Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength." (1 Cor. 1:22-25, NIV)
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