Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the the History in the Papacy podcast, and I talk heresy.

Before we begin, I'd like to talk about some emails I received.

These took me to task for concentrating on the biblical narrative at the expense of analysis

and archaeology. That's the result of a decision I made back at the start of the show.

I decided to mix in textual and literary criticism into each episode,

stuff like the Deuteronomistic historian and the J, E, and P sources,

but to chunk modern scholarly assessments into episodes at the end of specific periods.

It took me a whole 23 episodes to reach the end of my first period,

the Patriarchs. My next period ends with judges. My two April episodes will be getting into the

meat of that period. After that, I've got the long story of the United Kingdom to tell.

Then I'll have another one or two analytical episodes. You can't assess King Saul,

without also assessing David and Solomon, since the whole era is so murky.

The divided kingdom period and onwards is a whole different kettle

of fish. We have a lot of extra-biblical information about that time. I'll be mixing modern

scholarly assessment into pretty much every episode from then on. I hope you keep listening.

And now on with the episode. Hi again, it's Gary and

Steve here, and today we're talking heresy. And we're going to be talking about the foundations

of Gnosticism. And to start off, we thought we do a little segment where we rant about all the

things that we've read.

Yes, ranting.

I tell you what.

...