Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 83, Nosticism.

This program covers Nosticism, a diverse and energetic branch of early Christianity,

popular from roughly 100 to 400 CE, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean and in North Africa.

Nosticism encompassed a variety of beliefs and practices that were deliberately stamped out

and erased from the history of Christianity by the slowly-hardening consensus of some of

the early Church's Theologians and Bishops.

The most ancient Christian Church fathers, prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325, were

themselves a diverse lot with different interests and intellectual projects.

But one thing that Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertolian, and other very

early Christian thinkers shared was a sense that the Nostics were not like them, that the

Nostics were something else.

Up until quite recently, Nosticism remained mostly a mystery.

Early Christian Theologians, including those mentioned above, had written about Nostics

and maligned them as heretics, and that was what scholars had to go on.

A body of second-hand sources that generally aimed to portray Nosticism as a wayward and blasphemous

departure from the form of Christianity slowly being institutionalized and standardized over

the second and third centuries.

However, in the middle of the 20th century, all of that changed, with the discovery of

some extraordinary and often lengthy and complete Nostic texts.

The Berlin Codex discovered around the turn of the 20th century.

The Naghamadi Library discovered in 1945, and the Codex to Chakos, which came into circulation

in the 1970s, together form a sprawling group of Nostics scriptures that dwarf the New Testament

...