Summary
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Gnosticism, a sect associated with early Christianity. The Gnostics divided the universe into two domains: the visible world and the spiritual one. They believed that a special sort of knowledge, or gnosis, would enable them to escape the evils of the physical world and allow them access to the higher spiritual realm. The Gnostics were regarded as heretics by many of the Church Fathers, but their influence was important in defining the course of early Christianity. A major archaeological discovery in Egypt in the 1940s, when a large cache of Gnostic texts were found buried in an earthenware jar, enabled scholars to learn considerably more about their beliefs.
With:
Martin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture
Caroline Humfress Reader in History at Birkbeck College, University of London
Alastair Logan Honorary University Fellow of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Transcript
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| 0:47.0 | Hello in 1945 an Egyptian farmer walked out into the mountains near his home looking |
| 0:51.8 | for fertilizer. |
| 0:53.0 | Instead, he found a buried earthenware jar containing a dozen manuscripts bound in leather. |
| 0:58.0 | Having no idea what there were, he used some of them as fuel. |
| 1:02.0 | But eventually, the others found their way into the hands of an expert who identified them as one of the most important archaeological finds of the century, a cash of religious text dating from the third or fourth century |
| 1:13.0 | a d. |
| 1:14.0 | These documents known today as the NAG Hamani Library, |
| 1:17.4 | Hamadi Library comprised the most extensive collection |
| 1:20.1 | of texts relation to agnosticism, |
| 1:22.4 | a belief which was at its height in the second century |
| 1:24.7 | AD. The Gnostics believed that the physical world was evil and that inner knowledge would |
| 1:29.6 | allow them to escape to the true spiritual world. Gnosticism was an important religious movement for at least two centuries, |
| 1:36.0 | and some scholars believe that early Christian theology was profoundly influenced, even defined, |
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