What is Gnosticism?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
By far the most mysterious, intriguing, and widely-interesting ancient "heresy" was Gnosticism. But what exactly is it and why does it matter? In this episode we consider the basic ideas that lay behind the Gnostic religions and explore just how radically different they are from the views that came to be regarded as orthodox.
How could these religions be considered Christian if they didn't think Jesus' death mattered? How could they consider the God of the Old Testament to be a lower level and inferior divinity, and this material universe to be a cosmic disaster? Did Gnostics have their own Scriptures? Did they use the books that later became the New Testament? If so, why didn't they just admit their views were wrong? We will address these and other issues in this exploration of the highly unusual world of Christian Gnosticism.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.2 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, |
| 0:13.2 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, |
| 0:17.3 | the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:20.7 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's |
| 0:23.2 | begin. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. Today, we're |
| 0:29.2 | going to be talking about Gnosticism. I know we've mentioned it a little bit before. We've |
| 0:33.3 | talked about the heresies in early Christianity, but today we are focusing on just the one |
| 0:37.9 | on Gnosticism. But before we get into that, Bart, how are you doing? |
| 0:42.8 | Yep, I'm doing well, thanks. I'm still inundated in Roman moral philosophy, which is something |
| 0:51.1 | I never thought I'd be interested in. I think, you know, when I was in college, philosophical discourse didn't interest me very much. |
| 0:59.5 | And for some reason, I've been bitten by the bug and I've been reading, we don't have many writings by Epicurus, |
| 1:07.0 | but I've been reading Epicurus's letters in Greek, and they're just so powerful. |
| 1:11.6 | And a lot of it is about how death is nothing to be afraid of. |
| 1:15.4 | And he has a major emphasis on this. |
| 1:17.7 | And he has these really clever ways of putting it. |
| 1:19.8 | He says, death is nothing to us because we don't experience death now while we're living. |
| 1:25.0 | And when we're dead, we won't experience it because we won't be living |
| 1:28.4 | we won't be when we're dead and when we're alive we're not dead so it's like you know |
| 1:34.2 | what's to worry oh okay interesting point yeah that's a good way of looking at it so I you know |
| 1:40.2 | can't decide whether I'm having morbid thoughts or hopeful thoughts because it's one or the other. So yeah, how are you doing? Okay. Dealing with similar things just from a slightly different angle, my five-year-old, the pediatrician tells me it's very developmentally appropriate, but he's been talking about death an awful lot recently. So we've been having similar conversations. Yeah, nothing on this earth, I think, |
| 2:01.1 | could have prepared me for my five-year-old asking me, what happens when we die? Do we come back to |
... |
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