Originally contributed by Dave Stoverden in Colorado on Jan. 2, 2004, almost 9 years ago.
I have done a fair amount of research to get a handle on the life and times of the people from Jesus’s crucifixion to 200 AD. But the digging seems to be endless.
The most intriguing questions to me are just how widespread were the gnostic sects’ beliefs and influence. How did the gnostics view the womens’ roles in their concept of the religious life? Is the mythology of the Wisdom of Sophia a part of gnostic belief exclusively or was it a more general mythology that might have been known by Romans and Greeks and adopted? The Gospels of Nag Hammadi are called the Gnostic gospels, but what about the other sects? Did they use these same texts?
I don’t know about the rest of you but I can only relate to a fraction of what I see coming out of this time period. After I get some feedback from the rest of you about your thoughts I have a couple of paragraphs from Stephen Hoeller that do pretty good job of summing up “What in the World Are Gnostics?”