Guest Author - Lisa Shea

Gnosis means "knowledge" in Greek, and in essence the Gnostic religion is all about knowledge - secret knowledge. There was never a "centralized" gnostic group - it was a movement among all organized religions. The core tenet rests on the basis that those who put in the effort to learn the truth in the form of secret ceremonies and phrases will be saved. Gnostic groups do not believe that "faith" alone will save a person. They feel a person must gain specific knowledge about their religion in order to achieve salvation.

Note that Gnostics did exist before Christianity. When Christianity came along, they "evolved" to say that this knowledge would let them into God's kingdom. Gnostics felt that the current world was corrupt and rough - but with key knowledge, salvation can be reached. The gnostics were passionate in drawing in new recruits and poured out an immense volume of writings - mostly aimed at the masses and many involving wild romances - to encourage people to join them.

Gnostics allowed women to be priests and teachers. They felt that human bodies were bad, and that the spirit continually strived to be free of it and to rejoin with God.

The Bible was written in the 100s, so it was another 100 to 200 years before the gnostics began churning out their literature. The gnostics wanted to take over the power of Christianity and the two groups were often in violent conflict with each other. The Christians emphasized faith and acceptance of this life in order to work towards the next. The gnostics hated this "mud pit" we live in and looked for the secret code-words and ceremonies to turn them into the elite that would jump to heaven.

The Nag Hammadi gnostic gospel manuscripts were buried by monks around 400 AD in the upper areas of Egypt, at Nag Hammadi. There were 13 codices, holding 52 actual texts. These manuscripts were discovered around 1945 by a farmer. The documents are in pretty bad shape to begin with, including holes in the text and unreadable scribbles. Still, a full translation was complete by the 1970s and has now been published. You can see photos of the documents and buy translations At the Gnosis.org site to read for yourself what they say, and decide if they are the works of charlatans or real believers.

These documents were definitely books - NOT scrolls as claimed in the Da Vinci Code.

The Gnostic gospels were written in Coptic, which was an old Egyptian language. Originally coptic was written using hieroglyphs - but as Greek became more well known, the Coptic language changed to use Greek letters. It's like writing Japanese phonetically instead of using kanji symbols.

In The Da Vinci Code, it's claimed that the Nag Hammadi used the Aramaic word for "companion" to refer to Mary M - and that this is the same word as "spouse". Of course that is all wrong. The Nag Hammadi wasn't written in Aramaic - it was written in Coptic. The Coptic word used was "koinonos" - and according to experts, it really does just mean "companion".