Special Knowledge? No Way!

It would appear that there is some confusion regarding the Gnostic gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the teaching of Gnosticism. So first of all some clarification: the Gnostic gospels are dated from the second to fourth century AD and the writers of these gospels never even met Jesus Christ. Most of what we know of Gnosticism and it's teaching comes from St. Irenaeus and his work: “Detection and Overthrow of the Gnosis Falsely So-called”, also known as, “Against Heresies”. The Gnostic gospels were discovered accidentally by two farmers in Egypt in December, 1945 and although some were duplicated in different finds, only one copy of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene exists. The discovery of these writings did not devalue the writing of St. Irenaeus but rather confirmed what he had written. Indeed, St. Irenaeus remains the primary source for our understanding of the Gnostics.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of some 972 documents, including text from the Hebrew Bible discovered between 1946 and 1956 around the ancient ruins of the settlement of Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea and have nothing in common with the Gnostic gospels. These documents date from around 150 BC to 70 AD and written mostly in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Karin and I have actually seen them with our own peepers!

Now then, St. Irenaeus was the second Bishop of Lyons, succeeding the martyred St. Pothinus. Irenaeus was originally from Asia and he was a pupil of St. Polycarp, ordained bishop by the Apostles in Asia. In his above mentioned work, St. Irenaeus wrote:

[Marcion], moreover, mutilated the Gospel according to Luke, removing all that is written about the generations of the Lord; and he removed much of the teaching of the Lord's utterances, in which the Lord is recorded as confessing most clearly that His Father is the Maker of the universe. He also persuaded his followers that he himself was more truthful than those Apostles who have handed down the Gospel; and he furnished them not with the Gospel but with a small part of the Gospel.

The Catholic Encyclopedia describes Gnoticism's origin as:

Whereas formerly Gnosticism was considered mostly a corruption of Christianity, it now seems clear that the first traces of Gnostic systems can be discerned some centuries before the Christian Era. Its Eastern origin was already maintained by Gieseler and Neander; F. Ch. Bauer (1831) and Lassen (1858) sought to prove its relation to the religions of India; Lipsius (1860) pointed to Syria and Phoenicia as its home, and Hilgenfeld (1884) thought it was connected with later Mazdeism. Joel (1880), Weingarten (1881), Koffmane (1881), Anrich (1894), and Wobbermin (1896) sought to account for the rise of Gnosticism by the influence of Greek Platonic philosophy and the Greek mysteries, while Harnack described it as "acute Hellenization of Christianity".

Gnosticism then, has no place in Catholic or Protestant Christianity. So now you know!