Each of the 3 major religions has a subset devoted to its inner spiritual teachings. Islam has Sufiism; Judaism has Qabalistic teaching; and Christianity has Gnosticism (at least I think that’s the term - correct me if there’s a better one). These seem to be pretty different than their better known counterparts.
My question is, did all three of these promote the big religion as a way to distract people from the work of the Sufis, etc? You know, to keep the hoi polloi out of the real teachings? It just seems that the big, well known religions are full of easy-to-grasp bromides and beliefs, while the inner teaching are far, far more complex, almost to the point where they have virtually nothing in common with the main religion.
Each of the mystical traditions to which you refer were begun long after the larger bodies and have remained separate from them for years. There is no record of any proselytising by the smaller groups, particularly proselytizing for the larger groups.
I would guess that there is a tendency among some humans to wish to look beyond the immanent and, for people raised in the mainstream groups, these traditions satisfy that urge.
I’ll modify my first response to note that Gnosticism was, indeed, a “secret knowledge” belief that held itself separate from other early Christian traditions, so the notion of not being tainted by hoi polloi probably does imbue their teachings.
However, Gnosticism arose separately from Christianity and while there was a certain amount of overlap during the late first through early third centuries with both Christian and non-Christian Gnostics, it was never a direct spin-off from Christianity.
The equivalent Christian tradition to Sufism or Qabbalism would more properly be called (Christian) Mysticism. Conflating Gnosticism and Mysticism might lead to some confusion, of course. (Gnosticism was a form of [lower case] mysticism, but it is separate from the Christian tradition that developed later.)
None of that is true. Gnosticism existed at least during the 1st century, probably before, and all of Jesus, John the Baptist, Simon Magus, and Dositheos are recorded as being contemporaries of one another, acquaintances, and as Gnostic teachers. Obviously, Christians would argue that Jesus’ attribution as a Gnostic teacher is a fabrication, but there is no clear reason to think that given his connection to John the Baptist (who is also listed as the teacher of Simon Magus and Dositheos), the seeming pre-Christian existence of Sethianism, and the existence of the Ophites (Christian Gnostics) in the 1st century, and the plausible explanation that St Paul started Christianity largely independent of Jesus’ remaining church and so didn’t include the secret portions, that Jesus wasn’t a Gnostic. By the time of Valentinus (~130 AD) there was arguably an equivalent amount of Christian Gnostic writings as Paulian Christian. It’s hard to know how much has been destroyed.
Following that declaration with an imaginary history of your own is not very credible.
Your statement agrees with mine that Gnosticism was an independent system that existed in the first century. You disagree by asserting that Christianity must have been a spin-off from Gnosticism, yet you offer nothing to substantiate that claim. While I am sure that a lot of Gnostic writings were certainly destroyed by later Christians, your connections are little more than suppositions based on wishful thinking.
Dositheos has such a confused history that we cannot even figure out whether he was the teacher or the student of Simon Magus. Simon is supposed to have been a student of John the Baptist, but all the stories that make that claim are old enough to have relied on John as a legendary figure to give “authority” to later tales of Simon witout a single contemporary connection. Given the Samaritan origins of both of those men, presuming that their system was adopted by first a Jewish community and later the Gentiles requires a significant leap of faith. Simon is attacked by Irenaeus and Justin, but Dositheos is ignored by them.
If Paul was creating a heresy from a form of Gnosticism, it is more than odd that none of the works that are reliably his actually attack it and that the “Pauline” works that do attack Gnosticism do not appear until later in the first century, (probably after Paul’s death).
Is it possible that Christianity was a spin off from a Gnostic movement? I supose that it is possible. Certainly I do not have enough proof at my fingertips to demonstrate that it could not be. On the other hand, your absolutist declaration has too many holes to be considered as more than speculation.
I didn’t claim that it must have span off from Gnosticism, merely that there are several very good reasons to think that it did and no strong reasons to believe otherwise. What really happened is largely unknowable without a time machine.
Outside of Sethianism, the founder of which is unknown, I have seen no Gnostic group which appears to trace its roots to anybody but the acquaintances of John the Baptist. If you want me to exhaustively list them, I can do so.
The largest collection of Gnostic writings is overwhelmingly Christian. It’s possible that the cache at Nag Hammadi happened to be from a group of Gnostic Christians and since it’s the only source of ancient Gnostic writings, that perverts things to make it appear that Gnosticism and Christianity were particularly linked. But there’s no particular reason to think that. There are what appear to be Sethianist and Platonist documents as well, which seems to indicate that it’s just a generic cache of Gnostic writings.
But why would they have destroyed all Gnostic sects rather than just the Christian Gnostic sects?
Sure, their historicity is lower than Jesus’, but Jesus’ historicity isn’t particularly great either.
Whether there was two guys really named Simon and Dositheos isn’t really the main factor, it’s that all Gnostic sects trace their roots to John the Baptist. There’s no particular reason to assume that they weren’t started by the disciples of John the Baptist. Nothing that I’ve seen alludes to any other case. There’s no obvious reason why Gnostic groups would manufacture a link to Jesus starting as early as the 1st century when Jesus was hardly a household name at that point. There’s no obvious reason to think that the early Christians would purposely fashion a tale about the foundation of heretical groups which gave them founders acquainted with their own founder.
Why doesn’t Dositheos appear until later? Who knows, it might be because his real name was Theodosius, it might be because there was only one person (Simon) and somehow a second character later got added. It might be because we’re missing most of the works of Justin Martyr and Hegessipus, who would have been the most likely to comment on the very earliest sects – people generally focus on what’s important in their time.
Ultimately, if your standard for disbelief is if there’s a reason to discount stuff as hearsay and fantasy, I’m sorry to tell you but Jesus doesn’t look good from that light. The evidence is worse for the foundations of Gnosticism, but even still they’re unambiguously unidirectional.
Paul existed at the same time as Jesus’ actual apostles. He was comrades with Peter (generally). While he may have been aware of the mystical elements that the Jerusalem church espoused, there’s no reason to think that he had any interest in learning or spreading them, just the philosophical beliefs of the religion. But that doesn’t mean that he would be hostile to the mystical elements either.
But generally, it’s fairly likely that the church Jerusalem was poor and overall not terribly successful in gaining adherents. Paul’s church was influential and more importantly independent. If Paul didn’t focus on or preach the mystical stuff, there’s no particular reason to think that when mystical nonsense started appearing everywhere after Paul died and after the destruction of Jerusalem that everyone wouldn’t be flummoxed by it.
I didn’t say it was absolute, I said that your pronouncement of Gnosticism as being a late and largely unrelated movement that was attached to Christianity from outside is a very unlikely with what information we have. It was likely a section of Christianity from at least the end of the 1st century which is really as early as we can say anything at all about Christianity. And given the lack of Gnostic groups independent of John the Baptist, declaring it an unrelated movement is also a very shaky declaration.
Knowing that there were groups of Gnostic Christians in the 1st century, that Jesus preached alongside John the Baptist, that Jesus inherited several of John’s followers, that the majority of Gnostic groups appear to be Christian, and that Paul’s church could easily have been running largely independently of the Jerusalem church, there are many good reasons to suspect that Jesus’ teachings included a lot of mystical Gnostic stuff. But that is just “suspect”. It’s all secondary information. But it does explain what we see. If Gnosticism was started independently, you would expect to see a lot of different groups with different founders, or if they were in the habit of attaching their name to whoever the most famous person of the time was, you’d expect to see them changing the name of their founder over time. You would expect to see the Christian church having destroyed just Christian Gnostic documents, not all Gnostic documents.
What about the Corpus Hermeticum? That is, surely, the most historically influential body of gnostic writing, it is certainly not Christian, and, so far as I am aware, it does not reference John the Baptist.
Also, to address the OP, as mainstream Christianity, of all major and most minor denominations, has long considered gnosticism a dangerous heresy, it hardly seems likely that the Christian churches are secretly controlled by gnostics.
Gnosticism wasn’t the largest threat to the Church in the early years. It was actually Marcionism, which split the difference between Christianity and Gnosticism. Whereas the Gnostics were dependent on individual teachers and schools, which were constantly changing (correct me if I’m wrong as I’m more knowledgeable about the teachings), Marcion had an organized structure to pass on his teachings.
For the same reason that they destroyed a significant amount of pagan literature. Too many early Christians, (heck, too many current Christians), consider anything outside their narrow world view to originate from Satan or whatever, and seek to destroy it.
I did not say that it was a late development. As far as I know, it began contemporaneous with or slightly earlier than Christianity. I think that there were some ideas that were floating in first century theology that were sufficiently similar that some people, hearing both sets, created a syncretistic system based on conflating the two.
Actually, you really do not see all that much about any of the founders. What you see are Christain attacks on “heresies” that would, naturally, focus on those Gnostics who were most closely tied to Gnostic Christianity. We have the most information regarding the groups that the non-Gnostic Christians found most threatening. Primary sources tend to be slightly less common for Gnosticism than for Christianty, but that is almost certainly due to later Christian censorship.
Well, no, not in the present day. I suspect any secret societies are long gone. My question was if they were involved in the initial startup, for the reasons I stated.