Defenestrator

I stumbled upon a website: http://members.iinet.net.au/~quentin...-Timeline.html
that claims there are gnostic texts that predate the common era.
Most of the other info is correct as far as I know, but I'm very sceptical since the author doesn't cite anything. Does anybody know if these claims have any validity?

itsdatruth

Yes. Gnosticism was developed before the birth of Christ. When Christianity really took off, they added elements of Christianity to the religion to make it seem like it wasn't just the Christians who had the answers about Christ-it was called Christian Gnosticism by the author. It existed not only outside of the "catholic-i.e. universal" Church, but threatened it from inside as well. Even after Christ there was non-Christian Gnosticism. I got the Gnosticism info from an excellent work, The Story of Christianity, Vol. I, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, by Justo L. Gonzalez. It is detailed, yet still easy to read-426 pages.

CX

According to the landmark work "The Gnostic Religion" by Hans Jonas, Gnosticism is inherently syncretistic and is seen to be influenced by Jewish, Babylonian, Egyptian, Iranian and Hellenic themes. The origin of Gnosticism, however is thought to roughly coincide with occultist Judaism. It is possible that gnosticism originally began as an heretical Judaistic movement.

CX

I just realized I didn't actually answer your question. Basically, gnosticism incorporates pre-Xian ideas into it's philosophy, but true gnosticism emerged roughly contemporaneously with Xianity in the first centuries of the common era. I am not aware of any identified gnostic text that is said to predate the texts in the Xian canon.

CX

I took a look at your link and the real issue is the claim that the first Xians were gnostics. This is flatly not supported by the evidence. In fact there is no one monolithic group of first Xians that is known to modern scholarship. Rather early Xianity is largely characterised by a fragmented and widely divergent set of beliefs including gnostic, proto-orthodox, and docetic conceptions.