Gnosticism: From Nag Hammadi to the Gospel of Judas

by David Brakke

Listening Length: 12 hours and 19 minutes

Gnosticism, one of the most fascinating and perplexing phenomena in Western religious history, sparked religious ideologies that competed with many other religions of the time, including the theological thinking that came to define Christianity. And, though the emerging Orthodox Church eventually condemned Gnosticism as heretical, the church formed many of its most central doctrines (such as original sin, the Immaculate Conception, and even the concept of heresy) in response to Gnostic ideas.

This fascinating 24-lecture course is a richly detailed guide to the theology, sacred writings, rituals, and outstanding human figures of the Gnostic movements. What we call "Gnosticism" comprised a number of related religious ideologies and movements, all of which sought "gnosis," or immediate, direct, and intimate knowledge of God. The Gnostics had many scriptures, but unlike the holy texts of other religions, Gnostic scriptures were often modified over time. Gnostic cosmology was extraordinarily intricate and multidimensional, but religious myth was simply a means to the ultimate end of gnosis.

Follow Gnostic ideology and its vivid impact on Western thought through the centuries, from its role in early religions and its re-emergence in medieval spirituality to its remarkable traces in modern popular culture, from science fiction novels like Blade Runner to Hollywood films like The Matrix. In delving into the paths of gnosis, you'll discover a compelling, alternative current of religious practice in the West, and reveal Gnostic influence resonating in Western spirituality even in the present day.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Christianity, Audiobook, Philosophy, Gnosticism

13 pages, Audible Audio

Published February 5, 2015

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was fun!
I've been curious about Gnostics for a long time now, and David Brakke's lecture was just chock-full of all the little nuggets of information I had hoped for.
This was very in-depth. Perfect for someone like myself who had been curious about this sect of ancient Christianity. Starting with the Marcionites, then the Valentinian school of thought, and far beyond - including the present-day gnostics. He also covered the non-Christian gnostics and everything that came with them.
I was blown away by all the different off-shoots and their amazing lore.



The basic (very basic) gist is that they believed the god of the Old Testament (Yaldabaoth) was evil and that Jesus was the son of the good god (Barbelo). Again, extremely simplified, they believed that this evil god had been born due to the inconsiderate or selfish action of one of the minor good gods (Sophia), who was in some versions a kind of aspect of the good god himself. The evil god created Earth and everything on it, including humans. He was then tricked into breathing his spark of the divine into humans and has been trying to get it back ever since.
Meanwhile, the good god sent Jesus to give humans the knowledge (gnosis) to allow that spark of the divine inside of them to stop reincarnating in a human form, and return to its rightful place in Heaven.



ISH.
Because there's a lot of ins and outs here, and we're talking about a sect that, up till a few decades ago, we had none of their religious texts.
That all changed with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library (not a real library, btw) in 1945. Yes! You are correct, this was right around the same time the Dead Sea Scrolls were popping up.
Anyway, the point is, that all religious scholars had to go on before that were orthodox Christian texts that were written primarily to debunk the Gnostics. And you can never completely trust your enemies to write a fair and balanced story about you, right?
And what the Nag Hammadi stuff did was basically prove that to be true.
So, much like the way some pagans thought Christians in antiquity were cannibals due to the Eucharist (the "eating and drinking" of the body and blood of Christ), what we now consider orthodox Christians thought the Gnostics were holding orgies due to some rituals that were (in retrospect) poorly named and misunderstood.



There is so much more to this religion. And I could just go on and on about it because I'm simply fascinated, but I'll just hit one of the highlights that I thought was neat.
Their Book of Adam retells the Garden of Eden story in this crazy-good way.
Ok, so in this retelling, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is being kept from Adam and Eve because the evil god is trying to put the lid on the whole you've got the spark of the divine information.
And Sophia (which means wisdom) is the one telling them to shovel that apple in their mouths as fast as they can. They do, and everything goes tits up, especially for Eve who gets raped by Yaldabaoth, making him the father of those a-holes Cain & Able.
Seth is Adam's son. And he's apparently the one that everyone who has the spark descended from.
What?!
Yeah. Pretty cool, right?



Anyway. It's an interesting religion and even more interesting to learn about the battle for orthodoxy between this and what we consider traditional Christianity.
At the end of the day, (what we now think of as) the Catholics came out on top, but their doctrine's win was not as easy or straightforward as you might have originally thought. And I can honestly see why, as the Gnostics managed to explain away a lot of the things that still niggle away in the back of some Christian's minds even today.
I'm not sure who to recommend this to, but I surely enjoyed it.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything that ever has been or ever will be occurred as a result of the events that proceeded before it and is best understood by considering how things came before it and the environment from which it existed. To understand who we are today one needs to know what was going on before and what was happening concurrently at the time of the revealing. Christianity or Roman History did not appear out of whole cloth; they became as a result of interacting connections that came before it and that were transpiring as they were becoming. Unfortunately for the world, before 1950 most of what we thought we knew about Gnosticism came from its enemies and its real influence was shrouded by those who proclaimed orthodoxy (in the end, ‘orthodoxy’ is nothing more than what remains standing after the other is shot down by fiat).

Plotinus (circa 250) tells you how much he dislikes the Gnostics. It’s weird because when one reads Plotinus’ Enneads one feels the Gnosticism within it. Prof. Brakke will mention that he too thinks of Plotinus as a Gnostic and makes a clever statement to the effect that Irenaus did not like the Gnostics since they weren’t Christian enough and Plotinus did not like the Gnostics since they weren’t Platonist enough.

I would say in the history of the Western world one of the most important books ever written but seldom read today is Plotinus’ Enneads. Prof. Brakke classifies Plotinus as a Gnostic in spite of Plotinus’ statements to the contrary. In Peter Brown’s book Eye of the Needle he makes the statement that Augustine takes Cicero’s civic duty and combines that with Plotinus’ (Gnostic) metaphysics and the teachings of St. Paul and makes a religion. For the Middle Ages there was no more influential book besides the bible than the heavily influenced by Gnostic thought Augustine’s City of God . Aquinas (circa 1250) will reconcile Augustine with Aristotle and defend faith by reason. Gnostics, in general, as pointed out in this lecture will think that ‘ignorance of the good’ leads to evil as Plato, Augustine and Boethius would say, and that ‘contemplation of the divine’ is our ultimate virtue as Aristotle and Aquinas (and Spinoza, btw) would say.

I found this Great Course well presented. One can understand Christianity and Roman history between about 50 C.E. to about 450 C.E. just a little bit better if they also consider what the Gnostics meant for that time period, and understanding the Gnostics within their own terms is rewarding in itself. There is a rich body of knowledge available today on Gnosticism and its connections and this lecture gives the interested student the tools they need in order to grok (Robert A. Heinlein word meaning ‘to fully understand something’) it.

[Wendelle]

Interesting series of lectures. Gnosticism is an unorthodox religion that concludes from the imperfections and presence of evil in the world that the creator of the universe, the God of the Old Testament, is either a minor, warline ignorant god or an evil god, who in either case stands against human knowledge of the real Divinity, which almost happened when we bit into the Tree of Good and Evil. Gnostics believe Jesus Christ was a messenger from Wisdom, one of the aspects of the real Divinity, sent to pierce the misleading veil of the architect of our current universe. Gnosticism came in many forms, including hermeticism and Manicheanism. I would like to know how catechisms or theology (apart from St. Augustine) respond to Gnosticism.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gnosis, in this set of very excellent lectures, means 'knowledge'. Heresy can loosely be defined as any teaching or idea that does not conform to 'orthodoxy' (from Greek meaning 'right opinion'). This would lead a person (me, in this case...a non-religious one at that) to conclude that the Nag Hammadi codices (books outlining a major retelling of the origins of the Judaeo-Christian bible) were rejected by those early Christians who had canonized the New Testament. While the codices were most likely written in the 4th century, the ideas espoused were floating around in the early 2nd century (according to Iraneas...according to Brakke). Some scholars even suggest that some of these ideas might have been discussed over a proto-latte as early as 50 CE (Q document?). Regardless, during this time there seems to have been plenty of good news stories floating around...it must have been a very difficult decision as to what should be included as official 'Gospels' and which would be rejected. After all, you can't have a successful new belief system without a guiding orthodoxy.

Those writers of the Nag Hammadi codices (let's call them Gnostics) must have been crushed. After all, they had a pretty good story...in many ways much better that what had become the canon of the new religion. That, of course is my opinion.
But the course...Dr Brakke patiently laid out the history and background in this survey of Gnosticism and made me want to learn more. Better still, they got me thinking about the Gnostic ideas about the origin of mankind from their point of view. My takeaway, briefly, is that I liked the idea that the god of the Jewish bible Torah/Old Testament) was a lesser god, manifested/created by an aspect of the true supreme entity (who had multiple aspects). This lesser god created the world as we know it, including Adam and Eve. But, since he was a lesser god, he made mistakes that needed to be rectified. One aspect of the true God invested Adam and Eve with the Divine (in his/her image) and encouraged them to eat of the tree of knowledge. As Dr Brakke alludes in the final lecture, perhaps that Divine power that was instilled was consciousness, containing many aspects such as intellect, curiosity and imagination (among all the others). In this way, the world around us...that world created by a lesser god...contained both good and evil, and we humans contained the divine power to tell the difference. At this point the true god exits stage right...until there's a wake-up call. Jesus is introduced to the world to remind us that we have righteousness within us and we have the power (through Him) to choose good over evil. In the end it is our consciousness and intellect that are divine, making us responsible for our salvation.
In many ways, that interpretation (all mine at this point) is similar to Buddhism, but could be only slightly modified to fit into any religious dogma.

In summary, these lectures were great...they made me think, and isn't that why we're all here.

Recommended!

I think I used a coupon during a great sale when I bought this set.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of the subject. I really like this professor’s lectures.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complete and utter nonsense but a fantastic course!

I think I understand why people used to (and some still do) cling to such ideas. Many times life can be frightening and I suppose you can feel safer if you believe with all your might that celestial beings exist and watch over you, even fight for you with other malevolent celestial beings which are responsible for all the evils of the world.

[Ida · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting insight into a religious movement that left its mark on modern Christianity

[Payton Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

We gettin to the divine self originate of the pleroma and recovering our divine spark with this one fellas 🗣️🗣️🗣️💯💯💯 If I wasn’t LDS for very compelling and spiritual reasons, then I’d be a gnostic. (heavy sarcasm intended)

No but seriously, this is the greatest treatment of Gnosticism in all its forms and manifestations I’ve ever heard or read. The author does an excellent job treating Gnosticism fairly and surveying the scholarly field with accuracy and representation. I’d HIGHLY recommend this to anyone, since it’s not only very informative, but because it’s also such a unique and interesting worldview.

[Josh S · Rating 2 out of 5]

Going from reading the Bible (coupled with books written from a historically Christian perspective) to listening to this audio course about the Gnostics felt like entering a wacky, and at times sinister, carnival funhouse. The Gnostics severed any continuity with the historical faith of the ancient Hebrews, and they completely invert almost every Biblical story with rambling, esoteric texts written mostly in the ~200s/300s AD deceptively penned "from the perspective" of earlier individuals, e.g. secret revelations from Adam, Seth, the disciples, etc. These texts purport to explain the "true story" rewriting the Bible: the creator god is evil, the serpent in the garden was trying to liberate Adam and Eve, Judas is the true hero of the Gospel accounts, and so on. What a wild ride.

What I took away is that the Gnostics were taking a fundamentally Platonic point of view-- that the material world, with its obvious brokenness, is fundamentally evil, and that we are immaterial souls that are trapped here by the creator's ill intent and our own ignorance-- and reinterpreted all of Scripture from this lens. If this is the starting presupposition, then it naturally follows that the Genesis account of a good god creating a good world must be a lie. It must mean that Christ and Jesus are two completely separate beings, for the true god would never take on human form, let alone undergo physical torture and death. And where all of this Gnostic dogma leads is that true divinity is within us- we are, in fact, shards of the true god. Interesting that the final distillation of this distortion of Jewish and Christian faith ends up with its proponents trying to redefine themselves as being god, an exact replica of the ancient serpent's agenda in Eden.

I was frustrated by the author's narrative voice in this lecture. He takes an implicit secular standpoint--a faith assumption that there is no fundamental truth behind any spiritual claims--and goes on from this axiom to talk about Gnostics as if they were, in fact, a perfectly legitimate branch of Christianity. We have our modern-day Christianity, Dr. Brakke says, because groups like the Gnostics were "stamped out" by other Christian groups who, themselves, had no real basis to label anyone as fundamentally subverting the faith that had been handed down from the apostles. This argument, of course, ignores that all historical evidence suggests that the earliest Christians saw themselves as in complete continuity with the Jewish faith; if and when they incorporated new revelation it was not because they were trying to shoehorn in Platonic philosophy but because they were trying to make sense of the dynamic and viscerally experienced realities of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the powerful manifestations of the Spirit of God. Also ignored is the fact that a much simpler explanation of Gnosticism is that it is not truly a branch of the earliest Christian movement, but rather--with its texts written at least a century after the New Testament-- an overlaying of the Greek/Platonic background assumptions onto the Christian scriptures. This view-- that Gnosticism is fundamentally syncretistic and not a natural outgrowth of the earliest Christian traditions-- also has the advantage of making better sense of the historical data that the Gnostics and neo-Platonists held almost identical beliefs, despite the fact that the neo-Platonists had zero commerce with the Hebrew Scriptures or Jesus at all.

Aside: We live in an unusual time where the truth/faith claims made by secularism (i.e. that there is no "real" spiritual truth behind all the various contradictory claims of these religious groups) hold a privileged position in our society, as if they were not truth/faith claims at all but simply "self-evident". Dr. Brakke starts from this secular assumption and goes on to present not only sequences of historical events but also his own interpretations of these events in the same breath as if all of it is objective "history". Truly objective history is, of course, impossible. N.T. Wright, in his book "The New Testament and the People of God", sweeps widely over not only history but also literature, philosophy, and science, to show that philosophers in all disciplines have rightly concluded that positivistic truth claims are simply unavailable. We simply don't have access to "bare facts", but we always bring our own narrative. No historian can ever present a truly "objective" viewpoint but always and unavoidably interacts with both the editing of the relevant data and applying their personal lens to identify which narrative they believe best explains the data. And, of course, if historians can never present "objective history" about anything, surely this is even more so the case when interpreting the person of Jesus.

For we cannot really hold the middle ground that Jesus was just a "good teacher"-- his claims are simply too cosmic in scope and the earliest accounts of him are too reality-bending. The historian must also wrestle with the improbable rise of the earliest church, a group who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by holding to its firm conviction that they had beheld the risen Jesus in the flesh: they were willing to be tortured and die to say that they had eaten with him, touched him, spoken to him on many occasions. We are left with a haunting historical question about who Jesus really is. In the end, either Jesus is a ludicrous and pitiful figure, with almost all of the historical data about him fabricated; or else he is who he straightforwardly claimed to be: and if the latter case, it cannot be overstated how vast are the implications for understanding Reality, ourselves, and the destiny of the world.

[Malum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely comprehensive overview and examination of ancient gnostic schools of thought.

[N. N. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've decided to learn more about religion because (1) my biggest objection to theism is basically the theodicy issue, but there many proposed theodicies which I am not familiar with (though even without that, it is hard to see why it would make sense to take ancient scriptures so seriously...) and (2) if there is a true religion, that is the single most important fact about the world so on the off-chance that there is one it is worth studying religion in some detail.

I picked up these lectures about gnosticism because I had thought that gnosticism explained the existence of evil by saying there were two equally powerful gods, one good and one evil. I think this would be more logical than free will or original sin based theodicies (I am more sympathetic to divine command theory). I also was interested because a book I read about Jacob Taubes made gnosticism seem like a cool form of esoterica and I really like the simulation theory which is reputed to be similar to gnosticism.

The gnostic literature discussed in this course was mostly discovered in a buried jar near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. The manuscripts were copied in the 3rd and 4th centuries. If I understand correctly, the writings were originally composed in Greek, but the versions found at Nag Hammadi had been translated into Coptic. Coptic is actually a late form of Ancient Egyptian and remains the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians.

Apparently the echt gnostics were not actually dualists in the sense of believing in equally powerful good and evil gods. Rather, they thought that the god of this world was created accidentally by higher gods (one of whom was called "the Barbelo"--apparently the origin of this name is now lost). The higher gods then created humans, but the evil god of this world ("Ialdabaoth") had some role in making humans worse. The gnostic myth, as it appears in the Apocryphon of John, is very complicated, as Brakke says many times. It is also not correct to call the group that tried to correct for Ialdabaoth's actions many separate gods--apparently they are aeons or emanations of the highest level of god (I guess this is a bit like penumbras and emanations). I think I might read the Apocryphon of John.

The discussion of the other works was less interesting to me than the Apocryphon of John. The Gospels of Thomas and Judas did not really hold my attention at all.

Manicheanism is apparently actually closer to what I had previously thought gnosticism was, in that it is really a religion about a good god and an evil god. I guess they got this from Zoroastrianism. But Manicheans seems to have had a kind of pathological obsession with purity and hostility to the world. Which makes sense--they thought the world was created by an evil god.

Apparently Origen had some beliefs similar to gnostic beliefs and was also a universalist. This seems like a much more coherent theology than most I have heard of (for problem of evil reasons). I may want to read Origen.

I didn't quite understand whether Brakke was saying that various movements similar to gnosticism: Cathars, Merkabah mysticism, the writings of Origen, etc., were actually influenced by gnostics or were just motivated by similar concerns. The desire to explain evil and get direct access to God are probably both recurring. I appreciated Brakke's awareness that two things being similar to each other does not mean that the first one caused the second one. Many historians struggle to grasp this point.

A friend told me that he thinks that the Catholic reading of the New Testament according to which people survive bodily death because they have incorporeal souls is incorrect. Rather, he says, the New Testament says that people's bodies will be revived before judgement. If he is right, then it seems like the gnostics may have had a role in introducing this distortion, because they hated everything corporeal. On the other hand, Platonism may be the common cause of gnostic and Catholic belief in an immaterial soul.

In Greek, gnosis means direct personal acquaintance, in this case with God. Brakke seems to be a proponent of gnosis in this sense and he kind of obliquely encourages listeners to use gnostic texts for spiritual purposes. If I was a Christian, I would probably find that to be subversive, but it makes for a more engaging teacher on this subject.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a good survey of the Gnostics as an early Christian/Platonic sect and how the Nag Hammadi texts changed our understanding. Christianity in the 100-200s was still pretty fluid as different communities integrated different ideas and reacted to each other. Gnostic influences continue to affect Christian thought: Gnostics created the monastic movement, the mystic tradition, etc.

Memorable bits: 1) explaining suffering and the old-testament God's temper by as a lower, malformed God that only thinks he's the one God 2) the idea that God / the kingdom is already here but found internally 3) the prodigal son / finding the one lost ship are parables about avoiding the distractions of everyday life in the world and concentrating on the one important thing -- finding God. And the Pharisees and Sadducees were two Judaic parties. The former were about adapting the Law/Torah to contemporary situations. They also started the synagogue movement -- being Jewish wherever you happened to be. The Sadducees where the traditional people following all the laws exactly. Being Jewish mean worshiping at the one temple in Jerusalem under the directions of the Levites -- the priestly caste.

[Tretiakov Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, I've learned a lot.
So many different myths and competing ideas have been created and explored in the early centuries of Christianity.
Some of those have echoed through the centuries to the present day.
Braindump and notes:
Gnostysism: the god in the old testament cannot be good=> bad inferior god, but there is a better superior one.
The god cannot be good because he's moody, changes mind, kills people for no reason, etc.
Why wouldn't a good god let Adam eat of the knowledge tree? (Knowledge is gnosysis in Greek)
Gnostic myth is quite complex as compared to Orthodox/Catholic Christianity.
Gospel of Judas was fully transcribed only recently -- past ten years.
Most details about gnostysism have been recently discovered due to archeological finds in Egypt.
Gnostysism has a weird mix with platonism and absolute abstract forms world. Also Plato has talked about Demiurge -- a god that creates the universe, but is not the supreme being.
Caballah myths have parallels with gnostysism.
The book touches on such interesting religions as the one about Hermes Trismegistus-- a combination of Greek and Egyptian gods, though it is separate from gnostysism.

[Anthony Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite the series of lectures. I've read the Nag Hammadi texts, and remember the scholarly commentary on them, but am better informed for having now listened to Brakke contextualize the early Christian/Gnostic era, Irenaeus and his eventual ascension to the father of ideology for ALL of Christianity that lasts until today.

The Gnostics search for knowledge should be what they're remembered for. All religion is truly a search for truth and knowledge, and this makes it part of the same organic growth of the intellectual individual as Science. There's no clean break between the two, and there never has been.

When he veers into Phillip K Dick and the Matrix in his final lecture, Brakke just shows off that he knows his audience.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

These lectures cover more than just straight-up Gnosticism and it’s been a fun and strange ride.

The Gnostic interpretation of the Bible reminds me a little of the Star Trek mirror universe where everything is flipped, and many of the good guys are evil while some of them are still good in oddball ways.

I think if L. Ron Hubbard had read some of these Gnostic writings back in the 1940s, Scientology might have looked a bit different than it does today. I suspect that the Gnostics would have been right at home in the New Age scene back in the 60s and 70s.

Interesting stuff well presented.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview of the beliefs and movements generally put under the umbrella of "Gnosticism," as well as their origins and influence on later, more orthodox versions of Judaism, Christianity, and other belief systems. I actually found the last lecture, on the way these beliefs manifest "in the modern imagination" (in the various "Gnostic" congregations, movies such as The Matrix, and the works of authors such as Philip K. Dick) to be the most interesting, and I would imagine that at least a mini-course could profitably be devoted to this subject.

[James Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of a small group Bible study. It had vast amounts of information that I have never heard before. I always like learning new things and this was great for that. It was not always presented in the most interesting way. But there is only so much you can do with historical data. It is also always reassuring to me, given all of today's division and disagreement on religious matters, to note that it was always this way.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent primer for those interested in the details of various gnostic ideologies, their histories, how they interacted with each other and with other religions, and how they continue to influence thought today. Of particular note are the examinations of non-Christian gnostic schools of thought as well as how various gnostic schools shaped the early Christian church. A bit dense at times, but on the whole quite easy to follow.

[Gregory R · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author presents an in depth overview of the ancient Gnostic traditions. I enjoyed learning about the Valentinian and Manichean traditions especially. The first centuries of the common era had an incredibly rich tradition of literature. It is a shame that so many of those works were lost or destroyed.

[David Abigt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must listen for anyone who calls themselves Christian. This series lays out the evolution of early Christianity with all the various sects, texts left out of the King James bible, and other versions that differ slightly from the King James version. This then gives you greater insight into why certain word choices were made and why some parts of the King James Version seem to conflict.

[Marti Martinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The little text that accompanies the audio CD (or video DVD, if you're richer than myself) is just as engaging as his lectures. Now, of course, I'll have to read the Nag Hammadi texts themselves.....

I need to get Brakke and Ehrman together for a BBQ.

[John Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting and will regularly refer back to this. Audible purchase

[Ions · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating 12 hour deep dive into history, practice, and interpretations of this spiritual belief system.

[Clayton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the gnostic gospels. It was a good summary of what the NT writers had to deal with.

[Zachariah Harde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative!

[Nicolas Hoffmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will say it is remarkable and well explained, but this is the most complex Learning Company class I have yet taken.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. A really good in-depth look at the Gnostic and their belief systems.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating topic. Great lectures.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learning different ideas about Christianity.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn in by the mystery of Gnosticism and the history surrounding heresy. The first few chapters were incredibly interesting, though I do feel that the course was front-loaded, and by about halfway through there was not too much that differed thematically from one chapter to the next.