Gnosticism. Analysis and understanding of Codex VI

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject Theology - Biblical Theology, grade: A, , language: English, abstract: According to John W. Drane, in his Journal, "Gnosticism and the New Testament 2", John writes asserting that over the last seventy years or so, three considerations have been taken up in dealing with the question of Gnosticism and the New Testament referred to as 'The classical theory', 'Pre-Christian Gnosticism' and 'A simultaneous development'. The classical theory terming 'Gnosticism as a Christian heresy'.

The Church Fathers engaged in the fight to keep the Catholic Church of the early centuries free from heresy, assuming that the catholic faith was the original form of Christianity and any departure must have come in later, which could have been based on a perversion of orthodox Christian belief. From aforesaid, it was self-evident that Gnosticism was based on catholic Christianity, and constituted a deviation from the true faith.

From the time of the Fathers until the rise of scientific biblical criticism towards the close of the nineteenth century, interpreters had more or less claimed that Gnosticism was a perversion of the true Christian gospel, beginning sometime in the second century AD, and that a fairly clear line of development could be tracked from those elements of Docetic teaching opposed in such New Testament writings as 1 John to the developed Gnostic heresies. The arrival of a scientific approach to biblical history dealt what must be considered as a death-blow to this theory of Gnostic origins, though it was not without a counter-attack that this was accomplished.