The Nag Hammadi texts, containing the Gnostic Gospels, were found in Egypt in 1945. These codices were compiled in the 4th century AD, but the gospels themselves date to the 2nd century AD. The Gnostic teachings are quite different from those of the orthodoxy. The Gnostics had an egalitarian approach to the sexes. Sex itself was held a sacrament, and Jesus himself had a consort in Mary Magdalene. All this points to one of the most fundamental differences of Gnosticism to the Orthodox Christianity, which snuffed it out: God is ultimately male and female.

A second major difference is the consideration of the scriptures themselves. They were stories, and a fundamentalist interpretation of them was impossible. The very same sect of Gnostics could embrace books that gave two different accounts of the same thing. This was possible because the Gnostics were storytellers, not metaphysical historians. The truth was not in the stories, but in the goal of the stories, which was a direct experience of the divine, or higher spiritual states.

This leads us into the most important major difference between the Gnostics and the Orthodoxy; the Gnostics believed the journey to God was a journey within. The connection to divinity was present in the individual, not an exterior church.

It is easy to see why Gnosticism was not popular with the emerging Holy Roman Empire during the 4th century. If the church was to retain power, if Rome was to remain an empire in any way, it had to be necessary as a bridge to the divine. Pagles shows how the establishment of what became Catholicism was politically, rather than divinely, inspired. A must read for anyone interested in early Christianity.