The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

by Robert L. Wilken

Gnostics drew widely on the writings that became part of the New Testament, and toward the end of the second century Heracleon, a gnostic thinker, wrote the first commentary on the Gospel of John. Their works display a deep spiritual yearning expressed at times with poetic beauty and religious imagination. Yet when one takes up a gnostic treatise—and many are now available to us—one senses a different spirit at work in them from other Christian writings. Their authors dismember the biblical narrative, and the words of the New Testament are scrambled in strange and confusing patterns, shrouded in clouds of abstractions and unchecked astral speculations. Though their ideas seem original, they are not profound, and their mysteries, often alluring, are merely recondite.