2,000 Years of Christ's Power Vol. 1: The Age of the Early Church Fathers

by Nick R. Needham

If Gnostics rejected the Old Testament and Judaism, they had a more positive attitude to Christianity. They made use of some New Testament books, especially John’s Gospel, alongside their own Scriptures. Christianity, they said, teaches how the supreme God sent Christ into the world to save a special group of elect souls from the tyranny of the Demiurge and from the misery of existing in the world of space, time and matter. Christ was not God in person, but one of an exalted rank of spiritual beings called aeons; Christ was the greatest of these beings. Since physical matter was evil, Christ the Redeemer could have had no contact with it. Some Gnostics taught that the Christ descended on the man Jesus at His baptism, possessed Him, spoke through Him, and left Him at His crucifixion; others taught that Jesus was not a human being at all – He only seemed to have a body of flesh, but in reality He was a purely spiritual, heavenly being. Gnostics interpreted Christ as the “Heavenly Revealer” who had come down from the spirit-world to give the elect the true knowledge of the way home. For Gnostics, humanity’s great problem was not sin; the problem was our ignorance of our true spiritual nature and destiny. Christ solved this problem by giving us back the lost knowledge of who and what we really are, and where we belong.