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

by Nick R. Needham

3 The material world, Gnostics taught, had not been created by the supreme God, but by an inferior and foolish being called the Demiurge (Greek for “architect”). They identified the Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament, and therefore regarded the Old Testament as an evil and unspiritual book. The supreme God and the physical universe were completely alien to each other. The human body was part of this evil material world; salvation meant escaping from the body, and from the world of space and time in which the body holds us prisoner (there was no place for a physical resurrection in the Gnostic scheme). Gnostics had a totally negative attitude to all physical activities, particularly sex which they abstained from. The only thing of any value was the soul, which was a divine spark from the spiritual world, trapped inside the body by the wicked Demiurge.