Today’s foremost authority on this lost tradition is Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels. Her definition of gnosis from 1979 remains the best: The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis. As the Gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they [the Gnostics] claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny … to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to
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