Word: gnostic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Today Gnosticism is the object of renewed interest among scholars, owing largely to the publication of a remarkable library of Gnostic scriptures. Known as the Nag Hammadi Codices, for the town in southern Egypt near the site of their discovery, the library consists of twelve 4th century papyrus books containing 52 texts that are thought to have been translated from the original Greek into Egypt's ancient Coptic language. Many scholars believe that it will become as important to understanding the early Christian era as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the library of a Jewish Essene community that was discovered...
...case, it was largely the threat posed by the Gnostics that forced the early Christian church to codify its beliefs and fix the list of authoritative Bible books. As orthodoxy won out, Gnostic scriptures were destroyed, and for centuries the religion was known chiefly from church attacks against...
...true God, the Gnostics reasoned, could not have created anything so despicable as the material world. Another supreme being emerges in Gnostic tracts: an abstract figure who embodies absolute truth and light and rules an invisible, heavenly realm. The lowest being in this realm is a woman, Sophia (Greek for wisdom), who offends the supreme being by producing a child without a mate; her offspring, a malevolent false god named Yaldabaoth, created the material world. He is thus an evil parody of the Old Testament creator revered by Jews and Christians...
...Piers the ancient Gnostic beliefs became central. With a scholar friend, he linked the Gnostics' world-scorning pessimism with the still mysterious downfall of the Knights Templar. The Templars flourished as a chivalric order during the Crusades, eventually becoming one of the strong est financial, military and political forces in Europe, only to be swept away abruptly in the 14th century by the Inquisition on unconvincing charges of heresy and sexual deviation...
...theory advanced in Durrell's book is that the Templars were crushed because they had become Gnostics, and the implication is left in the air that they allowed themselves to be destroyed as an act of mass suicide. It is clear, at least, that Piers' own death was a Gnostic turning-away...