I. As the first century drew to a close there were those who gave interpretations of Jesus that were different from
what the apostles had taught about Him.
A. He was only a spirit.
B. He was a teacher with the spirit of God in him.
C. Christians were determined to maintain the true teachings that had come from the apostles.
D. The bishops were most clearly able to trace what they taught back to one or more apostle.
II. Gnostics rejected many of the writings of the apostles and the entire Old Testament.
A. They deny that Jesus was human. He only appeared to be.
B. They claim that Jesus had given secret information to a select few apostles. Salvation consists of
learning these secrets.
C. Some scholars consider Simon Magus in Acts 8 to show some early Gnostic elements.
D. There were many Gnostic groups and they often disagreed with each other.
E. Gnostics gospels claim to have been written by an apostle.
1. The Gospel of Thomas was popular among many Gnostic groups. Second century Church
leaders show that it could not possibly have been written by Thomas.
2. Other Gnostic gospels claim to have come from others including Mary Magdalene.
F. Gnostics picked up the dualism of Plato which claims a complete separation of the material and
spiritual worlds.
1. The Gnostics add to Plato the idea that the material world is evil; all matter is evil.
2. The world was created by an evil creator. This evil creator is the God of the Old Testament.
3. The physical body traps the human spirit in this material world.
4. Since the physical body is evil and Christ is good, he could not have been human.
5. The apostle John responded to some early Gnostic ideas in his first epistle: see 1John 4:2.
6. Christian writers affirmed the humanity of Jesus along with his eternal divinity and his physical
(not spiritual) resurrection.
III. In 1945 an Arab peasant found a jar at the bottom of a cliff near the town of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt.
A. It was full of Gnostic writings, many had been referred to by church fathers, but there were no
surviving copies. Some had never been seen before.
B. The most famous of these was the Gospel of Thomas.
IV. Another of Gnostic writings is the Berlin Gnostic Codes discovered in 1896.
A. These were not published until 1955.
B. The Gospels of Mary and of Judas come from this collection. Judas was not published until 2006.
V. In the early centuries Church leaders considered Gnosticism a serious threat.
A. Some scholars once said that early Christians twisted what the Gnostics taught, but with these
discoveries we can see that the Church leaders were very accurate in quoting what Gnostics believed.
B. Gnosticism taught that there was an eternal spirit within humans. This negates the Holy Spirit which is
a gift from God to us.
C. Gnostic writers make the villains of the Bible into heroes and heroes into villains.
1. The serpent in Genesis is a hero.
2. The God who deals with sin in Genesis is an evil and inferior creator.
D. Darrell Bock of Tubingen University in Germany has called Gnosticism Plato’s philosophy run wild.
E. We should note that there was never a Gnostic Church. There were schools which taught Gnosticism.
VI. Different Gnostic groups responded to the teachings in different ways.
A. The evil of the human body led some to asceticism.
B. Denial of the importance of the body led others to say it doesn’t matter how we live, so they became
immoral indulgers of the body.
C. To them martyrdom was silly. To die rather than deny the Lord had no value to it.
D. Some sects put women in a special place.
1. The Gospel of Mary has Mary Magdalene as the special recipient of Jesus’ revelation—to the
disgust of Peter.
2. There is widespread use of female sexual imagery in many Gnostic writings.
3. There is no evidence that Gnostics gave women a new respect. In fact it was Christianity which
did this.
VII. Bart Ehrman of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill sees orthodox Christianity as the winner in a great
competition for faith, and they, he claims, are the ones who write the history.
A. He cites how it is provable that early writings were changed by later Christians, so we don’t know
what the original writers of scripture wrote.
B. Later writers, he says, changed the scripture to suit their own theology, and he lists hundreds of
changes that were made over 1500 years.
C. What he fails to mention is that the vast majority of these are clerical errors that do not change any
meaning.
D. Some changes seem to have some substance, but again he fails to tell that modern textual criticism can make
use of earlier texts and correct these, and they are in most modern Bibles.
E. However some textual problems are not easily resolved. However, none of them jeopardizes a single
important teaching of the New Testament.
F. Timothy Paul Jones, a seminary professor, and currently pastor of First Baptist Church in Tulsa, OK,
has responded to every one of Ehrman’s assertions point by point in his book, Misquoting Truth.
VIII. It was very important to early Christians to keep the writings of the apostles.
A. They maintained libraries before there were church buildings.
B. Early Christians themselves referred to some sloppy copies, but they corrected them.
C. The vast majority of the apparent changes in scripture are insignificant.
D. Scholars today by comparing texts with each other (textual criticism) can usually discover when and
where changes were made and correct them.
E. Copyists were very concerned with preserving the words of scripture, and show no evidence of
promoting a personal agenda.
F. The bishops (whom Ehrman identifies as the ones who made changes) almost never made copies. There
were Church copyists who did this.
G. If Bishops had a plot to change scripture one might ask why then were changes so insignificant, and if
they did make changes on purpose, how did they get everyone all over the Christian world to agree to
them?
IX. Ehrman tries to impose on early Christianity a 21st century mind set that claims there is no certainty about God’s
truth and that all faiths are equally valid and must be accepted by all as truth.