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Christian History Magazine—Issue 96: The Gnostic Hunger for Secret Knowledge is unavailable, but you can change that!

The Gnostics called themselves “enlightened.” The early church called them heretics. In recent years the early church has become a subject of public debate and an enormous amount of confusion. Gone are the days when the average Christian can get away with not knowing about the Gnostics, the early church’s Rule of Faith, or how the biblical canon developed. In this issue the editors lay out the...

However, there is substantial indirect evidence that the movement pre-dated Christianity (for example, an early tradition says that Simon Magus, mentioned in Acts 8, was the “father” of Gnosticism). It may have originated in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first century B.C. as an aberrant form of Judaism, combined with certain ideas about divine reality drawn from the Platonism of the time (which had developed beyond the philosophical ideas of Plato). This movement then found its “home” in early Christianity,