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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...

Gnostic dualism was distinguished by its absolute, radical character: All matter (the world and the body) is evil and has its source in an evil creator who fell from and betrayed the true God. This lesser, inferior divine being arose through some mysterious tragic split with the ultimate realm (the Pleroma or “fullness”) of the ultimate God, who is often called the Father of All. Some forms of Gnosticism believed that this split in the deity produced an extensive array of intermediary beings (archons,