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GNOSTICISM During the early centuries of Christianity, one of the strongest threats to the development of the new religion was a parallel philosophical-religious movement called Gnosticism. The term is derived from the Greek work gnostikos, meaning "one who knows," in turn based on a word for "knowledge," gnosis. To the Gnostics there were different types of knowledge. The knowledge they claimed to have was not derived from ordinary sources; it was a special knowledge that came only from a divine revelation. It came only to a select number of people, and Jesus Christ was the main source of revelation. Gnosticism is a diverse set of ideas and doctrines that became quite popular throughout the Mediterranean world during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Despite some wide divergence among the many schools, the core belief is that there is in mankind a divine spark that can be awakened by its divine counterpart through the means of revelation. One of the most prominent Gnostic teachers Valentinus taught in the 2nd century that there are three types of human beings: spiritual, psychic, and fleshly. The spiritual are the Gnostics, those who are open to divine revelation and can receive the special knowledge that conveys salvation. Psychic people possess a soul and can, therefore, exercise free will. They can progress upward and become spiritual; if so, they are Christians. Or they can go downward into decay and become fleshly, or material--individuals who have no hope of true knowledge or salvation. According to the teachings of Valentinus, proof of his three classes of people can be found in the collected sayings of Jesus Christ and in the writings of Saint Paul as recorded in the New Testament. Basic to the beliefs of Gnosticism is the conviction that the created, material world is evil. It was not created by the true, good God but was made by a lesser being. Only by escape from the material into the spiritual can there be any salvation. Only such an explanation, the Gnostics believe, explains the presence of evil in the world because the true, good God could not have created anything less than perfect. Because the material body is inferior and evil, the spirit of an individual is dwelling in an alien atmosphere. This belief led the Gnostics to look upon Jesus as a human who received his Christ component, or part, during his lifetime, probably at his baptism. Therefore at his crucifixion he did not die but ascended to God from whom he came. No specific origins of Gnosticism have ever been traced. It probably emerged from a variety of religious and philosophical trends in the Middle East and Greece. Some of its ideas certainly originated with the Greek philosopher Plato. The movement produced a large volume of writings, many of which perished because of opposition from Christians. In 1945 a sizable number of Gnostic texts was discovered in a jar by two men digging in the ground in a cemetery near Nag (or Naj') Hammadi, Egypt. This remarkable find was translated into English and published in 1977 as 'The Nag Hammadi Library'.