[Sethomas]

My main problem with gnostics is that they were intellectual parasites. They'd pick up on some religion and re-interpret it within their agenda, then market the result as the original. Kind of like how if people don't like the original Superman comics, they can pick up on one of half a dozen spin-off series that suits them better. I dunno, I never got into comic books. One form of gnosticism tried to bait the Jewish people with the idea that Seth should be worshipped as the father of the human race because Adam gave us Original Sin. This is not to say that the Jews condoned or practiced worship of ANY human beings. This was particularly annoying for Christianity, which had to deal with the gnostics writing apocryphal "gospels" every year that were passed off as being genuine. Most people assume that gnostics were a sizable voice in the early Christian community that were simply deleted by medieval popes, but if you look at the historical record it's quite clear that they were never taken seriously.

Take the Gospel of Judas. The record of the Passion in the synoptic Gospels, which long predates any extant or alluded copy of the Gospel of Judas, has Christ referencing his betrayer (I believe in a conversation with Pilate, I'd have to check) as saying "It would have been better for that man never to have been born at all." Pretty clear, right? Well, the gnostics thought that Jesus could use some spicening up with a flair of Stoicism, so they have Him tell Judas before the Last Supper that he's just fulfilling his role in history and will be glorified for it. Apparently, the gnostics thought it would be an improvement in Christ's character to paint Him as a duplicitous asshole.

This is to say nothing of the integrity in writing "gospels" under the names of famous figures long after their deaths. Exemplia gratia, the Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene along with countless others.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the American public is so intoxicated by Dan Brown's rewriting of history. Superfluous archeological finds such as this one are SHOCKING because they escaped the BOOK BURNINGS of the early CATHOLICS. Oh, and there's TEMPLARS in there somewhere, too! LEONARDO! Mr Brown, I do believe you neglected to give GHENGIS KHAN his fair due in the story. Except for the fact that synopsis, if not the entire texts, could be found in copious literary tracts for the vast majority of apocryphal texts even before the twentieth century, let alone before the Nag Hammadi Codices were discovered. (Remember when the movie Stigmata talked about how the Church supressed those findings of a "new gospel"?) Saying that the early Church burned gnostic texts is like saying that the unavailability of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in contemporary bookstores is due to a vast Jewish conspiracy.