LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Gnosticism: Scholars
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For the past twenty-five years... the trend of scholarship has steadily moved towards proving the pre-Christian Oriental origins of Gnosticism. At the Fifth Congress of Orientalists (Berlin, 1882) Kessler brought out the connection between Gnosis and the Babylonian religion. By this latter name, however, he meant not the original religion of Babylonia, but the syncretistic religion which arose after the conquest of Cyrus. The same idea is brought out in his "Mani" seven years later. In the same year F.W. Brandt published his "Mandiäische Religion". This Mandaean religion is so unmistakably a form of Gnosticism that it seems beyond doubt that Gnosticism existed independent of, and anterior to, Christianity.
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The earliest scholars (who are no longer cited) regarded Gnosticism in the broad sense as a monumental spiritual movement of Asiatic origins, long predating Christianity. There is now a slight tendency to return to this view. See, for instance, the Introduction by James Robinson in NHLE 1990: “This debate seems to be resolving in favor of understanding Gnosticism as a much broader phenomenon than the Christian Gnosticism documented by the heresiologists.” Most scholars writing today... insist that Gnosticism was the mystical philosophy shared by a loose confederation of cults that sprang up between 50 and 350 CE in the milieu of early Christianity. In this view, Gnosticism was a marginal and even parasitic movement that only existed in response to genuine religious impulse of Christianity.
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Sitting in the living room of her home in suburban Boston, Ms. King passionately insists that "Gnosticism" needs to go if scholars want to paint a more diverse and authentic picture of early Christianity. Yet she acknowledges the strength of the current against which she and others are swimming.
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