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Christianity and Gnosticism both flourished during the unraveling of the Roman Empire, but dealt with this era of upheaval in different ways. The more optimistic Christians came to terms with the secular world; they embraced the belief that God had become incarnate on earth in the person of Jesus Christ, as well as the Jewish idea of a "good" creation. It was the world-hating Gnostics, says Robinson, who "expressed most clearly the mood of defeatism and despair that swept the ancient world."
The true God, the Gnostics reasoned, could not have created anything so despicable as the material world. Another supreme being emerges in Gnostic tracts: an abstract figure who embodies absolute truth and light and rules an invisible, heavenly realm. The lowest being in this realm is a woman, Sophia (Greek for wisdom), who offends the supreme being by producing a child without a mate; her offspring, a malevolent false god named Yaldabaoth, created the material world. He is thus an evil parody of the Old Testament creator revered by Jews and Christians.
Tree Secrets. Other elements of the Bible are similarly warped in the Gnostic scriptures. For example, the Gnostics viewed the serpent of the Garden of Eden as a hero rather than a villain, because he helped reveal the secrets of the Tree of Knowledge that Yaldabaoth had jealously kept from Adam and Eve. Yaldabaoth, working in league with Noah, tried to exterminate the knowledge-seeking Gnostics with a worldwide flood. Later on, he attacked them with brimstone when they sought refuge in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Gnostics believed that a spark of divine Light was imprisoned in some men's bodies, and that redemption meant union with the supreme being through possession of the mystical, Zen-Like gnosis; a Gnostic could thus achieve gnosis and partial redemption long before corporeal death. The Gnostic creed left no room for the Christian belief in redemption through Christ's atonement on the cross for the sins of mankind. In fact, Nag Hammadi texts depict a Jesus who did not die on the cross at all. In their version, Simon of Cyrene carried the cross to Golgotha and—by ghoulish accident—was crucified in Christ's place while Jesus looked down from above and laughed. The Nag Hammadi texts were packed away 16 centuries ago, perhaps to protect them from book-burning Christian opponents. The texts, rediscovered in 1945 or 1946, were probably hidden in a large jar in a mountainside tomb outside Nag Hammadi. Most of them ended up in Cairo's Coptic Museum. Yet because of scholarly rivalries and unsettled political conditions in Egypt, no comprehensive study of the entire find was undertaken until 1970, after Presbyterian Robinson, director of Claremont (Calif.) Graduate School's Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, got UNESCO to assemble a team for the painstaking process of piecing together and editing the 1,191 surviving pages. The first of eleven volumes of an English translation appeared earlier this year.