Not sure why I care so much, but the bumpkins over at The Orthosphere keep deleting my rebuttal to a half-assed post they made on Gnosticism. A thread. Original article: https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2020/01/02/stuart-holroyd-gnosticism-the-occult-wave-part-ii/?unapproved=140968&moderation-hash=eb548a07d9d65773cf43d0b185595e1e#comment-140968

It's interesting that these modes of denunciation never really delve into the wide variety of work found in the Nag Hammadi library. I think this tactic began with Irenaeus and the early church.

As many good scholars (not the popularizers like Pagels and King), such as Mark Edwards (Oxford), Einar Thomassen, and David Brakke have argued, late antique characterizations of the Gnostics almost all come from detractors and denouncers who did not fully understand the range

of theological complexity in the texts themselves. It's easy to make fun of the Gnostics when you have people (whether Irenaeus or Pagels, from different ends of the ideological spectrum) framing the discussion in bad ways. Mark Edwards has been especially useful in showing that

the catalyst for orthodox Christianity was gnostic theology (indeed many so-called gnostic elements are repackaged in the NT). Scholars like Cyril O'Regan insist on gatekeeping when they speak in grandiose terms of "gnostic revivals" in modernity and postmodernity, as if

gnosticism was a recessive gene that manifested various unfortunate characteristics in certain thought systems. No, in reality the Gnostics (or at least many of them) shared with the Hermeticists and the (Neo)Platonists a suspicion that something was fundamentally wrong with