The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity.

Significantly, in an article (13) published in 1952 and integrated into subsequent editions of his book, he presents it as a more optimistic version of existentialism, arguing that the gnostics believed that there was a way to escape from the pointlessness and falsity of life as we know it and access transcendence.

"Gnostics think that their explanations can make the entirety of the faith and the Gospel perfectly comprehensible," explains Francis.

Chapters discuss practices of baptism by Gnostics and Sethians; the beliefs of Gnostics, Sethians, and Valentinians; and the relation in philosophy and chronology of Gnosticism and Sethianism with Judaism and Christianity.

Modernity, and the Pursuit of the Sacred: Gnostics, Scholars, Mystics, and Reformers.

Some Christian Gnostics believed that through some secret gnosis, by some revealed knowledge humans could transform the earthly, perishable, passive and sense-perceptible elements in their make-up and become heavenly, rational, eternal beings.

Taking the Gnostics seriously in their claims about Jesus marrying would be like allowing the organisers of the Gay Pride movement to write the official history of the Catholic Church.

of Nebraska at Lincoln), this festschrift includes significant work on the interaction between Greek philosophers and Gnostics in late antiquity.

Plotinus in Dialogue with the Gnostics. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition, vol.

Burroughs's myth is clearly in the tradition of the Gnostics, whose chief modus operandi seems to have been to rewrite (even to unwrite) Western mythic conceptions of our ultimate beginnings and endings.