It seems to be unavoidable. After writing that gnosticism was such a difficult category that it is almost pointless, and that both the detractors and the fans of the Thomas gospel have applied this label to it at times, which only obfuscates things and never helps, nevertheless I received consumer complaints asking: but what IS gnosticism? I resisted. I explained, the point of the post was that it's a useless category. To no avail. So hereby I will try my hand at providing a somewhat useful operating definition of gnosticism.
For one thing, in order to be fair, if you follow e.g. Bart Ehrman in his book Lost Chrsitianities, you would understand that in the years immediately post Jesus, and before Christianity began to congeal in the 4th century (Nicea, the canon, etc), during which time Christians began to aggressively wipe out everyone who disagreed with them and their literatures, there may have been as many as 25,000 varieties of "Christian" belief. The appearance of unity that was created by Nicea, was really only an appearance, not a fact. The same illusion of one Christian religion then was powerfully reinforced when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, although it would not take too long before things started to fall apart again into the Roman and the Greek orthodox portion. And the rest we know. It is still a mess today.
One of the main lines of argument from the early centuries concerned the notions of can we know God directly, and the Greek word for "knowledge" is gnosis. This sort of knowledge is talked about in some text as clearly an inner knowing, not a discrete knowledge of facts. Generally the sects who employ this type of a concept were collectively described of gnostics. You could broadly call them: those who believe direct knowledge of God is possible. The other group, which became Christianity, and for which Paul was the main cheerleader, believed we were miserable sinners, or as he calls it adopted children, with Jesus being made into God's son exclusively, and very different from us, as a magical saviour who saves us vicariously, i.e. he stands in for us: he dies, we get saved. Since in the thinking of this group he does die, and we must wait till he comes back to save us, we now need something to tide us over, and handle our communications with God. This is the logic that leads to the idea of the Pope as God's representative on earth, he is the Vicar of Christ, until the latter comes back, and of course they secretly hope he never does, for then they're out of a job. More generally of course the priesthood is then the intermediary between God and us, and we don't get to have his phone number.
This is the basic distinction: gnostic say you can reach God directly, and Christians say you can't, you're a miserable sinner, etc. etcs. The more the Christians won, the more they put down the gnostics as heretics, and since they burned just about all of the gnostic literature, for a long time we knew very little about them, except for the famous bishop Irenaeus of Lyons at the end of the 2nd century, who described all the outrageous gnostic beliefs in his book Adversus Haereses. So in a lot of ways, Irenaeus became for a long time the pre-eminent source on gnosticism, since he described the teachings of many gnostic teachers in detail. So he did more to preserve it by trying to be so thorough and efficient in wiping them out. By now of course many documents have been found again.
Gnosticism has too many varieties to be useful as a category, for even the very word gnosis itself gets different interpretations in different sects, and this is the reason why the usefulness of the category is dubious. For one thing for some gnostics the term gnosis begins to mean some discrete secret knowledge which has to be passed down, very much in the sense of the kabbalistic tradition. This latter usage is a special meaning, and not the original meaning of the term as Yeshua tends to use it. To the early Christians the name "gnostic," certainly post Irenaeus, became an epithet. The Thomas gospel was found with a collection of clearly gnostic documents, and lo and behold there are a few sayings in the Thomas collection where Yeshua uses the word "know" in a way that is reminiscent of some gnostic usage. Therefore this now results in the term gnostic being applied to the Thomas sayings both by fans and by detractors, and I'm arguing for simplicity. My view is just listen to the sayings as they sound. Believe you me, Yeshua stood out from the crowd, and he was speaking in very direct straightforward language. Therefore to think that we are explaining his teachings by framing them in the concepts of some second stringers, does it a disservice. By applying the label, you rob the sayings of their direct impact.
In conclusion then, I come back to my original argument, the Thomas sayings are direct, and straightforward. We need to read them as if Jesus is speaking to us directly. Just imagine yourself hanging out with him in Palestine 2000 years ago. You're in the crowd, and you've written down these things you hear him say, and you come home, and you go Wow! I gotta think about that... but you go back for more and after a while you have this little notebook of sayings. That little notebook is the Thomas gospel. Trust me, we were there, you and me both.
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