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Updated: May 15, 2025
Again, if the gospels had not been written by these reputed authors, nor in the time that the evangelists lived, but some time after the destruction of Jerusalem, and these had been fabricated by designing men, they would certainly have been exposed as a fraud by the Gnostics who held many opinions so very contrary to the scriptures of the New Testament.
This was the attitude not only of the proud Stoic, but of certain kindred Jewish sects, which were subject to Greek influences, such as the Gnostics and the Cainites.
Mr Mead, in his introductory remarks, summarizes the evidence as follows: "The claim of these Gnostics was practically that Christianity, or rather the Good News of The Christ, was precisely the consummation of the inner doctrine of the Mystery-institutions of all the nations: the end of them all was the revelation of the Mystery of Man."
Hence the Gnostics attached little importance to the means of mercy in the Church, to the Bible, or the sacraments; they allowed the Church teaching to exist as a necessary conception for the people, but they placed their own teachings far above it as mysterious or secret teachings. As regards their morals and mode of life, the Gnostics generally went to extremes.
The extensive sect, or sects, of the gnostics contained in its teachings elements that at least paved the way for the conduct with which other Christians charged them, although the charges made may not have been true of all.
He has left an Address to the Gentiles, a treatise on Christian behaviour called Pedagogus, and eight books of Stromata, or collections, which he wrote to describe the perfect Christian or Gnostic, to furnish the believer with a model for his imitation, and to save him from being led astray by the sects of Gnostics "falsely so called."
He was particularly hard upon the Gnostics and Marcionites of the second century of the Christian era; but he never, in the remotest manner, attacked the everyday vices of the nineteenth century, as eminently illustrated in our man-of-war world. Concerning drunkenness, fighting, flogging, and oppression things expressly or impliedly prohibited by Christianity he never said aught.
Of this country was Simon, the reputed patriarch of the Gnostics; and he is introduced in the Acts of the Apostles as professing those magical powers which were so principal a characteristic of the oriental mysteries. His heresy, though broken into a multitude of sects, was poured over the world with a catholicity not inferior in its day to that of Christianity. St.
And did not the Apostle John live to see the germs of incipient gnosticism showing themselves in the church, assuming, like modern Christian science, that all evil is in matter, the soul is immaculate, and some Gnostics even believing that it was possible to have fellowship with God while living in all kinds of sensual indulgence and licentiousness, and moreover denying the reality of the incarnation of Christ, as also of the crucifixion and resurrection?
Commenting on Irenæus, who in his work Against Heresies lays much stress on the existence of an Apostolic Tradition in the Church, the Cardinal writes: "He then proceeds to speak of the clearness and cogency of the traditions preserved in the Church, as containing that true wisdom of the perfect, of which S. Paul speaks, and to which the Gnostics pretended.
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