The Gnostic Gospels

Christianity began with a traveling Jewish teacher who would become known as Jesus Christ (“Christ” being a Greek title, meaning “anointed one”) and his 12 disciples, the Apostles, who were also all Jewish. Jesus was put on trial and executed under charges that he was trying to provoke a revolt among the Jewish people against their rulers, the Roman Empire. His disciples believed that after he was buried, Jesus returned, not as a spirit but as a resurrected human being with a physical body. Right away, there were divisions between Jesus’s followers. Under the guidance of Jesus’s brother, James, some Christians continued following Jewish practices, while other Christians, led by an early Jewish convert named Paul, increasingly eschewed Jewish customs and religious restrictions. As Paul’s views won out, Christianity would over time further separate itself from Judaism and become its own religion with core claims seen as incompatible with mainstream Judaism, such as the belief that Jesus was a human incarnation of God.

Writings that would become important to all Christians—even those, like the gnostics, who were later deemed “heretical”—included the four Gospels, biographies of Jesus that tradition claimed were written by four of the Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and letters written to early Christian communities by Paul.