2021/08/20 by David Robertson · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies #Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices #Biblical Studies and Interpretation
paper · doi:10.5040/9781350137721
openalex publication_date 2021/08/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Gnosticism, as a category in religious studies - and public discourse - is inexorably entangled with the phenomenological ‘History of Religions’ school. Building on critical work in biblical studies, which shows how a historically-bounded heretical tradition called Gnosticism was ‘invented’, this work focuses on the following stage in which it is ‘essentialised’ into a sui generis, universal category of religion. At the same time, Gnosticism became a religious self-identifier, with a number of sizable contemporary groups identifying as Gnostics today, drawing on the same discourses. This book provides a history of this problematic category, and its relationship with scholarly and popular discourse on religion in the twentieth century. It uses a critical-historical method to show how and why Gnosis, Gnostic and Gnosticism were taken up by specific groups and individuals - practitioners and scholars - at different times. It shows how ideas about Gnosticism developed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century