Where exactly do mainstream Christians and Gnostics part ways?
Where it comes to what is considered salvific, or what saves. We don’t proselytize. There’s no belief that coming to us you’ll be immediately saved and by not coming to us that you’ll be lost. Gnosticism has often been described as “salvation through knowledge,” but Gnosis doesn’t mean knowledge of particular data. Rather, it’s an inner “knowingness,” a change of consciousness. Salvation through the death and suffering of Jesus is not part of our thought. What is the place of Jesus in Gnostic tradition? The Gnostics have held that there are always messengers of light who come from the inner worlds as archetypes of transformation, though many feel that Jesus was perhaps the latest and the greatest of these. However, you’ll have no difficulty finding experiences resembling gnosis within other religious contexts–the samadhi of the yogis, the nirvana of the Buddhists, satori within Zen Buddhism. How would you explain the revived interest in Gnostic thought? I believe there are two reasons
