Encyclopedia of Philosophy: CHRISTIANITY AND GNOSTICISM ?

In the second and third centuries Christianity, now organized into a disciplined Church, spread across the Roman Empire. It took hold mainly in the cities, in communities presided over by bishops: the Christian word for non-Christians, ‘pagan’, was originally just the Latin word for a countryman. During this period  Christian attitudes to philosophy varied. Some of the early Christian writers, such as Justin Martyr, a convert to the new religion from Platonism, used texts from Plato’s dialogues to Christian purposes, claiming that Plato had been influenced by the Hebrew Bible. Others, such as the African writer Tertullian, claimed that Athens and Jerusalem had nothing in common, and condemned all attempts to produce a Stoic, Platonic, or dialectical Christianity.  Orthodox Christian theologians in the second century, however, were engaged in battle less with hostile systems of pagan philosophy than with groups within the Church who devised heady mixtures of Platonic cosmology, Jewish prophecy, Christian theology, and Oriental mystery-mongering. Whereas both Jesus and Paul had preached a message that was available to the poor and unlearned no less than to scholarly rabbis or erudite philosophers, the members of these groups, known collectively as Gnostics, claimed to be in possession of special mysterious knowledge (‘Gnosis’) which had been handed down in secret by the first apostles and which set its possessors in a privileged position apart from the simple faithful.