Gnosticism and the History of Religions

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 was essentialised into a <i>sui generis</i> universal category of religion. At the same time it shows how Gnosticism became a religious self-identifier with a number of sizable contemporary groups identifying as Gnostics today drawing on the same discourses.<br/> <br/> This book provides a history of this problematic category and its relationship with scholarly and popular discourse on religion in the twentieth century.<i></i>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 scholarship drawing from continental phenomenology Jungian psychology and post-Holocaust theology to be constructed as a perennial religious current based on special knowledge of the divine in a corrupt world.<br/><br/>David G. Robertson challenges how scholars interact with the category Gnosticism and contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between primary sources academics and practitioners in category formation.