The End of Gnosticism?

http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i35/35a01801.htm

A well-informed article on the issue of Gnosticism as an academic category. "

Mr. Ehrman, of North Carolina, also believes the term is useful. "We talk about 'Christianity,' 'Judaism,' and 'apocalypticism,'" he points out, "even though there are many varieties of each."

While he does not agree with Mr. Williams's critique of the term, Mr. Ehrman does share his colleague's desire to plot out what links these texts together. "One of the things historians do in trying to understand the past is to try to find and understand commonalities," says Mr. Ehrman. "Religious historians group things together based on shared beliefs and practices. When we say 'Jew,' we mean something by it. ... A lot of these terms are slippery, but when there are enough similarities, they are shared enough that you can label them."

Doing away with "Gnosticism" entirely, he concludes, "would be to fragment our knowledge to such an extent that we can't know what we're talking about.""

Plus the transcript of a discussion with Karen King on the same subject,
http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2006/05/gnostic/
" Docetism (the view that Jesus only seemed to have a body but never really suffered or died) represents a charge of heresy that would apply to some of these new texts (notably the Apocalypse of Peter) but not others. Rather than start from the heresiologists' definition of what the central issue is, I am suggesting that we ask what was at stake in such issues. Here we see 1) different deployments of body symbolism to do different kinds of theological work (for example in the Secret Revelation of John); 2) the question about Jesus' body was fundamentally a question about what it means to be human: Are we soul and spirit-infused flesh? Or are we immortal spirit-infused souls whose fleshly bodies will decay at death? The question of genre arises because of the fluidity of early Christian literary experimentation."