Christian Gnosticism

The word Gnostic, which practices and / or live Gnosticism, is from the family of the Greek word "gnosis" which means 'knowledge'.

A Gnostic is therefore the one who acquires special knowledge about a given subject, and lives by it.

So far there is nothing pejorative that can be associated with Gnosticism and the Gnostics.

During the period of the Church Fathers, Gnosticism was associated with the knowledge of Jesus Christ obtained by faith.

From this association is that related to Gnosticism something pejorative, by the hand of those same Fathers of the Church between the centuries II and IV.

The first to make this association was Irenaeus, who sees Gnosticism as the origin of the heresy of Simon the Samaritan, who allegedly spread to Alexandria, Asia Minor and Rome, obtaining a significant number of followers of great concern to the Church hierarchy .

Irenaeus continues stating that the Valentinians, a group that he is fighting directlyderived from this group of heretics.

According to this Doctor of the Church, as all members of these groups want to be masters, eventually separating from the group that joined and set up another, saying that they are holding the original knowledge and discovered the whole doctrine alone that, he said, if limited to recompile.

From all the work of St. Irenaeus and other Fathers in combating Gnosticism

is possible know the big number of groups that existed and the diversity of principles and doctrines.

At the same compared to the library works, considered heretical by the church, discovered in Nag Hamadi: each has its own heretical direction.

One of the groups more popular, as already stated, were the Valentinian Gnostics, which were the most attacked not only by St. Irenaeus and throughout the Catholic Church which accused them, despite having the same scripture that the Catholic Church, they interpreted them differently (and therefore wrong for the Church).

Despite all the differences between them (about the identity of the creator-god, on theperson and mission of Jesus Christ), a common doctrine of the Gnostics caused chills to the hierarchy of the Church: the fact that For Gnostics, every human being have withinthemselves a divine spark, and the knowledge of God and salvation only is obtained through knowledge of themselves.

Moreover, Christ's mission was to awaken the man who held the knowledge inside, and only spiritual men are destined for salvation.

Given this, all the authority of the clergy and much of the teachings of the Church were seen as unnecessary. Of course the answer of the Church was fighting fiercely Gnosticism, giving reasons in the Bible to the falsity of his teachings.

But is it anyway? Does not the Church that has distorted what the Bible says? And how does  the Church sought to eliminate them was the most christian correct?