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| WHO WERE THE GNOSTICS? |
| A dangerous cult that proved fatally attractive. |
| This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. 4:2 |
| As Christianity spread across the Mediterranean, it came into contact with other religions. Greeks and Romans tried to absorb the faith into their own philosophies, just as some Jews had initially. Intellectual centers of the Mediterranean raised questions about Jesus: Who was he? If he was God, how could he die? And a popular new cult called Gnosticism (from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis) gained ground in an attempt to explain these things. The cult thrived especially among the intellectual elite. Could God Have a Body? Gnostics balked at the Christian concept of God's becoming a man. Because they believed a physical body was intrinsically evil, they denied that a pure God could take on a body. Some dealt with the problem by claiming that Jesus was never a real human being, but a phantom, a temporary appearance of God who only looked human. Others proposed that God had "descended" on Jesus at his baptism, but left him before his death. The apostle John debated in person with Gnostics of his day, and he had Gnostic thinking in mind when he wrote this letter. The very first sentence expressly states that the author has seen, heard, and touched Jesus - implying he could not have been a phantom, or pure spirit. Throughout the letter, and especially in 4:2-3, the author lambastes those who deny that Jesus came in the flesh. Live As You Please To Gnostics, all matter was evil. Only the spirit was pure, and Gnostics sought to rise to a higher, more spiritual plane. This teaching often produced a side effect: people who |