“They strove for the Knowledge of God, the Science of Realities, the Gnosis of the Things-that-are; wisdom was their goal; the holy things of life their study.”
“They were called by many names by those who subsequently haled them from their hidden retreats to ridicule their efforts and anathematize their doctrines, and one of the names which they used for themselves, custom has selected to be their present general title. They are now generally referred to in Church history as the Gnostics, those whose goal was the Gnosis--if indeed that be the right meaning; for one of their earliest existing documents expressly declares that Gnosis is not the end--it is the beginning of the path, the end is God--and hence the Gnostics would be those who used the Gnosis as the means to set their feet upon the Way to God.”
From: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten by G.R.S. Mead
Origins of Christianity
“THE familiar story of the Origins of Christianity which we have all drunk in as it were with our mothers’ milk, may be said to be almost a part of the consciousness of the Western world . . . It is interwoven with our earliest recollections; it has been stamped upon our infant consciousness with a solemnity which has repressed all questioning; it has become the "thing we have grown used to."
Previously (we have) been led to believe not only that the story is absolutely unique, but that it is entirely supernatural . . . we find it “divorced from all historical environment, a thing of itself, standing alone, in unnatural isolation”. . . Our picture has no background.
For if we look back to the evidence of the first two centuries of our era for an understanding of the actual state of affairs, instead of one Church and one form of faith, we find innumerable communities and innumerable modes of expression -- communities “united for the living of a Life and systems striving to express the radiance of a Light.”
In many of these communities and these expressions we find intimate points of contact with the life and faith of the best in universal religion, and a means that will help us to fill in the outlines of the background of the origins with a greater feeling of confidence than we had previously thought possible.