Gnosticism was not a single movement but a family of related spiritual traditions that flourished in the first centuries of the Common Era alongside early Christianity, offering a different answer to the central question: what is wrong with the world and how is it healed? Where mainstream Christianity would answer with sin and redemption, Gnosticism answered with ignorance and gnosis — direct experiential knowledge of the divine spark within, imprisoned in a material world created not by the highest God but by a lesser, ignorant demiurge. The Nag Hammadi texts, discovered in 1945, gave scholars direct access to Gnostic scriptures that the church had suppressed — and revealed a form of early Christianity far more diverse and philosophically rich than the canonical texts alone suggest.
Rumi