The 52 texts discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt include 'secret' gospels poems and myths attributing to Jesus sayings and beliefs which are very different from the New Testament. Scholar Elaine Pagels ...

The movie and book are fiction. But anyone who took in The Da Vinci Code in theaters over the weekend might be wondering whether they had fallen asleep in Sunday School. From the big screen, viewers ...

Morpheus, a man with circular mirrored glasses, approaches Neo Anderson, a young man who feels something is wrong with the world. “You are a slave, Neo,” the man continues. “You, like everyone else, ...

In this last entry for the Register on the great Father of the Church, St. Irenaeus, I hope to describe the primary heresy that he was combatting — Gnosticism. However, this is not so easy! Why?

The Dead Sea Scrolls got all the publicity. But more useful to students of early Christian history is a cache of Coptic papyri unearthed near Nag Hammadi in northern Egypt in 1945, the remnants of a ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. It opens with an account of an Arab peasant’s accidental discovery, in 1945, of a cache of thirteen leather-bound ...

Gnosticism, which arose in the second century, was a branch of Christianity that saw matter as evil and thus had problems with the concept of Jesus as human. The Gnostics, who produced many gospels, ...