ABSTRACT
The history of research into the Gnostics or Gnosticism properly begins with early Church Fathers after the first cataloguing of heresies was under way unwittingly founded the sociology of religion by classifying types of new religious groups, mainly according to distinctive beliefs, but sometimes also by practice. The Gnostics are those who can escape from the entrapment of the material world, presenting themselves as spiritual elite who, knowing the names of the aeons and taught by Christ, can safely ascend or return to the true source of their existence. The Nag Hammadi and related materials bore an immense effect on our understanding of "classic Gnostic" speculation of the second and third centuries bce, with all signs that it originated out of responses to the Jesus phenomenon, especially in its Valentinian and Sethian versions. The Nag Hammadi finds certainly pushed out threads of thought facilitating consideration of a wider Gnostic world, and new Manichaean texts entailed medieval provenances and disparate place.
