Chief among the common themes is the idea of two gods, taken from Greek philosophy and carried to a radical extreme: a supreme good God who is very remote from the world, and a less powerful, evil Demiurge who created a completely worthless, evil world and who torments humanity.

defined the term Gnosticism as claims to “knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved for an elite.”8 Many of the writers and groups taken to be Gnostic did “understand themselves to be the elite ‘chosen people’ who, in distinction from the ‘worldly-minded,’ were able to perceive” sophisticated matters and were in accord with the “goal of gnostic te

The word Gnosticism comes from a Greek word meaning “one who knows,” and what such a person knows is called gn–osis,4 which “does not refer to understanding of truths about the human and natural world that can be reached through reason. It refers to ‘revealed knowledge’ available only to those who have received secret teachings of a heavenly reveal

As Williams so carefully documented, when the many manuscripts and movements usually categorized as Gnosticism are examined closely, various clusters of characteristics can be identified, but the only element common to all is that each is remarkably heretical, which is how they were quite properly judged by their contemporaries—not just “one heresy

Once under way, this program allowed full-time missionaries such as Paul to assume the role of advisers and visiting supervisors of local churches built by, and sustained by, local ‘amateurs,’ as is fully evident in Paul’s letters.

Although the very first Christian converts in the West may have been made by full-time missionaries, the conversion process soon became self-sustaining as new converts accepted the obligation to spread their faith and did so by missionizing their immediate circle of intimates. This offended many pagans and has confused some historians. Pagans saw s

Paul did not rush from place to place leaving a trail of sudden converts. Instead, he spent more than two years building a Christian group in Ephesus, eighteen months in Corinth, and several years in Antioch—and many historians believe his stays in some other places were considerably longer than has been assumed.37

Learning that most conversions are not produced by professional missionaries conveying a new message, but by rank-and-file members who share their faith with their friends and relatives, we discover why ‘conversion’ involves monotheism. Only monotheism can generate the level of commitment to a particular faith sufficient to mobilize the rank and fi

By now dozens of close-up studies of conversion have been conducted. All of them confirm that social networks are the basic mechanism through which conversion takes place.36 To convert someone, you must first become that person’s close and trusted friend. But even your best friends will not convert if they already are highly committed to another fa