Frühes Christentum und Gnosis

In dealing with the reception of the New Testament scriptures in the sources handed down by early Christian gnosis, Hans-Friedrich Weiß shows the integration of early Christian writings into an authentic gnostic conceptual framework. Although the question of a pre-Christian gnosis, which up to now had been a burden to researchers, cannot be answered unequivocally in this matter using chronological data, it is in the end modified in the sense that early Christian second century gnosticism is not a secondary phenomenon compared to early Christianity; it is an independent phenomenon of the history of religion in late antiquity. In the age of late ancient syncretism, its universal influence was demonstrated in the specifically gnostic reception of the authentic Christian tradition in the form of the New Testament scriptures.