Body

The charge against the Gnostics fits in one breath. They believed a lesser god made the world, so they decided matter was bad, so they hated the body. You can still hear the verdict whenever someone calls an idea “gnostic” because it treats flesh as an inconvenience to be managed or escaped. I’ve spent a lot of this blog reading these texts sympathetically, so it seems only fair to put the charge to them directly. The short answer is sometimes yes. The longer answer is that the texts fought about the body among themselves, and a few of them defended it more stubbornly than their critics did. ...