God's a Jerk said the Gnostic

God is a strange word with strange associations especially if you're an ancient Greek Pagan who's used to a full Pantheon. When the Greeks encountered Judaism they were attracted by the monotheism, but had trouble giving up a multitude of lesser gods. And in the wake of the Jewish Wars - which killed a lot of Greek 'civilians' living near the Jews - the god of the Jews didn't seem like a good candidate for the Supreme Good.

So what did they do? Marcion was a Christian who decided that the god of the Jews was an evil, vengeful sort who had nothing to do with Jesus' mission of sacrifice and salvation. So Marcion split the Judeo-Christian God in two - the god of the Jews and Jesus' Father. This happened on top of the last Jewish War (132-135 CE) when Judaism was being actively suppressed by the Empire, so it made sense to a lot of other Gentile Christians that the Apostles of the Jews had gotten Jesus' message wrong, and only Paul the Apostle of Jesus' Father gave us the true Gospel.

Thus at least one brand of Gnosticism was born. Marcionism was so popular it was the dominant form of Christianity for a while. Not long after Marcion another Christian, Valentinus, decided that Marcion had gone too far in rejecting the Hebrew God - instead of being evil the Archon (Ruler) was merely mistaken, and was the legitimate Ruler of less advanced Christians. Those in the know (gnosis meant knowledge) could transcend the Archon and get to know their true Origin, the Invisible Father. Valentinus didn't want to break with the Church, merely provide a means of lifting it to a higher level.

A whole bunch of similar movements sprang up, both in Jewish, Christian and possibly Pagan circles. They disagreed with the Orthodox Church (represented by a few very wordy bishops), but they also disagreed with each other. The complexity of their theories about the structure of the invisible world multiplied as often as a new teacher arose and imagined a whole new take on the Pantheon/Pleroma.

I think they lost out for a number of reasons. One might have been complexity - you had to remember a lot of weird code words and concepts to get into the Gnostic In-Crowd. Another was that they founded their churches on individual egos - a Teacher revealed new ideas about the True Gospel, but then the Teacher died and there was no mechanism for preserving the original charisma that made the group around him.

The Orthodox survived because the Gospel was 'eternal' and the Church didn't need charisma to work - just mysterious ritual, communal meals and lots of story-telling to the bread-and-butter believers. They were better at teaching just the Gospel - the simple kind - and not spinning new fairy-tales about the doings of the Invisible World. Plus this life, and this world, was seen as originally good - everyday things mattered to the Orthodox God, while the Gnostic God could only be found through navel-gazing.