Hi,

Happy to have found this com,

I identify as spiritual but not religious and have always been interested in philosophy but i didn’t know what gnosis meant beyond the “relgious (a)gnostic” label used to differentiate between absolute belief that you know god exists vs believing but knowing you can’t really know, therefore accepting others.

This changed after reading a few pages of the gospel of Judas and it kinda hit me out of left field.

A summary for those who don’t know (its a few years ago i read it though)

The story in this book starts with the figure of Jesus ridiculing his followers for they worship Jaweh, a material demigurge that is not god.

He then singles Judas out for being smarter then to blindly worship this idol and takes him to the side where he first kinda praises Judas for being further then the others. And starts to talk about some mystical story something about a fake and a real temple.

Judas seems to get really excited by this and starts talking about if Jesus is in this real temple and if they can join them. (Or a dream of their own, cant remember)

Then Jesus ridicules Judas and says he will never reach the highest heaven but will instead become a star under the demigurge. And then starts to give an entire description of a mythical cosmic pantheon full of numbers.

Naturally i started researching wtf I just read. it reads like a warning for worshipping religion all together, at the same time its providing a kind of scripture but it feels like bait which Judas has taken and therefore lost.

Trough research I learned this book was considered one of the oldest gnostic texts, the mythical description and talk of demigurge appears to have been long standing tenets of gnostic religion.

But at the top, the unknowable, which is koninginly everything aka god aka gnosis.

This “unknownable” part is what stuck with me.

Apparently over the ages many gnostic cults have risen up that promised to reveal absolute truth/gnosis.

But you cannot reveal something that cannot be known. Someone who claims to have obtained gnosis will always be wrong.

But reaching for gnosis is still a nobel goal, to want to know and get close to the truth.

It simply seems mature to know the limits of our earthly form that we can never arrive, only attempt to get closer.

To get as close as one can to gnosis, one must be agnostic.

Is this a known interpretation? Have others stumbled upon this? I love to heat what people here think.