Timeline of Gnosticism

How to read this timeline

Dates before 200 CE are mostly inferred from later writers arguing with the people they describe, so ranges appear wherever scholarship is split. Any firm year rests on a document, a dated papyrus, or an accession record. Discoveries are dated to the find, not to the composition of the text found.

Precursors — to 100 CE

Nobody in this period called themselves a Gnostic. The era supplies raw material instead: a God beyond names, angels who make and botch the world, and a saving knowledge held by a few. These motifs are Jewish and Greek before they are Christian.

• c. 250–100 BCE — Enochic literature spreads the story of angels who descend and teach forbidden arts — the Watchers, whose book Christians quoted and then quietly dropped.
• c. 20 BCE – 50 CE — Philo of Alexandria fuses Genesis with Plato: an unknowable God who touches matter only through an intermediary Logos.
• c. 35 CE — Acts 8 puts a Samaritan wonder-worker named Simon in conflict with the apostles. Heresiologists later make Simon Magus the fountainhead of all heresy.
• c. 70–110 CE — the four canonical gospels are written. John frames the story as light against darkness in a world that fails to recognise its maker's envoy.
• c. 90–140 CE — 1 Timothy warns against “oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20, KJV). The Greek noun behind “science” is gnosis.
• c. 60–140 CE — the sayings that become the Gospel of Thomas take shape. It opens: “These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” (NHC II,2, trans. Mark M. Mattison, public domain.) The date is genuinely contested.

The teachers — 100–200

This is the century with names, addresses and reading lists. Basilides teaches in Alexandria, Valentinus in Rome, Marcion runs a rival church with its own canon, and by about 180 CE Irenaeus has written the counter-book preserving most of what we know about them.

• c. 120–140 CE — Basilides teaches in Alexandria. His system counts 365 heavens and attaches the name Abrasax to the number; Irenaeus and Hippolytus describe it irreconcilably.
• c. 136–165 CE — Valentinus teaches at Rome under three successive bishops. Tertullian says he left after being passed over for bishop; his school outlived him by two centuries.
• 144 CE — Marcion is expelled from the Roman congregation and his donation returned. He builds a rival church on the first fixed Christian canon: one gospel, ten letters, no Old Testament.
• c. 150 CE — Justin Martyr's First Apology names Simon, Menander and Marcion as live problems. His Syntagma, the first heresy catalogue, is lost.
• c. 150–200 CE — the Sethian corpus is composed, including the Secret Book of John — the fullest surviving creation myth of the movement, and the text that survives in four ancient copies.
• c. 175–180 CE — the pagan critic Celsus describes a Christian sect's diagram of the heavens with named gatekeepers. Outside confirmation that archon cosmology was real.
• c. 180 CE — Irenaeus writes Against Heresies, the richest hostile source on Sethian and Valentinian systems, and closes the gospels: “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are” (III.11.8, Roberts–Rambaut translation).
• c. 180 CE — the same book gives the first mention of a Gospel of Judas, a “fictitious history” its users “style the Gospel of Judas” (I.31.1, Roberts–Rambaut translation). It took 1,826 years for the book Irenaeus attacked to reach print.
• c. 180–230 CE — Syriac Christianity produces the Acts of Thomas, carrying the Hymn of the Pearl: the myth retold as an adventure about a prince who forgets who he is.

Suppression — 200–400

Two centuries in which disagreement becomes prosecution. The church answers the schools first with books, then with canon lists, and after 380 CE with Roman law. The era closes with someone near Nag Hammadi making a decision that reversed the verdict fifteen centuries later.

• c. 200 CE — Serapion of Antioch lets the church at Rhossus read the Gospel of Peter, then reads it himself and withdraws permission. Canon-making as an administrative afternoon.
• c. 233 CE — Origen, in his Homilies on Luke, names a Gospel according to Thomas among gospels the church does not receive — one of the earliest rejections on record.
• c. 240–277 CE — Mani, born 216 near Ctesiphon, preaches a fully dualist world religion reaching Roman Africa and Tang China, and dies in prison under Bahram I. His church keeps its scriptures and copyists for another thousand years.
• c. 250–300 CE — Pistis Sophia is composed in Egypt: the risen Christ answering questions for eleven years, with Mary Magdalene asking most of them.
• c. 263–268 CE — Plotinus writes Against the Gnostics; Porphyry names the books his circle argued with, including Zostrianos and Allogenes. Both surfaced at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
• 312–313 CE — Constantine's conversion and the Edict of Milan give Christianity an empire's administrative reach — and give losing arguments a new kind of risk.
• 325 CE — the Council of Nicaea debates the Father and the Son, and the date of Easter. Its surviving canons contain no scripture list at all; the canon was settled elsewhere, and slowly.
• c. 348–350 CE — Cyril of Jerusalem instructs baptismal candidates: “Let none read the Gospel according to Thomas” (Catechetical Lecture 6.31, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation).
• 367 CE — Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter lists exactly the twenty-seven books of today's New Testament and orders apocryphal writings rejected. The first list matching the modern one.
• 380–385 CE — the Edict of Thessalonica makes heresy a civil offence; five years later Priscillian is executed at Trier, the first Christian put to death by Christians for heresy.
• c. 350–400 CE — thirteen leather-bound codices are sealed in a clay jar and buried at the foot of the Jabal al-Tarif. We do not know who, or why; the Pachomian monasteries stood within sight.

Survivals — 400–1500

Classical Gnosticism disappears from the Mediterranean record around 400 CE, but dualist religion does not. Over the next thousand years it reappears in Mesopotamia, Armenia, Bulgaria and Languedoc — sometimes by real descent, sometimes by independent invention, and telling the two apart remains genuinely hard.

• c. 400–700 CE — the Mandaeans of southern Mesopotamia take written form, honouring John the Baptist and treating the world's maker as a usurper. After the Arab conquest they are treated as a protected People of the Book, and they are still here.
• c. 655–872 CE — the Paulicians of Armenia and Byzantium build a dualist church with a principality at Tephrike, destroyed in 872.
• c. 950–970 CE — a Bulgarian priest called Bogomil preaches a two-principle Christianity; Cosmas the Priest writes the first refutation.
• 1143 CE — Eberwin of Steinfeld writes to Bernard of Clairvaux about heretics at Cologne claiming an apostolic church hidden since the martyrs: the first solid documentation of Western Cathars.
• 1208–1209 CE — the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau is murdered; the Albigensian Crusade marches the next summer and sacks Béziers on 22 July 1209.
• 1229–1244 CE — the Treaty of Paris ends the crusade and the Dominican inquisition takes over. Montségur falls in March 1244; roughly two hundred perfecti walk into the fire rather than recant.
• 1321 CE — Guillaume Bélibaste, the last known Languedoc perfectus, is burned. The Western dualist churches are finished.

Recoveries — 1500 to today

Everything a modern reader knows firsthand comes from this era: a sequence of purchases, excavations, editions and translations running from Renaissance Florence to a press conference in 2006. The pattern repeats with grim regularity — a codex is bought, half lost, sat on for decades, and finally printed.

• 1460–1471 CE — a Greek Hermetic manuscript reaches Cosimo de' Medici; Ficino translates it in 1463 and it is printed in 1471. Renaissance Europe reads Poimandres believing it older than Moses.
• 1769–1773 CE — James Bruce buys a Coptic codex of the Books of Jeu in Upper Egypt and carries three Ethiopic manuscripts of 1 Enoch back to Europe.
• 1785 CE — the British Museum buys the Coptic codex of Pistis Sophia from the estate of the physician Anthony Askew, who had died in 1774. Where and when he acquired it was never recorded. It is now British Library Add. MS 5114.
• 1896 CE — Carl Reinhardt buys the Berlin Codex (BG 8502) in Cairo, containing the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of John, the Sophia of Jesus Christ and an Act of Peter.
• 1897–1904 CE — Grenfell and Hunt excavate Oxyrhynchus. P.Oxy. 1 appears in 1897 as unidentified sayings of Jesus; P.Oxy. 654 and 655 follow in 1904. Nobody knows what they belong to for fifty years.
• December 1945 — near Nag Hammadi, a farmer digging at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif strikes a sealed clay jar holding thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices, buried roughly 1,600 years: fifty-two tractates, among them gospels left out of the Bible. The story of the find is stranger than the summary.
• 1947–1948 CE — the Dead Sea Scrolls surface at Qumran while Jean Doresse identifies the Nag Hammadi codices in Cairo: two unrelated libraries, confused ever since.
• 10 May 1952 — the Jung Institute in Zurich buys the smuggled Codex I, thereafter the Jung Codex. The Gospel of Truth inside it is published in 1956.
• 1955 CE — Walter Till publishes the Berlin Codex, fifty-nine years after purchase and forty-three after a burst water main destroyed the first print run. The Gospel of Mary arrives with ten pages still missing.
• 1956–1959 CE — Pahor Labib publishes plates of Codex II, and the first edition and translation of the Gospel of Thomas appears in 1959. Fourteen years from jar to bookshelf.
• c. 1970s CE — Codex Tchacos is found near El Minya, then spends decades on the antiquities market, including sixteen years in a New York safe-deposit box that ruins much of it.
• 1972–1984 CE — UNESCO and Brill publish the complete facsimile edition of the Nag Hammadi codices, ending a scholarly monopoly that had fed thirty years of conspiracy theory.
• 1977 CE — The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James M. Robinson, puts all fifty-two tractates in one volume for general readers.
• 1979 CE — Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels wins the National Book Critics Circle Award and moves the subject from seminaries to airport paperbacks.
• 1996–2003 CE — Michael Williams and Karen King argue that “Gnosticism” is a category invented by its opponents and should be dismantled. The debate is unresolved and worth understanding.
• April 2006 — the Gospel of Judas is published, opening: “This is the secret message of judgment Jesus spoke with Judas Iscariot over a period of eight days, three days before he celebrated Passover.” (Codex Tchacos 33, trans. Mark M. Mattison, public domain.) Its reading was contested within a year.
• 2010s–today — the Coptic Museum in Cairo holds essentially the whole Nag Hammadi library, and public-domain translations put every major text within reach of anyone with a phone.

What the dates actually show

The timeline kills two stories at once. There was no single moment of censorship: exclusion took three centuries of argument, and the decisive document is a bishop's Easter letter in 367, not a council vote. And there was no clean extinction: the books were buried rather than burned, dualist churches reappeared for a millennium, and the Mandaeans never stopped.

What changed in December 1945 is not that these texts became true. It is that they became readable — after 1,600 years in which nearly everything anyone could read about them was written by people trying to destroy them.