Gnostic Christianity takes hold?

What if the Christian Gnostic movement wasn't stamped out in the early years of the church? A rather simple premise, but one I've been thinking about during my summer class on religious perspective.
 
By stamped out, do you mean it didn't go underground? Or that it reaches the same widespread influence as Christianity?
 

Spengler

Banned
It won't it never was a large movement to begin with, and also never really developed the functions that the Pauline Church did. No leadership to speak of. However one could make a case for an offshoot of gnostic thought Manicheanism developing into a major religion.
 
That's extremly unlikely.

The issue with gnostic churches is they work on the basis of a two-level instutions with initiates and vulgus pecus, imitating the "pagan" cults especially the mysterions.

The social sucess of Christianism can be explained by the fact it rejected such separation, and called everyone, from any social strata to the same place.
In gnostic churches, you have a blockade.

It requires double entendre, particularly appointed interpretations that can work on high social classes, but let on lowers ones.

Finally, due to this interpretative nature, it's particularly prone to schism and divisions (the number of gnostic cults is simply huge).

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Just a word about your OP.

Gnostic churches weren't "tramped out". That can be a misreading of how Christianism emerged.

Up to IV century, you didn't had really organised "gnostic", "arianist", or every -ist avaible, as it was more blur than that and without central authority to say what was the orthodoxy.

Before the Councils, at least, it would be hard to call about definited "churches". And even there, the relative easiness to crush "gnostic" (or so called, probably not called like that themselves) tends to show a more anecdotic presence in numbers and in influence (contrary to arianism or monophysism by exemple)
 
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