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- Gnostics were a branch of Christianity that was devoted to finding the truth and knowledge from the words of Jesus. They believed the world evolved around the inconceivable father that had sent Jesus to them to tell them about God, to save them from their ignorance and fear through this abstract woman “Error”. Jesus led them away from the symptoms of her (Error) such as forgetfulness in one passage, “Jesus enlightened those who were in darkness because of forgetfulness.” (ANT, 190). Humans were naturally corrupt and needed to be led from their ignorance by receiving instruction from the father.
- In this story a prince is sent to Egypt to capture a pearl For his father and mother, who were the king and queen. When in Egypt he was captured and enslaved there. It took his mother and father writing him in order for him to remember himself and take the pearl back to his family. You can see some of the gnostic traits in his forgetfulness after capture, “I no longer recognized that I was a king’s son, and served their king. I forgot the pearl for which my parents had sent me (ANT,204). This points to Error overtaking the prince and making him forget his task. It seems there are lord like images of God on the garments he receives as his reward and it begins to give him knowledge, “It is I who belong to the one who is stronger than all people and for whose sake I was written about by the father himself.”
- In both Documents by Peter and Jesus, they discuss how the imposter’s will not see what is actually happening during the death of Jesus because of their ignorance and blindness. “ I was on high, poking fun at all the excesses of the rulers and the fruit of their error and conceit. I was laughing at their ignorance (ANT,264).
