"Out of the mist of the beginning of our era there looms a pageant of mythical figures whose vast, superhuman contours might people the walls and ceiling of another Sistene Chapel. ...The tale has found no Michelangelo to retell it, no Dante and no Milton. The sterner discipline of biblical creed weathered the storm of those days, and both the Old and New Testament were left to inform the mind and imagination of Western man. Those teachings which, in the feverish hour of transition, challenged, tempted, [and] tried to twist the new faith are forgotten, their written record buried in the tomes of their refuters or in the sands of ancient lands. Our art and literature and much else would be different, had the gnostic message prevailed. ...[W]ithout its voice, its insights, and even its errors, the evidence of humanity is incomplete. ...Its glow throws light upon the beginnings of Christianity, the birth pangs of our world; and the heirs of a decision made long ago will better understand their heritage by knowing what once competed with it for the soul of man."
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Gnostic_Religion
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The Gnostic Religion
The Gnostic Religion:The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (1958) by , differs in scope, organization, and literary intention, but includes much of the information contained in his Gnosis und späntantiker Geist: Die mythologische Gnosis, the first volume of which was published in 1934. An enlarged edition of The Gnostic Religion was published in 1963 with an additional essay, and supplemented to include his research on the , discovered in 1945. This book, particularly th
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