Near the nexus of Hillhurst Avenue and Sunset and Hollywood boulevards, Bishop Stephan Hoeller has presided since 1977 at Ecclesia Gnostica, the tiny, incense-infused chapel of the Gnostic Society.

What do Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, The Matrix, Masonry, New Age and the Raelian cult, which claims to have cloned the first baby, have in common? Their ideological soil. Identical esoteric ...

This week your professor continues a very brief introduction into the early rivals of Christianity. We know of a great many religious cults which existed in ancient times, most of which have vanished ...

Gnosticism is a countercultural spirituality that forever changed the practice of Christianity. This is the premise of a new book by April DeConick, the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of ...

Gnosticism, the religious rival that lost out to orthodox Christianity in ancient times, has become fashionable again thanks to Dan Brown's huge-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code," along with the ...

Imagine a Bible that begins like this: God said, “I am the Lord thy God, and there are no other gods but me.” Then a voice came out of the deepest heaven and said, “Thou liest, god of the blind!” Or ...

Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Judge it by its cover, and you might imagine that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is just another trashy airport novel, with no greater ...

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of, most recently, "A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization." GNOSTICISM is a label ...

(UNDATED) From all the hullabaloo in the press over the “Gospel of Judas,” one might easily conclude that something like the plot of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” had suddenly been demonstrated as ...

Discussion of Gnosticism at a recent gathering of local clergy generated a comment from one pastor that perhaps Christian scriptures should be kept in a loose-leaf binder so we can add and remove ...