"If those who lead you say to you: ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds of the sky will precede you.
If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fishes will precede you.

Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and outside of you.
When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known,
and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.
But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you are poverty."

- Jesus of Nazareth,
The Gospel of Thomas,
from the Nag Hammâdi library

Gnosticism refers to the belief that knowledge of god and the possibility of personal salvation is self evident. The Knowledge of God is attainable through knowledge of oneself and the world around you.

Early church leaders, intent on securing the power of the church, condemned and persecuted as heretics those who believed that the church was not needed for salvation.

In the first three hundred years of Christianity, the Roman Empire in a series of persecutions, burnt as many Christian writings as they could get their hands on. During and for centauries after that time the Catholic Church burnt Christian writings and exiled or murdered many Christian leaders. As a result, with the exception of those leaders who maneuvered successfully within the politics and theology of the church and the writings that were in agreement with content later codified into the Holy Bible, much of the traditions, beliefs and writings of early Christianity have been destroyed.

Sometime between 200AD and 400AD a handful of writings were hidden from destruction by the church in clay jars in a cave not far from the famed library (or libraries) of Alexandria. Named the "Nag Hammâdi library" after the nearest town, the texts had remained hidden until their discovery in 1945.

The Nag Hammâdi library, all of which has only recently been translated into english, included a variety of texts, including several "Gospel" accounts of Jesuses life not found in the New Testament.

The Jesus who appears in the writings found in the Nag Hammâdi library proposes a much different version of "Christianity" than the one we know today.

First, existence was conceived by the divine forces of masculine and feminine. Then the feminine conceived without the masculine and the child was "Yaldaboath", a jealous god who created our world and our religious laws.

Jesus of Nazareth appears as Christ in both traditional Christianity and the Gnostic Gospels. However, in the Gnostic Gospels he teaches us how to become Christ ourselves. Being "Christ" is knowing the difference between god and the jealous god. Salvation is not gained by observance of religious doctrine, but rather by the knowledge of our own relationship with god.