Those of you who have read the New Testament (NT) know that the apostle Paul met early in his career churches who were deviating from the "gospel once delivered". Nowhere more evident is this than what must have been happening at Corinth. Here, a "spiritual aristocracy" developed, those in it seemed to be inclined to pride themselves on the possession of "special knowledge" and having greater, deeper "experiences" than the more run-of-the-mill Christian. These people were often dualists, believing that the spirit is everything and the body (and anything else material) as evil. At Colossae in Asia Minor Paul met with those who were creating a new belief system resulting from a blending of Christianity, heterodox Judaism, and some of the currently existing "mystery cults". Both of these types of beliefs, that Paul felt needed correcting, belong to the more broad category of belief systems known as Gnosticism. This term, often applied to rival sects that appear to have broken away from the early church between A.D. 80 and 150, is from the Greek work for knowledge (gnosis). These sects claimed to possess a special "knowledge" which transcends the simple faith of the Church. Part of this special knowledge was the dualistic bent of spirit=good, matter=evil, extending to the belieft of not one true God, but two Gods. The first God is all spirit and it is he who created the second (evil) god responsible for creating the material world. Many Gnostics denied the divinity of Christ because for them it was impossible for the divine to exist in the material world while other believed that the material body of Christ was simply an illusion which those "in the know" could understand and move up to a higher spiritual plane. As you can see, these views fly in the face of what was being taught in the early Church and thus writing containing such teachings could be be considered part of the canon. To quote from Early Christian Writings:
There are numerous references to the Gnostics in second century proto-orthodox literature. Most of what we know about them is from the polemic thrown at them by the early Church Fathers. They are alluded to in the Bible in the pastorals (spurious Paulines of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus), for example 1 Tm 1:4 and 1 Tm 6:20, and possibly the entirety of Jude. Ignatius of Antioch writes against them as well as Docetism, a doctrine closely related to Gnosticism that stated that Christ was pure spirit and had only a phantom body. Second Clement is a document aimed at refuting early second century Gnosticism. Marcion was the most famous of the Gnostics, and he established a "canon" of the Pauline epistles (minus the pastorals) and a "mutilated" Luke (presumably considered so because it lacked proof-texts such as Lk 22:43-44). Justin Martyr mentioned him c. 150 CE, and Irenaeus and Tertullian wrote against him extensively in the late second century (in Against Heresy and Against Marcion, respectively).
Besides Marcion, other important Gnostics were Basilides and Valentinus. Some Gnostic documents are the Gospel of Truth, the Letter to Rheginus, Treatise on the Three Natures, Apocalypse of Adam, the Gospel of Matthias, Gospel of Philip, Acts of Peter, and Acts of Thomas...
The Gnostics were prolific writers, but from the start their views were contrary to what we know about Christian doctrine in the pre-Gnostic time. Their writings are also lacked in many of the other areas used in evaluating the canon such as apostolic origin, internal claims of speaking for God, veridicality, etc and were not included in what was eventually called "The Bible"... but more on that next time.
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