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 ...

In this last entry for the Register on the great Father of the Church, St. Irenaeus, I hope to describe the primary heresy that he was combatting — Gnosticism. However, this is not so easy! Why?

Gnosticism, which arose in the second century, was a branch of Christianity that saw matter as evil and thus had problems with the concept of Jesus as human. The Gnostics, who produced many gospels, ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. It opens with an account of an Arab peasant’s accidental discovery, in 1945, of a cache of thirteen leather-bound ...

The Dead Sea Scrolls got all the publicity. But more useful to students of early Christian history is a cache of Coptic papyri unearthed near Nag Hammadi in northern Egypt in 1945, the remnants of a ...

A new letter issued by the Vatican's doctrinal office has reaffirmed that Christian salvation can only come through Christ and the Church, and highlighted modern expressions of Pelagian and Gnostic ...