Alincolnism

[rogue06]

At an organised level, yes. They may have had nuisance value earlier, if 1 John 2:18; 4:3; 2 John 1: 17 address the issue (and I think they do).

That's the other issue. Basically everything got pigeonholed by scholars into being Gnostic or even proto-gnostic in the 19th and 20th cent. when it might have been something else.

[tabibito]

I think it would be inherently hard, perhaps impossible, to actually firmly determine such a timeline. If two sets of writings show similarities, saying which of the two came first can be almost entirely speculative. One can equally say "the gnostics were familiar with the traditional Christian writings" or say "the traditional Christian writers were familiar with the gnostic writings". This kind of problem has been an issue for years in terms of the Synoptic Problem, and the Documentary Hypothesis... even if you can see a relationship between the sources, that doesn't tell you in what direction the relationship went, and A -> B and B -> A and C -> A&B remain equally valid theories.

Agreed. Mark was the first of the synoptic gospels to be written according to current consensus. But then you read the processes involved in teaching rhetorical writing by late BC and early AD philosophers, and Mark seems to conform with those processes. Nor have those processes markedly changed for current university assignment writing.

However, very early Christian writings show no influence from gnostic style teachings - to the limited extent that I am aware of them. Celsus writes a disparaging assessment of Christian teachings 75(?) years before Origen, and his report doesn't reflect gnostic influences. Problem is that we only have copies of parts of his work preserved in Christian writings, so other things he might have written are unknown.

[rogue06]

Agreed. Mark was the first of the synoptic gospels to be written according to current consensus. But then you read the processes involved in teaching rhetorical writing by late BC and early AD philosophers, and Mark seems to conform with those processes. Nor have those processes markedly changed for current university assignment writing.

However, very early Christian writings show no influence from gnostic style teachings - to the limited extent that I am aware of them. Celsus writes a disparaging assessment of Christian teachings 75(?) years before Origen, and his report doesn't reflect gnostic influences. Problem is that we only have copies of parts of his work preserved in Christian writings, so other things he might have written are unknown.

I really gotta find which book gets into this, but FWIU scholarship overwhelmingly supports the priority of Christian writings over Gnostic ones figuring that at the very earliest their gospels and the like originated during the first half of the first SECOND century -- which is the very latest date given for anything in the NT. For example, the Gospel of Peter is often put forth as the earliest work but that reveals a clear dependence on both Matthew and I Peter.

It appears that Gnosticism was dying out by the end of the third which would be a better explanation for the lack of their writings rather than Christians destroying them. Nobody was making copies. And even with the NT, which was copied over and over, we have a noted dearth of documents that survived from the 1st and 2nd centuries. In fact, as I've made it clear in several posts in this thread, we have very little left from the classical period including works that were very popular.