The Platypus and the Patristics
So I picked up a copy of the Gnostic Gospels today. I've been skimming through it and so far I'm thoroughly unimpressed (I will read them through patiently next week or the week after). They're quite obviously an attempt to syncratize Apostolic Christianity with the prevailing winds of Grecco-Roman popular religion and pop-philosophy; something that was a matter of course in the Ancient World. Read Plato, Plotinus, Epictetus, The Apostolic Fathers, the Gregories, Origin, Athanasius and it all makes pretty obvious sense. The only religious value of the gnostic gospels seems to be for modern syncratists who want to create a neo-gnostic Christianity that can be harmonized with American pop-culture, pop-philosophy and pop-religion. Historically speaking, they are a treasure-trove of data about the world of late antiquity and its attitudes toward religion. The Platypus recommends reading the Patristics if you want an accurate understanding of the evolution of early Christianity. Whatever your religious commitments, you will find much more of what you're looking for there.
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And the disciples did not know and understand that there was anything within that mystery. So they used it to carry home their dry cleaning. But they thought that the mystery was the head of the All, and the head of all the things that exist. And they thought that it was something like a checking account, because Jesus had said to them concerning the mystery, that it surrounded the first ordinance and the five incisions and the great light and the five helpers and the whole Treasury of Light.
And moreover Jesus had not spoken to his disciples of the whole extend of the places of the great invisible one and the three triple powers and the 24 invisible ones (or 45 on Tuesdays) and all their places and all their aeons and all their ranks, how they extend far into the suburbs - these which are the emanations of the great invisible one - and their unbegotten oens and their self-begotten ones and their half-begotten ones and their luminaries and their incendiaries and their unpaired ones and their wallflowers and their archons... and their church secretaries and all the cozy little bungalows of their spheres and all the ranks an honorary degrees of each one of them.