Gnosis and the Politics of Knowledge: How Canonization Becomes Censorship
Why the Gnosis, a little-known body of Biblical texts, were systematically excluded from the Bible — and how that relates to digital censorship today. It comes down to who controls the curation of knowledge.
Institutions that hope to establish a long-term grip on power cannot survive by merely governing people. They must also govern memory and the archives that comprise it, determining which stories are authoritative, which voices are trustworthy, and which narratives remain visible. This modus operandi is evident today in how technological platforms curate content, and with it the knowledge that content carries. But the practice is much older than the internet, and was already visible during the formation and publication of the Bible.
Millennia later, excluded pieces of early Christian literature were discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, bundled together in ancient leather-bound codices. These works, known collectively as the Gnostic texts, present a very different religious imagination from Biblical canon, emphasizing inward awakening, suspicion of worldly rulers, and a female-male or non-binary image of the divine. They include gospels and revelatory dialogues attributed to figures such as Thomas, Mary the Apostle, and John the Apostle – whose canonical Gospel of John did enter the New Testament – among others. The Gnostic models of ethics, authority, and spirituality adhere closely to the life and teachings of Jesus, and even contradict Biblical scriptures that ostensibly do not, yet were excluded from the Bible in favor of other narratives, and remain outside official Church legitimacy.
The process of knowledge curation now endures most luminously online, where platforms function as battlegrounds for propaganda, consent manufacturing, and institutional information control. Search engines algorithmically or bureaucratically “optimize” results by prioritizing some information while limiting, burying, or excluding other information. This does not necessarily prove malicious intent, but it does illustrate how technological systems can observably narrow the breadth of accessible information.
Perhaps even more clearly, big social media platforms, privately owned and subject to internal as well as external political whims, participate in the struggle over what knowledge is preserved, legitimized, and accessible. On big platforms, creators who use certain medical or legal terminology or challenge particular governmental positions have described being shadowbanned, suspended, or deleted, sometimes without meaningful avenues of appeal. In general, large platforms reward institutionally favorable views with visibility, algorithmic ranking, and often monetization, while institutionally unfavorable views must work disproportionately hard for comparable visibility in public discourse. In many cases, regardless of merit, those views and their creators are still sanctioned, hidden, or erased from the network.
This modern-day reality parallels the lengthy fate of The Gnostic Texts. One of the clearest ways to understand what was lost, gained, and for whom, through that curation is to begin with a figure many readers already know: Mary Magdalene. It took the Church several centuries after the death of Jesus to acknowledge her as the Apostle of All Apostles, even though her status had already been reinforced by those who witnessed her uniquely close companionship with Jesus and, for the observantly religious, her role as the first witness of the resurrection and bearer of Christianity’s central testimony. Her Gospel had been among the Gnostic works that were sealed away, concealed from public awareness. What did her Gospel, and the other excluded Gnostic texts, contain that proved so threatening to the fledgling Church’s political logic — and how does that logic persist today?
It is worth noting that gnosis is the Greek word for “knowledge” –or, more expansively, “knowledges” – suggesting that the unearthed texts preserve forms of value long withheld from common view. That they, and the knowledges they preserve, escaped common grasp reveals something about the politics of knowledge itself. Canonizing the writings that ultimately formed the New Testament while discrediting the Gnosis was to endorse one set of narratives while demoting another. In that sense, canon formation was curation, narrowing the field of what counted as legitimate knowledge within the Church and its enduring politics.
What knowledges do the Gnostic texts possess? For one, the Gnosis preserve teachings that dissolve rigid gender distinction and treat the female-male divide as both artificial and distracting. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus urges seekers of spiritual transformation to make “the male and female one, so that the male is no longer male and the female no longer female,” abandoning prejudicial binaries in favor of spiritual wholeness.
The Gospel of Thomas goes further, elevating direct knowing above reflexive submission to external authority: the “kingdom” is both outside and within us, and “when you come to know yourselves, then you will become known.” These emphases on rejecting split categories and prioritizing inward knowledge over inherited or external authority help explain why Thomas sat uneasily with a canonizing church increasingly invested in authorized doctrine, stable hierarchy, and the management of legitimate interpretation.
Then there is the Gospel of Mary, whose exclusion from the Bible is especially revealing not only because of Mary the Apostle’s authority as the Apostle of All Apostles, but because her Gospel offers a substantive blueprint for the relationship between Christians, the self, one another, and God. Like Thomas, Mary warns against blind obedience, while limiting the scope of the Church’s institutional governance: “do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.” By speaking in Christ’s voice, Mary was not merely a transmitter of doctrine but a vessel of divine authority, narrowing legitimate law to the example of Jesus himself rather than an expanding bureaucracy of command.
The Gospel of Mary rejects spiritual shame and the manifest destiny of original sin, even though these values later became institutionally entrenched. She wrote: “there is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are of the nature of adultery.” Whether adultery in this case means covenantal infidelity only or betrayal of any kind is still up for debate, although one could argue that characterizing adultery by its nature rather than the act suggests betrayal more broadly. She also contends with Simon Peter directly, naming his hostility toward women as spiritually petty, adversarial, and needlessly divisive, a thread that reinforces Thomas’s rejection of rigid and prejudicial binaries.
For an emerging Church consolidating doctrinal authority, compiling the New Testament as it was becoming a political rather than only a religious institution, a text like Mary’s – that warned against multiplying law, denied shame as a mechanism of obedience, and legitimized female or sex-blind authority – was structurally inconvenient, demanding a more expansive and egalitarian order than an institution oriented toward domination was prepared to support.
Another Gnostic text is the Gospel of Philip, which carries forward a more worldly and recognizably Judaic mystical sensibility, treating transformation not as a posthumous reward but as something realized in lived practice. Philip writes, “those who say they will die first and then rise are in error,” and “if they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.” By Philip’s logic, naming oneself a Christian is not enough; resurrection is not a credential conferred after death, but a transformation made real in life. Read alongside Thomas and Mary, Philip offers a practical blueprint for salvation grounded in the here and now: inward knowledge, ethical transformation, and fidelity to the lived pattern of Christ rather than mere institutional belonging. Once again, for a church whose authority depended in part on stewarding salvation by leveraging life after death, a philosophy grounded in present transformation would have strained its institutional logic.
The body of Gnosis is far larger than this essay can contain, but the Apocryphon of John, or Secret Book of John, is another relevant example of narrative building because it sits beside the canonical Gospel of John as a radically different account of divine order and legitimate rule. In the Secret Book, John rejects arrogant, loud, and possessive leadership as a masquerade, a ‘dark caricature’ rather than legitimate authority. By describing God as the “remembrance of the pleroma,” or remembrance of origin, John’s text makes also divine knowledge something to be uncovered through knowledge rather than passively received from an external authority. If endorsed by the Church, John’s framing of authority and knowledge would likewise have compromised institutional monopoly over divinity and salvation.
Other Gnostic texts preserve strands of Judaic mysticism as well, especially in their fascination with emanation, primordial thought, divine plurality, and the hidden architecture of creation. In the Trimorphic Protennoia, God appears as the “first thought,” a fluid intelligence described as a Mother-Father, pervading all things. In vividly chronicling the creation of realms, the text also describes battles against demons with Sophia, wisdom personified, reinforcing concepts of inner knowing and fluid, accessible divinity. In Thunder, Perfect Mind, a female divine voice declares, “I am the whore and the holy one,” “the honored one and the scorned one,” and “the first and the last,” again dissolving the categories and hierarchies through which women are sorted, while asserting the personal contradictions inherent to the human experience. The Secret Book of John also invokes “first thought” and Barbelo, the feminine face of divinity, before closing with an assurance whose many meanings the New Testament left behind: “Be not afraid. I am with you always. I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son.”
All of these texts threatened not only doctrinal boundaries but the politics of knowledge itself, because they displaced salvation from official custody, negated its use as a bureaucratic bargaining chip, and measured discernment within the seeker, the witness, and the community. Moreover, the authors’ repeated emphases on egalitarianism, intellectual inquiry, and imagination discredit mechanical or superficial markers of insight as reliable sources of knowledge, encouraging seekers to protect themselves from prejudice and bias in a search for salvation that is, under this framework, inseparable from inner awakening and tantamount to enlightenment.
But introspection, solidarity, and clarity are forms of empowerment. They inspire table-flipping, movement-building, and unsettling empires, all too reminiscent of a recently crucified Jesus of Nazareth, and all too uncontrollable for a Church on the verge of imperial ascent.
In pursuit of its interests, therefore, the nascent Church neither assembled the full body of Christian literature for seekers to interpret freely, nor limited itself to validating only those works most closely corroborated by Jesus’s historical life. Instead, the Church established a vision of its own and resolved dissonance by pushing texts that unsettled it to the margins while centralizing those that supported it. This was not a theological exercise; it was a political one.
Today, we see the same kind of sorting of knowledges – the same curation of knowledge – across contexts, repeatedly, in service of political ends. Certain stories are preserved, legitimized, and circulated, while others are fragmented, buried, and hidden from collective memory. The mechanisms have changed, but the levers have not.
Few examples of the contemporary authorship of power are clearer than technological platforms and the moderation systems, ranking algorithms, and search architectures through which they operate. The early Church and today’s tech apparatus – Silicon Valleys, governments, and companies alike – are not morphological analogues, but they are both institutions that manage epistemic legitimacy through censorship, narrative control, and archive curation.
What a religious council would have once done through canonization, oligarchs today do through policy, interface, and infrastructure, reinforcing and outright creating desired ways of thinking.
Like the Gnostic texts, today’s marginalized content is not always outright banned; it may simply be buried, stranded, or effectively locked away until someone goes looking. Suppression of knowledge looks like making specific information hard to find in search engines, stripping it from context so it seems unreasonable, masking neutral facts with politicized and ideologically polemical rhetoric, and monetizing or recommending institutionally compatible narratives more than equally relevant but institutionally incompatible ones. As with the early Church’s preference for canonical gospels over the Gnostic texts, information control is the basis of curated knowledge.
Mirroring the contrast between canonical Bible stories and those in the Gnosis, conflicting realities across media do not necessarily point to multiple contradictory truths so much as to a longstanding pattern: historical and contemporary records are often written by the powerful and not necessarily the honest or impartial.
Censorship, in this sense, is broader than the blunt removal of speech. The result is that control over knowledge often works not by proving rival narratives false, but by making them difficult to find, costly to articulate, or socially dangerous to repeat.
The exclusion of the Gnosis from Biblical canon shows how, and for how long, institutions have self-legitimized and ideologies have self-perpetuated by structurally favoring some knowledges over others.
Ultimately, a healthy knowledge ecosystem is one of genuine choice, in which marginalized knowledges fall out of favor incidentally or through open collective judgment, not because institutions – whether the early Church or contemporary tech – predetermine the future by filtering knowledge in advance.
Just because something is excluded from a narrative doesn’t mean that thing is true. But exclusion on this scale is an exercise of power.