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(Note: comment written poorly on a phone.) The Nag Hamadi library is a collection of mostly gnostic writings. The diversity of opinions and views in that collection, which seemed to be curated by a single monk, may only be a small sample of the wide diveristy in what we could call gnostic. It may be that there were Christian gnostics, Jewish gnostics and Pagan gnostics, or combinations of all of them. The main trust of much of the Nag Hamadi work is that the god of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is an evil god. Jesus may be a man with a spark of the divine from the other realm in some conceptions. That's all: he was a man. A spark of the divine came into him when he was baptized by John the Baptist. The spark from the other world was inside of him for one year, and then the spark deserted him on the cross and he died as a man. This reading is consistent with the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament: it's possible that the Gospel of Mark is gnostic. While he had the spark, he revealed secret knowlege of the other realm. That is the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, in Coptic in the Nag Hamadi library, a work that may have been written before the Gospel of John, although it's hard to know. The wilder parts of gnosticism are fun but the core or simpler readings are almost familiar. I like the way the gnostics make heroes of all the bad guys in the Old Testament, like Eve. The gnostic reading of Genesis make complete sense: God in the story of the Garden of Eden is clearly evil. He forbids Adam and Eve from obtaining knowlege. Why? Pure evil. Eve is a bold seeker of truth. In truth, the God of the Hebrew Bible is pretty damn evil. Noah's Ark: why did he murder everyone? There is no clear charge except some vague "immorality"... If the one God of the Bible is evil, then there must be a creation that is good but not here. In a way, it's way more logicially consistent than the Trinity, cooked up by the proto-orthodox. The Gospel of Truth is beautiful. The gnostics were okay. The first monks, the first monestaries were likely all gnostic, all in Egypt, which seems to be a center of this branch of the followers of Jesus. I wrote a whole book set at this time: Juba (Will Pflaum) (https://www.amazon.com/Juba-Search-Martyrs-Will-Pflaum/dp/1467917540) in which I imagine a gnostic ritual and a gnostic monk locked in a tower and all kinds of fun stuff.

History of Religious Ideas (3 Vols)- Mircea Elidae Link

Treasures of Darkness - Thorkild Jacobsen Link

Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia - Jean Bottero Link (damn I got this for $20 a few months back, great book though)

Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study - Ian Hodder & VA Link

Egypt Before the Pharaohs - Michael Hoffman Link