The Gnostic Bible: Should We Trust It?

Did you know that there is another "lost" canon of scripture? An entirely different Bible that teaches things like Jesus married Mary Magdalene, or that Jesus didn't die on the cross. Enter the Gnostic Bible, another type of Bible with around 50 books named after some familiar people, like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary. This book teaches that humans can make God into whatever they want, whatever makes them feel good. It affirms the universe was created by Yahweh, but that he is a lesser evil god, and the real goodness is the divine feminine. Through sexual rituals and mantra chants, you can gain secret "knowledge" that will widen your spiritual lenses and lead you to true salvation, a knowledge so beyond us that it is not communicable in human words; hence, not many will define what this knowledge exactly is, and if we can be deceived into the wrong knowledge. There are many people nowadays who claim this is the true canon of scripture that Constantine removed from the Bible during the council of Nicaea, and as we will shortly see, these people need to read an actual book or two... or three or four.

Many laymen today, and Christians, think these documents offer a more reliable testimony to Jesus' life, teaching, and death than the Biblical Gospels do. People sell the Gnostic texts as some "lost" or "newly discovered" canon of scripture that is equally authoritative as the Biblical Canon. Additionally, and sadly, some of these people believe the Bible was compiled in A.D. 325 during the Council of Nicaea, and that the original canon included every single book within the Gnostic texts. Constantine then removed the book he didn't like and kept the ones he liked. They think this canon is more ancient and closer to the events of Jesus' life than the Biblical Gospels, or that they were written at the same time as them. However, this is not historically accurate at all.

The Gnostic Bible

Proponents of the Gnostic Bible say that it is, for all purposes, a competing canon alongside the Canon we have today. And it is from this canon, for example, the Gospel of Mary, that things like Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene come from. The word Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, or knowledge. The word is often used to refer to some "hidden" or "secret" knowledge that only the enlightened Gnostic can access. The Gnostics considered themselves to be sensitive to spiritual visions and experiences through specific rituals, meditation, and chants, which provided a unique "inside" knowledge of the true and correct view of the world and God. To them, the true God is neither male nor female (though the divine feminine is what they usually refer to as God). Some Gnostic sects believe that Yahweh/Jesus created the universe, but that he was greedy and selfish. The real God is the divine feminine, and the actual Christians of the day were oppressive against sex, women, and spiritual autonomy. Do you see why it is so popular in Western culture today? The Gnostic Gospels mention sex rituals and claim to have references to the real historical Jesus.

“In later christology, Jesus would attain the stature of divinity, but his actual life may have been closer to that of a wisdom teacher, that is, a rabbi.” (Barnstone & Meyer, The Gnostic Bible, Pg 43)

The Gnostic Bibles use a lot of material directly from the Biblical Gospels, and in the material completely unique to them, they make little mention of cities and geography from the first century A.D., along with a severe lack of historical narrative. The way it is written is not in the way ancient historical biographies were written, implying that they do not actually claim to be legitimate history. Some of the ideas within the Gnostic Bible are a massive cluster of different philosophies, often contradictory. But we know enough about them from the Early Church Fathers to question their reliability, and their documents, for scholars, serve only as much as what the Gnostics believed, and not actual history.

Discovering the Gnostic Texts

A picture of the codices found near Nag Hammadi, called the Nag Hammadi Library.

We were aware of some Gnostic texts before we discovered them in the ground. Early Church writings, like Against Heresies, were written in order to refute the Gnostic texts and beliefs. But it wouldn't be until 1945 that we would find the Gnostic bible as we know it today. In Egypt, in 1945, an Arab Farmer, Muhammad Ali al-Samman, was digging and stumbled upon a red earthenware jar in Nag Hammadi (southern Egypt). Inside the jar were thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices (or books) written in Coptic. The carbon dating for some of these put them anywhere from A.D. 150s all the way to the third and fourth centuries A.D., and were translated into English in 1977 into the Gnostic bible today. Along with the Gnostic Gospels were writings from Islamic, Chinese, Madaean, and Jewish texts. It wouldn't be until new age spiritism took a lift off would the mass public would become obsessed with these texts.

The Gnostics

The Gnostics were a group of thinkers who called themselves the Gnostikoi and were heavily influenced by Platonism. They were around a little before the time of Jesus, and often mixed different religious philosophies into their texts and beliefs. They would begin to prosper during the time of the Early Church, and as before, they would hijack Christian teachings and assimilate them into their system of beliefs. Within their community, there were a lot of contradicting beliefs, but they were unified in a few core beliefs concerning Jesus and God. They generally believed that God did not become flesh in Jesus; Matter was evil, and the spirit good; the material world was created by an evil deity called the demiurge, while the spiritual world was created by the good deity; Man must work his way to salvation via the knowledge he gains; and man's problem is not sin, but a lack of divine knowledge. They believed the good deity was neither male nor female, and since matter was bad, they could not become flesh in Jesus.

They also believe that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, but another person took his place. Perhaps this is where Muslims got their idea of Judas taking Jesus' place on the cross, because Muhammad was not literate enough to read the Gospels himself; he had to rely on hearsay. But, like previously mentioned, the Gnostics are not anything "new" or "lost," and the Church has been dealing with them since the very first apologists arose. Irenaeus wrote an entire volume, Against Heresies, in the A.D. 180s, where his main focus is to refute the teachings of the Gnostics and explain why Christians don't see them as genuine Christians, but heretics. So the documents of the Gnostics are not surprising or new, but the modern-day obsession with them is. This may stem from modern people, who have been taught that Christianity is outdated, so they begin looking for a new way to be Moral and Christian, but without religion and God. Whatever the modern-day cause for the obsession with these documents is, it is nothing good when concerned to people's spiritual state.

Why the Gnostic Texts are not in the Bible

Were the Gnostic Gospels really removed from the Bible? Were they ever part of it? Constantine did not remove books from the Bible. You can read more about what actually happened at the Council of Nicaea here: https://www.ptequestionstoeden.com/post/did-constantine-make-jesus-divine. Suffice to say, the canon as we know it was already decided; the Council served as a way to officialize it for the entire Church.

Popular gossip, amplified by books and media such as The Da Vinci Code, is that the vote on Christ's deity was a "relatively close vote". This is complete bologna, as the vote was not even close, and to examine the evidence and think so is pure delusion. Five out of the some 318 bishops present protested the creed, and out of them, only two refused to sign it along with Arius. This is far from a close vote. “Constantine called the Council of Nicaea, and one of the issues involved Jesus’ divinity. But this was not a council that met to decide whether or not Jesus was divine.... Quite the contrary: everyone at the Council—in fact, just about every Christian everywhere—already agreed that Jesus was divine, the Son of God. The question being debated was how to understand Jesus’ divinity in light of the circumstance that he was also human. Moreover, how could both Jesus and God be God if there is only one God? Those were the issues addressed at Nicea, not whether Jesus was divine. And there certainly was no vote to determine Jesus’ divinity: this was already a matter of common knowledge among Christians, and had been from the early years of the religion." (Bart Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine, 14-15.)

We will now take a short look at the Gnostic texts, and why the Early church didn't accept them, and why we still don't 2,000 years later. Many of the books in the Gnostic Bible share the names mentioned in scripture: The Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Judas, and The Gospel of Thomas. They are known as pseudonyms, or ancient forgeries. Documents written by unknown authors, who name the document after a historical figure who is far too dead to have actually written them. So the fact that the Gnostic texts are pseudonyms implies they were trying to give the impression that they were based on Christian sources.

Unknown Authorship

One of the Early Church's criteria for a text to be considered canon is that it was written by an Apostle, someone who knew Jesus, or a companion of an Apostle. Not even the most secular scholars say the Gnostic texts were written by the people they are named after. We will soon see that the dates and locations of these documents show us that they were attributed to an Apostle to gain popularity and give the impression of credibility. The Early Church simply did not accept any book with an Apostle's name; they rejected pseudonyms.

"Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come." (2 Thessolonians 2:1-2)

Even Pul was aware of these documents in his day, warning the Early Curch in Thessalonica about them. Heretics were signing Apostolic names to their writings. No book of the Bible was accepted just because it was named after a Biblical figure.

Late Dates

Another criterion of the Early Church was the time it was written. The Church did not accept books for hundreds of years after the Gospels, as all the books of the New Testament were completed by the end of the first century. Practically no serious scholars claim these are original eyewitness testimony of Jesus' life. Even the ones who want the Gnostic texts to have credibility cannot push their dates no earlier than the A.D. 150s, more than one hundred years after Jesus was crucified, but the majority of the texts are from the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. The Gospel of Thomas was written sometime before A.D. 200. The Gospel of Philip was probably written in the third century in Syria, and The Gospel of Mary sometime in the second century (A.D. 100-200). Contrast these dates, which are hundreds of years after Jesus, to the early completion of the Biblical Gospels, all by A.D. 70, with John being completed during the 90s. The Early Church knew that these books were written far after the person they're named after died, which is another reason why they were not accepted into canon in the first place!

They Do Not Agree With Scripture

For a book to be included in canon, it must agree with already established theology from scripture. When you read the New Testament books, there is a smooth continuity running through all the books, extending all the way back to the first verses of Genesis. The books from the Gnostics have very little in similarity with the Biblical Canon already established. They contain very little historical narrative outside of the material they take from the Biblical Gospels; They do not follow a set chronology, and often make little sense; They have little care for geography or cities from the first century, as Jerusalem is the named city outside of the Biblical content taken from the Biblical Gospels; they also contain some light allusions to the New Testament sayings of Jesus, but also attribute contradictory and very illogical and non-original quotation to Him; When they do refer to accurate historical facts about Jesus, they are very clearly depending on the content of the four Bblical Gospels; And they articulate theological subjects that we know didn't arise in the Church until later centuries, implying they had no clue what the Church of the first century was thinking about. If the theological and textual details do not arise until later centuries, then they didn't come from the first century.

Consider the following quotations from the Gospel of Thomas:

“Jesus said, ‘Blessings on the lion if a human eats it, making the lion human. Foul is the human of a lion eats it, making the lion human.’” (The Gospel of Thomas)

“Jesus said, ‘ Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.’” (The Gospel of Thomas)

“Yeshua said, Foxes have their dens and birds have their nests, but the human child has no place to lay his head and rest.” (The Gospel of Thomas)

These are not unique to Christ; in fact, the majority of the sayings are not either. They are so general at some points that practically any other religious figure could have spoken them, originating from the way the Gnostics used other religious teachings to assimilate into theirs. But the Gospel of Thomas does contain sayings that Jesus actually said, mostly taken from the Biblical Gospels. Some scholars think the writer of the Gospel of Thomas was using a similar source of sayings as the Gospels may have used, but added a ton that makes no sense. There is no unique Jewishness to any of the sayings, something you'd expect from, well, a Jew. And it is very clear that actual events in history didn't matter to the Gnostics, only the ideas from them and other belief systems. Despite this, many people today still say that the gnostic bible represents a more reliable account of Jesus that was hijacked by later Christians, but oh, how the situation is flipped-flopped in reality.

They teach that Jesus wanted to marry Mary Magdalene and promote her to head of the Church; The divine feminine must be worshipped, and the masculine is oppressive; That all of this was silenced by power-hungry Roman politician Constantine. The unfortunate truth is that history contradicts this by every verifiable historical document on the subject. Moreover, the way that the Gospel of Peter ends is so irrational and an obvious legend. After the tomb opens, some angels fly out singing, and then Jesus comes out. When Jesus comes out, he is so tall that his shoulders pierce the clouds. After Jesus ascends to heaven, the cross exits the tomb prophesying about Jesus, when a voice from heaven tells the cross that it did a good job, and then it too ascends into heaven. It is so obvious that this is not historic, as the Gospels record the women finding the tomb first, an incredibly embarrassing testimony in the ancient world. The Gnostic texts lack the details that imply they are historically honest, which the Gospels are full of.

These Books Were not "Removed"

The very fact that we know why the Early church rejected these documents, long before Nicaea, refutes any claim that these books are "lost" or were "removed" from the canon, as they were never part of it. How could you lose your driver's license if you're just ten years old? You never had the qualifications to drive in the first place! Likewise, the Gnostic Gospels were never removed from the canon, as they never had the requirements to be part of it from the start. Christianity is not a religion of claims and rituals; it is a historic religion, verifiable through certain historical facts. Gnosticism is an amalgamation of different and contradictory ideas taken from different religions and thinkers, not verifiable through historical investigation. Would you watch Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) in order to investigate if Abraham Lincoln was a real person? Or would you go to the eyewitness testimony and historical records from his time? Who would you go to to investigate Jesus? The very people who walked, talked, ate, and slept next to Jesus? Or a small sect of pagans who wrote illogical philosophies hundreds of years after Him? The 27 New Testament books are the earliest and most reliable record of Jesus' life, not documents written centuries after them by people not even connected to Him and the events around Him. Still, some say that these books were removed from the Canon during the Council of Nicaea.

Let's now look at a few Gnostic books in deeper detail to get a better idea about what is wrong with these. We will look at The Gospel of Thomas, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and The Gospel of Peter to get a deeper understanding of what these books contain. We will not do a full deep dive, but an overview of why these were not accepted, along with the reasons already mentioned. We will then look at some modern-day forgeries that are floating around the internet that many people claim are "lost" Biblical texts. But before we look into the Gnostic Gospels, we need to clear up the misunderstanding that the Council of Nicaea removed books from the Bible.

The Council of Nicaea

I have written about the Council of Nicaea before, and essentially, nothing modern skeptics say actually took place. The Council was purposed to get the theological language decided, and articulate the relationship of the Father and the Son, and how we can understand what we see in scripture. It was not a new establishment of Jesus as God, and then choosing what books fit an ideology. Jesus was already seen as God, but at the time, a heretic named Arius was teaching that Jesus was a created deity from the Father and was not the true God. People say the vote was close on every decision, but the vote for Jesus was not close at all. Out of the more than 300 bishops present, only two refused to sign off on it, which tells us there was no real division in the Church about this. Scripture is also quoted in the records of the Council as if they were already considered canon, but they never even considered the Gnostic texts. No quotations included scripture from outside the canon, so why claim they removed books when they already recognized the Biblical Canon before then? Some say that Jesus was not seen as God before Nicawa, but this is false. To offer support, here are some quotations from Early Church Fathers before Nicaea, saying Jesus is God.

"...sanctified by the will of God, through our Lord Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, from Almighty God through Jesus Christ, be multiplied." (The Fist Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Chp 1, A.D. 90s)

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Sceptre of the majesty of God, did not come in the pomp of pride or arrogance, although He might have done so, but in a lowly condition, as the Holy Spirit had declared regarding Him." (The Fist Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Chp 16, A.D. 90s)

"We have also as a Physician the Lord our God, Jesus the Christ, the only-begotten Son and Word, before time began, but who afterwards became also man, of Mary the virgin. For “the Word was made flesh.” Being incorporeal, He was in the body; being impassible, He was in a passible body; being immortal, He was in a mortal body; being life, He became subject to corruption, that He might free our souls from death and corruption" (The Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians, Chp 7, A.D. 107)

"Wherefore also I praise Thee for all things, I bless Thee, I glorify Thee, along with the everlasting and heavenly Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Son, with whom, to Thee, and the Holy Ghost, be glory both now and to all coming ages. Amen." (Concerning the Martyrdom of the Holy Polycarp, Chp 14, A.D. 156)

"For not only among the Greeks did reason (Logos) prevail to condemn these things through Socrates, but also among the Barbarians were they condemned by Reason (or the Word, the Logos) Himself, who took shape, and became man, and was called Jesus Christ; and in obedience to Him, we not only deny that they who did such things as these are gods, but assert that they are wicked and impious demons, whose actions will not bear comparison with those even of men desirous of virtue." (The First Apology of Justin, Chp 5, A.D. 150s)

"Our teacher of these things is Jesus Christ, who also was born for this purpose, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judæa, in the times of Tiberius Cæsar; and that we reasonably worship Him, having learned that He is the Son of the true God Himself, and holding Him in the second place, and the prophetic Spirit in the third, we will prove." (The First Apology of Justin, Chp 8, A.D. 150s)

"(secondly) that Jesus Christ is the only proper Son who has been begotten by God, being His Word and first-begotten, and power; and, becoming man according to His will, He taught us these things for the conversion and restoration of the human race." (The First Apology of Justin, Chp 23, A.D. 150s)

"It is wrong, therefore, to understand the Spirit and the power of God as anything else than the Word, who is also the first-born of God." (The First Apology of Justin, Chp 33, A.D. 150s)

"But when you hear the utterances of the prophets spoken as it were personally, you must not suppose that they are spoken by the inspired themselves, but by the Divine Word who moves them. For sometimes He declares things that are to come to pass, in the manner of one who foretells the future; sometimes He speaks as from the person of God the Lord and Father of all; sometimes as from the person of Christ; sometimes as from the person of the people answering the Lord or His Father, just as you can see even in your own writers, one man being the writer of the whole, but introducing the persons who converse. And this the Jews who possessed the books of the prophets did not understand, and therefore did not recognise Christ even when He came, but even hate us who say that He has come, and who prove that, as was predicted, He was crucified by them." (The First Apology of Justin, Chp 34, A.D. 150s)

The Council of Nicaea did not create the Bible and Jesus, as the Church was already talking about it centuries before it happened. The Canon was not created or decided, but recognized, and Jesus was already seen as divine. Sorry, TikTok University Graduates, but you're wrong and need to open a book or two.

The Gospel of Thomas

Let us now look at the first Gospel we will discuss, the Gospel of Thomas. This document is much different than the narratives of the Biblical Gospels, as it is simply a collection of sayings that Jesus supposedly said. It was mentioned in the 2nd century A.D. in the writings of Church Fathers, and later found in the jar at Nah Hammadi in 1945, written in Coptic. It is a collection of 114 sayings in total, comprising many parables and quotes directly from the Biblical Gospels (approximately 13/16th of the content is Biblical). The other 3/16 of the sayings completely contradict the previous portion. These are the sayings where the quotations from above, where the ideas conveyed are "spiritual" and very general, or from other religions and philosophies.

There are only four manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas, all visible above. The first one is the Nag Hammadi Codex II, Tractate 2; the second is P.Oxy. 654, written in Greek from the mid-third century; P.Oxy. 1, also in Greek from the 3rd century; and P.Oxy. 655, written in Greek and also from the 3rd century. It gained fame in recent decades because of the unique layout as a list of sayings and the claims of conspiracy nuts surrounding it. But most of the book's content relies on the Biblical Gospels, with the later manuscripts actually exhibiting different content than the earlier ones. Theologian Wes Huff, who is a candidate for a PhD in New Testament Studies, says that the development of the Gnostic "secret knowledge" can be clearly seen leading up to the fourth century, which is when Gnostics were pretty much at their peak. In its original content, it displays Jesus as offering His disciples secret knowledge to expand their spiritual sensitivity to the divine. But this contradicts what the most reliable testimonies of Jesus' life, as well as extra-Biblical mentions, for example, Josephus.

Line 114 on the Gospel of Thomas depicts Peter telling off Mary Magdelen and Jesus, when Jesus says that He will take her and make her a man... because only men go to heaven. This very odd and uncharacteristic ending is a very Gnostic concept, that women cannot enter heaven.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

Multiple stories from the forged Gnostic texts make their way into the Islamic scriptures. https://www.wesleyhuff.com/blog/2024/6/24/earliest-infancy-gospel-of-thomas

There are over 25 manuscripts which are written in Greek and Syriac sometime in the second century. It is a childhood narrative of Jesus, which many people see as giving it validity, but there is a reason there is not much mention of Jesus as a child in the Gospels. There was no reason for someone to include things that had no value to readers, and ancient writers were selective with their content and, often, out of lack and expense of resources, chose to include the most important events surrounding their lives. This consequently resulted in most ancient historical figures lacking an in-depth record of their childhoods, and we see mythical versions pop up centuries later. We have texts from ancient historians telling readers not to include unimportant events in a biography, because of how expensive writing was. All they needed was what was important.

So, for such an extensive and uncharacteristic childhood document to appear after the eyewitnesses have died makes sense if people in heretical sects were wandering about it. One such story has child Jesus making clay doves, and when the Pharisees see Him working on the Sabbath, they go to tell Mary and Joseph. After they leave, Jesus blows on the doves, and they become alive and fly away. This is actually a story that made its way into the Quran, Surah 19:29-31. There is also another story about Jesus killing another child for running into Him on the streets. These stories are very sensational and do not imply that they care about an accurate historical record. And this lacks the characteristics of a historical narrative. It lacks the descriptive language and local terminology used in Acts, like when Luke uses local terminology for islands that was actually accurate (Acts 27:16, 28:7). Thomas was long dead, and he couldn't have actually written it. It, too, suffers the same issues as the other Gnostic texts.

There are Church Fathers who have mentioned and rejected these texts. Eusebius preserved a letter from the Bishop of Antioch, Sarapion, in the 2nd century. He writes to the Church at Rhosus, in modern-day Turkey, concerning the Gospel of Peter. The Church stumbled upon the Gnostics and was reading the document. Sarapion eventually reads it and identifies it as teaching docetism, which denies that Jesus had a physical body. It has Roman officials and guards, with priests attending Jesus' tomb before His resurrection, an obvious mythical forgery.

The Bible Contains the History

When you open up the Gospel of Luke in the Bible, you are not met with vague mentions of hills and cities, or mystical and heretical philosophies, but with a strikingly historical admission from Luke himself. He opens his Gospel by stating his methodology used in writing this biography.

 "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught." (Luke 1:1-4)

He admits that he conducted a careful investigation of the eyewitnesses still alive. He also tells us that there are other existing documents and sources, but he referred to eyewitnesses who were available to verify the details. Luke was a doctor, and that is reflected in his writing, as well as a companion of Mark and Paul. He was surrounded by eyewitnesses of Jesus' life, and because of this, he was in the prime state to take on such a task. He also uses the Greek word Akribros, or closely, which entails that a careful and accurate methodology was used. He tells us that he was willing to follow the facts, wherever they led. He also organizes his account according to certain features, and does not always follow a strict chronology. But this was common in ancient biography, as they were often organized according to a certain theme. Sometimes he groups events to make it more understandable, or even compresses some, which is not uncharacteristic of ancient biographies. Regardless, Luke followed a general chronology, putting together what belonged together to offer an easy-to-grasp account for Theophilus.

Luke also uses the Greek word Aspaleia for "certainty of the things," which literally means "one that can stand on a firm place." Luke was a historian, and probably the most important of the first century. Luke wrote Acts, which is full of verified historical details like cities, geography, weather patterns, seas, names for sailors, ships, etc. Sir William Ramsey set out to disprove Luke, but in his search, he became convinced that he was a world-class historian for his time (Sir William Ramsey, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, 1953, Pg 81). Archeology has also provided massive support for the historicity of the Bible's record. Compared to the Gnostic Texts, the Gnostic Bible stands no chance.

Conclusion

The Gnostic Bible is not a historically accurate, logically consistent, or a "lost Gospel" that contains the secrets to the universe. The Church was not originally a bunch of white politicians who wanted to make a religion for power, and neither was it Constantine. Jesus was a real person, lived a real life, claimed to be the real God and backed it up with miracles, suffered a real trial and real crucifixion, and finally achieved a real resurrection and forgiveness for sins. Jesus is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Just the same as he was almost 2,000 years ago. Please, stop following foolish philosophies and internet lies. And if you still do, you have the Right to be Wrong. God bless!