Gnosticism is a fascinating subject that we only truly started to understand last century (Nag Hammadi). What’s really blown my socks through my shoes is the possibility that Jesus was originally understood as a heavenly figure (crucified in the firmament) and the earthly biography came later.
As with Gnosticism, the early church would have suppressed all documents contradicting their narrative, but there’s reasonably compelling evidence that no one wrote of a man on earth for the first four decades of christian thought. This is something I’ve been reading about for the last several months. “The Jesus Puzzle” makes a great case for this idea.