Not quite bullshit. Gnostics refer to the “knowledge of god”. Some the “gnostic” gospels are the apocrypha ( those books at the end of some bibles)
In addition the Book of Thomas was the founding gospel of the Keralian (indian) Thomasinian church in the Second Century. It was rediscovered in the Nag Hammadi Library. Along with the Book of Mary and the Repentance of Judas and other versions of stories and texts.
The gnostics (like the freemasons) had specific rituals, not all gnostic houses believed the same. They believed that members of a congregation could receive the word of god and tell it in the form of a sacred story, which in some cases became a founding text as important (and believed) as the synoptics.
Gnosticism is a wide term employed by modern churches to a very splintered tradition. It can be argued (and is) that Paul himself was a gnostic having had the visions of a dead jesus come to him. That is the founding of the gnostic traditions.
Most of the young churches in the early years of the movement did not believe that Jesus was the actual Son of God., like the Jewish Ebionites they believed that jesus was very human and either adopted by god before his death, or spiritually revived afterwards and then claimed as his son.
The Marcionites in the 1st and Second centuries were a gnostic sect, their gospels ( later declared anathema) had differences with the Roman Curch, the largest was that their texts contained no reference to a divine birth. They used passages in Luke ( like the Ebionites) to “prove” adoption of the jesus figure. *
Study of the hundreds of gnostic texts and sects springing from them is both (as I am a history tragic) enlightening and frightening.
The Gnostic movement was eventually “wiped out” ( they thought) in the 6th century. All their books had been declared anathema and if found the adherents could be killed without penalty.
They have resurfaced several times over the centuries and been put down with a ferocity that can only be engendered by a religious fervour. Look at the Cathars for instance.
The modern day JWs are the inheritors of the Arian Heresy of the 4th century. Many of their beliefs (including the veneration of Paul) are strong echoes of a schism that ended in the followers being massacred wherever found. The Pentecostal church can be argued to be the inheritor of the “Mystic Tradition” of several of the 1st and Second century sects and cults now lumped together as Gnostics.
I can supply a list of reading and a list of the texts that were declared anathema in 492CE by the Bishop of Rome. The first instance of modern day censorship and the founding concept of the Catholic Index (that list of books and texts forbidden to Catholics)
EDIT
*The offending verses were altered/removed in the 3rd century CE and only replaced in the 5th century.
Eusebius ( the grand old bigot) is a great source of information. His bilious, hate filled diatribes about differing tradition is often all that survives of them.