Intellij can't understand gradle dependencies if wrapped in a classpath jar

Hello,

I am working on a large gradle project where we fetch all of our dependencies locally at bootstrap time, then we get all the depencency jar names and write them in a manifest in a jar to keep the classpath as short as possible, then use these 'pathJar's as our dependencies.

The MANIFEST.MF looks something like the following:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.9.11
Created-By: xxxxxxxxxx
Class-Path: directory/name-of-component1.jar directory/name-of-component2.jar directory/name-of-component3.jar

etc etc

This works fine in gradle on the command line, but Intellij can not resolve any of the dependencies in the IDE like this.  If I use a fileTree instead, both the command line and IntelliJ works.

Is this a bug in IntelliJ or is this jar method of declaring dependencies wrong?

Any help would be much apprecieated!