part0007

T he gnostics were religious mystics who proclaimed gnosis, knowledge, as the way of salvation. To know oneself truly allowed gnostic men and women to know god 1 directly, without any need for the mediation of rabbis, priests, bishops, imams, or other religious officials. Religious officials, who were not pleased with such freedom and independence, condemned the gnostics as heretical and a threat to the well-being and good order of organized religion. Heresiologists—heresy hunters of a bygone age who busied themselves exposing people judged dangerous to the Christian masses—fulminated against what they maintained was the falsehood of the gnostics. Nonetheless, from the challenge of this perceived threat came much of the theological reflection that has characterized the intellectual history of the Christian church.

The historical roots of the gnostics reach back into the time of the Greeks, Romans, and Second Temple Jews. Some gnostics were Jewish, others Greco-Roman, and many were Christian. There were Mandaean gnostics from Iraq and Iran; Manichaeans from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and all the way to China; Islamic gnostics in the Muslim world; and Cathars in western Europe. The heyday of their influence extends from the second century CE through the next several centuries. Their influence and their presence, some say, continue to the present day.

Gnostics sought knowledge and wisdom from many different sources, and they accepted insight wherever it could be found. Like those who came before them, they embraced a personified wisdom, Sophia, understood variously and taken as the manifestation of divine insight. To gain knowledge of the deep things of god, gnostics read and studied diverse religious and philosophical texts. In addition to Jewish sacred literature, Christian documents, and Greco-Roman religious and philosophical texts, gnostics studied religious works from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Zoroastrians, Muslims, and Buddhists. All such sacred texts disclosed truths, and all were to be celebrated for their wisdom.

Gnostics loved to explore who they were and from where they had come, and hence they read creation stories such as the opening chapters of Genesis with vigor and enthusiasm. Like others, they recognized that creation stories not only claim to describe what was, once upon a time, but also suggest what is , now, in our own world. The gnostics carried to their reading a conviction that the story of creation was not a happy one. There is, they reasoned, something fundamentally wrong with the world, there is too much evil and pain and death in the world, and so there must have been something wrong with creation.

Consequently, gnostics provided innovative and oftentimes disturbing interpretations of the creation stories they read. They concluded that a distinction, often a dualistic distinction, must be made between the transcendent, spiritual deity, who is surrounded by aeons and is all wisdom and light, and the creator of the world, who is at best incompetent and at worst malevolent. Yet through everything, they maintained, a spark of transcendent knowledge, wisdom, and light persists within people who are in the know. The transcendent deity is the source of that enlightened life and light. The meaning of the creation drama, when properly understood, is that human beings—gnostics in particular—derive their knowledge and light from the transcendent god, but through the mean-spirited actions of the demiurge, the creator of the world, they have been confined within this world. (The platonic aspects of this imagery are apparent.) Humans in this world are imprisoned, asleep, drunken, fallen, ignorant. They need to find themselves—to be freed, awakened, made sober, raised, and enlightened. In other words, they need to return to gnosis.

This distinction between a transcendent god and the creator of the world is all the more remarkable when it is recalled that many of the earliest gnostic thinkers who made such a distinction seem to have been Jews. What might have led them to such a conclusion that seems to fly in the face of Jewish monotheistic affirmations? Could it have been the experience of the political and social trauma of the time, culminating in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE , which prompted serious reflection upon the problem of evil and stimulated the production of Jewish apocalyptic compositions? Could it have been the reflection of hellenistic Jewish thinkers who were schooled in Judaica and Greek philosophy and recognized the deep philosophical and theological issues surrounding the transcendence of the high god and the need for cosmic intermediaries to be involved with this world? Could it have been that among the creative Jewish minds, representative of the rich diversity of Judaism during the first centuries before and of the Common Era, who boldly addressed the real challenges of Jewish mysticism before Kabbalah, of the wisdom and Hokhmah of god, of world-wrenching apocalyptic, of theodicy and evil in the world, there were those who finally drew gnostic conclusions? We know the names of some of these creative Jewish people: John the baptizer, who initiated Jesus of Nazareth and preached apocalyptic ideas in the vicinity of Qumran, where Covenanters and Essenes practiced their separatist, ethical dualism; Simon Magus and Dositheos, who lived about the same time as Jesus and advocated their ideas in Samaria and beyond; Philo of Alexandria, a hellenistic Jewish thinker who provided Greek philosophical perspectives on the Hebrew Bible; Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya, nicknamed Aher, “Other,” who dabbled in dualism; and there were more. We shall encounter some of these Jewish thinkers in this volume. John the baptizer becomes the gnostic hero of the Mandaeans, Jesus of the Christian gnostics. Simon Magus may lurk in the background of several gnostic texts, and Dositheos is said to be the compiler of the Three Steles of Seth. Others, mostly unnamed, may have made similar contributions to the discussion of the profound question of the transcendent god and the demiurge.

The role of the gnostic savior or revealer is to awaken people who are under the spell of the demiurge—not, as in the case of the Christ of the emerging orthodox church, to die for the salvation of people, to be a sacrifice for sins, or to rise from the dead on Easter. The gnostic revealer discloses knowledge that frees and awakens people, and that helps them recall who they are. When enlightened, gnostics can live a life appropriate for those who know themselves and god. They can return back to the beginning, when they were one with god. Such a life transcends what is mundane and mortal in this world and experiences the bliss of oneness with the divine. As the divine forethought, or Christ, in the Secret Book of John says to a person—every person—in the pit of the underworld, “I am the forethought of pure light, I am the thought of the virgin spirit, who raises you to a place of honor. Arise, remember that you have heard, and trace your root, which is I, the compassionate.”

Gnostic literature includes a typical cast of spiritual or mythological figures and realms, but they are referred to by different names.

Above and beyond all is the transcendent deity. In the Book of Baruch this deity is called the Good and is identified with the fertility god Priapos. In the Secret Book of John and elsewhere this deity is called the One, or monad, as well as the invisible spirit, virgin spirit, and father. It is said that the One should not be confused with a god, since it is greater than a god. Elsewhere the transcendent is called the boundless, depth, majesty, light. Poimandres reveals itself as the light, mind, first god. Mandaeans call this deity the great life and lord of greatness, Manichaeans the father of greatness, Muslim mystics the exalted king, Cathars the invisible father, true god, good god.

The glory of the transcendent is made manifest in a heavenly world of light. In the classic literature of gnostic wisdom this exalted world is often called the pleroma or fullness of god, and the inhabitants of this world are called aeons or eternal realms. The first of the aeons is usually the divine mother. For Simon Magus she is Helena, or ennoia, the thought of god. In the Secret Book of John she is Barbelo, or pronoia, the first thought or forethought of god. Thunder, in the text by that name, has certain similarities as well. Sometimes the transcendent father and the divine mother produce a child in spiritual love. Often the aeons are identified as spiritual attributes of the divine, are given names, and are joined together as couples, spiritual lovers in the fullness of the divine. In the Mandaean divine world the great life is surrounded by other lives and a host of Jordans, or heavenly waters; in the Manichaean kingdom of light the father of greatness is surrounded by 12 aeons and 144 aeons of aeons; and in the Mother of Books the exalted king is surrounded by seas, angels, lights, and colors.

Among the aeons and manifestations of the divine is often a figure who represents the divine in this world, fallen from the light above yet present as the light of god with us and in us. In many gnostic texts this is the figure called Sophia or wisdom, as mentioned above. In Valentinian traditions two forms of wisdom are evident, a higher wisdom called Sophia and a lower wisdom called Achamoth. Wisdom is closely linked to Eve in the creation stories, and Eve is portrayed as the mother of the living and a revealer of knowledge. Wisdom may also be linked to the gnostic revealer, and wisdom may take part in the process of salvation. In the Gospel of John and other texts the divine logos, or word, plays a similar role. Such is also the case with Ruha, the spirit, in Mandaean texts, and perhaps Salman, including great Salman and lesser Salman, in the Islamic Mother of Books.

As noted, the demiurge or creator of this world is commonly distinguished from the transcendent deity in gnostic texts. The demiurge is ignorant, tragic, megalomaniacal. In the Secret Book of John he is depicted as the ugly child of Sophia, snakelike in appearance, with the face of a lion and eyes flashing like bolts of lightning. He is named Yaldabaoth, Sakla, Samael, and he is the chief archon and an arrogant, jealous god. In the Gospel of Judas he is given another name, Nebro, said to mean “rebel.” In the Gospel of Truth error behaves like the demiurge, for it becomes strong and works in the world, but erroneously. Similar, too, are the actions of nature in the Paraphrase of Shem, Ptahil in Mandaean literature, the five evil archons in Manichaean literature, Azazi’il in the Mother of Books, and Lucifer or Satan among the Cathars.

The gnostic revealer awakens people who are under the spell of the demiurge. Within a Jewish context the gnostic revealer is Seth, the child of Adam and Eve, or Derdekeas, probably Aramaic for “male child,” or the first thought or the afterthought or the wisdom of the divine. Within a Christian context the revealer is Jesus the anointed, within a Manichaean context Jesus of light, as well as others. More abstractly, the call to revelation and knowledge—the wake-up call—is a winged divine messenger in the Song of the Pearl, instruction of mind in Hermetic literature, and enlightened Manda dHayye, knowledge of life, in Mandaean literature. In other words, the call to knowledge is the dawning of awareness, from within and without, of “what is, what was, and what is to come.” It is insight. It is gnosis.

In gnostic literature those who come to knowledge are described in different ways. Occasionally they are specifically called gnostics; the Mandaeans are also called by the word that means “gnostics” in Mandaic. More often they are named the unshakable race, or the seed or offspring of Seth, or the generation without a king, or the elect or chosen, or, in the Mother of Books, the ones who know. With a mystical flourish the Gospel of Philip recommends that rather than be called a Christian, a person with knowledge might be understood to be at one with the gnostic revealer and be called Christ. This recalls the Gospel of Thomas, saying 108, where Jesus says, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that one.” Such people of knowledge know how to live profoundly and well in the truth and light of god. The Gospel of Truth concludes, “It is they who manifest themselves truly, since they are in that true and eternal life and speak of the perfect light filled with the seed of the father, which is in his heart and in the fullness, while his spirit rejoices in it and glorifies him in whom it was, because the father is good. And his children are perfect and worthy of his name, because he is the father. Children of this kind are those whom he loves.”

The sacred texts presented in this volume all help to clarify what gnosticism is and who the gnostics were. The similarities and differences among these texts are equally instructive, as are the connections among them, whether historical or phenomenological. The early “wisdom gospels” of Thomas and John, both perhaps dating from the first century CE , portray Jesus as a speaker of wise words or even as the divine word itself, which is itself “wisdom.” These early wisdom gospels represent incipient gnostic perspectives, and they were used extensively by later gnostics, so that their impact upon the history of gnosticism was huge. The classic literature of gnostic wisdom dates from the second century CE , and some materials in the literature are probably even older. Justin’s Book of Baruch illustrates a Jewish form of gnosticism with Greco-Roman allusions. So does Sethian gnostic literature, with its provocative Jewish interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis and its emphasis on the special roles of Eve, the mother of the living, and Seth, whom the Sethian gnostics claimed as ancestor. Valentinian gnostic literature is named after the great second-century teacher Valentinos, who, along with his students, seems to have made use of Sethian insights in order to fashion an elegant gnostic system for reflecting upon the origin and destiny of true life and light. In Syria, the sacred literature relating to Thomas is closely related to the wisdom gospel of Thomas; Thomas is understood to be the twin of Jesus and the guarantor of his wisdom and knowledge.

The Hermetic literature dates from the first century CE and after. It is named after the Greek god Hermes, the divine messenger, nicknamed Trismegistos, “thrice-greatest,” and depicted in a syncretistic way, once again with Jewish and Greco-Roman themes, along with Egyptian motifs. The Mandaeans consist of Middle Eastern gnostic communities that exist to the present day, now in locales around the world. The Mandaeans interpret the opening chapters of Genesis in a typically gnostic manner, but they reserve a special place for John the baptizer, whose style of Jewish baptismal piety they considered to reflect the origin of their communities. Manichaean literature dates from the time of the prophet Mani, the third-century prophet who, with his followers, created a world religion intended to be universal. Manichaeism draws from Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Christian sources, likely including the Gospel of Thomas and other gnostic texts, in order to announce how the divine light of the cosmos may be saved from the machinations of the forces of darkness and gathered into the kingdom of light. Some of the songs in the Coptic Manichaean Songbook appear to be related to Mandaean literature, and Manichaeism and Mandaeism show connections with each other.

Such Islamic mystical texts as the Mother of Books, as well as Cathar sacred literature, are sometimes described by scholars as late gnostic or neomanichaean, because of similarities with the traditions of Mani and his followers. The Mother of Books comes from the eighth century CE and represents a form of Islamic ghuluw, which literally means “exaggeration.” The Cathar texts come from medieval Europe and offer a dualistic message of the triumph of light over darkness. The Cathars, too, like so many gnostics, venerated the Gospel of John. The Gospel of the Secret Supper features John and cites a portion of the Gospel of John as it announces the glory that will finally come to the children of the good god of light: “The just will glow like a sun in the kingdom of the invisible father. And the son of god will take them before the throne of the invisible father and say to them, ‘Here I am with my children whom you have given me. Just father, the world has not known you, but I have truly known you, because it is you who have sent me on my mission.’”

The term gnostic is derived from the ancient Greek word gnosis, “knowledge.” Gnosis is a common word in Greek, and it can designate different types of knowledge. Sometimes, as in the sacred texts included in this volume, gnosis means personal or mystical knowledge. Understood in this way, gnosis may mean acquaintance, that is, knowledge as personal awareness of oneself or another person or even god, or it may mean insight, that is, knowledge as immediate awareness of deep truths. These ways of understanding gnosis are not mutually exclusive, for knowledge may entail the immediate awareness of oneself or of another, in a personal union or communion that provides profound insight into the true nature of everything. As we have already noted, the Gospel of Thomas has Jesus articulate just such a mystical personal knowledge.

The gnosis sought by the authors of these texts is hardly ordinary knowledge. A text from the Nag Hammadi library, the Exegesis on the Soul (included in this volume), declares that the restoration of the soul to a state of wholeness “is not due to rote phrases or to professional skills or to book learning.” Indeed, mystics commonly have emphasized, in many books, that mystical knowledge cannot be attained simply by reading books. Other texts describe this sort of gnosis by listing questions that need to be addressed if one is to be enlightened by knowledge. In the Secret Book of John the savior or revealer announces that she or he will teach “what is, what was, and what is to come,” and in the Book of Thomas the revealer commands, “Examine yourself and understand who you are, how you exist, and how you will come to be.” To attain this knowledge—to become a gnostic—is to know oneself, god, and everything. Or, in the words of the maxim from the ancient oracular center dedicated to Apollo at Delphi, Greece, a maxim cited frequently in the texts in this volume: gnothi sauton, “know yourself.” According to many of these sacred texts, to know oneself truly is to attain this mystical knowledge, and to attain this mystical knowledge is to know oneself truly. Gnostic knowledge, then, relies on lived mystical experience, on knowledge of the whole timeline of the world, past, present, and future, and on knowledge of the self—where we have come from, who we are, where we are going—and of the soul’s journey.

Thus, the Greek word gnosis was used extensively by people in the world of Mediterranean antiquity, including the people who wrote the texts in this volume, but among the heresiologists the word was employed in a particularly polemical fashion. The heresiologists were heresy hunters who, as the guardians of truth and watchmen on the walls of Zion, were trying to expose people judged to be dangerous to the masses, especially the Christian masses. The more famous of the heresiologists include Irenaeus of Lyon, whose major work was Adversus haereses, “Against Heresies”; Hippolytus of Rome, who wrote Refutatio omnium haeresium, “Refutation of All Heresies”; Pseudo-Tertullian (an author writing under the name of Tertullian), who wrote Adversus omnes haereses, “Against All Heresies”; and Epiphanius of Salamis, who authored a particularly nasty piece entitled Panarion, “Medicine Chest,” with an orthodox remedy for every heretical malady. The neoplatonist philosopher Plotinos of Lykopolis also wrote a heresiological treatise, Against the Gnostics, according to his student Porphyry. All these heresiologists focused, to one extent or another, upon the supposed gnosis of the heretics, and they suggested that at least some—even if only a few—of the heretics could be called gnostikoi, gnostics, or referred to themselves as gnostikoi . While these heretics used the word gnosis, they did not necessarily call themselves gnostics. Irenaeus wrote five volumes against heresies, and he claimed to have composed an “exposé and refutation of falsely so-called knowledge.” Irenaeus and his fellow heresiologists, motivated by a religious zeal to expose and refute people with whom they disagreed, were rather sloppy and imprecise in their use of terms and their enumeration of heresies. Yet their presentations of gnosis, “falsely so-called gnosis,” have played a role, albeit a polemical one, in defining the terms gnosis, gnostic, and gnosticism in modern discussions.

The widespread use of the word gnosis (and similar words in other languages, for example, in Coptic and Latin), and the polemical application of this word and related words among the heresiologists, have created a challenge for scholars and students who wish to understand gnosticism. What is gnosticism, the religion of gnosis? Gnosis is a word widely attested in the ancient world, but the word gnosticism itself is a term not attested at all in antiquity or late antiquity. Rather, it first was used in the eighteenth century to designate the heretical religious groups discussed by the heresiologists. Are gnosticism and gnosis valid categories for analysis? Who actually were the gnostics? These questions have become even more interesting when scholars have reflected upon gnosticism and gnosis in relation to hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, Shi‘ite, and Cathar religions. Further, the discovery and publication in recent times of primary texts (as opposed to the secondary texts of the heresiologists) generally considered to be gnostic has raised the issues of definition and taxonomy in new and exciting ways. Among these primary texts are those from the Askew Codex (Pistis Sophia, or Faith Wisdom), the Bruce Codex, the Berlin Gnostic Codex 8502, and the Nag Hammadi library. The Nag Hammadi library is a treasure trove of Coptic texts, most previously unknown and many considered gnostic by scholars. The texts in the Nag Hammadi library were discovered around December 1945 near Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, and they are now becoming available in editions and translations. A substantial number of texts in the present volume are from the Nag Hammadi library. One text, the Gospel of Judas, is from the recently published Codex Tchacos.

Scholars of ancient and late antique religions have attempted to sort through the issues of definition and taxonomy in order to reach some clarity regarding gnosis and gnosticism. In 1966 many of the leading scholars of gnosis gathered at an international conference in Messina, Italy, and produced a set of statements that are meant to define gnosis and gnosticism. Gnosis, they maintain, is “knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved for an élite,” and this is a term of very broad application. On the other hand, gnosticism is “a coherent series of characteristics that can be summarized in the idea of a divine spark in man, deriving from the divine realm, fallen into this world of fate, birth and death, and needing to be awakened by the divine counterpart of the self in order to be finally reintegrated.” 2 Gnosticism is thus a religious movement represented by religious groups that emerged in the second century CE and after, especially within the context of Christianity, groups such as the followers of Basilides and Valentinos, two particularly significant early Christian teachers of gnostic religion.

This distinction between gnosis and gnosticism resembles that of Hans Jonas in his books The Gnostic Religion and Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, in which he distinguishes between the gnostic principle—“the spirit of late antiquity”—and the gnostic movement or movements. The gnostic religion, Jonas suggests, is a religion of knowledge, with “a certain conception of the world, of man’s alienness within it, and of the transmundane nature of the godhead.” 3 This knowledge is communicated creatively in myths, which contain themes borrowed freely from other religious traditions and which employ an elaborate series of symbols. The end result, according to Jonas, is the expression of religious dualism, dislocation, alienation—“the existing rift between God and world, world and man, spirit and flesh.” 4 Whereas Valentinian gnostics (and others) seek to derive dualism from a primordial oneness, Manichaean gnostics begin with a dualism of two opposing principles. But both options remain dualistic. 5 For Jonas, these expressions of gnostic dualism can be articulated in terms of modern philosophical existentialism. The gnostic drama highlights the self-experience of a person as Geworfenheit, “thrownness,” abandonment of self in the world. As the Secret Book of John and other texts describe it, one is thrown into this world, into a body, into the darkness. Yet, Jonas states, “There is no overlooking one cardinal difference between the gnostic and the existentialist dualism: Gnostic man is thrown into an antagonistic, anti-divine and therefore anti-human nature, modern man into an indifferent one. Only the latter case represents the absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit.” 6 Ancient gnostics and modern existentialists may both be nihilistic, but we modern folks, in our post-Christian world, face the more profound abyss: the uncaring abyss. For gnostics, there is light in the darkness and hope in the abyss.

More recently scholars have questioned these ways of describing and defining gnosis and gnosticism. Here we shall consider three significant attempts to shed new light on the gnostic debate, those by Elaine Pagels, Bentley Layton, and Michael Williams.

1. In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels admits that Jonas’s book The Gnostic Religion remains “the classic introduction,” but in her own book Pagels depicts gnostics in a different way. 7 She reads the gnostic gospels and draws conclusions about social and political concerns that motivated the gnostics. Thus, for Pagels, the gnostics formulated teachings on the spiritual resurrection of Christ that subverted the emerging orthodox church’s hierarchy of priests and bishops, whose authority was—and still is—linked to the messengers or apostles who were witnesses of the bodily resurrection of Christ. The gnostic teaching on spiritual resurrection and spiritual authority, Pagels observes, “claimed to offer to every initiate direct access to God of which the priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant.” 8 Again, Pagels notes that the gnostics formulated teachings on the multiple manifestations of god, the mother and the father, that subverted the emerging orthodox church’s commitment—which still can be found—to the authority of one bishop, and a male bishop at that. In these and other ways, as Adolf von Harnack once said and Pagels also recalls, the gnostics may have been the “first Christian theologians,” whose ideas and actions stimulated theological thinking in the Christian church. In Pagels’s view, the gnostics lived as freethinking advocates of a mystical spirituality, and they talked a different talk and walked a different walk than the emerging orthodox church. To many readers of Pagels’s book the gnostics seemed to advocate a more attractive sort of spirituality than that of the orthodox priests, bishops, and heresiologists, and they seemed to be on the right side of many issues that remain important issues to the present day. Pagels was accused by some reviewers of portraying the gnostics in too attractive a fashion. Nonetheless, The Gnostic Gospels offers a compelling portrayal of the gnostics as freethinking mystics who recommended a direct experience of god, unmediated by church hierarchy.

2. In The Gnostic Scriptures, Bentley Layton assembles an anthology of gnostic texts in English translations as authoritative gnostic scriptures. The title of Layton’s book is close to the title of our volume, and the conception is similar, though more limited in scope. Like the scholars assembled at Messina, and like Hans Jonas, Layton distinguishes between two meanings of the word gnostic: “One is a broad meaning, denoting all the religious movements represented in this book, and many more besides. The elusive category (‘gnosticism’) that corresponds to this broad meaning has always been hard to define. The other meaning of ‘gnostic’ is narrow and more strictly historical: it is the self-given name of an ancient Christian sect, the gnostikoi, or ‘gnostics.’” 9 Layton points out, as we have noted, that the words gnostikos, “gnostic,” and gnostikoi, “gnostics,” were uncommon in the world of antiquity and late antiquity, and that the Christian sect that called itself the gnostics has been nicknamed the Sethians, or else the Barbeloites, Barbelognostics, Ophians, or Ophites, by ancient heresiologists and modern scholars. These gnostics form the foundation for Layton’s anthology, and Part One of his book, “Classic Gnostic Scriptures,” is devoted to gnostic works in this limited sense of the word. The subsequent parts of his book have additional texts—texts written by Valentinians, by the followers of Judas Thomas, and by proponents of the systems of Basilides and Hermetic religion.

Michael Williams, in his book Rethinking “Gnosticism” (discussed next), applauds Layton’s efforts to be as exact as possible in his use of terms, but he points out that the Coptic primary texts classified by Layton as classic gnostic scripture do not refer to themselves as gnostic and are not indisputably gnostic. The term gnostic is not used in so simple a way as Layton maintains, Williams continues; for example, Irenaeus says that the followers of a woman named Marcellina called themselves gnostics, but Layton does not include them anywhere in his anthology. Yet, in spite of Williams’s protestations—and with his grudging acknowledgment—it must be admitted that Layton has convincingly demonstrated the connections among a variety of texts that are gnostic. In the present volume we too shall feature these classic or Sethian gnostic texts prominently in Part Two of our book, “Literature of Gnostic Wisdom.”

3. In Rethinking “Gnosticism,” Michael Williams is more negative is his assessment of the word gnosticism . He argues for “dismantling a dubious category,” the dubious category being gnosticism itself. Williams begins by giving his own definition of gnosticism: “What is today usually called ancient ‘gnosticism’ includes a variegated assortment of religious movements that are attested in the Roman Empire at least as early as the second century CE .” 10 While he casts his net widely in his discussion of this set of religious movements, Williams does not include Hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, and later religions in his discussion. He does survey the use of the terms gnosis and gnostic in both the heresiological sources and the primary gnostic texts, and he finds that rarely do gnostics seem to have described themselves as such, and the occasional use of the term gnostic among the heresiologists is uneven, ambiguous, and contradictory. Further, the effort on the part of scholars to employ gnosticism as a typological category has also failed. Scholars have proposed, variously, that gnosticism was an anticosmic protest movement, or an innovative religion of adoption and adaptation of other religious traditions, or a religion of spiritualists who hated the body, or of ethical radicals who opted for either an ascetic or a bohemian lifestyle, and so on. Williams judges that these descriptions of gnosticism are caricatures of a diverse set of religious movements—misguided efforts to define a single, overarching category called gnosticism. Instead, Williams proposes that we jettison the category gnosticism altogether and focus our attention on specific religious movements, for instance, the Valentinians.

I would suggest the category “biblical demiurgical traditions” as one useful alternative. By “demiurgical” traditions I mean all those that ascribe the creation and management of the cosmos to some lower entity or entities, distinct from the highest God. This would include most of ancient Platonism, of course. But if we add the adjective “biblical,” to denote “demiurgical” traditions that also incorporate or adapt traditions from Jewish or Christian Scripture, the category is narrowed significantly. In fact, the category “biblical demiurgical” would include a large percentage of the sources that today are usually called “gnostic,” since the distinction between the creator(s) of the cosmos and the true God is normally identified as a common feature of “gnosticism.” 11

Rethinking “Gnosticism” is one of the more thought-provoking books to have appeared in the past several years on the topic of the definition of gnosis and gnosticism. In spite of Williams’s argument, however, in this volume we shall continue to use the term gnostic . We do so for three reasons.

First, Williams concedes, as we have seen above, that Bentley Layton has brought some clarity to the discussion of what is gnostic, and he acknowledges with Layton that there are in fact connections among gnostic texts. The savvy of scholars from the time of the Messina colloquium and Hans Jonas to the present day is vindicated in the continual use of the terms gnosis, gnosticism, and gnostic, though now with important qualifications. We too shall continue to make use of these terms.

Second, Williams stresses the widespread diversity within the category gnosticism, and of course he is correct in doing so. Yet his recognition of gnostic diversity merely parallels the similar recognition by scholars of diversity in Judaism and Christianity. This recognition of diversity has led Jacob Neusner to suggest “Judaisms” and Jonathan Z. Smith “Christianities” as appropriate terms for these diverse religious movements. Perhaps we might also opt for “gnosticisms” or “gnostic religions” as a similar way of acknowledging the differences among religions of gnosis.

Third, we continue to use the terms gnosis, gnosticism, and gnostic with a particular understanding of comparison and classification. In Drudgery Divine, Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us that comparisons do not necessarily tell us how things actually are as much as they tell us about the people doing the comparisons and their assumptions and perspectives. Smith notes that statements of comparison are triadic, with an implicit “more than” and an additional “with respect to.” Thus, A resembles B more than C with respect to N. Seen in this light, statements of comparison are always relative and contextual. This understanding of comparison and classification may be helpful to us in our current discussion of what is gnostic.

Contrary to those who doubt whether there is any set of traits (N) that allow us to compare and classify religions of gnosis as gnostic, in this volume we wish to suggest a set of gnostic traits that in fact may be helpful in comparing and classifying texts and traditions.

To do this, we begin by building on the observation that, according to Irenaeus of Lyon, the people we here refer to as Sethians defined and described themselves as gnostics. Here is the historical basis for the use of gnostic as a valid term of self-definition.

Next we continue to explore who the gnostics were by identifying traits that were characteristic of these Sethians who called themselves gnostics. Irenaeus helps us by citing sacred materials that were used by Sethian gnostics, and it turns out that these materials are remarkably similar to the classic Sethian text entitled the Secret Book of John, presented prominently below. Through a careful examination of the Secret Book of John we identify five traits that we suggest are central to this gnostic text and that guide us in understanding Sethian gnostics. The Secret Book of John proclaims the importance of (1) gnosis, or mystical knowledge, (2) understood through themes of wisdom and (3) presented in creation stories, particularly in Genesis, and (4) interpreted through a variety of religious and philosophical traditions, including platonism, (5) in order to announce a radically enlightened way and life of knowledge. These five traits, we propose, may help us describe the leading features of Sethian gnostics.

Finally, we extend the use of the terms gnostic and gnosticism to other movements that appear to be linked to Sethian gnostics historically or that resemble Sethian gnostics phenomenologically. Sometimes there seem to be historical connections between Sethian gnostic texts and texts that are representative of some other sort of gnosis, and at other times there seem to be clear similarities in content and theme. This wider application of the terms gnostic and gnosticism allows us to classify comparable texts and traditions as representative of gnosticism.

In this volume, then, we understand the following to be the traits of gnostic religions:

These traits of gnostic religions come to expression, to varying degrees, in the sacred texts that are included in this volume: wisdom gospels, classic texts of gnostic religions—Sethian, Valentinian, Syrian, and other gnostic religions—and Hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, Islamic, and Cathar texts. These traits, though derived from an analysis of a Sethian text of fundamental significance from a tradition that understood itself to be gnostic, do not necessarily come to expression in a uniform way in the texts included here—recall what Jonathan Z. Smith said about the relative nature of comparisons. Yet all of the texts included in this volume address the interests of gnosis and gnosticism.

The term bible is derived ultimately from the ancient Greek word biblos (or byblos ), meaning “papyrus,” the reed used to make a primitive sort of paper in order to construct scrolls and codices, or books, in the world of ancient bookbinding. The Greek word was also written in a diminutive form, biblion; the plural is biblia, “books.” Within the context of Judaism and Christianity certain books came to be associated with the sacred scriptures, which in turn were eventually referred to in the singular, the Bible. Thus, within the history of the use of the term, the Bible, or the book, designates a collection or anthology of sacred texts.

We can explain how this set of meanings came to be associated with the word Bible by examining the process of establishing a canon or canons within Judaism and Christianity. Organized religions usually teach that adherents to a given religion should observe the tenets of the tradition in a way that is right, proper, and correct according to a given canon. (Originally a canon was a cane or reed, a measuring stick, but the term came to be applied to any standard by which one might determine whether a person’s thoughts or actions measure up to the standard of correctness in the tradition.) Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions of the book, and so their canons are written canons, authoritative books and anthologies. For Judaism and Christianity, their authoritative books are the Hebrew Bible (or, more exactly, the Tanakh, that is, the Torah [“law”], Neviim [“prophets”], and Kethuvim [“writings”]) and the New Testament (or the New Covenant), respectively. The Hebrew Bible was used in antiquity in Hebrew and in Greek translation. The Greek version called the Septuagint was completed in Alexandria, Egypt, by bilingual Jewish translators during the first centuries BCE . A legend emerged that the Septuagint was written in a miraculously identical fashion by seventy-two translators who labored in pairs over a period of seventy-two days. The Septuagint was the Bible of the early Christian church, which originated, after all, as a Jewish religious movement. This Greek translation of the scriptures of Judaism contains several texts not included in the Hebrew Bible—for example, Baruch, 1 Esdras, Judith, 1–4 Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and the Wisdom of Solomon. To this day the inclusion or exclusion of these texts contained in the Septuagint remains a canonical issue among Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Christians.

The formation of the New Testament as the Christian Bible was a gradual process that took centuries to complete. Finally, at the Council of Trent in 1545, the Roman Catholic Church acted to recognize its list of biblical, canonical books as final, that is, closed to any additions or subtractions. (Minor changes from the work of textual critics are quietly incorporated into new printings of Bible translations.) Many Protestant denominations have never acted officially to recognize a biblical canon. While there is widespread agreement among Christians concerning what books should be included in the New Testament, the traditions of the Syrian and Ethiopic churches have claimed that different sets of texts should be included in the Christian canon. Today some are proposing the Gospel of Thomas as an authoritative Christian text, and the Jesus Seminar in Santa Rosa, California, is discussing the possibility of a new New Testament, a new Christian Bible.

Arguably the most influential person in the process of the formation of a New Testament was a second-century Christian teacher, a dyed-in-the-wool dualist named Marcion of Sinope. Marcion is sometimes included in discussions of the gnostics because of his radical dualism, but his Christian religion was a religion of faith rather than gnosis. In this volume we consider Marcion to be an unrepentant Paulinist, with a literalistic way of reading the Bible, rather than a gnostic. As one prominent scholar quipped, the only person in the second century who understood Paul was Marcion, and he misunderstood him.

Marcion was a rich shipowner turned evangelist who went to Rome in the middle of the second century in order to contribute his money and his teachings to the Roman church. Both were returned to him. Marcion preached that the good and loving god, revealed in Christ, must be distinguished from the just and righteous god, who was the god of the Jewish people. Marcion’s theological dualism, with all its anti-Semitic implications, necessitated for him the creation of a new Bible, a new authoritative book for the god newly revealed in Christ. Marcion wrote a book, a rather simple-minded piece called the Antitheses, with quotations from Jewish and Christian texts that seemed to Marcion to show the striking contrasts between the Jewish god and the Christian god. Marcion also formulated a Christian canon—as far as we can tell, he was the first Christian to come up with the idea of a separate Christian Bible. He knew of a series of letters of Paul, and he knew of the Gospel of Luke, which he considered Paul’s gospel, and he combined these into his New Testament. And when he read in Paul’s letter to the Galatians that some troublesome people want to “pervert the gospel of Christ” (1:7), he took the words seriously and literally. He assumed that lackeys of the Jewish god were perverting the written texts by penning in words favorable to the Jewish god and the scriptures of the Jewish god. Marcion responded as a highly opinionated textual critic by removing the sections of Paul’s letters and Luke’s gospel that he thought needed to be erased in order to restore the texts to their original form. For Marcion’s misguided efforts his foe Tertullian chided him, “Shame on Marcion’s eraser!”

Marcion proved to be popular and influential as a leader of his church, but only for a time. Eventually he was rejected by many Christians, including the heresiologists, and declared a heretic. The Christians opposed to Marcion disliked his insistence on two gods and his rejection of Judaism and the god of the Hebrew Bible. Instead, such Christians looked for continuity in the history of salvation from Judaism to Jesus and beyond. Yet the Christian canonical idea of Marcion carried the day, as did Marcion’s basic outline of the Christian canon, with a gospel section and an epistolary (Pauline) section. From the perspective of the Christian Bible, Marcion lost the battle but won the war.

When we refer to the texts in the present volume as The Gnostic Bible, we are in this world of discourse. We are presenting these texts as sacred books and sacred scriptures of the gnostics, and collectively as sacred literature of the gnostics. But in this Bible of the gnostics there is no sense of a single, authoritative collection. The sacred literature in this Bible illustrates a diversity that we have suggested is characteristic of gnostic religions. Further, the sacred literature in this Bible constitutes no closed canon. We present here what we judge to be the most significant gnostic texts, but there are other gnostic texts that have not been included. All these gnostic texts may be equally authoritative, truths may be discovered in a variety of texts and traditions, and the way to wisdom and knowledge cannot be closed. Such a sense of wisdom and knowledge has made this sacred literature attractive to free spirits in the past and equally fascinating to many in the present day.