The Harvest of Hellenism and the Category 'Gnosticism'

Abstract

Among the various forms of religious expression attested in die early Roman Empire mere is one assortment of phenomena that modern scholarship of die past two hundred years or so has come to group togetiier under the label "gnosis" or "gnosticism."1 Many scholars today would locate die origins of "gnosticism" in preChristian circles of the late Hellenistic period-for example, widiin late Hellenistic Jewish circles. A majority of the surviving sources, however, are either Christian or "Christianized," focusing on and interpreting central elements in Christian tradition (Christ as Savior, traditions from Christian gospels, etc.), or at least incorporating some Christian elements (e.g., vocabulary, ritual). The classic sources describing "gnosis" or "gnosticism" are in fact writings by ancient Christian heresiologists, from as early as the second century CE., who catalogued many such traditions and treated diem as deviant forms or corruptions of Christian truth, "heresies." The lists of ancient "heresies" provided by the heresiologists include sects associated widi die names of various individual teachers, such as die Christian teachers Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, Carpocrates, Cerinthus, or Satomil, but also groups that are labeled by die heresiologists based on some element of their alleged teaching (e.g., "Sethians," because of dieir mytiis about die biblical figure Setii). We also have a certain number of surviving original writings from some of these alleged "heretics" themselves. This year in fact marks the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of die largest single body of such original writings, a group of a dozen or so fourdi-century CE. codices, written in Coptic (though almost all of the writings in them are arguably translations from earlier Greek works), and found in 1945 near die Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.2 The discovery and publication of the Nag