{"title":"Desiring Divinity: Self-Deification in Early Jewish and Christian Mythmaking, written by M. David Litwa","authors":"D. Rose","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340081","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130464842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha: Proceedings from the 2015 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium, edited by Tony Burke","authors":"Vicente Dobroruka","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340083","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131438748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Special Issue: Gnostic Afterlives in American Religion and Culture","authors":"A. DeConick","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340066","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"32 19","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113984265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Can We Recover Gnosis Today?","authors":"G. Shaw","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340068","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper attempts to redefine what we mean by “gnosis.” It begins with a critique of scholars who—in order to maintain their supposed objectivity—avoid wrestling with the subjective experience of gnosis. They reduce gnosis to its literary, political, and religious contexts, and their explanation of these influences passes for our scholarly understanding of gnosis. Yet gnosis remains unknown to them. Once we dare to explore gnosis as a transforming experience, we can recognize it outside of the historical context of the late antique world. What, then, is the gnostic experience? Following Frances Yates, I suggest that there are two kinds of gnosis: the pessimistic, dualist, and anti-cosmic gnosis, and the optimistic, non-dual gnosis that sees the material cosmos as divine. I trace the lineage of this non-dual gnosis from Neoplatonic theurgists who speak of an “innate gnosis” that allows us to see the world as theophany, to its expression in our own American Gnostic, Ralph Waldo Emerson.","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117140107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theologische Orakel in der Spätantike, edited by Helmut Seng and Giulia Sfameni Gasparro","authors":"L. Ditommaso","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340082","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126872898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sociology of Gnostic Spirituality","authors":"A. DeConick","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340067","url":null,"abstract":"This paper owes debt to the field of study known as sociology of knowledge, which is interested in the social location of groups and their constructions of knowledge and reality. This project, however, is not about ordinary knowledge, but how gnosis, the direct knowledge of a transcendent God beyond the traditional Gods, became the foundation of a new form of spirituality in antiquity, and how this form of Gnostic spirituality has reemerged in modern America, impacting traditional religious communities and fostering new religious movements. Several social factors are involved in the emergence of Gnostic spirituality, including the dislocation of the founders and collaborators of Gnostic movements, the prominence of the seeker response, the revelatory milieu in which they find themselves, their reliance on revelatory authority, their push for alternative legitimation, and their flip-and-reveal and do-it-yourself constructions of new knowledge. Gnostic countercultures arise when Gnostic spirituality is mobilized. Much of religion and society are overturned so that we find constructions of the counter-self, calls for counter-conduct, the establishment of counter-cult, the deployment of counter-media, and the emergence of modes of Gnostic esoterization. The final section turns to the awakening, transport, and occulturation of Gnostic spirituality into modernity in America via artifact migration and alpha channels like Blavatsky.","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117340556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Is Gnosis? An Exploration","authors":"A. Versluis","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340069","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The word “gnosis” is widely used in contemporary scholarship in a range of fields including not only the study of the historical phenomenon of Gnosticism, but also in more unexpected areas like translations of Buddhist texts, where the term has taken on a fairly specific collectively understood meaning. Broadly speaking, in the developing consensus visible both in scholarship and in popular culture, gnosis refers to knowledge that transcends ratiocinative, discursive, or dualistic forms of knowledge. Gnosis, broadly understood both in scholarship and to some extent in popular culture, refers to knowledge understood as the transcendence of self/other dualism. Authors discussed include Edward Conze, Theodore Roszak, Carl Jung, Andrew Newberg, April DeConick, Peter Carroll, Andrieh Vitimus, Ken Wilber, and Christopher Bache.","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132229277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions, written by Jeffrey J. Kripal","authors":"V. Nelson","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340080","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121952756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deviant Christians: Romanization and Esoterization as Social Strategies for Survival Among Early Christians","authors":"A. DeConick","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340056","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper explores the relationship between deviance and esotericism, particularly as this relationship relates to the emergence of new religious movements and the processes of social accommodation and resistance. Applying sociological models for the study of deviance, I show how emergent Catholics use a variety of accommodation strategies to better fit into Roman religious expectations, constructing a public face to their worship along with ancestral ties. As they do this, the emergent Catholics dissociate themselves from other Christians, like groups with gnostic orientations, whom they have marked as different from themselves and a liability for the survival of Christianity. They begin to argue that these “other” Christians are the deviant ones, not themselves. Their willingness to Romanize certain aspects of their religion reduces the tensile relationship between their new religion and the surrounding society, increasing their ability to attract and maintain new recruits. To make matters more complicated, gnostic groups largely resist accommodation to Roman religious expectations, a strategy that powers their countercultural critique of the hegemony of Rome. They esoterize their groups by privatizing and converting their deviance into secret social capital. The choice to maintain their deviance by limiting access to their internal social networks affects their ability to recruit, grow, and sustain their communities in the long term. The social politics of deviance goes a long way to explain the rise of Catholicism and its domination over other forms of Christianity.","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124825588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ancient Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan: Contexts, Traditions, and Influences, edited by Matthew Goff, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, and Enrico Morano","authors":"Carson Bay","doi":"10.1163/2451859X-12340064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2451859X-12340064","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":130908,"journal":{"name":"Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123781917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}