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[...]the monastic context of the Nag Hammadi texts has been questioned. There have been suggestions that they belonged to a private owner who was buried with the texts and that the monastic letters in the bindings of the Nag Hammadi codices might have come from a heap of scrap papyri of diverging origins. Cahana-Blum builds on Hans Jonas’s works and concludes that Gnostic ritual was a way to free the Gnostic of the dualism of the cosmic sphere. [...]it gives the Gnostic a view of the conditions that seem to be self-evident cosmic perspectives, but from an acosmic perspective that is open to critique

According to Aetius, for instance, "the Stoics defined God as an intelligent, designing fire systematically proceeding towards the creation of the world, and encompassing all the seminal principles according to which everything comes about, in accordance with fate, and a breath (... pervading the entire world . . GNOSTIC ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS Irenaeus complains bitterly about how the Marcosians, Valentinians, and Marcionites say that there is another maker than the Father.67 In his mind, worldly evil is the consequence of human free will;68 other "protoorthodox" contemporaries explain evil as the work of Satanic or demonic beings, or the ravages of sin, even as they maintain ultimate divine governance of the cosmos and the human creation.69 Meanwhile, the distinction between the first, high God and inferior beings responsible for creation's complications is the sine qua non of Gnostic myth, found even in Irenaeus's accounts of early exponents of such myths, like Menander.70 It is then clear that the anthropogonies from Nag Hammadi reviewed above use philosophical terms to allegorize an idea about divine care already implicit in our earliest evidence about Gnostic myths: if God cares for and intervenes on behalf of human beings (as Christians of all stripes seem to have agreed upon) but the present world and our present bodies (however construed) are full of evils, then the latter must be the creation of beings who are not providential, and are thus inferior to the beings that God does care for-humanity, which is divine, superior to the creator of the cosmos. [...]much of our Gnostic literature acknowledges this fundamental difference of perspective with their proto-orthodox contemporaries insofar as it attempts to hedge and mollify it. Translations of all primary sources are my own, except where noted (as here). [...]Louth, "Pagans and Christians on Providence," 280. Archaologie, Kunst und Religion zwischen Okzident und Orient. [...]Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 25-28; Heikki Raisanen, "Marcion," in A Companion to Second-Century "Heretics," ed.

Building on the recent surge of interest in early Christian martyrdom, especially with regard to voluntary martyrdom and social rhetorical processes, this article challenges the traditional view that Gnostics opposed martyrdom. A close analysis of the primary texts results in a more nuanced presentation of martyrdom in the late second and third centuries. While some early Christians may indeed have opposed martyrdom, it is far too simplistic to make such totalizing claims about Gnostic Christianity. This article argues that the debates over volunteerism are embedded within the rhetorical discourse of these texts.

This essay explores the poetics of the divine body in the so-called Untitled Treatise in the Bruce Codex and uses that body and its text to examine two boundaries, both boundaries of Gnosis. First, modern scholars debate whether and how to draw a boundary around the phenomenon that is sometimes called "Gnosticism." Such scholarly boundary-making can be productive, and here the Untitled Treatise belongs, along with On the Origin of the World , outside the boundary of Gnostic Christianity and dates most likely to the fourth century. Second, in his elaborate description of the Human Being or City, the author has drawn on several currents, especially in Valentinian thought, to use the human body as the guiding metaphor for what human beings can and cannot know of the divine. The Untitled Treatise participates in a wider late ancient conversation about the value and limits of knowing through the body, a conversation that Patricia Cox Miller's recent work has helped to bring vividly to life. The paper argues that, when it comes to Gnosis, boundaries can be productive and bodies can be productive means of thinking about boundaries.

The following early review of Walter Bauer's book, Rechtglaubigkeit und Ketzerei im altesten Christentum (1934), was by one of the most prominent Protestant patristic scholars of the era. Walter Volker was himself the author of important and still valuable studies on Philo, Gnosticism, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius Areopagita, and Maximus the Confessor. The significance of Volker's devastating critique of Walter Bauer's thesis and historical method is that it stemmed from a scholar whose stature in the field of patristic studies was not negligible and whose expertise was precisely focused on the material and time period covered in Bauer's work. Moreover, as a fellow German Protestant, Volker could hardly be suspected of "Roman" sympathies. It is certainly interesting to observe that the highest praise for Bauer's thesis has come from New Testament scholars, such as Bultmann and Koester; yet Bauer's work does not deal with the New Testament, but with second and third century Christianity.

Despite the potential importance of Cerinthus for understanding the development of Christianity in Asia Minor, his teaching and legacy have been obscured in the patristic reports about him. One can identify two contrasting images of Cerinthus in the sources: an early "gnostic" in conflict with the Johannine tradition (Irenaeus); a Judaistic chiliast who opposed the apostles (beginning with Gaius of Rome and culminating with Epiphanius of Salamis). This has resulted in an impasse in understanding the early heretic and his significance which has continued up to the present. This article proposes a way of sorting out the traditions concerning Cerinthus and making sense of the earliest accounts. Upon critical investigation, Irenaeus' profile of Cerinthus as an early ditheistic and adoptionistic Christian emerges as essentially unproblematic and plausible. But most elements of the "Judaic" portrait are shown to be the product of confusion. What remains from this portrait, namely Cerinthus' chiliasm, may however be understood as consistent with Irenaeus' report if it was the type of chiliasm taught later by Marcion. The article shows how Cerinthus' chiliasm finally can be accounted for as a natural, not a heterogenous, part of his dualizing and anti-Judaistic system. It suggests that a coherent picture of Cerinthus' teaching can now be of help in elucidating the background and history of the Johannine churches and the rise of Christian gnosticism.

Hans Jonas' influential account of "Gnosticism" as the expression of a unitary "Spirit of Late Antiquity" defined by " Entweltlichung " (acosmism) has recently come under strong attack by scholars who suggest that the category "Gnosticism" should be dismantled and discarded. This debate calls for a thorough critical analysis of Jonas' construct "Gnosticism." Jonas' construct has highly problematic roots, on the one hand, in Spengler's account of "Arabian culture" and, on the other hand, in the normative understanding of de-objectivated existence ( Entweltlichung ) in the existential philosophy of the early Heidegger. The principal defect of Jonas' construct is that it tends to misrepresent the actual history suggested by the Nag Hammadi texts. This criticism can be exemplified by an examination of the Apocryphon of John , generally considered to be a paradigmatic Gnostic text.