Month: February 2015

As with the lecture on Valentinianism a few weeks ago, this week we looked at another prominent gnostic group, Sethians, and again squeezed in a lot of reading: three chapters from the textbook and two primary texts: the Three Steles of Seth and the Apocryphon of John.

The lecture was structured around a callout box on. p. 118 of Denzey Lewis’s textbook entitled “The Development of Sethianism,” adapted from the work of John D. Turner. This schema essentially has three stages: Jewish, Christian, and Platonic.

It can be hard for some to swallow the notion that Gnostic Judaism could have existed; so I tried to show how some elements of Sethianism were already present in Hellenistic Judaism—namely, an interest in Seth (based on Genesis 4:25-26; 5:3, 6-8; and also part of contemporaneous Christianity, observable particularly in Syriac tradition through the Cave of Treasures, the Revelation of the Magi, and other texts), and in hypostasized Sophia/Wisdom (particularly in Proverbs 9 and Sirach 24). Denzey Lewis’s discussion of gnostic creation myths (ch. 11) was helpful in this regard, as she demonstrates quite effectively the exegetical strategies employed in the texts to account for problems in Genesis—e.g., why are there two creation stories? why does God use the plural “us” in creation; why does God not want humans to have knowledge, etc. She notes also that the exegetes did not want to throw out Genesis, because they considered it scripture without error, instead they teased out its hidden meanings to …

This week’s class was comparatively lighter than last week’s look at Valentinianism. The students had to read only one textbook chapter and two primary texts. Mind you, they also had to hand in their book review of Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels. And if they were anything like me as an undergrad, most of them were reading the book up to the last minute in a mad scramble to get the review done.

It feels increasingly odd to teach the Gospel of Thomas in a Gnosticism class. Many scholars do not see it as really Gnostic; it does hint at Gnostic ideas, though perhaps no more than, say the Gospel of John. Gos. Thom. is such an important text for studying early Christianity that I discuss it in virtually all of my courses, and this week I had to repeat much of what I said about the text in my New Testament Apocrypha class from last Fall.

We began with a discussion of the so-called “School of Thomas.” Early Christian groups seem to have coalesced around certain apostolic figures: the Synoptic Gospels (especially Matthew) primarily around Peter, and the Gospel of John and the Johannine letters are seen as products of a “Johannine community.” The apostle in the texts is portrayed as a spokesperson for a particular theology, perhaps traceable to early missionary efforts by these personalities. The Thomas literature is typically held as the best example of this process. With Thomas you have three texts—the Gospel of Thomas…

I was overly ambitious this week. Denzey Lewis’ textbook devotes four chapters to Valentinianism; we covered all of it in one class. On top of that the students had to read an assortment of primary texts—Prayer of the Apostle Paul, Tripartite Tractate, Gospel of Truth, and Gospel of Philip—and hand in a short paper on the Gospel of Truth. Worse still, the Tripartite Tractate is really, really long! Even I had trouble getting through all the material before class.

The lecture distilled the textbook discussion of the life of Valentinus, the Valentinian schools that succeeded him, and the problems of reconstructing the Valentinian literary corpus—we use the statements by the heresy hunters to determine what texts are Valentinian, but then declare the statements of the heresy hunters to be inaccurate based on the differences we observe in the texts. We’re not even sure if the Gospel of Truth from Nag Hammadi is the same text that is ascribed to Valentinus! I mentioned briefly the fragments of Valentinus, including the one about Jesus not having to poop (“he ate and drank in a special way, without excreting solids”). That’s gold.

We turned next to an overview of the Valentinian myth drawn from Irenaeus, based on his knowledge of the works of Ptolemy. We noted along the way the differences between this version of the myth and what we find in the Tripartite Tractate. The myth engendered a lot of discussion, particularly about Valentinian anthropogony: …