alike lay claim to the figure of his close relative Zoroaster.89 Given the pedigree of their nomenclature and the total absence of Hellenizing features that would have appealed to readers steeped in the Second Sophistic and Neopythagoreanism, it is difficult to imagine that the pseudepigraphic device was used in Sethian apocalypses as an apologetic appeal to Hellenes.90 The frame narratives of Allogenes and Marsanes are not entirely clear, but their apocalyptic personages and rhetoric both are very much in line with that of Zostrianos, and were recognized as such by Porphyry. Sethian pseudepigraphy associates the texts with figures populating Jewish and Christian apocrypha, who served in the worlds of Roman Judaism and Christianity as repositories of the ancient scribal culture of the Near East.
While there are messianic and prophetic elements to the personalities of our Platonizing seers, they are above all sages, scholars steeped in sapiential and philosophical lore.91 As J. Z. Smith argues, “apocalypticism,” featuring these sages, “is a learned rather than a popular religious phenomenon. It is widely distributed throughout the Mediterranean world and is best understood as part of the inner history of the tradition within which it occurs rather than as a syncretism.”92 Apocalyptic literature, whether historical or speculative, was produced by individuals within groups that had their own religious identities and attendant jargon and rhetorical motifs.
In the case of the Platonizing Sethian texts, such traditions are those of Jewish and Christian “scribal phenomena.” Recipients of vision, such as Daniel, Ezra, Baruch, and especially Enoch are all described as scribes in their apocalypses.93 The Sethian texts are thus invested with the worldview of Mesopotamian scribal culture, which saw an “interlocking totality” of phenomena that could be interpreted through cataloging them in lists and analyzing them as indicative of divine activity.94 Yet these catalogues of natural phenomena are replaced, in the Sethian literature, by equally repetitive lists of heavenly beings and metaphysical jargon. Nonetheless, the Sethian sages are clearly designed to appear as scribal figures who possess, by unverifiable means (e.g., ascents, dreams, visions), superior wisdom and authority.95
What entitles the sage to this special knowledge is also largely contingent on cultural background. Ioan Couliano distinguishes between three types of heavenly journeys:96
1. “Call” or “elective” apocalypses (merit based): unknown in Greek literature but ubiquitous in Judeo-Christian literature.
2. “Accidental” experiences, where the heavenly journey follows some calamity that leads to a revelatory near-death experience. There is only one Jewish apocalypse in this type (3 Bar.), but it is the predominant form of Greek apocalypse (Myth of Er, etc.)
3. “Quest apocalypses,” where the protagonist must employ special techniques in the pursuit of wisdom.
Judeo-Christian sages, such as those associated with Sethian traditions, are nearly always “elect” (type 1), invested by God himself with authority, at times resulting in quasi-worship of the seer.97 A good example is Mani himself, in a letter to Edessa (italics mine): “The truth and the secrets which I speak about—and the laying on of hands which is in my possession—not from men have I received them nor from fleshly creatures, not even from studies in the scriptures … by His (the Father’s) grace, He pulled me from the council of the many who do not recognize the truth and revealed (ἀπεκάλυψε) to me his secrets and those of the undefiled father and of all the cosmos. He disclosed to me how I was before the foundation of the world, and how the groundwork of all the deeds, both good and evil, was laid, and how everything of [this] aggregation was engendered [according to its] present boundaries and [times].”98 Such extraordinary claims to authority are a hallmark of the apocalyptic genre, participating in the greater trend under the early Roman Empire to search for some kind of esoteric, “higher” knowledge.99 There are a variety of traditions common to the genre that express these claims, and as discussed above, many of these are present in the Sethian apocalypses.100 Together, they constitute a peculiar “register,” a way of writing that strongly contrasts not just with sapiential literature but with the tone and idiom of Greek philosophy.101
Altogether, the remarkable claims to authority made in apocalyptic literature, advanced by means of narrative traditions and pseudepigraphic authorship, are designed to quell any doubts a potential reader may have about the topic at hand, whatever it might be.102 Christopher Rowland remarks that this rhetoric tries to create a sense of “unmediated” or “direct” access to knowledge, but all apocalypses actually are transmitted (i.e., mediated) by an otherworldly figure.103 What he seems to mean is that the “apocalyptic technique” is designed to assure the reader of the complete veracity of a worldview or set of propositions. While it is indeed mediated by narrative devices and characters, this worldview or conceptual set is assigned a truth value that is entirely positive, pure, and undistilled. In the context of 4 Ezra and other apocalypses that deal with historical issues, this technique is consoling. In the context of Platonic epistemology, it is an extraordinary subversion of ordinary means of accessing knowledge.
WHAT IS A GOOD STORY?
Plotinus charges the Sethian apocalypses with being “fictions,” πλάσματα; Porphyry uses the same word, with the sense of “forgery.” In the context of Middle Platonism, the use of frame narrative, developed characters, and supernatural mythologoumena set the Sethian apocalypses in the realm of “fictions” (πλάσματα), together with “myths.” The Platonizing treatises’ use of the genre “apocalypse” is radical, because most Platonists of the period did not compose fiction or myths: they interpreted them, usually with allegory. This method was warranted by a Platonic epistemology that interpreted images as faulty, shadowy representations of heavenly realities. The philosophical contemporaries of the authors of the Sethian texts did think stories (myths) or fiction could “be good” (i.e., contain truths), but only if they were interpreted properly—that is, under the aegis of παιδεία, following training in philosophy and cult.
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