noted earlier in this book, Coptic treatises bearing the titles of several of the apocalypses mentioned by Porphyry in Vita Plotini 16 were discovered among the Nag Hammadi hoard in Upper Egypt in 1945. These treatises appear to belong to a Gnostic literary tradition that spans a wider group of Nag Hammadi texts, first identified and dubbed “Sethian” by Hans-Martin Schenke.4 The study of these Sethian treatises in the greater project of understanding the relationship between Plotinus and his Gnostic friends thus brings one to the study of Sethian tradition, and how it may have affected the particular issues that were contested by these thinkers. “Sethianism” describes a literary tradition defined by a family resemblance of various shared features, but chiefly the veneration of Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve, as revelator and even savior in the context of the “classic” Gnostic myth recounted at the beginning of Chapter One and criticized by Plotinus.5 The tradition encompasses, if not a system of thought, a school of thought, which thus presupposes some kind of belief in the Gnostic myth.6 Despite occasional criticism,7 the category of “Sethianism” enjoys widespread scholarly acceptance, even from those who dub it instead “Classic Gnosticism”8 or even eschew the term “Gnosticism” itself (thus speaking of “Sethian Christianity”).9 It is worth pausing to discuss this tradition here, since recent work brings into sharp relief the fact that nearly every Sethian treatise, even when they are Platonizing, is an apocalypse; therefore, the treatises criticized by Plotinus and Porphyry possess a very specific literary background that deserves to be explored in full.
One scholar of Gnosticism, John D. Turner, drew up a hypothetical but widely followed “literary history” of the movement that may have produced the Sethian literature.10 This history is based on a perceived tension between three subgroups within the Sethian corpus identified by Schenke: midrashic texts concerned with exegesis of the Paradise narrative in Genesis, texts focusing on baptism and the incarnation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, and the Platonizing texts full of metaphysical terminology but no speculation about the story of the serpent in Paradise or Jesus of Nazareth. Turner thus speculated that the Sethian literature offers snapshots of three phases of the transformation of a single Gnostic group that arose out of speculation on Jewish themes, was Christianized in the second century CE with the incorporation of Barbelo-Gnosticism (speculation about the Barbelo, or divine mother known to Irenaeus) and separate traditions about the veneration of Seth, suffered persecution at the hands of the proto-orthodox, and attempted to find a home among contemporary Platonic thinkers, like Plotinus’s group.11 These later Sethians composed Platonizing but “pagan” apocalypses where Judeo-Christian motifs and ideas have been replaced with Platonic metaphysics, in an attempt to appeal to the philosophers.12 As we know from Plotinus and Porphyry themselves, the rapprochement was unsuccessful, but these pagan apocalypses nonetheless deeply influenced the development of Neoplatonic thought. Thus, most scholars today refer to the Platonizing Sethian treatises as pagan apocalypses, written with the aim of appealing to the philosophical sensibility of Plotinus and other Hellenes.13
However, recent, groundbreaking research has forced us to reconsider the contours of Sethian tradition, by demonstrating that the Jewish midrashic texts first identified as “Sethian” are not Sethian at all. They possess few Sethian features (including the most important one—veneration of Seth himself), and instead belong to a separate Gnostic literary tradition dealing with Adam, Eve, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Hence, they should be termed “Ophite” texts (Gk. ὄφις = “serpent”).14 Much confusion, for instance, stems from the composite nature of one of the most famous treatises from this body of literature—the Apocryphon of John—which contains Sethian, Ophite, and Barbeloite themes.15 In attempting to shoehorn the entirety of this composite text with a complex source history into the category of Sethianism, scholarship thus obscured the distinctive nature of the Ophite tradition underlying sections of it.
The distinctively apocalyptic nature of Sethian literary tradition was obscured, too. Once the Ophite material is set aside, Sethianism is left with apocalypses and treatises containing large apocalyptic sections.16 The literary frame narrative governing the Apocryphon of John is both Sethian and an apocalypse.17 The Apocalypse of Adam, a history of the descents of Seth to save his “seed” from its tormentors, the rulers of the cosmos, and three of the Platonizing treatises—Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes, featuring the ascent of a seer to discover the secrets of the intelligible cosmos—are all apocalypses. The fourth Platonizing treatise, the Three Steles of Seth, is an ecstatic liturgy, but its scribe dubbed it an apocalypse.18 Trimorphic Protennoia is a revelation monologue complete with its own miniapocalypse featuring historical eschatology. Apocalyptic sections also litter the Egyptian Gospel, a text that begins with cosmogony and proceeds to a history of the seed of Seth and its rescue by its founder, who intervenes in various incarnations throughout history, before terminating in a liturgical section. The genre of the fragmentary Melchizedek is unclear, but this treatise seems deeply embedded in contemporary apocryphal traditions about the incarnation of the eponymous, celestial high priest (Gen 14:18–20; Heb 5:5–6) to battle the forces of darkness at the eschaton.19 Another work distantly related to Sethianism—the bizarre cosmological speculations of the Untitled Text from Codex Brucianus—and recent discoveries, including the Gospel of Judas and the untitled treatise from Codex Tchacos provisionally titled the Book of Allogenes, are apocalypses as well.20
Are these works “apocalypses” in name only or could one describe their contents as “apocalyptic” as well? Certainly most of the Sethian literature uses the genre of apocalypse, which “carries that title (ἀποκάλυψης) for the first time in the very late first or early second century a.d. From then on, both title and form are fashionable, at least to the end of the classical period.”21 John J. Collins defines the apocalyptic genre as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”22 One of the chief virtues of this approach is its movement away from scholarship that privileged historical and political themes in apocalyptic, neglecting the many apocalypses that deal more with cosmology, the makeup and fate of the soul, and so on.23 Other scholars have also emphasized the esotericism of the apoclaypses, that is, their focus on the revelation of hidden wisdom and cosmological secrets.24 As we will see in later chapters, Sethian tradition offers both “historical” and “cosmological” apocalypses.
Even so, esotericism, eschatology, and historical change are merely subjects commonly discussed in ancient apocalypses, without defining the genre, whose content remains open. Rather, the genre of apocalypse is defined by function, or “what may be called the ‘apocalyptic technique.’ Whatever the underlying problem, it is viewed from a distinctive apocalyptic perspective. This perspective is framed spatially by the supernatural world and temporally by the eschatological judgment…. It provides a resolution in the imagination by instilling conviction in the revealed ‘knowledge’ that it imparts. The function of the apocalyptic literature is to shape one’s imaginative perception of a situation and so lay the basis for whatever course of action it exhorts.”25 All apocalypses use elements such as frame narrative, stock motifs, and rhetoric to make extraordinary claims to authority that help address any sort of crisis experienced by the reader, which might result from political situations, but can be of an abstract or, as in the case of the Sethian apocalypses, even philosophical nature.26
Pseudepigraphy is perhaps the chief device used to bolster the authority of an apocalypse, authorizing the claims made by the text while creating a sense of self-definition.27 The claim of “historical” apocalypses to stem from a figure of remote antiquity validates ex eventu prophecy and creates a sense of providential activity that consoles the reader.28 In the “speculative” apocalypses, the device heightens the dynamic of concealment and revelation that lends a sense of gravitas.29 Pseudepigraphy
