Christians who were associated by their opponents with a myth of the creation of the world by a demiurge (“craftsman”) of ambivalent ability and mores.4 It appears that these sects referred to themselves as γνωστικοί (“knowers”).
Plotinus’s student Porphyry provides our only record of a personal encounter with ancient Gnostics that does not come from one of their bitter opponents among the church fathers:
There were in his (Plotinus’s) time many others, Christians, in particular heretics who had set out from the ancient philosophy, men belonging to the schools of Adelphius and Aculinus—who possessed many texts of Alexander the Libyan and Philocomus and Demostratus of Lydia, and who produced revelations of Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos and others of this sort who deceived many, just as they had been deceived, actually alleging that Plato really had not penetrated to the depth of intelligible substance. Wherefore, Plotinus often attacked their position in his seminars, and wrote the book which we have entitled “Against the Gnostics.” He left it to us to judge what he had passed over. Amelius went up to forty volumes, writing against the book of Zostrianos, and I, Porphyry, wrote a considerable number of arguments against the book of Zoroaster, showing the book to be entirely spurious and contemporary, contrived by the founders of the heresy to fabricate the idea that the doctrines which they had chosen to honor were in fact those of the ancient Zoroaster.5
The translation of this passage will be discussed in detail below, but it is immediately clear that Porphyry gives us evidence more specific and reliable than what we have about any other Gnostics. First, he says that, in Plotinus’s time, there were Christian heretics, Plotinus’s refutation of whom he entitled Against the Gnostics; therefore, “Gnostics” were present in Rome and known to Plotinus and his group. Second, Plotinus discussed philosophical questions with these Gnostics, which means that they were sufficiently educated to participate in a sort of ancient postgraduate seminar. Third, these discussions led to disagreement, much of whose substance is extant in Plotinus’s treatise Against the Gnostics. Finally, Porphyry mentions the books the Gnostics considered authoritative: “revelations” (ἀποκαλύψεις, i.e., “apocalypses”).
Luckily for us, titles identical to several of the apocalypses mentioned by Porphyry were unearthed at Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) in 1945.6 Thus the especial importance of Porphyry’s evidence; when read in concert with Porphyry and Plotinus, these apocalypses, and other texts (mostly apocalypses as well) from Nag Hammadi that belong to the same literary tradition, enable us to pose and answer significant questions about the social background, literary preferences, theological proclivities, and ritual life of a particular group of Gnostics, who came into serious conflict with the great Platonic academics of their time.7 One of these titles, Allogenes, means “foreigner,” or “alien.” As we will see, the concept of alienation figures strongly in the Sethian apocalypses, texts that describe a god so utterly transcendent and divorced from creation that he can only be revealed by an avatar who bridges a chasm between human and divine, descending from heaven to preach to the elect, who reside as “aliens” on this strange planet. Conversely, to Plotinus, everything about this message—from its vigorous use of Judeo-Christian language and literary traditions to its treatment of specific philosophical problems (such as divine providence or the afterlife of the soul)—seemed wrong, wrongheaded, and decidedly foreign: that is, alien. For both parties, albeit in entirely different senses, the Sethian literature offered a revelation (apocalypse) of the alien god to his alien worshippers.
One might then ask how it is that the Sethian literature and its Christian Gnostic readers wound up in Plotinus’s circle in the first place. The Nag Hammadi discovery answers this question: some of the now extant Sethian literature—in particular, a group known as the “Platonizing” texts (Zostrianos [NHC VIII,1], Allogenes [NHC XI,3], Marsanes [NHC X,1] and the Three Steles of Seth [NHC VII,5])—appears to have been deeply conversant with advanced Platonic metaphysics and does not mention the figure of Jesus.8 The question of dating the copies that were known to Plotinus and others, and thus the possibility of mutual philosophical influence between them, remains controversial; however, there is a scholarly consensus that some version of this literature was present at a crucial period in the development of Platonic metaphysics, and may have even contributed to the thought of Plotinus himself.9
Yet the importance of the Sethian literature is not limited to our understanding of the history of later Greek philosophy or even Gnosticism. Its indebtedness to the literary traditions and genre of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature merits its inclusion in the study of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha of the second and third centuries, a period for which our evidence is otherwise scarce. Some of these traditions deal with themes of self-transformation that we know not just from these apocalypses but from the Dead Sea Scrolls, again, furnishing valuable evidence for an obscure field of study—the development of Jewish mysticism between Qumran and the late antique ascent literature known as the “Hekhalot” (“palaces”) corpus, a field the great scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, termed “Jewish Gnosticism.” Finally, these texts also occupy a liminal position along the notoriously permeable boundaries of Judaism and Christianity, and some of their doctrines are most recognizable in the context of the Syrian groups scholars label “Jewish-Christian,” particularly the Elchasaites. The Sethian evidence from Nag Hammadi is thus indispensable for scholars trying to understand the negotiation and mutual permeation of the boundaries between emerging Christianity and Judaism.
The evidence for these conclusions is set out in the first six chapters of this book. Chapter 1 addresses an overlooked but significant implication of Porphyry’s evidence: the physical presence of these Gnostics in the social context of a philosophical study group. The chapter thus explores the context of such groups in the Hellenic culture wars of the second and third centuries CE, where the Second Sophistic movement developed a Hellenophile ideology permeating educational life and was countered by a spike of interest in “Oriental” sages like those invoked by Plotinus’s Christian Gnostic opponents.
Chapter 2 takes a close look at Plotinus’s own writing about these opponents, who, he says, were once his “friends.” He viciously attacks their cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology, accusing them of developing a kind of deviant Platonism. His criticisms apply not only to the apocalypses his Gnostics read but also to contemporary Christian Platonism in general, serving as evidence of the Christian background of the group and the more generally Judeo-Christian valence of their texts.
Chapters 3 through 6 introduce and discuss the Sethian Gnostic apocalypses themselves, alongside evidence from Plotinus that has been hitherto read in isolation from them. Chapter 3 examines the genre of the texts, grounding their rhetoric, motifs, and especially claims to authority in contemporary Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. Their approach to myth and revelation is sharply contrasted with contemporary Platonic models, which employed allegory to interpret myths; thus, to Plotinus, they appeared to be “another,” alien “way of writing.” Chapter 4 discusses the apocalypses’ attitudes toward soteriology, focusing on the identity of the Sethian savior (a cosmic Seth who descends to earth throughout history to intervene on behalf of the elect), the ethnic valence of their soteriological language, and Plotinus’s complaints about these conceptions with respect to his philosophy of divine providence. Chapter 5 looks at Sethian eschatology, both personal (handling the postmortem fate of the soul) and cosmic (handling the fate of the cosmos). In both of these chapters, it is clear that the apocalypses’ stances, from a philosophical perspective, resemble Christian Platonism, not its Hellenic counterpart.
