in these Gnostic texts. A review of these practices shows that they drew not from Platonic but from Jewish and Christian sources, particularly those associated with ancient Jewish mysticism, as preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, apocalypses, and Hekhalot literature. Moreover, recalling scholarly debate about vision and experience in Jewish literature helps us resolve obscurities in Sethian rituals themselves and theorize for what they could have been used in an ancient context.
Chapter 7 summarizes the aforementioned conclusions, offering a clearer picture of the function of the Sethian apocalypses, the lives of their authors, and their relationship to the Gnostics in Plotinus’s circle. Moreover, the chapter discusses the texts’ relationship with Judaism, Manichaeism, and Christianity (or “Jewish Christianity”), emphasizing the important role that Jewish literature plays in understanding Sethianism, the ways that Sethian literature helps elucidate the thorny problem of “Jewish Gnosticism,” and the significance of the Sethian literature for the history of Jewish mysticism. Similarly, significant parallels to Manichaeism emerge that invite a reevaluation of exactly what kind of baptismal groups Sethianism grew out of, and where they might have been.
Finally, this book will defend a Judeo-Christian authorship of the Sethian treatises—even the “Platonizing” texts that do not mention Jesus Christ or Scripture!—thus rejecting the scholarly consensus that the texts represent a non-Christian or pagan development of Sethianism, or evidence of an outreach to paganism. Some have recognized already that “a lack of Christian features” does not necessarily indicate Jewish or pagan provenance.10 Yet the boundary between Judaism and Christianity seems impossible to divine in much of the Sethian literature, particularly the Platonizing texts, which are laden with Neoplatonic jargon instead of biblical references. Perhaps this is no accident, because many of their Jewish and Christian features are associated specifically with groups that flourished precisely along these borderlines, groups (such as the Elchasaites, Ebionites, and author[s] of the Pseudo-Clementine literature) that have duly been named “Jewish-Christian” by modern scholars. As I will argue in the concluding chapter, it is likely that Sethian traditions developed in a Jewish-Christian environment like that which produced Mani, who also drew widely on Jewish apocryphal traditions in formulating a religion that honored Jesus of Nazareth as one of many descending savior-revealers—important, but not the object of every prayer or treatise.
The apocalypses brandished in Plotinus’s seminar were thus the products of intellectuals from a community that, like Manichaeans or the Elchasaites, dwelt on the boundaries of Judaism and Christianity. Drawing from the literary traditions of the Jewish pseudepigrapha, they wrote their apocalypses as manuals for eliciting an experience of visionary ascent, using Platonic metaphysics as a meditative tool. While such practices are best understood in the context of contemporary Jewish mysticism, the Platonism that informs them also permeated the cosmological and soteriological thought of their authors, producing a Platonism that was at the forefront of Christian theology—hence their appeal to the Christian “heretics” mentioned by Porphyry. He and Plotinus recognized the Christian valence of this Platonism, and here drew a line in the sand between the Platonism of their Christian Gnostic interlocutors and their own thought. Hellenic Platonism thus began to be seen not just as a school interpreting Plato but a Hellenic philosophy distinct from and actively opposed to Jewish and Christian traditions, which the Platonists hoped to exile from their schools once and for all.
CHAPTER I
Culture Wars
Who were these followers of “Adelphius and Aculinus” in the time of Plotinus? Porphyry says that they were Christian heretics, but also trained Platonists. Nothing is known about Adelphius or the authors of other texts (now lost) the heretics brandished, “Alexander the Libyan and Philocomus and Demostratus of Lydia.”1 Aculinus appears to have enjoyed a reputation as a Platonist roughly contemporary with Plotinus.2 Alexander the Libyan was known to Tertullian and Jerome as a Valentinian.3 These figures all bore normal names (i.e., epigraphically attested as used by everyday people), not pseudepigraphic, authoritative titles.4 They are Greco-Roman, showing that in this context, at least, the “heretics” identified themselves as Hellenes, who followed a Hellenic philosopher, Aculinus. Whence then the animosity of Porphyry and Plotinus? Porphyry’s remarks about these Christian Platonists and the works they read tell us that cult, culture, and authority were at stake. The followers of Aculinus and the rest are accused of having sailed from the safe harbor of Hellenism, “deceiving many others and themselves being deceived, actually alleging that Plato really had not penetrated to the depth of intelligible substance.”5 These thinkers began their careers as students of the Hellenic “ancient philosophy,” but came to betray it. He dubs them impostors, for they esteem the works of Oriental prophets over those of the Hellenes. Porphyry calls these works “apocalypses,” or “revelations,” a genre with which he was not unfamiliar, and lists the prophets who purportedly authored them—individuals with alien, foreign names like “Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos.”6
What did it mean to challenge the authority of Plato with the invocation of alien authorities? Was “Oriental” wisdom prized or despised among ancient philosophers? What kind of people did one meet in these circles anyway? Where did they come from, and how did they feel about the ruling powers—the non-alien authorities of Hellenism and Rome? Answering these questions requires us to step back momentarily and ascertain the social environment in which the appeals to these foreign authorities took place. As we will see, analysis of contemporary Christian and Hellenic philosophical circles themselves sheds scarce light on the problem. Study groups in the second and third centuries were small, ad hoc affairs, about which it is difficult to generalize—except that their participants all came out of a deeply ideological rhetorical environment known today as the “Second Sophistic.”7 Modern research into this wider educational environment has blossomed, yielding important data for a “thick description” of members of a group like that of Plotinus—and the Christian Gnostics who belonged to it as well,8 thus providing the most extensive sociological information on the background of any known Gnostic group.9
PHILOSOPHY CLUBS
Gnostic literature itself says virtually nothing about the relationship of Gnosticism to contemporary philosophical circles, much less the culture informing them. References to philosophy in the Nag Hammadi corpus indicate that the Gnostics adopted stances about philosophical issues but excoriated contemporary philosophers, striving (like Tertullian), to distinguish themselves from contemporary Greek education. Such anti-philosophical polemic is striking.10 While recorded Gnostic groups did not proclaim adherence to any particular philosophical sect, the high philosophical import of their texts demonstrates that they must have spent quite a bit of time among the philosophical sects, particularly the Platonists.11 Irenaeus referred to a school (διδασκαλεῖον) of Valentinus.12
Recalling the Judeo-Christian background of Gnosticism, one can turn to Jewish and Christian texts in hopes of finding something like a school in which Gnostics could learn philosophy. One looks in vain. Rabbinic sources are silent about the interaction between Jews and the Greek philosophical schools.13 We are left with Philo, whose account of the Therapeutae contrasts the sages’ allegorizing of scripture with the oratorical display of the sophists.14 Elsewhere, he refers to his own education as propaedeutic.15 Philo’s status as a Jewish Platonist is obviously not comparable to that of the Sethian traditions and thus provides no social context for them. His testimony indicates nothing more than small schools of exegesis of the Septuagint. Here he is very much in agreement with the greater movement in Hellenistic Judaism, as seen in the Letter of Aristeas, to defend the faith with the idiom of Greek philosophy without becoming a partisan of it.16
Christian literature offers more information. There certainly was a need for education in the instruction of catechumens, but anything
