Gnosis: An Introduction (review)

For Markschies, this short survey of the phenomenon of "Gnosis' is the epitome prior to the magnum opus. The production of a bigger book in the current scholarly environment, however, presents major difficulties. Navigating these obstacles, Markschies offers an explanation without pretending to provide exhaustive warrant for his claim or a thorough discussion of the secondary literature. This introduction, a welcome English translation of his Die Gnosis (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), should not be taken lightly. An author of longer treatments and definitive articles on aspects of Gnosis, Markschies now offers to the English reader a succinct, readable, and learned orientation to a problematic question with a clear and pointed thesis.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The introductory chapter provides a definition of Gnosis. After looking at the term in Greek culture, Jewish tradition, and early Christianity, as well as measuring it against the term "Gnosticism" and the discussion at the Messina Congress in 1966, Markschies settles upon a typological model. He finds that ancient Christianity gathered together diverse groups and intellectual currents, all fascinated with the value of true knowledge, under the designation "Gnosis," "knowledge." To continue to do so in the modern world is simply an appropriate modern development of an ancient typological construct which allows scholars to see related content among a variety of phenomena and movements. While in antiquity such a construct might have been embraced for polemical purposes, it can also be used for the purpose of ordering things in the quest for a history of religion, culture, and ideas.

Markschies's model builds on a consensus within the study of Gnosis. It has eight components: (1) the experience of a supreme, other-worldly god; (2) the inclusion of additional divine figures closer to human beings than the distant god; (3) the valuation of world and matter as evil and alienating; (4) the introduction of an ignorant/evil creator, craftsman (demiurge); (5) the explanation of alienation by means of a myth in which a divine element falls and is trapped within human beings of an elite class, longing for its ultimate freedom; (6) the definition of Gnosis as knowledge about this state, which can only be provided by a descending redeemer from the other world; (7) the redemption of human beings by means of the knowledge of the distant god and/or divine element within them; and (8) a tendency towards dualism in concepts of the divine, spirit and matter, and human beings. The remainder of chapter 1 posits the problem of whether Gnosis is to be understood as a movement within or outside Christianity.

Chapter 2 provides a substantial survey of the sources of Gnosis. The author organizes them into (1) ancient critics who pass on original texts; (2) heresiologists who simply report; (3) original Gnostic, Coptic texts; and (4) non-Gnostic texts. Markschies argues that the final form of the Nag Hammadi texts "certainly do not come from the period before the end of the second century" (58).

The third chapter treats the question of early forms of Gnosis in antiquity. It is better, Markschies thinks, to speak of Jewish roots to Gnosis than of Jewish Gnosis and to see John's Gospel, Ephesians, and Colossians as part of the pre-history of the movement. Neither does he find the beginning of Gnosis with Simon the magician. Instead, influenced by Basilides, he believes Gnosis arose "in the metropolitan centres of education in antiquity as an attempt by semi-educated people to explain their Christianity at the level of the time" (83). To accomplish this aim, elements of Jewish-Hellenistic philosophy were popularized.

This central thesis appears repeatedly in Markschies's fourth chapter as he discusses the great Gnostic schools. Of great import is his opinion regarding Valentinianism. In this school, for example, the multiple Aeons are not multiple gods but several, partial aspects of the...