Notes
no t e s introduction 1. E.g., Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness. 2. This rhetorical strategy is widely employed in pedagogical and popular writing—e.g., Holland Lee Hendrix on “Early ‘Christianities’ of the 2nd and 3rd Centuries,” in the PBS television special (later adapted for the web) From Jesus to Christ (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion /first/diversity.html, accessed July 18, 2012). On “Jewish-Christianity,” see Jackson-McCabe, “What’s in a Name?” For a succinct exemplar of the classical approach, followed here—which is to designate the groups in question “Jewish-Christian” because of their adherence to Torah Law alongside recognition of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah —see Paget, “Jewish Christianity.” For further references and a survey of the problem with respect to Sethianism, see Burns, “Jesus’ Reincarnations Revisited.” 3. For a fine criticism of the term “pagan,” see O’Donnell, “Late Antiquity : Before and After.” I use the term “Hellenic” instead not because I believe that it successfully covers all the same territory as “pagan” might (as if that were a laudable goal) but because the bulk of the non-Abrahamic traditions engaged in this book are Greek, and “Greek-ness,” or “Hellenicity,” was a primary term of self-identification for adherents to these traditions. Cameron makes a fine argument in defense of the use of “pagan,” but this argument can be applied only to the second half of the fourth century ce (Last Pagans, 17). 4. Accepting laudable criticisms of the category “Gnosticism” and its discursive baggage (M. A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”, esp. 51–53, 265; King, What Is Gnosticism? esp. 168–69), this study nonetheless follows the approach of Layton, “Prolegomena.” Others basically following Layton include Marjanen, “What Is Gnosticism?” 2ff; Pearson, “Gnosticism as a Religion,” 94ff; Logan, The Gnostics, 9; Pleše, “Gnostic Literature ,” 164; esp. Brakke, The Gnostics, 29–51. Some have objected that this term does not appear as a term of self-designation in the Nag Hammadi hoard, which has bequeathed to us so many of these “Biblical Demiurgical” myths (the term is Williams’s, from Rethinking “Gnosticism”); rather, the Notes to Introduction 166 term is an invention of the heresiologists, who used it sarcastically to denigrate their opponents (M. A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”, 42; King, What Is Gnosticism? 167). One might reply that the mythological valence of Gnostic literature leaves no room for an academic, self-designating term like “Gnostic” (Layton, “Prolegomena,” 344, followed by Brakke, The Gnostics, 47–48; cf. M. A. Williams, “Was There a Gnostic Religion?” 74). A problem with this reply is that if we accept that “Gnostics” constituted a discrete social group who transmitted to us only aetiological myths and metaphysical tractates, we are shut off from any secure knowledge about the group beyond these myths—including questions of their social makeup, interactions with contemporaries, etc. This is why Porphyry’s evidence (see next paragraph in text) is doubly important, because it gives us a firm social and temporal context for fixing the use and interpretation of a body of extant Gnostic texts— the “Platonizing” Sethian apocalypses, as I call them below. 5. Porph. Vit. Plot. ch. 16, text and tr. Armstrong (LCL), significantly modified. See the Appendix for discussion of this rendering of the opening lines. 6. Robinson, “Nag Hammadi: The First Fifty Years.” The origin of the codices is unknown; see recently Logan, The Gnostics, 12ff. 7. Recognized decades ago by Schenke (ap. Klijn, “A Seminar on Sethian Gnosticism”) and Layton, “Prolegomena,” 348. 8. Tardieu has identified a source shared by Zost. and Marius Victorinus’s treatise Adversus Arium that deals with negative theology and describes God in terms that recall the anonymous Turin commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (Tardieu, “Recherches sur la Formation”; Hadot, “Porphyre et Victorinus: Questions et hypothèses”; Turner, “Introduction: Zostrianos,” 76–77; idem, “Commentary: Zostrianos,” 579–608; idem, “Introduction: Allogenes,” 141–54; idem, “Gnostic Sethians,” 42–51; idem, “Victorinus,” 72–79). The implications of this body of evidence for rewriting the Gnostic role in the development of these ancient metaphysicians continues to be debated; see recently Turner, “Platonizing Sethian Treatises”; Chase, “Porphyre Commentateur.” 9. Thus Mazur, “Platonizing Sethian Gnostic Background,” esp. 14, an argument followed by Brakke, The Gnostics, 83, 137; see also Narbonne, Plotinus in Dialogue. It remains unclear, however, whether it is possible to prove that key innovations in Platonic metaphysics originated with Gnostic thinkers. An early dating of the Greek Vorlagen of the Coptic versions of Zostrianos and...
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