29. Michael Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism

[Music] Welcome to the New Testament Review, where every episode we discuss an influential piece of New Testament scholarship. I'm joined today by Chance Bonar, a PhD student from Harvard University. Hi, Chance. Hi. Chance and I actually met when we were in undergrad because we're both Minnesotans. And we discovered we actually ran cross country together for a little while. Today we're discussing Rethinking Nosticism, an argument for dismantling a dubious category by Michael Williams. Williams wrote this book in 1996. This book is going to be a critique of the word "nostic" as referring to a specific group in history. We're going to discuss Karen King and David Brackie's work on the same topic as we go along. But we're focusing today on Michael Williams, and Williams argues we should not use this word. But to contextualize things a little bit, Chance, who was Uranus? Sure. So Uranus was a bishop in the South of France, and he's best known for writing the work called "Against Heresies" to attack, particularly followers of Valentineus, a certain Christian teacher in Rome in the early to mid-second century. He's writing kind of near the end of the second century, probably around the late 170s or 180. And Valentineus is one of the figures that scholarship has traditionally referred to as a "nostic." And Uranus, in attacking Valentineus, criticizes a number of other figures. Scholarship has traditionally grouped most of these figures, or the few exceptions, as "nostics." Let's talk about what that meant for older scholarship and for people who continue to advocate the use of this term today. So two ways that sellers previously attempted to define "nosticism" are through what we're calling a genealogical approach and a typological approach. The genealogical approach is an attempt, kind of similar to what Uranus does, to connect certain ancient figures to one another, and to produce lineages. So, for example, Uranus tries to say that almost all heresies stem from a fairy called Simon Megus, and this tradition is carried on by later a radiologist, like a Athenianist, who also creates this kind of timeline of heresies. But even in early 20th century scholarship, we see a similar genealogical approach happening in the history of religion school. Right. Many people who belong to what we call the history of religion school viewed narcissism as a pre-Christian religion, something that had its roots in Iranian or Babylonian or even Indian folk religions. And you're going to pick up on orientalizing things here, but they thought this religion came from Eastern Climes and came into Christianity and merged with Christianity in the varieties that we see criticized by Uranus. A very famous sort of later development of this approach is Rudolf Boltman, who thought, as we've discussed in previous episodes, thought the Gospel of John was actually sort of responding to and demathologizing this gnostic myth. So this is one way of defining narcissism. That it is a distinct religious tradition that is genetically related. The varieties of narcissism, Uranus, is criticizing have a common genetic ancestor that is, for most of these authors, imported from pre-Christian Eastern religions. And even early on in this approach, we start to see some cracks in this genealogical approach. Probably one of the more famous examples of this is Hans Jonas, a German Jewish philosopher who started his career by writing about narcissism. And Jonas critiques this computer genealogical approach. He argues that narcissism is not just like a sponge that's soaking up different myths and beliefs and antiquity and is kind of the sum of all of its parts, but he starts taking this kind of existentialist approach to narcissism and says that there's something new and radical about it that it has a particular experience of self and world that you don't find in these earlier genealogical connections. So even in the early to mid 20th century, we start seeing some challenges to this approach. I think for Jonas, narcissism was sort of like the New Age movement, the 70s American New Age movement in this second or first century AD, that it was a sort of response to world conditions and a sort of existentialist new way of approaching religion. And so it wasn't necessarily that there was one common ancestor, but it was this group of movements that grew up in response to world conditions. I totally agree. I think that's exactly what Jonas understands it to be. Instead of seeing it as a pure continuation of something else in antiquity, he shifts to say, "This is like the New Age, a new spiritual movement that's moving through and is radically changing how people are interacting with the world." Another popular way of defining narcissism is what we might call the typological approach. And I should pause here to say, "We're borrowing these categories from Karen King's book, what is narcissism?" And we're going to talk about that book more fully later on. But the typological approach doesn't look for a genetic ancestry, a genealogy of the Gnostic religion. But in said it says, "It's a group of movements that share enough characteristics that we can talk about them with one term, usefully." So Mark Shees has a reason book called "Nosis" that gives a modern articulation of this way of approaching narcissism. And for Mark Shees, there are eight features that generally characterize narcissism that sort of include all the people we would want to include and exclude the people we would want to exclude. And this is an experience of an otherworldly distant god, the introduction of divine beings, viewing matter as evil, a distanced creator, the use of a mythological drama to describe the fall of goodness into material reality, the redemption of humanity through spark, the tendency towards dualism, and knowledge gained from a redeemer. So these are eight characteristics that Mark Shees says sort of pick out groups that are useful for us to talk about history. Bracky would call this a interpretive category. So one like analogy for how this might work is our use of the word Christianity or Christian. There are different people in antiquity who may or may not have called themselves Christians or have thought that other people we call Christians were in fact Christians. But it's still useful for us to look back and say, "No, Justin, Martyr, and Marcy and were both Christian in some meaningful sense, even if they would have hated each other." So this brings us to Michael Williams 1996 book, "Rethinking Nosticism." And like I said in the introduction, Williams is going to say that the word "nostick" or the word "nosticism" is not one that scholars should or can responsibly use today. There is such a thing as a bad category. Even if we recognize we're doing this adequately and agronistically in order to be useful for scholarship, if we are grouping disparate phenomena obfuscating distinctive characteristics by creating a group that can be unhelpful and actually misleading. And Williams is going to say that the category "nostick" has led us to import into certain texts, features that are not present in those texts and may even be contradicted by those texts because we have put them under the label of "nostick." To take one example of this, the gospel of Thomas, many scholars have argued, doesn't actually have the full-blown "nostick" myth of a fall and a demo urge and things like that. But because for so long it was simply labeled as "nostick," scholars have read that mythology into the gospel of Thomas. Right, and another one of Williams' points is that as far as we know, there's no surviving self-designation of "nostics" among the texts that we have often designated as "nostick." Ironically, you know, we hear about the true "nostick" in the text of a Clibbet of Alexandria, who's generally considered on the side of the orthodox of the church file, rather than "nostics." But as far as texts that we found it not commodity, other texts that have been categorized as "nostick" does not as much of a vested interest in those figures calling themselves "nostics." Right, exactly. The only two figures we have who actually call themselves "nostick" and "intiquity" are "climative Alexandria" and "evagrius" Ponticus. Two people who later church fathers would claim as "proto-orthodox." Well, I guess they wouldn't have used that term. I would have viewed these people as basically "orthodox" plus or minus or just "originist" controversy, but we're not going there. Now, Euroneus and Epiphanyus and some of the other heuriciologists do say that there were people who called themselves "nostick." And Williams, of course, knows this. We're going to talk about this more when we talk about Brachy in a second, because Brachy is going to argue that there was, in fact, a school that called themselves "nostick." Williams' response is that this more likely looks like a quality or a characteristic, not a socio-traditional identity. So "nostick", as far as we can tell, was a compliment in "intiquity." It was calling yourself a scholar. And Williams is going to argue that these other Christians who called themselves "nostics" for them, it was like calling themselves "Christian intellectuals." If I call myself today a Christian intellectual, I'm not saying I belong to a long lineage of Christian intellectuals, or I participate in a particular religious movement of Christian intellectuals. I'm instead telling you something about myself. I'm saying I think of myself as an academic person who is also a Christian. I'm not sure I would use that term ever, but this is what Williams thinks Nostek was. These people viewed themselves as, especially, aerodite, and so called themselves Nostek's, and Irenaeus, and Epolytus, and Epiphanius are mocking this by calling this falsely so-called knowledge. And Clement is reclaiming this title for himself, "I am a true Nostek." That is, they are saying, "You're not intellectuals, we're intellectuals." So, one of the ways that Williams attempts to dismantle osteosism is to demonstrate that by grouping these texts and figures together, we're equating things in ways that they probably should not be equated. We're assuming that there's this larger Nostek myth or narrative that we can import into all of these texts in the exact same way, and that they might all be secretly referring to this same narrative, but it is an attempt to demonstrate that when we start reading these texts and figures side by side, we start to notice these discontinuities, and that maybe this label of Nostek doesn't work as well as we thought. Williams is going to give us three figures whom scholars have traditionally categorized as Nostek. The apocryphan of John, the Justin the Nostek, and Ptolemy Valentinus' Disciple, and then a fourth figure whom scholars have not traditionally identified as Nostek, Marcien of Synope, but who shares many of the traits that we traditionally associate with Nostek. But with these four, he is trying to illustrate the diversity within what scholars have gripped as Nostek, and the fact that these don't make a coherent group, but share certain features with non-nostek things and certain features with Nostek things, just like all the other varieties of Christianity we see in the second century. The first text that Williams talks about is the apocryphan of John. So this is a fairly well-known text for antiquity. We have four manuscripts of this long and short version, so there's a lot of variety in how this story is told, and it seems that Irenaeus may have known of some version of this when he was writing his treatistic interracies. So this text kind of runs us through the history of creation, and explains how the true God, the invisible spirit, is distinct from, but connected to the material world through the manifestations and eventually through wisdom and the creation of this God of Genesis, Yaldaba, both. So the apocryphan of John is a narrative that takes place right after the resurrection where John encounters a Pharisee that troubles him with questions about what the Savior was doing on earth, and John starts questioning himself, who was the Savior's father? Why did the Savior come to the world? What is this eon, this eternal age that the Savior was talking about and alluding to, and at this point, Christ appears and attempts to answer all of these questions for John. So we have this long discussion of the invisible spirit, which is kind of the God above everything else, in this production of various other aspects of this deity that are kind of emanating from the invisible spirit, till we get down to the perfect human called Adamus and his son Seth, which are kind of the prototypes of the human atom that's created later. But the narrative starts to shift when the final kind of manifestation is created, this character called wisdom, that tends to produce a new entity and fails because of not contemplating properly on the divine and asking consent of her spiritual partner, and this produces a character called Jaldaba Oath in the text, which goes on, it becomes clear that this figure of Jaldaba Oath is supposed to be the God from the Book of Genesis, the God of Israel, and even claims in the same way to be the only God, an attempt to make humanity along with his known henchmen, which is kind of an attempt to explain who the us is in the phrase "the us make humanity in our image and our likeness." So the God of Israel, the God of Genesis, is a creation from this divine entity Sophia, her failure to understand the true God. So the God of Genesis here is a mistake, and this God of Genesis isn't a way of this plurality within the divine, but thinks it is the only and the one true God and creates the material world. So we're seeing some of the distinctive features of older typological models. We have the God of the Hebrew Bible not being a good thing, creation not being a good thing, a sort of inverted reading of the Old Testament. One of the aspects of the Parkinson's John is that the kind of divine spark is implanted within human beings, particularly in the case of Adam and Seth, and this becomes kind of a significant feature of the text that those who are kind of related to Seth in some way have this divine spark that is important for their salvation in the future. It's a thing that's worth saving. But a way that they are able to connect with the invisible spirit and with kind of manifestations beyond the material world that they are stuck in under Yaldabo's and his instrument. So you may have heard of that and thought, well, what's the problem with the typological model? It sounds like the typology and the Messina definition pretty well accounts for the Gnostic myth as presented in the Apocryphan of John. And that's not a coincidence, because the Apocryphan of John presents the myth which so often scholars have read into other texts. The typology, the typological model, the definitions people have presented often are relying heavily upon this one text. So this in some ways presents Gnosticism as classically conceived. For many of the traditional scholars, they've viewed the Apocryphan of John as the clearest articulation of Gnosticism that we are justified then to read into other texts. Yeah, yeah, that's where a lot of other scholars, this is the Gnostic Bible box like this is the text that you turn to when you want to understand what Gnosticism is and to find the characteristics that you can import into all other readings. William's second figure does unfortunately not survive in four manuscripts like the Apocryphan of John, but has preserved only in quotations from Hippolytus, another one of these ancient riceologists. This person is called Justin the Gnostic, not to be confused with Justin Martyr, the famous apologist, but Justin apparently wrote or used a book called Baruch. And this text too laid out a mythology of creation and the prehistory of the divine and redemption, etc. This myth is very, very different. So in the beginning there were three principles, good Elohim, which is one of the names the Hebrew Bible uses for God and Adam. At first Elohim and Adam were not aware of the existence of a third entity, the good, and they fell in love with one another and got married. And from their marriage were created the angels and these angels created humanity. Thereafter Elohim discovers the good and leaves Adam behind to go contemplate the good. This understandably upsets Adam who, an act of revenge, introduces sin into the world to torment humanity and thereby get back at Elohim. So first of all, this myth has very, very little in common with that presented in the apocryphan of John. And creation here isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it seems to be a good thing. It's the result of a marriage between two of the three principles. And the introduction of sin and evil in the world has nothing to do with matter in itself, and is instead this active revenge upon Elohim for abandoning his consort or partner. And in fact, hypothesis tells us that just in the Gnostic recognized marriage as a sort of good imitation of the creative act of the creation of the universe. Although they too, like most all early Christians still held out a set of celibacy as the ideal, for them that would be like imitating Elohim to go contemplate the good. But here we have a very different understanding of the creation of the world. We have a very different understanding of the nature of reality and of the place of humans within that reality. And Williams is going to say it's kind of absurd to group these two texts together and say these are both part of the same religious movement. These are both Gnostic that definitely masks over the very different takes these two texts have upon creation, cosmos, etc. A third figure that Williams introduces is Oli. Oli is one of the students of Valentinus. Oli is probably best known for inviting the letter to Flora, which is an epistle written that explains how the law was produced in five books and Moses. We tried to give this kind of tripartite image of laws that were made by God alone, laws that were introduced by Moses and laws that were introduced by the elders. But here what's most important about Tommy is unlike the epoch of John, which had one primordial finger, the invisible spirits and unlike just in the nest. who had three figures, good Elohim and Eden, Talami has two primordial figures. One is a male entity with various names, like pre-beginning, pre-father or deep, and a female entity called thought or grace or silence. And these two start emanating various divine figures, especially pulling from certain terms that we see in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, Mind, Truth, Logos, Life, Human Church. And at the end of all this is a smaller story of wisdom, trying to do something without the consent of her consort, and eventually splitting in two. So we have higher wisdom that's already redeemed, and it's kind of accepted by the other audience, and we have this lower wisdom called ECMOF. And because of this division of wisdom, Mind, one of the earlier Aeons that was created, produces a new couple, Christ and Holy Spirit. And their job is to bring all of the ions of the eternal realm into order and eliminate all the sanction, and also to redeem this lower wisdom figure ECMOF. In order to save ECMOF, Christ sends a second Christ called the Savior, so the Savior is the one that helps redeem this lower wisdom. And when the Savior redeems her, he condenses her passions in the passions themselves become the raw materials of creation. And at this point, ECMOF is involved in the production of this lower demiurge, this lower creator, God figure, that as Williams points out is ignorant but not evil, this demiurge creates the devil. But ironically, the devil is implanted with kind of the spiritual stuff. So the devil actually knows more than the demiurge in Ptolemy's narrative. - You can see why I brought on chance for this episode. (laughing) Thanks, Jens. - Yeah. - So for Ptolemy, it's important to note that the creator of the universe, the figure with whom they would identify the God of Genesis, is not evil, as he is in the apocryphan of John, and isn't in Just and the Nostek, but is instead simply ignorant, which also isn't exactly true of Just and the Nostek. So here we see different understandings of how creation comes about and the status of the creator. Fourth and finally, we get Marcian of Synope. And if you want a fuller account of who this figure was, go listen to our 22nd episode on Adolfan Harnack's book about Marcian and sort of the reception and history of that book, I'm not gonna go into detail here. The thing that's important about Marcian for Williams is that Marcian is not a Nostek. As far as I know, modern scholars have known as ever said Marcian was a Nostek, but Marcian does have an evil God with whom he identifies the God of Genesis and a good God who is the father of Jesus. And in service of this or giving rise to this probably, we have a sort of value reversed reading of the Hebrew Bible of the Jewish scriptures where some of the good figures are in fact bad and some of the bad figures are in fact, according to Marcian, good. Furthermore, for Williams, Jesus, because he can't participate in the creation of the evil God is de-settic. There's been a great publication we talked about in our Marcian episode by David Will Height or we're pointed out that maybe this is actually a misreading of Dr. Tulian and the other heresialogists, but setting that aside, for Williams, the point of this is we have someone who is not a Nostek, sharing some of the most essential features of Nosticism according to the typological models, whereas Justin the Nostek doesn't have those features which are purportedly essential or indicative of Nosticism. And this should throw up red flags that maybe if we have people who don't belong to that category, sharing the essential features and people who do belong to that category, lacking the essential features, it may be that there is something very, very wrong with your category. - Williams presents two different solutions to the problem of defining Nosticism. Two solutions that might improve the way that we talk about these texts and figures and might rearrange them in different ways, rather than grouping all of them under a single category of Nosticism. One solution that Williams proposes is to use the term biblical, demurgical traditions, also rolls up the tongue just fine. (laughing) And by this, what Williams means is biblical in the sense that it has some relation to the traditions from Jewish or Christian scripture, and demurgical in the sense that creation is a scribe to a lower entity, not the highest God, but some lower figure. Williams finds this a more helpful solution than using Nostics, especially because it already starts as a clearly modern category. It's not an attempt to borrow an ancient self-designation or an ancient designation given by heresiologist, but it's very clearly a scholarly construct. - Sometimes Williams is misread as arguing that there is no commonalities between these various figures called Nostics. This is not actually what he says because he does put for this alternative category, and we're gonna see later scholars like David Brackie are gonna criticize this move by Williams. He does think there are similarities between these groups that scholars have traditionally called Nostics, but thinks it's unhelpful to borrow this ancient term, but we should instead come up with a term that characterizes what they have in common. That is, they're both interested in the Bible, biblical, and they both have a demi-erge, that is something else that creates other than the one true highest God. And so we should use this term instead to designate those groups, and that that according to Williams will help us avoid importing features that these texts don't all have in common, like nature being evil, or like a particular conception of Jesus. So that's proposal number one. His other proposal, and this is gonna be the proposal that Brackie actually will adopt kind of, is to discuss specific traditions as those specific traditions. That is, Valentines had a teacher named Valentinus, and then the disciples went off in different directions with slightly different developments, but they all had some continuity with Valentinus. So instead of talking about Nostics, why don't we just talk about Valentines? Same goes for facilities, facilities on E.C. Dorill later wrote his own books and his own development of that theology, but we can refer to that group as Basilidians, and we don't need to use the word Nostic to say that the Valentines and Basilidians had anything in common, other than the fact that as previously noted, they're both biblical dummy urges. So Williams has two different approaches to solving this. We talk about specific teachers and their schools when we want to be specific, and we can use this clearly edic and at clearly anachronistic term, biblical dummy or geical, to describe the things that they do in fact have in common. So to give another example of how Williams is going about showing that Nosticism is a term that is being applied to broadly to texts or figures that really don't have as much in common as Alice previously assumed, one of his examples is examining whether or not all these so-called Nostic texts fall within this kind of realm of anti-cosmic world rejection or sociocultural accommodation, two of the ways that Nosticism, as a term, has been used and applied to certain figures and certain texts are ones that are world rejecting or world-led. There have been scholars that have read these texts as being too eager to reject the world and to see the body as a prison, to see the necessity of escaping the body and escaping this world run by these demonic figures and they got a genesis of this evil deity. But on the other hand, Nosticism, as a term, has also been applied to texts that seem too cozy with the world. Right, there's been claims that Nostics get too invested in kind of the larger Greco-Roman world and that they, you know, being promiscuous in a moral. So part of what Williams is trying to do is to show that there's this kind of Goldilocks solution being presented by scholars who try to say that, you know, if it's too worldly, it's not stick. And if it's too anti-worldly, it's not stick. I trust that, you know, they try to present this middle ground is the place where all Orthodox Christianity should be. Right, for some late 20th century scholars, Nostics are hippies or they're sellouts. And the Orthodox are the ones that get it right nicely in the middle. And this seems to be having your cake and also eating your cake. Exactly, so in Williams' approach to this, it tries to show kind of how very text and figures are reading figures of Demiurge. And, you know, whether or not they're all dualistic. So he looks at some text that in which the Demiurge, this creator, God figure, it's sometimes evil, like the popcorn of John and the paraphrase of Shem. In another case, like Justin Nostics, it's more ambivalent, creation didn't necessarily a bad thing. With the case of Stunnalis, it seems like creation and this Demiurgeical figure is generally good that has fallen, sometimes creation seems to be a good thing. Telling me in Valentine's would fit more into that category. So with the himself. As far from Nostics being the weirdos of the ancient world, who had crazy ideas about sex and food in the universe, Williams argues for that, and this has been basically well received by later scholars of Nosticism for that. The Nostic myth doesn't look like fanciful multiplication and metaphysical speculation, but I'm sort of attempting to reduce the distance between the proto-orthodox Christian creation myth. Yeah, there's lots of problems with what I just said, but deal with it for a second. Reducing the distance between the Christian myth and platonic philosophy. That is, it looks like the groups we've traditionally called Nostics are people who are trying to explain Jesus being a savior and the creation of the universe in terms and categories and structures that would have been familiar to the ancient intellectual from the platonic school of thought, from how Platonism had developed into late antiquity. The other, and we're not going to go through all of Williams' chapters on this, but the other elements we get about Nostics of, like for instance, not totally rejecting marriage as some Christians were doing in the second and third century, and rejecting certain forms of fasting and sort of going easy towards martyrdom, that is not glorifying dying for your faith, seem to be other ways of sort of making Christianity more palatable to the norms of intellectual society. Why this is interesting to me is there are certain commonalities between the different groups that people have classified Nosticism, and I think this gives us a way of accounting for those similarities without positing a genealogical relationship that is without positing a common ancestor, the founder of Nosticism, Simon Megas, or something like that. Because if these were simply the ideas that were in the air in contemporary platonic intellectuals, then it's really easy to see how facilities in Valentinus might share certain things in common without actually having both study under Simon the Megas, or one of his disciples, because they were just getting this from what was middle platonic philosophy, and I need to be really clear that this isn't something by any means particular to groups that people we would call heretics, or people that would become to be called heretics, origin, clement, these people are doing the exact same things, and I need to make that clear, accommodating to the intellectual trends kind of sounds like it might have a negative valence, and I don't mean it that way, because the proto-orthodox were definitely doing the same thing. Right, so we can say the same thing, even of the late second century apologists, many of whom were attempting to show Roman emperors that Christians were obeying Roman norms. Yep, one last point to hit on Williams before we move on. Nostics have sometimes been grouped together because they share something called "protect exegesis" or "value reversal", that is when they read the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish scriptures, that they systematically or consistently make the good guys, bad guys, and the bad guys, good guys in the Old Testament. William objects to this characterization on a number of grounds. First of all, "value reversal of protest exegesis" is not at all systematic or consistent between Nostics exegesis. He has this chart of who says who is evil, and there isn't a consistent pattern across Nostics except for a few figures for whom there is already within both Christian and Jewish circles a long tradition of the problem solving, of allegorical exegesis or other ways of reading the text in order to reverse who is good, who is bad, or explain away some problematic features in the Old Testament. Furthermore, "value reversing readings of the Hebrew Bible" is not at all unique to Nostics. And this isn't in Williams, but my favorite example is Paul in Galatians. The Hagar and Sarah story, he totally inverts who is the good figure here and who is the bad figure here in order to get his interpretation of the story to work. So if we want to group Nostics as people who engage in protest, exegesis, or value reversal, we're going to have to include Paul, and that's not something that most scholars would be interested or willing to do. So in 2003, "Turn King" published "Was Nosticism", which in many ways compliments Williams argument and some ways tries to push Williams argument even further. Both Williams and King were working on their books contemporaneously and King attempts to go a step further than Williams, not only saying that this category of Nosticism needs to be dismantled and that it's being applied to broadly to texts and features and figures that don't actually deserve to be categorized together. But she goes as far as arguing that modern historical scholarship is kind of trapped in these ancient discourses of origins and essence and purity. Most of her book, "What is Nosticism" is an examination of 19th and 20th century scholarship, which for her has two kind of main methods of trying to define Nosticism. Determining its historical origin as we talk about the genealogical approach or establishing its central characteristics, a topological approach. And for King, what's most important is that Nosticism as a term has kind of become a substitution for heresy and in particular there were certain groups and certain figures that were called Nostic by figures like Irenaeus or Epiphanyus, but now in 19th and 20th century scholarship, Nosticism has become the term for defining a heretic. And in King's mind, this is a problem because it's using old terms in new ways. And now, you know, Nostics can be something that seems too Catholic or too Oriental or too anti-colonial. So she starts worrying about these kind of, the way that this term is being applied to newer problems and Christian thoughts and Christian identity. Her first three chapters are really intellectual history where she's looking back and showing the ways that older scholarship, Adolf von Harnack, the history of religion, school, Jonas, have uncritically adopted categories from the heresyologists. They've taken over this polemical, theologically loaded and often not quite fair critiques of figures that Irenaeus thought were heretics and used those to create their own categories and their own reconstructions of history. And this, of course, leads to lots of distortions. And King does really interesting work laying out how those have distorted different authors, analyses of Nosticism in different ways. Ultimately, does she just want us to abandon using the category? Yes. Overall, King's argument is that we need to abandon using the category because the category of Nosticism has shaped the questions that we ask about these texts and figures, not to categorize them in that way, is to still play into this ideological mode of trying to find early Christian unity, early the essence of early Christianity and that she thinks that this approach doesn't take into account the multiplicity of narratives in early Christianity. Absolutely. So her last two chapters are the closest parallel with Williams where she goes through and uses the primary texts to demonstrate the diversity of beliefs within what scholars have classically called Nosticism and how ill-fitting some of these typological models or genealogical models are for describing these different schools of thought. So if you have in Red Williams, I would strongly recommend actually reading this book backwards, starting with her note in methodology, reading the two chapters that sort of engage the primary text and then going back and reading the intellectual history. If you have Red Williams and you're persuaded by his analysis, then maybe you can read it in the order that King has written it. The final author who we simply must talk about today is David Brackie. He wrote a book called The Nostics where he picks up an approach that was championed quite influential by his teacher, Bentley Layton, who wrote a number of books and articles also on Nosticism and this variety of early Christian schools that argues that there was in fact a specific group called Nostics in antiquity, but that this is a smaller subset of all the texts that Euneus criticizes and that scholars have traditionally grouped as Nostics. This is the subset that a lot of earlier scholars had characterized as Sethian Nostics. So first of all, let's do his criticism of Williams and King. His problem with Williams' Demi-Eurgical Biblical Traditions solution is that Demi-Eurgical Biblical describes all early Christian texts and virtually all contemporaneous Jewish texts. The Gospel of John has this thing called The Word that does the creating on behalf of God. That is a Demi-Eurge. The epistle of the Hebrews or the Book of Hebrews does the exact same thing. Houston has the two. Two hands of God, Jesus in the Holy Spirit, creating, that is Justin Martyr, where the logos Jesus creates on behalf of God, Philo has demi-urgis. Demi-urgical biblical traditions doesn't pick out any particular subset within Christianity, but as far as we can tell, groups basically all early Christian texts, and this pretty obviously is unhelpful. Bracky does, of course, like Williams' other solution, that is, let's talk about specific traditions. And he says that one of these traditions, as we're gonna talk about in a second, are the Gnostics. And in response to King, Bracky is concerned that King has done away with large categories like Jewish Christianity and Gnosticism, and doing those worries that King focuses too much on rhetorical practices and misses out on social practice. It is just because these categories don't work, that doesn't mean that scholars shouldn't still try to understand social groups, that even if this category doesn't work, we still need something to be able to talk about. Bracky argues that we really can't do without interpretive categories, that is, edic, anachronistic categories that don't map on to ancient Christians' self-understanding. And his critique of King, he sort of introduces King by saying, "And some scholars have been so critical of Gnosticism that they would attempt to do away with all categories entirely." And I think for Bracky, although he doesn't say this fully, but his criticism is basically, if we go too far, we basically undermine the usefulness of language. And so that's going to be a problem. Just to be clear, I think Bracky would agree with King that Gnosticism to group in all of these texts, to group in Basilotians and Velotinians, is a bad interpretive category, that it groups together unlike things or things that are, it is not helpful to group. And so they're not actually particularly far apart here. He just thinks following his teacher, Bentley Layton, that there was one group in antiquity that actually called themselves Gnostics and had certain social and, like, ritual practices that grouped them together in antiquity. And so it's useful for us to talk about them as such. So one example that Bracky gives to demonstrate, like, how groupings matter and why it matters in how we conceptualize different social groupings in antiquity through the examples of three Christian figures that are in Second Century Rome, more or less at the same time, Marcyan, Justin, and Valentinas. So with these three figures, what Bracky does is try to demonstrate some similarities that these figures have to one another. You know, they're all practicing Eucharist in some way, they're all practicing baptism in some way. But none of these figures fit Bracky's model of the Sepian Gnostics, but none of them are considering themselves the seed of Seth or the immovable race, terms often associated with Sepian figures. And by doing so, what Bracky is trying to demonstrate is that scholars have labeled Justin as orthodox or proto-orthodox. Marcyan is kind of just this general heretical figure, and has an own cap, whereas Valentinas is often categorized as Gnostics or now Valentinian. And what he's trying to do is to show that instead of using those categories, Gnostics, orthodox, orthodox, or synch, if we look at them in their social location, second century realm, there might see similarities and differences between these figures differently than if we just use these broader theological interpretive categories. So Bracky is going to argue that Sethians actually did an antiquity call themselves Gnostics, and he's using the physiological data to show this. Sereneus writes his book against the Gnostics falsely so-called Clement wants to claim to be the true Gnostics. They are plemical things trying to reappropriate or sort of criticize other people's use of a term that was generally deemed positive. One of my qualms with Bracky's analysis is he doesn't actually fully engage Williams' proposal that Gnostics wasn't a socio-traditional identifier, but was still, was this characteristic or quality identifier that is like Christian intellectual rather than Baptist, Baptist would be the socio-traditional, and intellectual would be just sort of a quality or characteristic. It seems to me that to make his case, he needs to exclude this possibility, especially considering all of the so-called Gnostics texts or the Sethian texts that we've recovered omit this term Gnostics, and they do use other terms to refer to themselves. They call themselves the seed of Seth and they call themselves the immovable race and things like that. So they have names for themselves and it's not Gnostics. So it seems to me there's a hurdle here that Bracky hasn't jumped over. It may be that his case still holds, that the ery theological sort of wrestling with this term does events that some people call themselves this. And so maybe it's still a useful term for us to use, but I'm not fully persuaded that case has actually been made. So one final image that Bracky works with to help us rethink early Christianity and early Christian diversity is the horse race model. So for much of Christian history, Irenaeus' model of Christian unity and diversity has been dominant. And by that I mean this model of Jesus, Neopostals, are kind of the apostolic origins of Christian unity, the pure orthodoxy right at the beginning, and that from that we have diversity that comes from that unity. We have these external Greek forces or Hellenic forces that are poisoning this pure origin of Christianity. So you start with unity and you end up with diversity. And this model is dominant for much of Christian history and was actually flipped on its head in the 20th century by figuring Walter Bauer. Well, having an episode on that out. So what Walter Bauer does is actually orthodoxy comes after parasy and that after that point we have the production of kind of this orthodox plenty of these correct practices, these correct beliefs. And that's where many scholars still sit today within that the general approach that Walter Bauer presents us with. One of the most famous examples of that is Art Hermann. Brachy is specifically reacting to Art Hermann's lineage of the term proto-orthodox. It is that the people that would eventually be clamed as orthodox within later Christian tradition. So part of Brachy's approach to this is to use this kind of well-known horse race analogy that each of these different Christian groups is a horse in horse race and they are competing right. We have the proto-orthodox horse, the Sethian Nostek horse, the Valentinian horse, the Marcy Nite horse, and we know at the end that the orthodox horse wins. But what Brachy does is says this horse race analogy goes too far because it assumes that these horses exist as stable entities and that they aren't being constantly produced and reconstructed. He wants to say it's not as easy as saying that the proto-orthodox horse won, but rather that there's this kind of constant maintenance that needs to happen in order to make that narrative work. Right, Justin, for instance, would be clamed as proto-orthodox, but his conception of the divinity of Jesus in the Holy Spirit would not have been acceptable to 4th century orthodox Christians. So it's probably problematic to identify figures in antiquity as themselves proto-orthodox. I am myself partial towards cutting up the horses a little bit, oh, it's a horrible metaphor, but that is talking about particular beliefs as the sort of things that would later win out. And doing this as a self-conscious anachronism, it is not inevitable that this particular conception of the incarnation would have one. But I think it is useful as a historian to look back and say, okay, we can see the first people that start advocating this in different ways and how that developed because this historians were making narratives and avoiding anachronism is, I mean, at best a quicksotic enterprise. If we just cut up the horse like that, at least then we're getting at specific practices, and it seems more fair to trace practices and how they develop rather than to kind of trace these still kind of fairly large categories of people and people with texts. Absolutely. Okay, so big picture, Irenaeus criticizes a bunch of people as falsely-so-called gnostics. Scholarship in the 19th and early 20th century came up with different ways to define gnostic, genealogical approaches and typological approaches. Michael Williams wrote a book arguing these figures are two diverse to be classified in this way, and that scholars have misrepresented the data by reading the apocryphan of John into other texts that instead we should use Biblical Dimeurgical and talk about specific identifiable traditions. Karen King pushed it even further, saying Biblical Dimeurgical illegitimately groups things, and these earlier scholars by talking about gnostic as a category, having any category that includes all of these figures are inappropriately borrowing from the heresialogical discourse. David Brackie basically agrees with Karen King's critique of the big group gnostic that encompasses all of these texts, but pushes sort of against previous scholarship, but taking up Benley Layton's approach argues there was one specific particular group that would have identified themselves as gnostics, the so-called Sathians, and we should refer to other groups by how they identify themselves. themselves a semi-emic term. And at least in our reconstruction of the history of scholarship, that's where we're going to leave you today. Okay. Thank you chance so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. We have a new Twitter handle. If you want to find us on Twitter, we're at NT Review Pod.