Gnostic Apocalypses for the Study of Jewish Mysticism (Prof. Burns)

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1. Gnosticism, Judaism, and Jewish Mysticism Revisited
2. The first is rabbinic evidence about Jewish mysticism, particularly regarding the character of Elisha ben Abuya, who appears in our rabbinic sources as a kind of mystical, intellectual rebel, who, torn by the problem of evil, rejects halakah in favor of licentiousness and Greek paideia (see Alon Goshen-Gottstein, The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha ben Abuyah and Eleazar ben Arach, Contraversion). Most famously, the Babylonian Talmud features him in its commentary on the legend of the four sages who ascend to paradise, wherein “Aḥer”—ben Abuya’s nickname (Heb. for “other”)—sees Metatron sitting and writing the merits of Israel. Knowing that angels are not allowed to sit, he is shocked and wonders (incredulously), “perhaps—God forfend!—there are two divinities!” “Permission was [then] given to him to strike out the merits of Aḥer. A Bath Kol went forth and said: Return, ye backsliding children—except Aḥer” (Hag. 15a) (Isidore Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Hagiga; Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981], §20); Hekhalot Zutarti (Schäfer, Synopse, §§338–39, 344–46, 348, G7); and Merkabah Rabbah).

1. Scholars have long drawn a connection between ben Abuyah’s Otherness, mysticism, antinomianism, and ostensible speculations about there being “two powers in heaven” and took him as evidence of pre-Christian, Jewish Gnosticism, a line of reasoning we still find today in some secondary literature. For earlier Forschungsgeschichte on the “two powers controversy,” see: Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Judaism, SJLA 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 8–14. More recent studies (which have little to say regarding gnostic sources) include Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “Jewish-Christian Relations and Rabbinic Literature—Shifting Scholarly and Relational Paradigms: The Case of Two Powers,” in Interaction between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art, and Literature, ed. Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, and Joseph Aaron Turner, JCP 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 15–44, esp. 30–40; Boyarin, “Beyond Judaisms”; and Orlov, “Two Powers in Heaven,” 351 n. 1. Segal acknowledged the evidence about ben Abuya to be highly redacted but nonetheless considered it indicative of interaction between gnostic and merkabah traditions in Tannaitic circles (Two Powers in Heaven, 60–67, 150–51). Others have regarded ben Abuya to be a historical personage and “gnostic heretic” (Pearson, “Friedländer Revisited,” 24: “it can hardly be doubted any longer that Elisha ben Abuya [Aḥer] was a Gnostic heretic,” who, dissatisfied with Judaism, “turned to Gnosticism” and “proselytized” on its behalf); see also Guy S. Stroumsa, “Aḥer: A Gnostic,” in The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism, ed. Bentley Layton, NBS 41 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 2:816.

Meanwhile, the 1945 discovery of a cache of thirteen Coptic papyrus manuscripts near the city of Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) revolutionized the study of Gnosticism, for these ancient books seem to contain many works whose contents resemble the teachings of the gnostic school of thought mentioned by Irenaeus, Porphyry, and others. Scholars widely recognized that many of the Nag Hammadi texts recall midrashim, extensions of and commentaries on famous biblical stories, gnostic retellings of the creation of Adam, his fall with Eve from the garden of Eden, Noah and the flood, God’s statement that he is jealous, and much else. Classic examples include but are not limited to Apocryphon of John (NHC II 1 par.), the Nature of the Rulers (NHC II 4), and Apocalypse of Adam (NHC V 5). On these and other texts from Nag Hammadi as midrashim, see e.g., Birger A. Pearson, “Jewish Haggadic Traditions in The Testimony of Truth from Nag Hammadi (CG IX,3),” in Pearson, Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity, 457–70. For exhaustive analysis, see Lahe, Gnosis und Judentum, 191–356. Did Gnosticism then arise from Hellenized exegesis of problematic passages in the Hebrew Bible, producing the famous gnostic view of the Jewish God as foolish, if not arrogant and cruel? An old thesis; for a recent rehearsal, see Volker Henning Drecoll, “Martin Hengel and the Origins of Gnosticism,” in Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Ancient World: Essays in Honour of John D. Turner, ed. Kevin Corrigan and Tuomas Rasimus, NHMS 82 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 139–65, esp. 161–63. It is difficult to draw a line between this phrasing and Pearson’s contention that “although much of the detail of Friedländer’s argument is open to question, he has been vindicated in his basic contention, that Gnosticism is a pre-Christian phenomenon that developed on Jewish soil” (“Friedländer Revisited,” 28).

1. On the manufacture of our Coptic gnostic sources by Egyptian Christians, see: Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), focusing on the “monastic hypothesis.” On the Christian character of even early evidence about Gnosticism, see Alistair H. B. Logan, Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996).
2. This is where our Coptic gnostic evidence steps in. Here, we have a corpus of texts that we can date to the fourth–fifth centuries CE in Roman Egypt but in some cases are translations of works we know to have circulated in the second and third centuries throughout the Roman Empire. Significantly, the predominant genre of these works is apocalypse—about half of them, in total. This figure assumes one regards revelation-dialogues without a heavenly journey under the heading of apocalypse, so Harold W. Attridge, “Valentinian and Sethian Apocalyptic Traditions,” JECS 8 (2000): 208–9; see Dylan M. Burns, “The Gnostic Apocalypses,” in The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature, ed. Colin McAllister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 59–78.

A particular set of gnostic apocalypses constitutes valuable evidence for our understanding of the history of Jewish mysticism. These apocalypses belong to a branch of gnostic literature called “Sethian,” chiefly due to its focus on the figure of Seth as revealer and savior (Hans-Martin Schenke, “Das sethianische System nach Nag-Hammadi-Handschriften,” in Studia Coptica, ed. Peter Nagel, BBA 45 (Berlin: Akademie, 1974), 165–73; and Schenke, “Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism,” in Layton, Rediscovery of Gnosticism, 2:588–616. Frederick Wisse rightfully points out that Schenke’s recognition of a coherent body of mythologoumena and ideas spread throughout the Nag Hammadi texts does not necessarily constitute the existence of a Sethian social group; see “Stalking Those Elusive Sethians,” in Layton, Rediscovery of Gnosticism, 2:563–76. Even so, scholars generally agree that the set of Sethian characteristics identified by Schenke constitutes a more or less coherent group; see, e.g., Michael A. Williams, “Sethianism,” in A Companion to Second-Century “Heretics”, ed. Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen, VCSup 76 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 33–34, 36. For criticism of the category (resulting in a trimmed Sethian corpus set next to a smaller Ophite corpus), see Tuomas Rasimus, Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking: Rethinking Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Evidence, NHMS 68). Within this group of Sethian apocalypses, Zostrianos (NHC VIII 1), Marsanes (NHC X 1), and Allogenes (NHC XI 3) stand out as particularly exotic. They are apocalypses of the cosmological stripe of Ethiopic or Slavonic Enoch, describing the heavenly journey and acquisition of cosmic secrets of the revealer-savior figures after whom the treatises are named.