https://blogs.uoregon.edu/rel424s15drreis/valentinus/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1584312
The Original Doctrine of Valentinus the Gnostic by Gilles Quispel
Over the past twenty-five years, the social and ethical aspects of Gnosticism have won increased attention. Scholars have tended to shift away from phenomenological approaches to Gnosticism, which maintained a strict demarcation between ethics and cosmological speculation. Rather, scholars have increasingly recognized and explored social ethics within the various “Gnosticisms” that flourished in the second to fourth centuries, focusing on particular topics such as sexual ethics, gender roles, and the soteriological implications of sinful or virtuous behavior. Little attention, however, has been devoted to the question of how ancient rhetorical conventions shaped Gnostic ethical and moral discourse, especially as it is evidenced in the Nag Hammadi sources. The application of rhetorical criticism to other early Christian literature has demonstrated that the proper identification of the genre of a text is a crucial step toward determining how that text was designed to rhetorically influence its audience. Thus, an appreciation of the generic conventions that dictate certain features of a text can improve our understanding of the social context in which that text was produced. In this essay, I examine one text from Nag Hammadi, the Interpretation of Knowledge (NHC XI,1; henceforth Interp. Know.), whose genre has not, in my opinion, been satisfactorily established. I will argue that the text should be read as a sustained work of paraenesis—that is, as a moral exhortation with a persuasive intent. On the basis of that identification, I will attempt to reconstruct some features of the social context in which it was produced.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/zac-2014-0007/html?lang=en
The re-examination of the first eight chapters of Book 1 of Adversus Haereses by Irenaeus of Lyon (so-called “Grande Notice”) has allowed reasserting the importance of this source, not only to reconstruct the history of early Valentinianism and Gnosticism as a whole, but also to get to know better a crucial phase of the doctrinal evolution which accompanied the exegetic-theological debate in the Church of Rome in the mid 2d century, a debate which was to result in the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy. Analysing the praefationes of Books 1 and 2 of Adversus Haereses, it seems that the phases of realization of the work are two and the conception of the “Grande Notice” and the retrieval of the sources (mainly from Ptolemy and his disciples) can be anticipated from the traditional dating, i.e. 180, to the Roman period of Irenaeus (ca. 160−165). The chronological distance between Valentinus’ stay in Rome and that of Irenaeus is shorter and Irenaeus knows the doctrine of Valentinus and that of the continuers in detail, as well as being well aware of the theological differences among them. The research was based on philological reconstruction, ever made so far, of the Greek text of the “Grande Notice” on the basis of the quotation handed down by Epiphanius, using synoptically the Latin transposition of Tertullian (Adversus Valentinianos) and considering that the Latin text of Adversus Haereses is not a version written by Irenaeus himself, but a translation dating back to the 4th−5th century, not always faithful to the original text.
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