Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Hi all. As I've been going through a positive deconstruction this past year, I've been reading through the apocryphal texts. I've found something interesting, I'm wondering if anyone might have an answer. In the Meyer translation of Trimorphic Protennoia (aka Three Forms of the First Thought), Barbe...

Originally the story of Sophia and the creation of the demiurge came from Plato and the canonical books of Plato which were preserved by the apostolic succession within the academy of Plato. The authors of books like the Secret Book of John in the Nag Hammadi Library combined and acclimatized the P...

Stepping back from Irenaeus' farrago, it's worthwhile to note that in antiquity there was, in general, a 'single sex' understanding of biology : females were incomplete males. Thus a male could be termed female in terms of gradations in the social/cosmic hierarchy. This is explicitly stated regardi...

Hi all, I've been reading some works by John Turner and Tuomas Rasimus, who theorize that popular gnostic texts, such as the Secret Book of John, were actually amalgamations by three different gnostic groups (ophite, sethite, and barbeloite) that eventually syncretized into what we call the 'sethian...

fwiw, in chronological order by year: Williams, “Uses of Gender Imagery in Ancient Gnostic Texts,” in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols ; edited by Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman; Boston: Beacon, 1986. Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Autho...

Sup all. I’ve taken a huge interest in gnosticism in the past few months. Since the texts we currently have are likely a fusion of much older schools of thought (sethite, ophite, barbeloite) my current interest is trying to find what parts of different texts came from which gnostic camp. (For instan...