RESOURCESBaruda (Choche)," Mesopotamia 13-14 (1978-79): 233-49. The
standard collection is now C. Isbell's Corpus of the Aramaic Incan-
tation Bowls (Missoula, 1975).
The main primary source on the decline of paganism in the sixth
century and which survives in a sixth-or seventh-century manuscript
was edited with a French translation by M. Martin as "Discours de
Jacques de Saroug sur la chute des idoles," ZDMG 29 (1875): 107-
- The consequences have been treated by J. Wellhausen in Reste
arabischen Heidentums (Berlin, 1897) and by E. Westermarck in Pagan
Survivals in Mohammedan Civilization (London, 1933; repr. Leiden,
1973). For possible survivals in popular local customs, see N. L. Cor-
kill's "Snake Specialists in Iraq," Iraq 6 (1939): 45-52, which gives
modern descriptions with some historical references.
Gnosticism has generated its own scholarship, which seems to have
been concerned mainly with two issues: whether or not it constituted
a single "system" and, if so, how it could exist in several religious
traditions; and which tradition should have the credit (or blame) for
inventing it. The best introductions to the range of issues concerning
early gnostic expressions are provided by E. Yamauchi's, Pre-Christian
Gnosticism (London, 1975); R. M. Grant's Gnosticism and Early
Christianity (New York, 1959); and A. F. Segal's Two Powers in
Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism
(Leiden, 1977). The argument over the existence of a gnostic religion
may be followed in the works of H. Jonas (contra), Gnosis und spat-
antiker Geist, vol. I (Gottingen, 1934, 1954); vol. II (Gottingen, 1954),
and The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the
Beginnings of Christianity (Boston, 1958; 2nd rev. ed., 1963); Grant
(pro), Gnosticism (New York, 1961); and J. Knudson (contra), "The
Gnostic View," in The Scope of Grace: Essays on Nature and Grace
in Honor of Joseph Sittler, ed. P. Hefner (Philadelphia, 1964), pp.
123-40. The previous decade has seen a renewed wave of gnostic
scholarship by W. Foerster, Gnosis: A Selection of Gnostic Texts
(Oxford, 1972-75);J. Needleman, The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics,
Cosmology, Tradition (Baltimore, 1974); G. Quispel, Gnostic Studies
(Istanbul, 1975); H. Puech, Enquete de la gnose (Paris, 1978); and
U. Bianchi, Selected Essays on Gnosticism, Dualism, and Mysterio-
sophy (Leiden, 1978).
Much of the information about gnostics and other dualists in Late
Antiquity comes from hostile sources. For the gnostic Valentine see
Irenaeus, Adversus Haereticus, MPG, VII, cols. 445, 493-96. From