INTRODUCTION 3
spiritual deity, who is surrounded by aeons and is all wisdom and light, and
the creator of the world, who is at best incompetent and at worst malevolent.
Yet through everything, they maintained, a spark of transcendent knowledge,
wisdom, and light persists within people who are in the know. The transcen-
dent deity is the source of that enlightened life and light. The meaning of the
creation drama, when properly understood, is that human beings—gnostics
in particular—derive their knowledge and light from the transcendent god,
but through the mean-spirited actions of the demiurge, the creator of the
world, they have been confined within this world. (The platonic aspects of this
imagery are apparent.) Humans in this world are imprisoned, asleep,
drunken, fallen, ignorant. They need to find themselves—to be freed, awak-
ened, made sober, raised, and enlightened. In other words, they need to return
to gnosis.
This distinction between a transcendent god and the creator of the world
is all the more remarkable when it is recalled that many of the earliest gnostic
thinkers who made such a distinction seem to have been Jews. What might
have led them to such a conclusion that seems to fly in the face of Jewish
monotheistic affirmations? Could it have been the experience of the political
and social trauma of the time, culminating in the destruction of the Second
Temple in 70 CE, which prompted serious reflection upon the problem of evil
and stimulated the production of Jewish apocalyptic compositions? Could it
have been the reflection of hellenistic Jewish thinkers who were schooled in
Judaica and Greek philosophy and recognized the deep philosophical and the-
ological issues surrounding the transcendence of the high god and the need
for cosmic intermediaries to be involved with this world? Could it have been
that among the creative Jewish minds, representative of the rich diversity of
Judaism during the first centuries before and of the Common Era, who boldly
addressed the real challenges of Jewish mysticism before Kabbalah, of the wis-
dom and Hokhmah of god, of world-wrenching apocalyptic, of theodicy and
evil in the world, there were those who finally drew gnostic conclusions? We
know the names of some of these creative Jewish people: John the baptizer,
who initiated Jesus of Nazareth and preached apocalyptic ideas in the vicinity
of Qumran, where Covenanters and Essenes practiced their separatist, ethical
dualism; Simon Magus and Dositheos, who lived about the same time as Jesus
and advocated their ideas in Samaria and beyond; Philo of Alexandria, a hel-
lenistic Jewish thinker who provided Greek philosophical perspectives on the
Hebrew Bible; Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya, nicknamed Aher, "Other," who dabbled
in dualism; and there were more. We shall encounter some of these Jewish