LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOM 111this point in the myth humans enter into the plot, especially Adam, Eve, Cain,
Abel, Seth, and Seth's offspring, the gnostics themselves.
Of the gnostic texts included in this volume,^7 most of the texts designated
as Sethian exhibit clear Sethian affinities. Thunder is less obviously Sethian
(or gnostic, for that matter), but we classify it, tentatively, as a Sethian gnostic
text (with Bentley Layton), for several reasons. First is its concern for wisdom
and knowledge, and its resemblance to portions of the statement of divine
transcendence at the beginning of the Secret Book of John. In Thunder, the "I
am" self-declarations, with their paradoxical formulations, reveal a female
deity who comes from above to the human realm. She is called life (as Eve is
called "the mother of all living" in Genesis 3:20), and she is wisdom and
knowledge, and thus she resembles the female deities who appear in a number
of roles and accomplish a number of tasks in the Secret Book of John and
other Sethian texts: forethought, wisdom, life (Eve), and especially after-
thought (epinoia), which is specifically mentioned in Thunder.
The Letter of Peter to Philip incorporates various traditions into a text that
resembles the New Testament or apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, but the rev-
elation about the deficiency of divine light brought about by the fall of Sophia,
though tersely presented, contains elements that bring to mind the Sophia
myth of the Secret Book of John. In the Letter of Peter to Philip, like the Secret
Book of John, the problem in the eternal realms stems from the mother, whose
disobedience leads her to act independently of the father. She produces a
child, an arrogant one, who steals power from his mother, establishes a bu-
reaucracy of ignorant cosmic administrators, and collaborates in the creation
of mortal human beings. This human creation is based, however, upon a mis-
representation of the image of the divine that had appeared. For, in words that
closely parallel Gospel of Thomas 72, the creator wished to make "an image in
place of an image and a form in place of a form" (see also Genesis 1:26).
VALENTINIAN LITERATURE
One of the two great gnostic teachers of the second century whom we know
by name is Valentinos. The other is Basilides, who was a contemporary of
Valentinos but who is given little attention in this volume because he is known- Additional Sethian texts not included in this volume on account of their fragmentary charac-
ter or their length include Melchizedek (Nag Hammadi Codex IX,J), the Thought of Norea
(IX,2), Marsanes (X), perhaps Hypsiphrone (XI,4), and the untitled text from the Bruce Codex.
Other mythological texts with some similarities to Sethian mythological texts include On the
Origin of the World and the Paraphrase of Shem, both presented below.