(^10) INTRODUCTION
considered gnostic by scholars. The texts in the Nag Hammadi library were
discovered around December 1945 near Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, and
they are now becoming available in editions and translations. A substantial
number of texts in the present volume are from the Nag Hammadi library.
Scholars of ancient and late antique religions have attempted to sort
through the issues of definition and taxonomy in order to reach some clarity
regarding gnosis and gnosticism. In 1966 many of the leading scholars of gno-
sis gathered at an international conference in Messina, Italy, and produced a
set of statements that are meant to define gnosis and gnosticism. Gnosis, they
maintain, is "knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved for an elite," and this
is a term of very broad application. On the other hand, gnosticism is "a coher-
ent series of characteristics that can be summarized in the idea of a divine
spark in man, deriving from the divine realm, fallen into this world of fate,
birth and death, and needing to be awakened by the divine counterpart of the
self in order to be finally reintegrated."^2 Gnosticism is thus a religious move-
ment represented by religious groups that emerged in the second century CE
and after, especially within the context of Christianity, groups such as the fol-
lowers of Basilides and Valentinos, two particularly significant early Christian
teachers of gnostic religion.
This distinction between gnosis and gnosticism resembles that of Hans Jonas
in his books The Gnostic Religion and Gnosis und spatantiker Geist, in which he
distinguishes between the gnostic principle—"the spirit of late antiquity"—
and the gnostic movement or movements. The gnostic religion, Jonas sug-
gests, is a religion of knowledge, with "a certain conception of the world, of
man's alienness within it, and of the transmundane nature of the godhead."^3
This knowledge is communicated creatively in myths, which contain themes
borrowed freely from other religious traditions and which employ an elabo-
rate series of symbols. The end result, according to Jonas, is the expression of
religious dualism, dislocation, alienation—"the existing rift between God and
world, world and man, spirit and flesh."^4 Whereas Valentinian gnostics (and
others) seek to derive dualism from a primordial oneness, Manichaean gnos-
tics begin with a dualism of two opposing principles. But both options remain
dualistic.^5 For Jonas, these expressions of gnostic dualism can be articulated
- Bianchi, ed., Le origini dello gnosticismo, p. xxvi. On the history of the discussion of gnosti-
cism, see King, What Is Gnosticism? - Jonas, Gnostic Religion, p. 101.
- Ibid., p. 237.
- Today scholars are arguing about whether or not the Manichaeans were truly gnostics, as
Jonas affirmed.