12 INTRODUCTIONmystical spirituality, and they talked a different talk and walked a different
walk than the emerging orthodox church. To many readers of Pagels's book
the gnostics seemed to advocate a more attractive sort of spirituality than that
of the orthodox priests, bishops, and heresiologists, and they seemed to be on
the right side of many issues that remain important issues to the present day.
Pagels was accused by some reviewers of portraying the gnostics in too attrac-
tive a fashion. Nonetheless, The Gnostic Gospels offers a compelling portrayal
of the gnostics as freethinking mystics who recommended a direct experience
of god, unmediated by church hierarchy.
- In The Gnostic Scriptures, Bentley Layton assembles an anthology of
gnostic texts in English translations as authoritative gnostic scriptures. The
title of Layton's book is close to the title of our volume, and the conception is
similar, though more limited in scope. Like the scholars assembled at Messina,
and like Hans Jonas, Layton distinguishes between two meanings of the word
gnostic: "One is a broad meaning, denoting all the religious movements repre-
sented in this book, and many more besides. The elusive category ('gnosti-
cism') that corresponds to this broad meaning has always been hard to define.
The other meaning of'gnostic' is narrow and more strictly historical: it is the
self-given name of an ancient Christian sect, the gnostikoi, or 'gnostics.' "^9 Lay-
ton points out, as we have noted, that the words gnostikos, "gnostic," and gnos-
tikoi, "gnostics," were uncommon in the world of antiquity and late antiquity,
and that the Christian sect that called itself the gnostics has been nicknamed
the Sethians, or else the Barbeloites, Barbelognostics, Ophians, or Ophites, by
ancient heresiologists and modern scholars. These gnostics form the founda-
tion for Layton's anthology, and Part One of his book, "Classic Gnostic Scrip-
tures," is devoted to gnostic works in this limited sense of the word. The
subsequent parts of his book have additional texts—texts written by Valen-
tinians, by the followers of Judas Thomas, and by proponents of the systems
of Basilides and Hermetic religion.
Michael Williams, in his book Rethinking "Gnosticism" (discussed next), ap-
plauds Layton's efforts to be as exact as possible in his use of terms, but he points
out that the Coptic primary texts classified by Layton as classic gnostic scripture
do not refer to themselves as gnostic and are not indisputably gnostic. The term
gnostic is not used in so simple a way as Layton maintains, Williams continues;
for example, Irenaeus says that the followers of a woman named Marcellina - Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 5.