240 LITERATURE OF GNOSTIC WISDOMThe Valentinians met privately and later in churches, as students guided by
scholars. Many of their leaders were women, for whom gnostic Christianity
held out positions as leaders and teachers not available in the official church.
The Valentinians saw their mythic theologies as allegorical commentaries on
the Hebrew Bible and Christian scripture, but their opponents saw them as
extravagant heresies. In Valentinian gnosticism Christ and the word (logos)
are eternal beings (aeons), and Jesus is brought forth to bring salvation and
enlightenment here below. This recalls the logos made flesh in the Gospel of
John. But beyond some common interpretations of the life of Christ, their be-
liefs and documents clashed. One cannot read the Valentinian documents
without concluding that gnosticism was different, and not just allegorically,
from mainstream Christianity. The Valentinians offered a whole new scheme
of salvation through knowledge, and an unknowable father in the heavenly
realm of light, which is the pleroma or fullness. Traditional Christians were
right to suspect otherness in the Valentinians.
The Gospel of Truth begins with a Jewish-Christian enunciation of joy in
the good news of the gospel, which brings hope to those who would seek the fa-
ther. The following lines describe the generation of ignorance and error, which
derives ultimately from the father. Here ignorance, terror, and error reside in the
pleroma, which resides in the father. It is clear that this represents a crisis in the
pleroma, site of the thirty aeons of light, but the text suggests that the father is
neither responsible for this error nor diminished in his powers. In the contrast,
the paradox, between the error in the pleroma and the goodness of the father we
have perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this sermon of truth. Somehow,
from the very realm of the good father, error comes. Herein lies the mystery, for
gnostics, of the goodness of the divine and the reality of evil in the world.
This section ends with the appearance and death of Jesus the anointed,
whose fate at the hands of "error" is described in an amazing passage that in a
few words sets Jewish-Christian orthodoxy apart from gnosticism:
He was nailed to a tree. He became a fruit of the knowledge of
the father. He did not, however, destroy them because they ate
of it. He rather caused those who ate of it to be joyful because of
this discovery.This passage reverses the fundamental biblical notion that knowledge is sin. It
dissolves the original stricture against obtaining knowledge by eating of its
fruit, for which disobedience came a punishment of shame, sensuality, and
death. Rather, here in the Gospel of Truth the fruit of knowledge is a discovery