Several of the Nag Hammadi writings also provide varia-
tions on the story of the world’s creation found in the book of
Genesis. In the biblical account, it is God who created the world.
In the various Nag Hammadi versions it is not the supreme pre-
existing deity but a lesser and imperfect creator god who does
this. He is decribed, moreover, in singularly unflattering terms.
The Testimony of Truth, for example, offers the following
commentary on the biblical story of the expulsion of Adam from
Eden found in Genesis:
But what sort of God is this? First [he] envied Adam that
he should eat of the tree of knowledge. And secondly he
said, ‘Adam, where are you?’ And God does not have fore-
knowledge, that is, since he did not know this from the
beginning. [And] afterwards he said, ‘Let us cast him [out]
of this place, lest he eat of the tree of life and live forever.’
Surely he has shown himself to be a malicious envier.
(Nag Hammadi Codex IX, 47.14–30.
in Robinson 1988: 455)In this version, the creator god obstructs the path to fulfilment
through knowledge. The message is underlined in other texts. The
Hypostasis of the Archonstells of how, when the creator god first
saw his creation, ‘he became arrogant, saying “It is I who am God,
and there is none other apart from me”’ (Nag Hammadi Codex
II, 94.21–2, in Robinson 1988: 167). Identical views are found in
two other texts from the same codex, the Apocryphon of Johnand
a treatise On the Origin of the World(Pagels 1979: 55–6).
In addition to these variations on the Bible, the Nag
Hammadi texts appeared to confirm suspicions about the conflict
between orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity that had been
mooted before their discovery. In 1934 the German scholar Walter
Bauer had published Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten
Christentum, a book that finally appeared in English transla-
tion thirty-eight years later as Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest
Christianity(Bauer 1972). Bauer subjected the writings of the
ORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
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