And there shall be others of those who are outside our
number who name themselves bishops and also deacons, as
if they have received their authority from God. They bend
themselves under the judgement of the leaders. Those
people are dry canals.
(Nag Hammadi Codex VII, 79.22–31,
in Robinson 1988: 376)It is not hard to see why heresiologists such as Irenaeus, who
invested so much in the tradition and authority of the church,
should have been outraged by such teachings.
The problem of GnosticismThus far we have seen how various of the Nag Hammadi texts
present rather different points of view on scripture, salvation, and
the church from those found in the heresiologists, and that
scholars felt that it was possible at last to write a comprehensive
account of the Gnostics from their own perspective. It became
customary to talk in positive terms about a unitary ‘Gnosticism’
and even a definable ‘Gnostic religion’. More recently, however,
the validity of these conjectures has been questioned. The titles
of studies such as Michael Williams’ Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’
(1996) and Karen King’s What is Gnosticism?(2003) hint at the
nature of the disquiet. The basic terminology used in scholarly
literature in the area has been thrown open for debate.
One upshot of these new investigations has been to remind
us that the term ‘Gnosticism’ is a coinage of the early modern
period, originating in the debate between Protestants and Roman
Catholics (King 2003: 7). Modern scholars have used the word
rather indiscriminately to designate a wide range of religions
and their adherents that claimed special insight or knowledge.
Indeed, some modern descriptions of Gnosticism include religious
traditions that would have been quite alien to Irenaeus. Thus
Kurt Rudolph, who eschewed the term Gnosticism for the more
neutral ‘Gnosis’, included the Manichaeans, followers of the
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