third-century AD Mesopotamian mystic Mani, and even the
Mandaeans, a sect still to be found in small numbers in Iran and
Iraq. He also saw the influence of Gnostic thought in medieval
religious groups such as the ninth-century Bogomils in the
Balkans and the twelfth-century Cathars of southern France
(Rudolph 1983: 326–76). The possible reverberations can be
found elsewhere, in modern literature and psychological theory –
it was not for nothing that one of the Nag Hammadi codices was
offered as a gift to Carl Jung.^2 Scholars such as Williams and
King argue that the meaning of the term Gnosticism has become
so diluted as to be almost useless as a precise historical category.
This debate has important implications for the Nag
Hammadi library. In the first place, it was noticed quite early on
in the investigation of the manuscripts that they were hardly a
cogent Gnostic collection.^3 Generally speaking, the contents of
the Nag Hammadi codices present such an astonishing diversity
that scholars have found it difficult to agree whether or not texts
were Gnostic, and even if they were, it was debated as to what
sort of Gnostic teachings they reflected. Michael Williams
comments that ‘the failure in reaching a consensus on classifica-
tion of writings as “gnostic” or “non-gnostic”... suggests that
the problem may lie not in natural scholarly contentiousness so
much as in a category that is unacceptably vague and probably
fundamentally flawed’ (Williams 1996: 49). His concerns have
been echoed by Karen King, who argues ‘that a rhetorical term
has been confused with a historical entity. There was and is no
such thing as Gnosticism, if by that we mean some kind of ancient
religious entity with a single origin and a distinct set of charac-
teristics’ (King 2003: 1–2).
This is perhaps a natural conclusion when dealing with a
modern term like Gnosticism; but what about words that are
attested in antiquity, such as Gnosis and Gnostic? Again, they
seem to have a broad range of meaning and are perhaps useless
for defining a precise historical phenomenon. When Irenaeus used
the Greek noun gno ̄ sis(‘knowledge’) to identify the target of his
polemic, he qualified it with the adjective pseudo ̄ numos(‘falselyORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
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