in using the words gno ̄ stikosandgno ̄ sisin a positive rather than
pejorative sense. But Clement’s writings hint that there may well
have been Christians who aimed at a form of enlightenment that
led to a closer relationship with the divine – precisely the sort of
thing that the texts from Nag Hammadi suggest repeatedly.
Whether or not the authors, copyists, or readers of the Nag
Hammadi texts would have called this enlightenment gno ̄ sis, as
Clement did, cannot be known for certain. With the exception of
Clement, it seems to be a general rule that the terms gno ̄ stikos
andgno ̄ siswere deployed polemically to castigate a theological
enemy. As a term of abuse, gno ̄ stikosmight simply have meant a
‘know it all’.
If Gnosticism is a mirage and the terms Gnosis and Gnostic
of questionable validity, how are we supposed to talk of the
systems of thought revealed in the Nag Hammadi texts? King sug-
gests that ‘the term “Gnosticism” will most likely be abandoned’
(King 2003: 218). If it is not, she argues, then at the very least
use of the term will have to be more thoughtful and rigorous,
eschewing the distortions imported from the early Christian dis-
course on orthodoxy and heresy. Williams has offered a more
radical solution, to dispense with the term forthwith! He prefers
to speak of ‘biblical demiurgical traditions’ (Williams 1996: 51–3,
263–6) which is more descriptive of the contents of the Nag
Hammadi library and related documents: the traditions are bibli-
cal in that they arise out of recastings of scripture; they are
demiurgical in that they allude to the demiurge, the inferior creator
divinity.Manuscripts and heretics
Most discussions of the Nag Hammadi library have tended to
analyse it in connection with heresiological polemic. In terms of
their historical significance, the texts are usually examined in the
context of conflict between orthodoxy and heresy in the second
and third centuries AD. It is assumed, correctly I think, that the
manuscripts preserve Coptic translations of earlier Greek writings.ORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
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