(^2) INTRODUCTION
Religious officials, who were not pleased with such freedom and independ-
ence, condemned the gnostics as heretical and a threat to the well-being and
good order of organized religion. Heresiologists—heresy hunters of a bygone
age who busied themselves exposing people judged dangerous to the Christ-
ian masses—fulminated against what they maintained was the falsehood of
the gnostics. Nonetheless, from the challenge of this perceived threat came
much of the theological reflection that has characterized the intellectual his-
tory of the Christian church.
The historical roots of the gnostics reach back into the time of the Greeks,
Romans, and Second Temple Jews. Some gnostics were Jewish, others Greco-
Roman, and many were Christian. There were Mandaean gnostics from Iraq
and Iran; Manichaeans from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and all
the way to China; Islamic gnostics in the Muslim world; and Cathars in west-
ern Europe. The heyday of their influence extends from the second century CE
through the next several centuries. Their influence and their presence, some
say, continue to the present day.
Gnostics sought knowledge and wisdom from many different sources,
and they accepted insight wherever it could be found. Like those who came
before them, they embraced a personified wisdom, Sophia, understood vari-
ously and taken as the manifestation of divine insight. To gain knowledge of
the deep things of god, gnostics read and studied diverse religious and philo-
sophical texts. In addition to Jewish sacred literature, Christian documents,
and Greco-Roman religious and philosophical texts, gnostics studied reli-
gious works from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Zoroastrians, Muslims, and
Buddhists. All such sacred texts disclosed truths, and all were to be celebrated
for their wisdom.
Gnostics loved to explore who they were and from where they had come,
and hence they read creation stories such as the opening chapters of Genesis
with vigor and enthusiasm. Like others, they recognized that creation stories
not only claim to describe what was, once upon a time, but also suggest what
is, now, in our own world. The gnostics carried to their reading a conviction
that the story of creation was not a happy one. There is, they reasoned,
something fundamentally wrong with the world, there is too much evil and
pain and death in the world, and so there must have been something wrong
with creation.
Consequently, gnostics provided innovative and oftentimes disturbing in-
terpretations of the creation stories they read. They concluded that a distinc-
tion, often a dualistic distinction, must be made between the transcendent,
elliott
(Elliott)
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