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The Book of Baruch
Justin
I he Book of Baruch, by Justin, is a Jewish gnostic myth, set in Eden,
I that exists today in a lightly Christianized and hellenized form. A
JL. sizable fragment of a lost larger scripture, Baruch is preserved
only as a paraphrase in Hippolytus of Rome's Refutation of All Heresies. Who
the author of the Book of Baruch is we cannot know. Hippolytus tells us little
other than that he is a gnostic named Justin.
Baruch maybe one of the earliest extant gnostic texts,^1 a missing gnostic link
between Jewish monotheism and full-blown gnosticism. Elohim is still Elohim
of Genesis 1:1, the essentially good creator god, but he is no longer the one
almighty god, for now he reports to a deity above him, whose epithet is "the
Good." Elohim is not devoid of frailties—he is a blundering lover in the garden
of Eden—yet he is not the demonized demiurge that he will become in classical
gnosticism. In normative gnostic scripture, the creator god of the Hebrew Bible
will be declared guilty of having created humans on earth and having locked
their divine particles of spiritual light inside the prison of material flesh. For
that travesty, Elohim will be given dreadful epithets, while his present master,
- Irenaeus declares the oldest gnostic scriptures to be the three doctrines of Simon Magus,
Menander, and Saturninus, which are known through refutations of them. To these doctrines
we should add the Samaritan Dositheos.