INTRODUCTION 13
called themselves gnostics, but Layton does not include them anywhere in his
anthology. Yet, in spite of Williams's protestations—and with his grudging ac-
knowledgment—it must be admitted that Layton has convincingly demon-
strated the connections among a variety of texts that are gnostic. In the present
volume we too shall feature these classic or Sethian gnostic texts prominently in
Part Two of our book, "Literature of Gnostic Wisdom."
- In Rethinking "Gnosticism," Michael Williams is more negative is his as-
sessment of the word gnosticism. He argues for "dismantling a dubious cate-
gory," the dubious category being gnosticism itself. Williams begins by giving
his own definition of gnosticism: "What is today usually called ancient 'gnos-
ticism' includes a variegated assortment of religious movements that are at-
tested in the Roman Empire at least as early as the second century CE."^10 While
he casts his net widely in his discussion of this set of religious movements,
Williams does not include Hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, and later reli-
gions in his discussion. He does survey the use of the terms gnosis and gnostic
in both the heresiological sources and the primary gnostic texts, and he finds
that rarely do gnostics seem to have described themselves as such, and the oc-
casional use of the term gnostic among the heresiologists is uneven, ambigu-
ous, and contradictory. Further, the effort on the part of scholars to employ
gnosticism as a typological category has also failed. Scholars have proposed,
variously, that gnosticism was an anticosmic protest movement, or an inno-
vative religion of adoption and adaptation of other religious traditions, or a
religion of spiritualists who hated the body, or of ethical radicals who opted
for either an ascetic or a bohemian lifestyle, and so on. Williams judges that
these descriptions of gnosticism are caricatures of a diverse set of religious
movements—misguided efforts to define a single, overarching category called
gnosticism. Instead, Williams proposes that we jettison the category gnosti-
cism altogether and focus our attention on specific religious movements, for
instance, the Valentinians.
In addition, Williams suggests a new category to replace gnosticism:I would suggest the category "biblical demiurgical traditions" as
one useful alternative. By "demiurgical" traditions I mean all
those that ascribe the creation and management of the cosmos to
some lower entity or entities, distinct from the highest God. This- Williams, Rethinking "Gnosticism," p. 3.