29. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth
I he work entitled Second Treatise of the Great Seth is a fascinating
I gnostic text with a most peculiar title. It is called the second trea-
JL tise (logos), but it is not really a treatise, and we know of no first
treatise; and it is attributed to Seth, whose name occurs nowhere in the docu-
ment itself. (If Jesus is assumed to be a manifestation of Seth, that mighi begin
to help explain the title of the text.) The Second Treatise of the Great Seth is a
gnostic meditation, presented as a revelation of Christ, on the meaning of the
life and particularly the death of Jesus the anointed, and the relationship be-
tween gnostic believers and the emerging orthodox church.
The meditation has Jesus tell the story of his career: his beginnings in the
divine assembly, his descent into this world and adoption of a body, his deal-
ings with the cosmic rulers of this world, his crucifixion—or what seemed to
be his crucifixion—and finally his ascent back home to the divine fullness. As
in the Coptic Revelation of Peter, the Nag Hammadi text that follows the Sec-
ond Treatise of the Great Seth in Codex VII, the heavenly Christ's death is
said to have never happened. Jesus was thought by some to have suffered and
died, but the rulers got the wrong man. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth
says (rather like Basilides, according to Irenaeus of Lyon) that Simon of
Cyrene (who in Mark 15:21, Matthew 27:32, and Luke 23:26 is enlisted to help
Jesus carry the cross) was involved in events leading up to the crucifixion,
and that another—perhaps Simon, perhaps the body that Jesus adopted—