Lietzmann, “Anfänge,” 171. The text may be found at F. C. Conybeare, Rituale Armenorum (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1905), 92.
H. von Campenhausen, “Das Bekenntnis Eusebs von Caesarea,” in Urchristliches und altkirchliches:
Vorträge und Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1979), 278–99.
Here working on the assumption, as argued above, that this is original in the Palestinian rite and that
the interrogatory creed found in Jerusalem is an importation.
Trinitarian statements at the syntaxis are found in Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. myst. 1.9; Theodore of Mop-
suestia, Hom. cat. 13.13; and implied by the narratives of the Historia Johannis (Syriac, 44; English, 40; Syriac,
59; English, 54, in the page numbers of the edition by W. Wright, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles [London,
1871; repr. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2005]).
Hae r. I.9.3.
Irenaeus, Women, and Tradition
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random, 1979).
See, for example, Karen L. King, ed, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, Studies in Antiquity and
Christianity 4 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).
Jonathan Cahana, “Androgyne or Undrogyne? Queering the Gnostic Myth,” Studia Patristica, forth-
coming. Cahana points to passages such as the Apocryphon of John 5.5-6, “She became a womb for the entirety,
for she was prior to all, the mother-father, the first human, the holy spirit, the thrice male, the three powers;
the thrice-androgynous name,” in support of his claim that Gnostics meant to challenge ancient assumptions
about gender to the core.
Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 108.
Ibid., chapter 3.
Williams argues that “Gnosticism” should be dismantled in favor of the more restricted category of
“biblical demiurgical” myths and writings. This proposed terminology has the advantage for Irenaeus scholars
of concentrating on exactly the aspects of these writings that Irenaeus himself most disliked and objected to.
Its disadvantage is that it also makes Irenaeus’s move of preferring a respectable, agreed, and authoritative
scholarly narrative over the joys of free-spinning myth-making, thus offering to rob these writings of much of
their romance in the popular imagination. (The much-loved category of “Celtic Christianity” faces a similar
problem when confronted with cold, sober historical reality.) As I think the emotional appeal Irenaeus is both
making and countering depends on presenting his opponents as one coherent, distinctive, and at least superfi-
cially attractive package, I will continue to use the term Gnostic in this paper, with all its baggage.
I am here taking Irenaeus’s description of the teaching of “those around Ptolemy” given in AH I.1-9
as representative of the core of the doctrine he is opposing, as he does (AH Book I Pref. 2). However, on the
assumption that all the Gnostic texts to which Irenaeus refers come from his contacts in Valentinian circles,
even those which are not themselves originally Valentianian, I will also draw on the exegetical and theological
moves made in other Gnostic traditions he discusses, particularly the narratives of I.29-30.
I.5.4; see also I.29.4, I.30.6.
I.30.7-9. Ialdabaoth punishes Adam and Eve by expelling them to Earth, but Prounikos takes pity on
them and returns to them what made them divine (which she had previously removed from them to protect it
from their punishment). The power struggle between the Demiurge and his mother does not appear in Ptol-
emy’s version of the myth, in which the Demiurge rejoices when he finally hears the truth about the realms
above him from the Savior (I.7.4).
I.13.2-3.
In Ptolemy’s system; in other systems, the highest God may be both male and female, half of an equal
male/female pair, or neither, though never simply female (I.11.5).
I.2.2 in Ptolemy’s system; there are a number of different but related versions of this myth cited by
Irenaeus.
I.13.5-7. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism,” 174–78, doubts the truth of Irenaeus’s charges, although
he concentrates on the ritual side of them. Accusations against teachers of seducing women are common
enough in ancient polemic to raise doubts about their veracity, but on the other hand the account Irenaeus
gives of Marcus’s actions is quite circumstantial, and fits well with a certain psychological profile (Marcus’s
