ABSTRACT
Before the discovery of the Berlin Codex in 1892, the Gnostics were known to us only from the writings of their antagonists, together with the few derisive extracts from their own works which are embedded in these polemics. The contents of the Codex, in conjunction with those of the documents which came to light at Nag Hammadi in 1945, reveal that while Gnostic literature was not well understood by these custodians of orthodoxy, they did not go out of their way to misrepresent it. It is therefore not unreasonable to hope that they may help us to resolve questions which the texts themselves cannot answer regarding their origin and the circles for which they were written. There are scholars who deny such a possibility, contending that any information derived from such sources can only be prejudicial; certainly we could put no trust in any writer who followed the example that Justin Martyr sets when he makes a wizard of Marcion and mistakes a statue of the Sabine deity Semo Sancus for a relic of the cult of Simon Magus (First Apology 23). The following review of our principal witnesses, however, will suggest that they were not uninformed or wantonly mendacious when the truth would be equally hurtful to their opponents. We are not obliged to believe their more lubricious disclosures, even when these are offered as personal testimony, but we cannot doubt their acquaintance with Gnostic books (which they must have read in the original Greek), and we cannot dismiss their attempts to differentiate the sects and establish an order of succession simply because the results do not always confirm the taxonomies proposed by modern scholars.
