ABSTRACT

Despite contemporary scholarly reservations concerning the appropriateness of the term “Gnosticism” as a designation for the teachings of certain religious groups or individual thinkers of the first four centuries that the second-century Church Father Irenaeus and subsequent heresiologists – and even Plotinus’s disciple and biographer Porphyry – designated as “gnostic” (Williams 1996; King 2005), this essay is an attempt to survey the types of revelatory literature produced by such thinkers and practitioners, and then to focus on an early stratum of the literary corpus produced by them that has come to be referred to as “classical Gnosticism” or “Sethian Gnosticism.” While “Gnosticism” is a typological category designating a type of teaching and practice either claimed by its adherents or perceived by others to be different or distinct from common opinion, “Classic Gnostic” or “Sethian” refers more properly to a specific sectarian group of thinkers and practitioners and attempts to characterize a significant aspect of their sense of social identity.