Greek Philosophy in the Coptic Gnostica 

I am at work on an introduction to the ancient school of thought today called “Gnosticism” written from the perspective of the history of philosophy. Gnostic thought is a biblically-inflected form of later Platonism that developed among intellectuals engaging emergent forms of Christianity and related movements, and whose adherents (self-styled “knowers,” from the Greek gnōstikoi) claimed to possess special salvific knowledge (gnōsis). Literature espousing Gnostic ideas was controversial in ancient Roman churches as well as philosophical reading groups (such as that of Plotinus), and subsequently suppressed and, finally, lost for 1500 years. The modern discovery and publication of over a dozen manuscripts containing Gnostic works in the Coptic (Egyptian) language—especially the Nag Hammadi Library, first published in 1977—revolutionized the history of early Christianity, but we have scarcely begun to understand the implications of the Coptic Gnostic corpus for the history of philosophy.

Significantly, the last major philosophical treatment of Gnostic thought—Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion—was published in 1957, and largely consists of work conducted in the 1930s. Ancient Gnostic Philosophy will thus be the first introduction to Gnosticism as a philosophy written in 70 years, and the very first to center its analysis on the Coptic data. Each chapter will offer a reading of a Coptic text that focuses on the Gnostic engagement with Greek and Christian philosophical intertexts and ideas, thereby introducing the key concepts of Gnostic thought—such as aeons, the fullness, the demiurge, consciousness, and providence—in a clear and straightforward way, and deciphering the Coptic texts’ esoteric terminology with respect to questions of Greek physics, logic, and ethics. The book thus will offer a novel reading of the Coptic evidence, arguing that ancient Gnostic thought is most easily understood as a type of Platonism.