Apocalypse of the Alien God. Dylan M. Burns
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Gnostic initiator, teaching disciples how to navigate the path to heaven by using “seals” or “passwords” to gain power over malevolent archons and angels.73 The Manichaean Psalm-Book also features “wardens” (τελῶναι) whom the ascending soul must pass with the proper verbal offering, as obtained by the descending savior.74 In each of these cases, the one who descends is a savior figure.75 Zostrianos himself, then, appears to be not merely a seer but a savior, and perhaps even a Christ-figure.76 Indeed, the treatise ends with an eschatologically oriented sermon calling its hearers to repent and abandon the body.77
Thus the opening and closing pericopes of Zostrianos, like Allogenes and what is extant of Marsanes, consistently and repeatedly employ stock literary traditions drawn from the apocalypses. It is a way of writing characterized by the acquisition of revelation from a heavenly mediator, a heavenly journey (by cloud), the composition of heavenly books, and paraenetic discourses, in this case concerned with Platonic metaphysics and a cognate ascetic practice. Perhaps most distinctively, it is a way of writing that uses pseudepigraphy to authorize itself, donning the garb of hoary characters of Jewish antiquity to narrate their fantastic heavenly journeys. Not merely the stories that are told but the Sethian storytellers themselves, it seems, presume an audience familiar with and receptive to the world of the Jewish and Christian apocrypha.
ANOTHER KIND OF STORYTELLER
Much of our evidence about Sethianism from outside the Nag Hammadi corpus underscores the debt of this literary tradition to the apocalypses, the distinctive kinds of stories they tell, and the distinctive storytellers they are ascribed to. Epiphanius of Salamis’s evidence about the Sethians also shows that they routinely appealed to the authority of Judeo-Christian figures in apocalypses;78 moreover, he employs the language of the Platonists to mock them. He claims that the Gnostics (or “Borborites”) “forge (πλάττουσι) many books,” with titles such as Norea, the Gospel of Eve, “books in the name of Seth,” the Apocalypse of Adam, and the Gospel of Philip.79 His Sethians relate a version of the tale of the Nephilim found in Genesis 6:1–4 and the Book of the Watchers. They also “have composed certain books, attributing them to great men (βίβλους δέ τινας συγγράφοντες έξ ὀνόματος μεγάλων ἀνδρῶν): they say there are seven books attributed to Seth; other different books they entitle Foreigners (’Αλλογενεῖς); another they call an Apocalypse Attributed to Abraham (ἐξ ὀνόματος ’Αβραάμ … ἀποκάλυψιν); others attributed to Moses; and others attributed to other figures.”80 “The Archontics,” continues Epiphanius, “have forged their own apocrypha (οὗτοι δὲ ὁμοίως βίβλους ἑαυτοίς ἐπλαστογράφησάν τινας ἀποκρύφους),” including books of “the Foreigners” (τοῖς ’Aλλογενέσι καλουμένοις) and an Ascension of Isaiah, probably that known today.81
The Archontics also had a tradition about a certain “Marsanios” who was “snatched up” into heaven, as discussed in Chapter 1.82 Pistis Sophia in the Askew Codex refers to a revelation dialogue between Jesus and Enoch in Paradise, resulting in the latter’s composition of a book of mysteries, the Books of Jeu (probably those preserved in the Bruce Codex), which is protected by the archon “Kalapatauroth” so that it might survive the deluge.83 In an unfortunately fragmentary passage, the Sethian text Melchizedek mentions Enoch along with Adam and Abel.84 Finally, the Cologne Mani Codex85 lists several apocalypses, with similar titles, circulating in the community of Mani’s childhood: an “Apocalypse of Adam,” “Apocalypse of Sethel,” “Apocalypse of Enosh,” “Apocalypse of Shem,” and “Apocalypse of Enoch.”86 Significantly, the entire catalogue is motivated by the need to recall past revelations, presumably accepted by the target audience, in order to validate the revelations of Mani himself.87
The Platonizing Sethian apocalypses of Nag Hammadi all make similar appeals to the authority of individuals within Jewish and Christian tradition.88 Marsanes, Nicotheus, and Allogenes are all figures of Judeo-Christian provenance; only the name of “Zostrianos” is in itself ideologically neutral, since Hellenes, Jews, and Christians alike lay claim to the figure of his close relative Zoroaster.89 Given the pedigree of their nomenclature and the total absence of Hellenizing features that would have appealed to readers steeped in the Second Sophistic and Neopythagoreanism, it is difficult to imagine that the pseudepigraphic device was used in Sethian apocalypses as an apologetic appeal to Hellenes.90 The frame narratives of Allogenes and Marsanes are not entirely clear, but their apocalyptic personages and rhetoric both are very much in line with that of Zostrianos, and were recognized as such by Porphyry. Sethian pseudepigraphy associates the texts with figures populating Jewish and Christian apocrypha, who served in the worlds of Roman Judaism and Christianity as repositories of the ancient scribal culture of the Near East.
While there are messianic and prophetic elements to the personalities of our Platonizing seers, they are above all sages, scholars steeped in sapiential and philosophical lore.91 As J. Z. Smith argues, “apocalypticism,” featuring these sages, “is a learned rather than a popular religious phenomenon. It is widely distributed throughout the Mediterranean world and is best understood as part of the inner history of the tradition within which it occurs rather than as a syncretism.”92 Apocalyptic literature, whether historical or speculative, was produced by individuals within groups that had their own religious identities and attendant jargon and rhetorical motifs.
In the case of the Platonizing Sethian texts, such traditions are those of Jewish and Christian “scribal phenomena.” Recipients of vision, such as Daniel, Ezra, Baruch, and especially Enoch are all described as scribes in their apocalypses.93 The Sethian texts are thus invested with the worldview of Mesopotamian scribal culture, which saw an “interlocking totality” of phenomena that could be interpreted through cataloging them in lists and analyzing them as indicative of divine activity.94 Yet these catalogues of natural phenomena are replaced, in the Sethian literature, by equally repetitive lists of heavenly beings and metaphysical jargon. Nonetheless, the Sethian sages are clearly designed to appear as scribal figures who possess, by unverifiable means (e.g., ascents, dreams, visions), superior wisdom and authority.95
What entitles the sage to this special knowledge is also largely contingent on cultural background. Ioan Couliano distinguishes between three types of heavenly journeys:96
1. “Call” or “elective” apocalypses (merit based): unknown in Greek literature but ubiquitous in Judeo-Christian literature.
2. “Accidental” experiences, where the heavenly journey follows some calamity that leads to a revelatory near-death experience. There is only one Jewish apocalypse in this type (3 Bar.), but it is the predominant form of Greek apocalypse (Myth of Er, etc.)
3. “Quest apocalypses,” where the protagonist must employ special techniques in the pursuit of wisdom.
Judeo-Christian sages, such as those associated with Sethian traditions, are nearly always “elect” (type 1), invested by God himself with authority, at times resulting in quasi-worship of the seer.97 A good example is Mani himself, in a letter to Edessa (italics mine): “The truth and the secrets which I speak about—and the laying on of hands which is in my possession—not from men have I received them nor from fleshly creatures, not even from studies in the scriptures … by His (the Father’s) grace, He pulled me from the council of the many who do not recognize the truth and revealed (ἀπεκάλυψε) to me his secrets and those of the undefiled father and of all the cosmos. He disclosed to me how I was before the foundation of the world, and how the groundwork of all the deeds, both good and evil, was laid, and how everything of [this] aggregation was engendered [according to its] present boundaries and [times].”98 Such extraordinary claims to authority are a hallmark