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Abstract: Through the influential thesis of Hans Jonas, for a long time modern scholars considered Gnostic schools as being, par excellence, anti-Jewish philosophical and religious movements. An influential group of scholars thought that Gnostics rejected the books of Old Testament. Gnostic exegesis, they say, is a "protest exegesis", an "inverse exegesis" or "value reversal". To start with, there is not a systematic approach of "reversals" or a systematic rejection of Old Testament. Indeed, in original Gnostic sources we can find such an exegesis, but this is not a common point for all Gnostic writings. In this paper we want to tackle some scholarly debates on Gnostic exegesis on Genesis.

Keywords: exegesis, Genesis, protest, reversal, allegory

1. Introduction

In a recent study, Winrich Löhr notes that in the Second Century begin to appear a series of "Christian teachers sought to interpret and propagate Christianity as a Philosophy in the Ancient sense of the word" (Löhr 2013, 584). These thinkers are at the origins of Scriptural Hermeneutics, or, using his own words, "Christian Gnostic teachers and schools are at the origin of the Christian interpretation of the Bible" (Löhr 2013, 584). Indeed, there are a couple of Gnostic teachers who played a leading role in the history of biblical interpretation. Basilides, Valentinus, Ptolemy or Herakleon - who wrote the first systematic commentary on the Gospel of John, are well known names therein. Over time, certain scholars have considered Gnostic teachers as anti-Jewish thinkers. That is what led them to say about those thinkers and teachers that they rejected the Jewish traditions and Jewish scriptures. The new discovered Gnostic writings revealed a more complex attitude toward the Old Testament and its doctrines. In this paper we want to highlight some scholarly debates on Gnostic exegesis in general, and their exegesis on book of Genesis, in particular.

Giovanni Filoramo and Claudio Gianotto analyze both heresiological sources and Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi and observe the following thing: from nearly 600 analyzed sources, the references to Old Testament are in particular references to book of Genesis; more exactly, from 600 texts, 50 % refer to historical books, 25 % to prophets and 25 % to sapiential books. In the first group, almost 70 % are references to Genesis. Further, from...

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