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Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism. By ALASTAIR H. B. LOGAN. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996. xxiv + 373 pp.
Logan's basic thesis is that Gnosticism is a Christian development, not the product of earlier Iranian myths or Jewish hermeneutics. He acknowledges, with Schenke and MacRae and others, a background in Jewish speculation about the descent of Wisdom into the world (Proverbs 8 and Wisdom 7). But the only surviving texts, he notes, are Christian, and he thinks that the Gnostics' interest in both cosmogony and soteriology is specifically Christian (influenced along the way by the language of Hebrews 1-2). Another crucial factor, he suggests, is the Platonist or neo-Pythagorean Numenius, who thought of the divine Nous as split into higher and lower aspects (there is no mention of Plutarch, with his theory of the fallible World Soul).
Genealogies of Gnosticism are as complex and contested as those constructed by the...