The aim of this book is to mediate between those who argue for a ‘pre-Christian gnosis’ and those who urge that Gnosticism arose as a deviant reading of the literature which constitutes our New Testament. In Weiss's view, we must acknowledge that even Christian Gnosticism presupposes a view of the world that must have been developed outside the biblical milieu, though it would suffice to characterise this as ‘non-Christian’ without further speculation on its antiquity. After a survey of catholic accounts of the origin and propagation of Gnostic thought, the second chapter undertakes to prove that the hermeneutic applied to biblical texts in such compositions as the Apocryphon of John and Justin's Book of Baruch cannot originate with the texts themselves, but approaches the text with the parti pris that the hidden sense is intelligible only to the elect who are themselves in the present world under incognito. Weiss maintains, quite reasonably, that such writings as the Eugnostos from Nag Hammadi are more likely to be original compositions than abridgements of related works which openly disseminate Christian teachings; how we distinguish paganism from reticent Christianity he does not explain so clearly. The longest chapter, devoted to the Gnostic interpretation of the New Testament, concludes that, while Basilides and the so-called Valentinians have allowed a few spores of apostolic rhetoric to germinate in their own orchards, they have made no attempt to cultivate a theology which is Johannine or Pauline at its roots. Only by snatching words from the mouth of Paul and embedding them in a different script can he be made to deny the goodness of creation or the posthumous resurrection of the body; only after metaphor decays into metaphysics will John appear to teach that the light is a captive in the darkness or that the lost and the elect are of different natures. In a final chapter, the knowledge purveyed by Gnosticism is found to consist (as for so many other scholars) in the knowledge whence and whither we are that is canvassed in the seventy-eighth of the Excerpts from Theodotus. It may seem premature to turn from summary to criticism at this point, but a longer abstract would only discover prolix reiteration of the dominant position in German scholarship, unrefined by either strict or sympathetic examination of any countervailing theory.

Nowhere in the 500 pages of this volume does Weiss justify his assumption that the extension of the term gnôsis in Irenaeus is coterminous with that of gnôstikos. He himself is conscious that this thesis requires us to speak of the Nicolaitans as Gnostics (pp. 41, 52), although they differed from their critics only in holding that a pure conscience cannot be defiled by the meat from a pagan offering. The one passage which he adduces to show that Irenaeus reckoned the Valentinians as Gnostics (p. 47) does not clearly allude to this sect and does not even use the term gnostici in the surviving Latin text (Adversus Haereses 2.31.1). All the groups that Weiss elects to call Gnostici are supposed to be at one in their claim to the sovereign gnosis or knowledge of the meaning of their own scriptures – a claim which, of course, would not set them apart from their catholic adversaries, were it not that the catholic gnôsis is repeatedly characterised as an innocent reading of the text as a whole, in contrast to the Gnostic way of kidnapping one trope at a time from Paul or John in order to force a prepared confession from them on the rack of allegory. ‘Seek and ye shall find’ is the ubiquitous maxim of Gnostic exegesis, but, according to Weiss, the finding invariably precedes the seeking because their aim is always to coax from the text an antithesis between spirit and flesh, or between the creation of beings in this world and their redemption, which is manifestly repugnant to the intention of their authors. Weiss forgets, however, that exegesis, whether catholic or heterodox, is never content to paraphrase what is already legible in the revelation: it acknowledges as its further tasks the erasure of apparent contradictions within the text and the defence of its veracity when the word seems to be at odds with the event.

No honest Christian of the second century could deny that the proclamation of the Gospel to the Jews had come to nothing, and that the world had outlived the prophecies of Jesus long enough to see his generation passing way and mouldering in the grave. The thinkers whom Weiss calls Gnostic did not always devise the same palliatives, but all took their ingredients from those passages of the Old Testament which are agreed to be mythological or symbolical in tenor. Sophia, in the Valentinian myth, is fused with Eve, and her subsequent history recapitulates the sufferings of Israel; just as Christ supplants Isaac as the heir of Abraham in Paul, so here the children of Wisdom follow the cycle of remorse, dispersion and restoration that Jewish texts ascribe to the Shekinah, or tabernacled glory of God. When the bodies of the saints had begun to perish, it was reasonable to conclude that the proper subject of redemption is the inner man, and even that his salvation may be complete before the dissolution of his mortal coil. The conclusion that the god of this world is not the God of the saved would be a violent misconstruction of the original teaching if it were taken literally; but those who interpret other texts allegorically are apt to use allegory as a vehicle of exposition, and Pétrement argued twenty-five years ago that the Creator and the Redeemer in Valentinian preaching represent not two deities but the false and the true understanding of the same God. Pétrement, like most French and English authors who think differently from Weiss, receives only nominal attention in this study, which all too often falls into the error that it imputes to the Gnostics, substituting desultory quotation and prefabricated judgement for discerning exposition of the text.