This collection consists of sixteen essays spanning the years 1970 to 2008, with the first eleven chapters covering standard themes in scholarship on gnosis, followed by three essays on Marcion, one on Bardaisan and one on the origins of Manichaeism. (Two of the gnostic discussions are reviews, of Frickel's monograph on the Apophasis Megalē, and Wucherpfennig's study of Heracleon's commentary on John.) There are some discussions of Nag Hammadi texts (the previously unpublished 2008 essay has short discussions of the Tripartite Tractate and the Exegesis on the Soul; the Gospel of Truth is the focus of chapter viii, the Paraphrase of Shem of chapter x), but the general focus of the articles in the book is upon the representations of gnostic mythology in the Fathers, and the fragments preserved by those same writers.

There are a number of central contentions. First, Gnosticism, or rather – as Aland prefers – gnosis (see pp. 245–6 on the terminology) is a Christian heresy which is incomprehensible without the presupposition of the redemptive death of Jesus. This comes to the fore in particular in ‘Gnosis und Christentum’ (1978/80) and ‘Was ist Gnosis’ (1984). In the former, the Gospel of Truth as a prime instance of Valentinian gnosis is seen as founded upon a particular conception of the death of Jesus, rather than as having been dabbed at a late stage with a thin Christian glaze. This contention is perhaps an easy argument to make, however; the cases of, for example, the Apocryphon of John, the Hypostasis of the Archons and On the Origin of the World are much harder, as Jonas replies in the dialogue appended to chapter viii, though Aland contends that the conception of the fall in the Apochryphon of John is also distinctively Christian. Above all, though, the central contention of all gnostic schemes of redemption whether Valentinian or otherwise (p. 230), according to which ‘God falls into the nothing to overcome the nothing’ must, Aland argues, be indebted to New Testament thought.

Secondly, following on from the first, is the influence of Platonism upon gnosis. Basilides, ‘the earliest Gnostic’ (p. 108), is strong evidence of this, as is Heracleon (p. 210), though this employment of Platonism is ‘Entlehnung gegen den Sinn des Entlehnten’ (p. 104), hence the attack from Plotinus’ circle ‘gegen gnostischen Missbrauch ihrer Theologie’ (pp. 111–20).

Thirdly, Aland sees experience rather than philosophical speculation as the decisive impulse for gnostic thought. The opening line of the Gospel of Truth, referring to ‘joy’, with the later emphasis on ‘rest’ are primary; as such it is the mood of ‘Freude und grenzenloser Jubel’ rather than a dogma or a philosophoumenon which is central (p. 243). This is allied to the perception of revelation as a pure gift (p. 221), and the missionary outlook of the gnostics (p. 245).

Fourthly, the volume argues for the importance of gnosis as a formative influence upon second-century and later Christianity. This point is made briefly, in the observation that gnosis prompted the systematisation of Christian thought (pp. 252–3), but is also the theme of chapter i, an unpublished essay entitled ‘Dercunverzichtbare Beitrag der sogennanten Gnosis zur Ausbildung der christlichen Theologie’, in which the challenge of the gnostic conceptions of the fall and redemption are taken to have been a decisive influence upon Irenaeus.

This volume gives an illuminating series of snapshots of a particular approach to defining gnosis and explaining its origins (which were, according to Aland, in the first quarter of the second century). It provides a vigorous, and multi-faceted, defence of a very ancient perception of gnostic thought (which was, after all, regarded by the Fathers as heresy, rather than paganism). Overall, however, the volume has a slightly dated and parochial feel, not so much in its conclusions (which are eminently defensible) but in its choice of dialogue partners. This is understandable in the older essays, but one might have hoped in the introduction for a more spirited defence of the author's approach in the light of recent challenges. There is rather a perfunctory summary of Karen King's recent criticisms of the function of ‘gnostic’ language in modern scholarship; rather than engaging in a real sense, however, Aland replies that one can conduct scholarship in an objective manner, even if that is not with disinterested objectivity, and that there is no need to dispense with questions of origins and essence (p. 4). Just as signficant in recent scholarship is M. A. Williams's Rethinking Gnosticism (1996), which Aland does not mention. Other important English-language scholarship (as well as S. Pétrement's 1984 Le Dieu séparé) is completely neglected, such as R. P. Casey's still important 1935 article (‘The study of Gnosticism’), G. C. Stead's essay on the Valentinian Sophia myth (1969), M. J. Edwards's 1989 and 1990 articles in the JTS, Bentley Layton's ‘Prolegomena to the study of Gnosticism’ (1995) and A. Logan's Gnostic truth and Christian heresy (1996). These are (or should be) standard fare in the current discussion and their absence is remarkable.

The question that inevitably arises with collections of essays is whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In the present volume this is happily the case. There is an admirable consistency in the volume, and the constituent parts really are mutually dependent, such that a lacuna left in chapter ix is filled in chapter viii, and a suggestive hint there is expanded upon in chapter i. Despite its shortcomings, this volume is a useful complement (and challenge) to the growing body of literature on gnosis and Gnosticism currently emerging from the United States.