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CHAPTER 3

Other Ways of Writing

Plotinus claims that the Gnostics do not write in a philosophical style, and so “another way of writing” would be necessary to refute them. Porphyry, meanwhile, denigrates the Sethian apocalypses as “forgeries” (πλάσματα), and it seems this formed the basis of his critique of the Apocalypse of Zoroaster.¹ Porphyry’s use of the word “apocalypse” or “revelation” (ἀποκάλυψις) for these documents is tantalizing, and at first sight straightforward: These texts were apocalypses, “revelations” of some sort, stories dealing with whatever kinds of ideas that “revelations” traffic in. Yet the apocalyptic background of the texts has not been studied with respect to the Platonic tradition, much less Plotinus’s criticism.² In fact, there are few studies of Gnostic apocalypses at all.³ This chapter will therefore unpack the technical language of Plotinus and Porphyry’s criticisms about “fiction,” “forgery,” and “myth,” while introducing the Platonizing Sethian literature itself, which is deeply embedded in the literary culture of the apocalypses.

Indeed, three (of the four) Platonizing Sethian treatises—Marsanes, Allogenes, and Zostrianos—are apocalypses. Analysis of their genre and their pseudepigraphic appeal to authority reveals that numerous key motifs of the texts, particularly in their frame narratives, are common stock in contemporary Jewish and Christian apocalyptic storytelling. Their cultivation of authority using these motifs challenges the culture of παιδεία explored in Chapter 1, instead employing images and authoritative figures with currency in Judeo-Christian circles, alien to Hellenism. Finally, the Sethian texts do not reject Platonic terminology about imagery, but employ it to articulate contemplative technique and authorize the concept of revelation as a perfect “image” of reality transmitted by the unknown, alien God to the seer. Such revelations, other ways of writing, thus demand to be read literally, not allegorically—another way of reading than we find prized by the Neoplatonists, who did not write stories as much as allegorically interpret the ones they deemed to be good. All of this points to the need for a reevaluation of the provenance and target audience of the Platonizing Sethian literature and the evidence of Plotinus and Porphyry.

ANOTHER KIND OF STORY—THE SETHIAN APOCALYPSES

As noted earlier in this book, Coptic treatises bearing the titles of several of the apocalypses mentioned by Porphyry in Vita Plotini 16 were discovered among the Nag Hammadi hoard in Upper Egypt in 1945. These treatises appear to belong to a Gnostic literary tradition that spans a wider group of Nag Hammadi texts, first identified and dubbed “Sethian” by Hans-Martin Schenke.⁴ The study of these Sethian treatises in the greater project of understanding the relationship between Plotinus and his Gnostic friends thus brings one to the study of Sethian tradition, and how it may have affected the particular issues that were contested by these thinkers. “Sethianism” describes a literary tradition defined by a family resemblance of various shared features, but chiefly the veneration of Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve, as revelator and even savior in the context of the “classic” Gnostic myth recounted at the beginning of Chapter One and criticized by Plotinus.⁵ The tradition encompasses, if not a system of thought, a school of thought, which thus presupposes some kind of belief in the Gnostic myth.⁶ Despite occasional criticism,⁷ the category of “Sethianism” enjoys widespread scholarly acceptance, even from those who dub it instead “Classic Gnosticism”⁸ or even eschew the term “Gnosticism” itself (thus speaking of “Sethian Christianity”).⁹ It is worth pausing to discuss this tradition here, since recent work brings into sharp relief the fact that nearly every Sethian treatise, even when they are Platonizing, is an apocalypse; therefore, the treatises criticized by Plotinus and Porphyry possess a very specific literary background that deserves to be explored in full.

One scholar of Gnosticism, John D. Turner, drew up a hypothetical but widely followed “literary history” of the movement that may have produced the Sethian literature.¹⁰ This history is based on a perceived tension between three subgroups within the Sethian corpus identified by Schenke: midrashic texts concerned with exegesis of the Paradise narrative in Genesis, texts focusing on baptism and the incarnation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, and the Platonizing texts full of metaphysical terminology but no speculation about the story of the serpent in Paradise or Jesus of Nazareth. Turner thus speculated that the Sethian literature offers snapshots of three phases of the transformation of a single Gnostic group that arose out of speculation on Jewish themes, was Christianized in the second century CE with the incorporation of Barbelo-Gnosticism (speculation about the Barbelo, or divine mother known to Irenaeus) and separate traditions about the veneration of Seth, suffered persecution at the hands of the proto-orthodox, and attempted to find a home among contemporary Platonic thinkers, like Plotinus’s group.¹¹ These later Sethians composed Platonizing but “pagan” apocalypses where Judeo-Christian motifs and ideas have been replaced with Platonic metaphysics, in an attempt to appeal to the philosophers.¹² As we know from Plotinus and Porphyry themselves, the rapprochement was unsuccessful, but these pagan apocalypses nonetheless deeply influenced the development of Neoplatonic thought. Thus, most scholars today refer to the Platonizing Sethian treatises as pagan apocalypses, written with the aim of appealing to the philosophical sensibility of Plotinus and other Hellenes.¹³

However, recent, groundbreaking research has forced us to reconsider the contours of Sethian tradition, by demonstrating that the Jewish midrashic texts first identified as “Sethian” are not Sethian at all. They possess few Sethian features (including the most important one—veneration of Seth himself), and instead belong to a separate Gnostic literary tradition dealing with Adam, Eve, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Hence, they should be termed “Ophite” texts (Gk. ὄφις = “serpent”).¹⁴ Much confusion, for instance, stems from the composite nature of one of the most famous treatises from this body of literature—the Apocryphon of John—which contains Sethian, Ophite, and Barbeloite themes.¹⁵ In attempting to shoehorn the entirety of this composite text with a complex source history into the category of Sethianism, scholarship thus obscured the distinctive nature of the Ophite tradition underlying sections of it.

The distinctively apocalyptic nature of Sethian literary tradition was obscured, too. Once the Ophite material is set aside, Sethianism is left with apocalypses and treatises containing large apocalyptic sections.¹⁶ The literary frame narrative governing the Apocryphon of John is both Sethian and an apocalypse.¹⁷ The Apocalypse of Adam, a history of the descents of Seth to save his “seed” from its tormentors, the rulers of the cosmos, and three of the Platonizing treatises—Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes, featuring the ascent of a seer to discover the secrets of the intelligible cosmos—are all apocalypses. The fourth Platonizing treatise, the Three Steles of Seth, is an ecstatic liturgy, but its scribe dubbed it an apocalypse.¹⁸ Trimorphic Protennoia is a revelation monologue complete with its own miniapocalypse featuring historical eschatology. Apocalyptic sections also litter the Egyptian Gospel, a text that begins with cosmogony and proceeds to a history of the seed of Seth and its rescue by its founder, who intervenes in various incarnations throughout history, before terminating in a liturgical section. The genre of the fragmentary Melchizedek is unclear, but this treatise seems deeply embedded in contemporary apocryphal traditions about the incarnation of the eponymous, celestial high priest (Gen 14:18–20; Heb 5:5–6) to battle the forces of darkness at the eschaton.¹⁹ Another work distantly related to Sethianism—the bizarre cosmological speculations of the Untitled Text from Codex Brucianus—and recent discoveries, including the Gospel of Judas and the untitled treatise from Codex Tchacos provisionally titled the Book of Allogenes, are apocalypses as well.²⁰

Are these works “apocalypses” in name only or could one describe their contents as “apocalyptic” as well? Certainly most of the Sethian literature uses the genre of apocalypse, which “carries that title (ἀποκάλυψης) for the first time in the very late first or early second century a.d. From then on, both title and form are fashionable, at least to the end of the classical period.”²¹ John J. Collins defines the apocalyptic genre as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”²² One of the chief virtues of this approach is its movement away from scholarship that privileged historical and political themes in apocalyptic, neglecting the many apocalypses that deal more with cosmology, the makeup and fate of the soul, and so on.²³ Other scholars have also emphasized the esotericism of the apoclaypses, that is, their focus on the revelation of hidden wisdom and cosmological secrets.²⁴ As we will see in later chapters, Sethian tradition offers both “historical” and “cosmological” apocalypses.

Even so, esotericism, eschatology, and historical change are merely subjects commonly discussed in ancient apocalypses, without defining the genre, whose content remains open. Rather, the genre of apocalypse is defined by function, or “what may be called the ‘apocalyptic technique.’ Whatever the underlying problem, it is viewed from a distinctive apocalyptic perspective. This perspective is framed spatially by the supernatural world and temporally by the eschatological judgment…. It provides a resolution in the imagination by instilling conviction in the revealed ‘knowledge’ that it imparts. The function of the apocalyptic literature is to shape one’s imaginative perception of a situation and so lay the basis for whatever course of action it exhorts.”²⁵ All apocalypses use elements such as frame narrative, stock motifs, and rhetoric to make extraordinary claims to authority that help address any sort of crisis experienced by the reader, which might result from political situations, but can be of an abstract or, as in the case of the Sethian apocalypses, even philosophical nature.²⁶

Pseudepigraphy is perhaps the chief device used to bolster the authority of an apocalypse, authorizing the claims made by the text while creating a sense of self-definition.²⁷ The claim of “historical” apocalypses to stem from a figure of remote antiquity validates ex eventu prophecy and creates a sense of providential activity that consoles the reader.²⁸ In the “speculative” apocalypses, the device heightens the dynamic of concealment and revelation that lends a sense of gravitas.²⁹ Pseudepigraphy had an apologetic function, but this was necessarily audience-specific; not all antediluvian sages were created equal, at least in the Rome of the third century CE.³⁰ The decision to compose a treatise under the name of a “foreign” character like Zostrianos or Enoch, as opposed to Pythagoras, is significant, particularly among thinkers such as Numenius, Plotinus, or Porphyry for whom Platonic Orientalism was a live issue. Sethian literature thus employed a specific genre that used a body of specific literary motifs to make vigorous claims to authority in a scholarly environment where these specific claims would have been controversial. A close look at the Platonizing treatises’ use of these motifs—literary traditions common to the Jewish and Christian apocalypses—will tell us a great deal about what kind of audience the Platonizing Sethian treatises must have been intended for, and what Plotinus meant when he said that another way of writing would be more appropriate for refuting their readers.

ANOTHER WAY OF WRITING

The frame narratives of Marsanes, Allogenes, and Zostrianos (I omit the Three Steles of Seth, because, as a liturgical work, it has almost no narrative to speak of) each employ stock motifs of Jewish and Christian apocalypses, chief among them being the pseudepigraphic appeal to the authority of Judeo-Christian seers. Other features are instantly recognizable within the context of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic tradition, including the disposition of the seer prior to enlightenment, the medium of the heavenly journey, and interaction with the revealer figure. Altogether, these traditions compose a distinctive way of writing of its own, which seeks to authorize its message by invoking themes and images, familiar to readers of the apocalypses, that its audience would have found convincing and respectable.

Marsanes is an apocalypse insofar as a revealer delivers cosmological secrets to the eponymous seer. The identity of the revealer is not clear, but two apocalyptic literary traditions are: the emphasis on the authority of the seer and the use of paraenesis. As discussed at the end of Chapter 1, the character “Marsanes/Marsianos” was the protagonist of other Gnostic apocalypses, known to Epiphanius and the author of the Untitled Treatise in the Bruce Codex.³¹ Early on in Marsanes, a “third power of the Thrice-Powered One” describes to the seer the “silent” nature of the One beyond the One.³² After what appears to be a visionary experience, it tells the seer, “it is necessary [for you to know] those that are higher than these and tell them to the powers. For you (sg. masc.) will become [elect] with the elect ones [in the last] times.”³³ Marsanes himself repeatedly asserts his revelatory authority in the text, as when he addresses the reader at the beginning: “for I am he who has [understood] that which truly exists, [whether] partially or [wholly], according to difference [and sameness].”³⁴ Authorized to preach, Marsanes tells his readers to “[control] yourselves, receive [the] imperishable seed, bear fruit, and do not become attached to your possessions.”³⁵ Each of the Platonizing apocalypses has paraenesis culminating in injunctions to missionary activity;³⁶ these are common in contemporary Jewish apocalyptic texts, such as 2 Enoch, 4 Ezra, or 2 Baruch.37

Allogenes also exhibits the traditions of pseudepigraphic authorization via identification with a seer, reinforcement of the seer’s authority, and paraenesis, in addition to several other common apocalyptic themes: the protagonist’s fear, periods of preparation between revelation, and the practice of inscribing and burying books. The treatise assumes the genre (closely related to apocalypse) of a testament, or will, to the seer’s “son,” Messos. If we acknowledge that the very name “Allogenes” refers to the author as a Sethian, that is, one of “another seed,” as some scholars do, then we can “indirectly impute patriarchal status to Allogenes,” who is probably of antediluvian origin.³⁸ Other scholars simply assign him the identity of an incarnation of Seth himself.³⁹ The incipit of the narrative is unpreserved; the reader is immediately thrust into a revelation dialogue between the seer and the angel Youel, describing the makeup of Barbelo and the first principle, a “Thrice-Powered Invisible Spirit.” Allogenes grows upset:⁴⁰

“I was able (to conceive of transcendent things), although I was clothed in flesh. [I] heard about them through you, about the teaching which is in them (i.e., the revelations), since the thought that is in me distinguished those [which] are beyond measure and the unknowables. Because of this, I am afraid, lest my learning has produced⁴¹ something beyond what is fitting.” And then, O Messos, Youel, the one who belongs to all the glories, said these things to me. She [revealed ()] these things, and said, “No one is allowed to hear these things, except for the great powers alone, O Allogenes, (for) a great power has been laid upon you, that which the father of the entirety, the eternal, laid upon you before you came to this place, so that you might distinguish those things which are difficult to distinguish, and so that you might understand those things which are unknown to the multitude, and so that you might be saved, in that one who belongs to you, that one who was first to save (others) and who does not himself need to be saved.⁴²

What Collins terms the “disposition of the seer” is a stock element in apocalypses, particularly the disposition of fear, which is met by the soothing words of angelic mediators.⁴³ Allogenes skillfully applies the motif to the dilemma of the mystic—the problematic status of knowledge of what is necessarily unknowable—even while retaining its Jewish coloring. While the first principle of the Greek philosophers is unknowable, it is certainly nothing to be afraid of.⁴⁴ Sirach, on the other hand, discourages attempts to know too much, and in Hekhalot literature, knowledge of the Godhead is not only forbidden but dangerous.⁴⁵

Youel’s response fails to “steady” Allogenes, who once again expresses his fears and is reassured that he is both worthy of vision and responsible for communicating it to others.⁴⁶ The angel anoints and “strengthens” him. This “empowerment” of the seer by heavenly beings is common to the Platonizing Sethian texts. Paralleled only rarely in contemporary Platonic literature, the tradition is also clear in the heavenly journeys of 2 Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham, where the seer is occasionally “strengthened” by angels to ease the shock of the journey.⁴⁷

The discussion continues along predictably metaphysical lines, and, finally, Allogenes, convinced of his worthiness, prepares himself for ascent through meditative techniques: “And when Youel, the one who belongs to all the glories, had said these things to me, she separated herself from me, leaving me. But I did not despair because of these words which I had heard; I contemplated myself for one hundred years. And I rejoiced by myself a great deal, since I was in a great light and a blessed path, since those, meanwhile, who I was worthy of seeing and then those who I was worthy of hearing about (are) those whom it is fitting for the great powers alone [ … ].”⁴⁸ “Breaks” in between revelatory discourses are another tradition in the apocalypses; Ezra and Baruch fast for seven days between visions.⁴⁹ The inordinate life span that enables Allogenes to meditate for a century is common to Jewish legends about the patriarchs.⁵⁰ Some kind of period of waiting between visions of “the Father” seems to be implied in a fragmentary passage of Marsanes.⁵¹ It is not clear if such practices involved a withdrawal from contemporary urban life to the wilderness or understood retreat in a more metaphorical or limited fashion, or simply as apocalyptic literary cliché.⁵²

Finally, upon his descent from the Barbelo, Allogenes is commissioned to write a book, presumably that bearing his name: “he (speaker unknown) said to me, write down [those things that I] will tell you, and I will remind you, for the sake of those who will be worthy after you. You must leave this book upon a mountain, and adjure a guardian: ‘come, dreadful one.’ And when he had said these things, he separated himself from me. As for me, I was full of joy, and I wrote down this book, which was set apart for me (to write), my son, Messos, so that I might reveal (σωλπ) to you those things which were preached before me, and that I received first in a great silence.”⁵³ The ancient seer’s composition of a revelatory manuscript for posterity is one of the most common traditions in apocalyptic literature, as in the Ascension of Isaiah or 2 Enoch: “give them books in your handwriting, and they will read them and they will acknowledge me as the Creator of everything. And they will understand that there is no other God except myself.”⁵⁴ The tradition showcases the esoteric nature of a revealed book, and explains how antediluvian texts could survive cataclysms or simply go unread for a long time.⁵⁵ Indeed, the device carries the eschatological implication that only the “last generation (the author’s own)” could “break the seal of the mystery” of God’s plan; or further, it is not the generation of the author that is being confronted with the revealed mystery but that of the reader(s).⁵⁶

A similar constellation of apocalyptic traditions is negotiated in the lengthy Zostrianos, which, thanks to its relatively well-preserved opening and closing, offers by far the most data. It begins with the eponymous seer reflecting on his circumstances prior to revelation: “I was in the cosmos for the sake of those of my generation and those who would come after me, the living elect…. I preached forcefully about the entirety to those who had alien parts. I tried their works for a little while; thus the necessity of generation brought me into the manifest (world). I was never pleased with them, but always I separated myself from them, since I had come into being through a holy birth.⁵⁷ And being mixed, I straightened my soul, empty of evil.”⁵⁸ Frustrated with his community, he retreats and contemplates metaphysical questions alone, which eventually leads him to despair and a resolve to suicide, when an angel appears and intervenes.⁵⁹ The arrival of revelation to a seer in great emotional distress is common in the Jewish apocalypses.⁶⁰ Then Zostrianos “instantly and exuberantly ascended with the angel, into a great luminous cloud,⁶¹ leaving my shell (πλάσμα) upon the earth, to be guarded by some glories. And [we] were rescued from the whole cosmos, and the thirteen aeons that exist in it, and their angelic beings. They did not spot us, and their ruler (ἄρχων) became disturbed before [our mode of] passage.”⁶² The tradition of the ascent to heaven via cloud is also widespread in Jewish apocalypses.⁶³

The same is true of the stealthy passage through the clutches of the heavenly powers, which is replicated prior to Zostrianos’s reembodiment at the end of the treatise, after his revelations: “Then, when I came down to the aeons of the [self-begotten] individuals, I received an [image ()] that was pure, yet appropriate for sense-perception (αἴσθησις). I came down to the aeonic copies (ἀντίτυπος) and went to the aetherial earth. And I wrote three wooden tablets (πύξος), leaving them in knowledge ()⁶⁴ for all those who would follow me, the living elect. I came down to the perceptible world and I put on my image (); since it was uneducated, I strengthened it, going around to preach the truth to everybody. Neither the angelic beings of the world nor the archons saw me, for I evaded a myriad of torments which nearly killed me.”⁶⁵ This passage is obscure; it does not identify these steles with the text of Zostrianos itself, so they must be a separate work.⁶⁶ However, writing in heaven was commonly associated in Jewish pseudepigrapha with Enoch’s role as a divine scribe, a role at the root of rabbinic traditions where, transformed into Metatron, he sits in heaven writing. ⁶⁷ Zostrianos probably drew on this tradition, for, like the seer of 2 and 3 Enoch, Zostrianos has been transformed into an angel over the course of his heavenly journey and acquired supra-angelic knowledge.⁶⁸

Meanwhile, Zostrianos’s descent “invisible and unharmed” past a series of hostile archons is a leitmotiv of apocalyptic, Gnostic, and Manichaean ascent texts. In the Ascension of Isaiah the prophet witnesses the savior’s descent to earth in a disguise, to avoid conflict with malevolent angels.⁶⁹ In a hymnic passage shared between the Apocryphon of John and Trimorphic Protennoia, the figure of Protennoia, a female savior, descends three times.⁷⁰ For Ophites, it is a preexistent Jesus himself who descends.⁷¹ In The Ascension of Isaiah, the descent leads to his crucifixion.⁷² In other texts, he assumes the role of 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 of the apocalyptic genre, participating in the greater trend under the early Roman Empire to search for some kind of esoteric, “higher” knowledge.⁹⁹ There are a variety of traditions common to the genre that express these claims, and as discussed above, many of these are present in the Sethian apocalypses.¹⁰⁰ Together, they constitute a peculiar “register,” a way of writing that strongly contrasts not just with sapiential literature but with the tone and idiom of Greek philosophy.¹⁰¹

Altogether, the remarkable claims to authority made in apocalyptic literature, advanced by means of narrative traditions and pseudepigraphic authorship, are designed to quell any doubts a potential reader may have about the topic at hand, whatever it might be.¹⁰² Christopher Rowland remarks that this rhetoric tries to create a sense of “unmediated” or “direct” access to knowledge, but all apocalypses actually are transmitted (i.e., mediated) by an otherworldly figure.¹⁰³ What he seems to mean is that the “apocalyptic technique” is designed to assure the reader of the complete veracity of a worldview or set of propositions. While it is indeed mediated by narrative devices and characters, this worldview or conceptual set is assigned a truth value that is entirely positive, pure, and undistilled. In the context of 4 Ezra and other apocalypses that deal with historical issues, this technique is consoling. In the context of Platonic epistemology, it is an extraordinary subversion of ordinary means of accessing knowledge.

WHAT IS A GOOD STORY?

Plotinus charges the Sethian apocalypses with being “fictions,” πλάσματα; Porphyry uses the same word, with the sense of “forgery.” In the context of Middle Platonism, the use of frame narrative, developed characters, and supernatural mythologoumena set the Sethian apocalypses in the realm of “fictions” (πλάσματα), together with “myths.” The Platonizing treatises’ use of the genre “apocalypse” is radical, because most Platonists of the period did not compose fiction or myths: they interpreted them, usually with allegory. This method was warranted by a Platonic epistemology that interpreted images as faulty, shadowy representations of heavenly realities. The philosophical contemporaries of the authors of the Sethian texts did think stories (myths) or fiction could “be good” (i.e., contain truths), but only if they were interpreted properly—that is, under the aegis of παιδεία, following training in philosophy and cult.