ASPECTS OF THE JEWISH-GNOSTIC CONTROVERSY

BY

ITHAMAR GRUENWALD

THE scholarly discussion of the relation between Judaism and Gnosticism

has taken various directions. The chief problems discussed by scholars
are: (a) the amount, form and nature of the contribution of Judaism
to the formation of Gnosticism; (b) the extent and nature of the
Jewish polemic against Gnosticism; (c) the assumed influence of Gnos-
ticism on Judaism; and (d) the possible existence of a Jewish heterodox
Gnosis that paved the way for Christian and heretical Gnosticism.
In the present paper we shall concentrate on several aspects relating
mainly to the first and fourth points, namely the Jewish contribution
to the formation of Gnosticism and the possible existence of a Jewish
heterodox Gnosis. 1
As has been variously recognized, the Gnostic texts which were
discovered at Nag Hammadi show many points of connection with
Jewish ideas and literary sources. The same holds true concerning
certain points in the polemical accounts given by the Church Fathers
about the Gnostic systems which they set out to refute. However,
with the Jewish influence on Gnosticism taken for granted, there is
still no consensus as to the source and the means by which the Jewish
material came to the knowledge of the Gnostic writers. Obviously, no
generalizations can be made concerning those particularly complex
problems, since the sources and the channels through which the Jewish
material could have reached the Gnostic writers need not have been
the same in all cases. Furthermore, it has elsewhere been shown by
the present writer that upon close examination of certain details in two
of the Gnostic writings discovered at Nag Hammadi one is led to the
conclusion that not everything that on first sight appears to be an
idea which was directly borrowed from Jewish sources really is so. 2
It has been shown that the dependence of the Gnostic writers on
Jewish sources is not as simple as one could have assumed if the

1 A first version of this paper was read and discussed at the Seventh World

Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, August 1977.

2 "Jewish Sources for the Gnostic Texts from Nag Hammadi 9 " in Proceedings

of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies, vol. 3 (Jerusalem, 1977) 45-56.
714 ITHAMAR GRUENWALD

major points of difference between the alleged Jewish sources and the
Gnostic manner of using them were overlooked. The manner in which
the Gnostic writers used the Jewish material which they allegedly
knew is so idiosyncratic that a question mark had to be put against
the phrase "Jewish Sources for the Gnostic Texts from Nag Hammadi."
Indeed, it is difficult to tell in what manner the Jewish material reached
the Gnostic writers: was it in the form of literary documents such as
Targum and Midrash, or as general ideas that were just in the air
in the syncretistic cultural atmosphere of the first centuries of the
Christian era?
It is said in Yerushalmi Sanhedrin (10.6; ed. Venice 29c) in the
name of Rabbi Yobanan that the people of Israel did not go into exile
before they had become twenty-four sects of heretics (in Hebrew:
kittot she/ minim). Sayings of this kind have been taken by scholars
to indicate the existence of Jewish sects of a heretical nature, possibly
Jewish Gnostics. If this were true, the conclusion could be drawn
that beside the general inventory of Talmudic, Midrashic, and Targumic
sources which eventually stood at the disposal of the Gnostic writers
there were Jews who pulled the Jewish heretical strings together for
those writers. In fact, several attempts have been made to identify
those Jews, as if the existence of a Jewish type of a heterodox Gnosis
was an established historical fact. Thus, we may find H. Gratz speaking
about a "jiidische Gnosis," 3 M. Friedlander strongly defending his
case for the existence of a "vorchristliche jiidische Gnosticismus, " 4
and G. Quispe! advocating in our day the idea of a Jewish heterodox
origin of Gnosis. 5 We may, of course, add the names of other scholars
who went along similar lines of speculation, but it appears that in our
case the vox populi cannot be accepted as vox dei. It may be argued
that the theory of the existence of a Jewish Gnosis became possible
only because people were reading backwards, from Gnosticism to
Judaism. However, reading the Jewish texts themselves without knowing
what happened to some of them in the course of the development of
Gnosticism, one can hardly find any explicit indications in them for

3 H. Gratz, Gnosticismus und Judenthum (Krotischin, 1846; Gregg reprint, 1971).

4 M. Friedlander, Der vorchrist/iche judische Gnosticismus (Gottingen, 1898; Gregg
reprint, 1972). See also B. A. Pearson, "Friedlander Revisited," Studia Philonica 2 (1973)
23-39.
5 G. Quispe!, Gnostic Studies (Istanbul: Nederlands historisch-archaeologisch instituut,

1974) I. 195: "Es wurde wahrscheinlich, <lass es eine vielleicht vorchristliche, judaisierende
Gnosis gegeben hat ... "; ibid. 26: "And in so far as Gnosis is pre-Christian, it goes back
to heterodox Jewish conceptions."