VIER GNOSTISCHEN MYTHOLOGEME UND IHR JÜDISCHER HINTERGRUND
The four Gnostic mythemes and their Jewish background

Summary/Abstract: The four Gnostic mythemes and their Jewish background. Among the different religions that have influenced Gnosticism, a special position is held by Judaism. This fact has already been referred to by the 19th-century researchers F. Ch. Baur, H. Grätz and M. Friedländer. The same century also established the hypothesis that the origins of Gnosticism must be sought from sectarian or syncretistic Judaism. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century W. Brandt and W. Bousset, the researchers of Mandeans, discovered that the literature of that sect had strong influences from Judaism. Therefore many of the 20th century researchers on Gnosticism believe that the origins of Mandeans should be sought in the Syrian-Palestinian territory and that the said sect has developed from some Judaistic grouping of Baptists active in that area and later transferred to the territory of the present-day Iraq, as we know them from the first centuries of Christian chronology. When in 1945/46 Gnostic texts were discovered in Nag Hammad, it appeared that these also contained several motives, stories and concepts originating from the Old Testament and Jewish religious literature outside the canon. The Gnostic literature found in Nag Hammad also contains several Mythemes with a Jewish background – the differentiation between an unknown God and a demiurge, the image about seven Archons who have created the world and rule it, the complex of images usually labelled as “the teaching of God called Man” (the myth of Anthropos) and the image about a heavenly creature called ‘Wisdom’ and the story of its fate (the myth of Sophia). There are different explanations as to why Gnostic literature contains themes of Jewish origin. It certainly does not prove the theory according to which the origins of Gnosticism can be derived only from Judaism, but the presence of these themes still confirms that the birth of Gnosticism has, among others, been accompanied by people who have been familiar with Jewish traditions and have therefore also been in contact with Judaism.

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