In 1933 a young German Jewish scholar left his country with an unfinished study of Gnosticism and a vow “never to return except as the soldier of a conquering army.” Hans Jonas kept that vow. He came back with the British in 1945, and he went on to write The Gnostic Religion, the book most of us still start with.

That book contains a phrase every fan of these texts should read slowly. Jonas writes of “the violently anti-Jewish bias of the more prominent gnostic systems.” He wasn’t a hostile witness. He gave a good part of his life to these writings, and he said it anyway.

So is Gnosticism anti-Jewish? A site that spends this much time with these texts owes you a straight answer, and mine is that some of it clearly is. Let’s look at the worst passages first, and then at why “some” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The Worst Passages First

The basic move is in the Secret Book of John, where Jesus corrects Genesis to its face: “It is not as Moses wrote and you heard.” The myth then hands the rulers of the lower heavens the Bible’s own names for God. Jonas lists them (Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddai) and notes that they’ve been turned into “proper names of inferior demonic beings.”

Retelling Eden, the Testimony of Truth stops to sneer at the storyteller’s God:

“What kind of a god is this? First, he begrudged Adam’s eating from the tree of knowledge. Second, he said, ‘Adam, where are you?’ God does not have foreknowledge; otherwise, wouldn’t he have known from the beginning?”

The low point is the Second Discourse of Great Seth, which walks down the family tree of Israel like a heckler. “Adam was a joke,” it says, and then so were Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. David and Solomon get the same line, and so do the twelve prophets. “Moses was a joke, called a faithful servant and friend.”

Two sayings closer to home are harder for me, because I quote their neighbors all the time. In Thomas 43, Jesus tells his disciples they’ve “become like the Jewish people, for they love the tree but hate its fruit, or they love the fruit but hate the tree.” And the Gospel of Philip says, “When we were Hebrews we were orphans, with only a mother, but when we became Christians we had a father and a mother.”

Scholars don’t soften this. Bentley Layton, introducing the Reality of the Rulers, simply refers to “the anti-Jewish intention of the myth.”

Jonas thought Jewish scripture took the brunt because it was the tradition people held most sacred. There alone, he says, “the prestige of the sacred original, the gravity of its claims, the devotion of its believers” gave the reversal its “flavor of provocation and scandal.” That’s an explanation, and I don’t think he meant it as an excuse.

Jewish Fingerprints on the Same Pages

The odd thing is who seems to have written some of this. Layton notes that the Reality of the Rulers is full of learned puns on Semitic names, which suggest “close contact with a Jewish or Jewish-Christian milieu.” Jonas himself says the anti-Jewish bias “is by itself not incompatible with Jewish heretical origin at some distance.”

Jewish scholars have done a lot of the digging here. Gershom Scholem’s 1957 lectures at the Jewish Theological Seminary became Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, and Alan Segal’s Two Powers in Heaven traced the rabbis’ own arguments against people who saw a second power beside God. How far back the Jewish roots go is still disputed.

I leaned on those roots in my post on the Dead Sea Scrolls, where I called the harsh language an argument inside Israel’s own house. I’d add a caution to that now. Family quarrels can be vicious, and by the time Great Seth was written, its Jesus is speaking for Christians laughing at a house they don’t live in.

Then there’s Sabaoth, who may be the strangest figure in the whole story. In the Nature of the Rulers (Meyer’s title for the same text), this son of the blind creator sees what’s happening, and “he repented and condemned his father and his mother, matter.” Sophia lifts him up and sets him over the seventh heaven, and Layton suggests with a cautious question mark that he stands for the god of Israel. Jonas saw “a streak of sympathy for Judaism” here, sitting oddly beside the animosity in the same pages.

Same Jar, Different Temperature

“Gnosticism” also covers too many people for one verdict. Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora argues against the Gnostics who said the Law came from the devil, and it treats Moses as a lawgiver doing his honest best. It still assumes Christ made Jewish practice obsolete, so I wouldn’t call it respectful of Judaism. The tone, though, is nothing like Great Seth.

The Exegesis on the Soul goes further. It was buried in the same Nag Hammadi find as Great Seth, and it says, “The holy Spirit prophesies in many places about the prostitution of the soul,” before quoting Jeremiah and Hosea at length. One text calls the prophets a joke, and another hears the Spirit speaking through them.

That’s why the arc map on this site colors each link by how a text uses the Bible. Some affirm, some reinterpret, some invert. You can’t tell which by the label on the shelf.

Where the Larger Damage Came From

Fairness cuts in another direction too. The most damaging anti-Jewish writing of early Christianity came from the side that won. Bart Ehrman calls the Epistle of Barnabas “a virulent attack on historical Judaism,” and he notes that Melito of Sardis, late in the second century, was the first Christian we know of to charge Jews with killing God. He doesn’t mince words about the result:

“The ugly, painful, and notorious history of Christian anti-Semitism is in some ways a direct result of writings such as these.”

The proto-orthodox kept Israel’s God and accused Israel of betraying him. Their heirs eventually had the Roman state behind them, which Gnostic Christians never did. A smaller record still isn’t a clean one, though, and the idea of a Christianity cut loose from Jewish scripture had a long afterlife.

Marcion, who wasn’t quite a Gnostic, is the classic case. In 1921 the historian Adolf von Harnack published a book on him, arguing that the church had been right to keep the Old Testament in the second century but that modern Protestants no longer needed to treat it as fully authoritative.

In 1939 German Protestant theologians went much further and opened an institute for the “eradication” of Jewish influence on church life, which produced a dejudaized New Testament. I’m not drawing a straight line from the Nag Hammadi jar to that institute. I’m saying the road between “this scripture’s God is lesser” and “these people are lesser” has been walked before.

Critique or Contempt

Here’s where I think the line falls, and the Bible helps draw it. Questioning God is an old Jewish habit. When Abraham hears what’s coming for Sodom, he asks, in the NIV’s wording, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Job does the same thing for most of a book.

Critique takes a thing seriously enough to argue with it. Contempt laughs at the people who love it. By that test, Ptolemy is a critic, and the Testimony of Truth is a furious one standing near the edge. Great Seth is over it, and so is that one line in Thomas.

If You Read These Texts

A few habits have helped me keep the books I love without inheriting their worst moments. None of them takes long.

  • Drop the shorthand. “The God of the Old Testament is the demiurge” is how the slide starts. “This myth gives its blind creator lines from Isaiah” says what the text does, and it leaves living people out of it.
  • Read Genesis with a Jewish guide before you read the Secret Book of John’s version of it. Rashi or Robert Alter will do, and you’ll see how much the myth has to leave out.
  • Don’t hide saying 43. If you share Thomas with a friend, let the hard saying stay in the book.
  • Check where your anger belongs. A lot of us came to Gnosticism bruised by a strict church. That anger may be earned, but it’s yours, and it has nothing to do with the synagogue down the street.

When Jonas reached Marburg in 1945, he went to see his old teacher Rudolf Bultmann. After twelve years of catastrophe, Bultmann pointed at a wrapped package Jonas was carrying and asked, “May I hope that this is the second volume of the Gnosis?” Jonas kept working on those texts for years afterward. He saw what was in them, he put it in print, and he kept reading, which seems to me about the right way to hold them.

The Secret Book of John, the Testimony of Truth, the Second Discourse of Great Seth, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Nature of the Rulers and the Exegesis on the Soul are quoted from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2010). The Jonas quotations and the Bultmann story come from Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Beacon Press), including the memoir material in that edition. Layton’s remarks come from The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021). The Ehrman material is from his Lost Christianities course. Genesis 18:25 is quoted from the NIV. The institute and its dejudaized New Testament are described in Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus (Princeton University Press, 2008).