Ask most people what the Gnostics thought of the Hebrew Bible and you’ll get a one-line answer. They hated it. The God of Moses was the villain, the jealous craftsman who trapped us in matter, and the whole Old Testament was his propaganda. There are Gnostic texts that come close to saying exactly that, and this site has walked through some of them.

Then there is a letter from a teacher named Ptolemy to a woman named Flora, and it does something nobody expects. It takes the Law of Moses apart piece by piece, with a scalpel rather than a hammer, and it ends up treating most of the Law with respect. If you’ve only met the cartoon version of Gnosticism, this is the text that complicates it. Here’s how the argument works, where it still falls short, and what a modern reader can borrow from it.

Who Were Ptolemy and Flora?

Ptolemy was one of the leading students of Valentinus, the second-century poet and teacher whose school produced the Gospel of Truth and the Letter to Rheginus. Bentley Layton dates his activity to roughly AD 136 to 180, probably somewhere in the western empire, possibly Rome. He wrote in Greek.

Flora is harder to see. Layton describes her as “a female adherent of ordinary Christianity,” a churchgoer with no particular Gnostic background who seems to have asked a sincere question. Ptolemy calls her “my dear sister,” which Layton glosses as roughly “my dear fellow Christian.” She is someone he hopes to teach, and the letter reads like a first lesson.

We have the text only because an enemy copied it. Around AD 375, the heresy hunter Epiphanius of Salamis quoted it word for word in his catalog of heresies, intending it as evidence for the prosecution. What he preserved instead is one of the calmest documents in early Christian literature.

The Question Flora Asked

The letter opens by admitting the topic is hard:

“The law established by Moses, my dear sister Flora, has in the past been misunderstood by many people, for they were not closely acquainted with the one who established it or with its commandments.”

Ptolemy names two camps he thinks are wrong. The first says the Law came straight from God the Father, which was the view of most Christians and many Jews. The second says the Law came from the devil, who also made the world. Layton suggests that second camp may be other Gnostics, the ones who told a myth like the Apocryphon of John, where the world’s maker is a blind and arrogant ruler.

That second rejection is what makes this letter matter. Ptolemy is a Gnostic arguing against the harshest Gnostic position. A law that forbids injustice cannot come from the author of injustice, he says, and he cites Jesus’s own line about a house divided against itself. Whoever made the world, in his view, is “a god who is just and hates evil,” and you can see his forethought in the order of nature with your own eyes.

Three Authors in One Book

His first move will sound surprisingly modern. The Law, he argues, was not written by a single author. Some of it comes from God, some from Moses acting on his own judgment, and some from the elders of the people, who added their own traditions.

His evidence comes entirely from Jesus. When the Pharisees ask about divorce in Matthew 19, Jesus answers that Moses permitted it “for your hardness of heart,” but “from the beginning it was not so.” Ptolemy reads this closely. Here are two laws in the same book pointing in opposite directions, one forbidding separation and one allowing it, so they cannot have the same author.

What strikes me is that Ptolemy doesn’t sneer at Moses for this. He says Moses wrote the divorce law “of necessity because of the weakness of those to whom it was ordained.” Some marriages had turned bad enough to push people toward worse crimes, and Moses chose “the lesser of two evils.” That is a pastor’s reading. It assumes the lawgiver was trying to protect people who couldn’t yet keep the higher standard.

Three Kinds of Commandment

Then he takes the part that really does come from God and splits it again, this time into three kinds.

  • The pure part. The Ten Commandments are good law “not interwoven with evil,” but incomplete. Jesus came to fulfill them, which Ptolemy illustrates with the Sermon on the Mount, where “you shall not kill” deepens into not being angry at all.
  • The part mixed with injustice. An eye for an eye belongs here. Ptolemy’s reasoning is sharp. “The one who is second to act unjustly still acts unjustly, differing only in the relative order in which he acts.” Jesus abolished this part by commanding its opposite, turning the other cheek.
  • The symbolic part. Sacrifice, circumcision, the Sabbath, fasting, and Passover. These were images of spiritual realities, and Christ changed what they refer to, “with the words remaining the same but the subject matter being altered.”

The middle category holds my favorite sentence in the letter. A God who says “You shall not kill” and then commands the killer to be killed, Ptolemy observes, has ended up “acting as judge between two murders.” In doing so, “he who forbade even a single murder has without realizing it been cheated by necessity.” That’s a strangely tender way to describe a flawed law. The lawgiver in this picture is a well-meaning judge, trapped by the hardness of the people he was trying to govern.

The God in the Middle

Only after all this does Ptolemy reach the question Flora probably cared about most. If the Law didn’t come from the perfect God, and didn’t come from the devil, who wrote it?

His answer is a third figure, the craftsman and maker of the world, who stands between the other two. The perfect Father is good. The adversary is evil. This middle god is “neither good, nor evil or unjust,” and so “might well be properly called just.” He is lower than the Father because he was made and the Father was not, but better than the devil, and Ptolemy adds that he is “an image of the better god.”

Compare that with the snarling Yaldabaoth of the classic myths. Ptolemy’s creator is closer to a stern but honest magistrate. He keeps order and rewards fairness, and he does as well as a being of his rank can. Layton notes that this three-part scheme shows “a relatively positive attitude” toward the world’s maker. You can disagree with the theology and still see the difference in temperature.

Where the Letter Still Falls Short

Nobody should mistake this letter for a model of respect for Judaism. Ptolemy treats circumcision, the Sabbath, and the sacrificial laws as images whose physical practice was “abolished” once Christ arrived, which is the same supersessionist logic most second-century Christians used, orthodox and Gnostic alike. Jewish readers of this letter would not find themselves honored in it.

What the letter does show is that the Gnostic relationship to the Hebrew Bible was an ongoing argument. Some Gnostics demonized its God. Ptolemy argued with them in writing. That’s worth knowing the next time someone tells you how Gnosticism differs from orthodox Christianity in one tidy sentence.

Reading Your Own Rules Like Ptolemy

You don’t have to accept a three-tiered cosmos to use Ptolemy’s method. He gives you a way to sort any inherited set of rules, whether it comes from a church, a family, or your own head.

  • Ask who wrote each rule. Some of your rules came from something you’d call sacred. Some came from a parent solving a problem you no longer have. Some are the traditions of the elders, habits your community added and forgot it added. Sort one rule this week.
  • Find the concessions. Moses permitted divorce because of hardness of heart. Which of your own rules exist only because you were weaker when you made them? A concession can stay in place and still be named honestly.
  • Look for the image. Ptolemy says the Sabbath means being “inactive in wicked acts.” Pick one ritual you keep and ask what it points to. Then try doing the thing it points to.
  • Fast with reason. Ptolemy’s school kept physical fasts, but only “so long as it does not take place in imitation of other people or by habit.” If you practice any kind of fasting, check whether you still know why you’re doing it.

The Lesson That Never Arrived

Near the end, Ptolemy admits he has reached the edge of what he can say in a first letter. Next time, “god permitting,” Flora will learn where the Father, the just god, and the adversary each came from, and how to test every claim against the Savior’s teaching. Layton notes that this second lesson doesn’t seem to have survived.

So we are left where Flora was, halfway through a course of study with the metaphysics still ahead. Ptolemy’s closing hope is that she will be “like good rich soil that has received fertile seeds,” and bear fruit. For a teacher remembered mostly by his enemies, it’s a generous wish to leave behind, and it seems to have reached a few more readers than the one he wrote to.

Ptolemy’s Epistle to Flora is quoted from Bentley Layton’s translation in The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021), including Layton’s introduction for the dating, the addressee, and Epiphanius’s transmission of the text.