Ptolemy's Letter to Flora: How a Gnostic Actually Read the Old Testament
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. ...