Were the Gnostics a Christian sect or a cult?

  • Brakke, David. 2010. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Burns, Dylan M. 2014. Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism. Divinations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Dawson, David. 1992. Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Denzey Lewis, Nicola and Justine Ariel Blount. 2014. “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” Journal of Biblical Literature 133: 399-419.
  • Edwards, Mark J. 2009. Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate.
  • Haar, Stephen. 2003. Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? BZNW 119. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
  • Lewis, Nicola Denzey. 2013. Introduction to “Gnosticism”: Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Logan, Alastair H. B. 2006. The Gnostics: Identifying an Early Christian Cult. London: T&T Clark.
  • Lupieri, Edmondo. 2002. The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics. Italian Texts and Studies on Religion and Society. Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans.
  • Marjanen, Antti. 2008. “Gnosticism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, 203-20. Ed. S. A. Harvey and D. G. Hunter. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Marjanen, Antti and Petri Luomanen, eds. 2005. A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics’. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
  • Marjanen, Antti, ed. 2005. Was There a Gnostic Religion? Helsinki/Göttingen: Finnish Exegetical Society/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
  • Markschies, Christoph. 2003. Gnosis: An Introduction. London ; New York: T & T Clark.
  • Marx-Wolf, Heidi. 2016. Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E. Divinations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Mastrocinque, Attilio. 2005. From Jewish magic to Gnosticism. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
  • Pearson, Birger Albert. 2007. Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
  • Smith, Carl B. 2004. No Longer Jews: The Search for Gnostic Origins. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers.
  • Smith, Geoffrey S. 2019. Valentinian Christianity: Texts and Translations. Oakland: University of California Press.
  • Thomassen, Einar. 2006. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians”. Leiden/Boston: Brill.  (And cf. the review by P.L. Tite in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60: 755-58.)
  • Von Wahlde, Urban C. 2015. Gnosticism, Docetism, and the Judaisms of the First Century: The Search for the Wider Context of Johannine Literature and Why It Matters. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark
  • Watson, Francis and Sarah Parkhouse, eds. 2020. Telling the Christian Story Differently : Counter-Narratives from Nag Hammadi and Beyond. The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries. London/New York: T&T Clark.

rev. 11/21