DeConick A.D

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SUPERPOWERS AND MONSTERS
Seth, the Incorruptible Race, and the Holy Generation (Williams 1985;
Turner 2001; Logan 2006; Brakke 2011). Their communal identity as the
offspring of Seth is derived from the biblical Seth, who is the last son of
Adam and Eve. He was born to replace his brother Abel, who had been
killed by Cain. He was said to be the spitting image of Adam, an exact
likeness of his father. This Gnostic group understands Seth to be their
founder and inaugural ancestor. This is why we call them Sethians.
The earliest Sethian communities represent the initial collision of Gnostic
spirituality with the Jewish Bible, before Christianity began to form
in the Mediterranean. Once Christianity began emerging, some Sethian
communities started to engage Christian perspectives and scriptures, too,
blending them with their received Sethian views. In these cases, forms
of Christian Sethianism grew alongside non-Christian Sethian communities,
as Gnostic spirituality absorbed both Jewish and Christian versions
of the Bible.
Cracks in God
What makes this expression of Gnostic spirituality unique is the way it penetrates
the biblical narrative, transgressing the very foundation of conventional
Jewish covenant spirituality and scriptural interpretation. It leaves
no stone unturned in its quest to figure out how the biblical narrative
confirms the new revolutionary Gnostic orientation. In other words, the
first biblical Gnostics were unwilling to give up their belief in the veracity
of the Jewish scriptures. They wanted nothing more than to align the
Jewish sacred scriptures with Gnostic spirituality, to reconceive the story
of YHWH in light of their own direct experiences of the supreme God.
At first, the biblical Gnostics were concerned about whether or not
YHWH is the ineffable supreme God they had come to know. To this
end, they were obsessed with explaining a crack that they perceived in the
biblical narrative: that YHWH exhibits human characteristics and emotions.
He walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day and interacts
directly with the first humans, Adam and Eve. He claims to be jealous of
other gods. He does not work alone but creates human beings with the
assistance of other beings, as he himself says in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make
man in our image, after our likeness” (my italics).