DeConick A.D

7
INTRODUCTION
power to innovate, stir up, change, and even revolutionize the way we are
in our world. It is the transgressive power of the Gnostic to innovate and
revolutionize religion that I expose in The Gnostic New Age and explore
as a distinctive feature of Gnostic spirituality.
Although it is true that the heresiologists like Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons
and Hippolytus of Rome framed the Gnostic as the demonic and created
a grand narrative that connected a variety of unrelated groups to
the arch-heretic Simon Magus, this does not mean that Gnostics did not
exist historically nor that Gnostics were innocuous alternative Christians.
Or, to put it another way, although Gnostics may have been made into
heretics by the early Catholics, this does not erase the fact that Gnostics
were operating in the margins of the conventional religions, with a countercultural
perspective that upset and overturned traditional theology,
cosmogony, cosmology, anthropology, hermeneutics, scripture, religious
practices, and lifestyle choices (DeConick 2016; cf. Kaler 2009). When
we insist on Gnostics as alternative Christians, we run the risk of taming
the shrew. The word alternative points to equivalent acceptable routes to
the same destination. The Gnostic road, however, is countercultural, concerned
with journeying on a road to a different destination, perhaps even
along a road in the opposite direction (see Yinger 1982, 42).
Real Gnostics
The domestication of the Gnostics as innocuous alternative Christians
becomes even more problematic when we consider the historical evidence
for the emergence of full-blown Gnostic religions by the third century, as
we will see in chapter 10. The Mandaeans are self-confessed Gnostics with
a religious identity that is neither Jewish nor Christian nor Zoroastrian.
Mandaean literally means “the Gnostics” or “the Knowers,” deriving
from the Aramaic word for knowledge, manda . Mandaeism emerged as a
new religious movement in the late first century and by the third century
CE was a mature Gnostic religion (Deutsch 1995; Lupieri 2002; Buckley
2002, 2006). It still exists today.
Manichaeism, another new religious movement of the third century,
was an intentionally created Gnostic religion (see Klimkeit 1993; Be-
Duhn 2000, 2015; Gardner and Lieu 2004; Coyle 2009; Baker-Brian
2011; Colditz 2015). It had its own self-identity and religious beliefs and