DeConick A.D

55
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
Preexistent, Before the Beginning, Forefather, First Father, Depth, Unspeakable,
Unity, Hermaphrodite, and Greatness. This God is characterized
in negative terms as well, as Invisible, Indescribable, and Incomprehensible.
There are constant references to the fact that this God dwelled
for countless eons in silence and quiescence.
It is out of this God, either from his mouth or his womb, that the primeval
aspects of the divine world emerge, often in a primary collection of
gods called the Ogdoad (the Eight). Gnostics picture the supreme God
as a serpent, or his representatives as serpentine. The demonic is similarly
conceived in Gnostic sources as a Leviathan, a serpent who lives in the
outer darkness or in the ocean that surrounds the world. So there are two
serpents, the good and the bad, who coil in and out of Gnostic stories
(Mastrocinque 2005).
Some Gnostic theologians, such as Justin, identified this supreme God
with Plato’s Good, dwelling above the zodiac and whirling planets, but
this is a secondary identification that has been blended into an earlier
story about the awakening of a transcendent deity from primal waters.
The Gnostic story of a primal supreme God waking up and generating the
gods is not originally a Hellenistic or Greek story about Plato’s Good. At
the start, Gnosticism is not the acute Hellenization of Christianity.
Nor is the story of the transcendent God originally a Jewish story, with
the first verses of Genesis read to reflect an invisible, unformed, primal
God and his Ogdoad of helpers (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.28.1).
The Gnostic understanding of the transcendent God does not arise originally
within circles of rebel Jews, or even among the Samaritans, for that
matter (cf. Broek 2013, 206–26). Instead, the transcendent God begins
as an Egyptian story, with a twist (Parrott 1987; Adamson 2013). It is
an Egyptian story transposed for a nonnative audience, so that the basic
frame of the story remains in place while the names of the gods and other
details are shifted to accommodate the viewpoints of non-Egyptians and
to resonate with their own preferences, expectations, and outlooks. The
Egyptian story is from Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, about the all-lord
named Atum, who created the gods from his sweat and humans from the
tears of his eye (see Faulkner 2004, spells 464g–465a).
He is pictured in the oldest layer of Egyptian mythology as the single
God above and beyond the world and the deities who populate it. He is
the self-created God who came into being alone within the primal waters
of chaos, Nun (Assmann 2001, 177, 180). The Egyptian Coffin Texts