The distinctively apocalyptic nature of Sethian literary tradition was obscured, too. Once the Ophite material is set aside, Sethianism is left with apocalypses and treatises containing large apocalyptic sections.16 The literary frame narrative governing the Apocryphon of John is both Sethian and an apocalypse.17 The Apocalypse of Adam, a history of the descents of Seth to save his “seed” from its tormentors, the rulers of the cosmos, and three of the Platonizing treatises—Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes, featuring the ascent of a seer to discover the secrets of the intelligible cosmos—are all apocalypses. The fourth Platonizing treatise, the Three Steles of Seth, is an ecstatic liturgy, but its scribe dubbed it an apocalypse.18 Trimorphic Protennoia is a revelation monologue complete with its own miniapocalypse featuring historical eschatology. Apocalyptic sections also litter the Egyptian Gospel, a text that begins with cosmogony and proceeds to a history of the seed of Seth and its rescue by its founder, who intervenes in various incarnations throughout history, before terminating in a liturgical section. The genre of the fragmentary Melchizedek is unclear, but this treatise seems deeply embedded in contemporary apocryphal traditions about the incarnation of the eponymous, celestial high priest (Gen 14:18–20; Heb 5:5–6) to battle the forces of darkness at the eschaton.19 Another work distantly related to Sethianism—the bizarre cosmological speculations of the Untitled Text from Codex Brucianus—and recent discoveries, including the Gospel of Judas and the untitled treatise from Codex Tchacos provisionally titled the Book of Allogenes, are apocalypses as well.20
Are these works “apocalypses” in name only or could one describe their contents as “apocalyptic” as well? Certainly most of the Sethian literature uses the genre of apocalypse, which “carries that title (ἀποκάλυψης) for the first time in the very late first or early second century a.d. From then on, both title and form are fashionable, at least to the end of the classical period.”21 John J. Collins defines the apocalyptic genre as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”22 One of the chief virtues of this approach is its movement away from scholarship that privileged historical and political themes in apocalyptic, neglecting the many apocalypses that deal more with cosmology, the makeup and fate of the soul, and so on.23 Other scholars have also emphasized the esotericism of the apoclaypses, that is, their focus on the revelation of hidden wisdom and cosmological secrets.24 As we will see in later chapters, Sethian tradition offers both “historical” and “cosmological” apocalypses.
Even so, esotericism, eschatology, and historical change are merely subjects commonly discussed in ancient apocalypses, without defining the genre, whose content remains open. Rather, the genre of apocalypse is defined by function, or “what may be called the ‘apocalyptic technique.’ Whatever the underlying problem, it is viewed from a distinctive apocalyptic perspective. This perspective is framed spatially by the supernatural world and temporally by the eschatological judgment…. It provides a resolution in the imagination by instilling conviction in the revealed ‘knowledge’ that it imparts. The function of the apocalyptic literature is to shape one’s imaginative perception of a situation and so lay the basis for whatever course of action it exhorts.”25 All apocalypses use elements such as frame narrative, stock motifs, and rhetoric to make extraordinary claims to authority that help address any sort of crisis experienced by the reader, which might result from political situations, but can be of an abstract or, as in the case of the Sethian apocalypses, even philosophical nature.26
Pseudepigraphy is perhaps the chief device used to bolster the authority of an apocalypse, authorizing the claims made by the text while creating a sense of self-definition.27 The claim of “historical” apocalypses to stem from a figure of remote antiquity validates ex eventu prophecy and creates a sense of providential activity that consoles the reader.28 In the “speculative” apocalypses, the device heightens the dynamic of concealment and revelation that lends a sense of gravitas.29 Pseudepigraphy had an apologetic function, but this was necessarily audience-specific; not all antediluvian sages were created equal, at least in the Rome of the third century CE.30 The decision to compose a treatise under the name of a “foreign” character like Zostrianos or Enoch, as opposed to Pythagoras, is significant, particularly among thinkers such as Numenius, Plotinus, or Porphyry for whom Platonic Orientalism was a live issue. Sethian literature thus employed a specific genre that used a body of specific literary motifs to make vigorous claims to authority in a scholarly environment where these specific claims would have been controversial. A close look at the Platonizing treatises’ use of these motifs—literary traditions common to the Jewish and Christian apocalypses—will tell us a great deal about what kind of audience the Platonizing Sethian treatises must have been intended for, and what Plotinus meant when he said that another way of writing would be more appropriate for refuting their readers.
ANOTHER WAY OF WRITING
The frame narratives of Marsanes, Allogenes, and Zostrianos (I omit the Three Steles of Seth, because, as a liturgical work, it has almost no narrative to speak of) each employ stock motifs of Jewish and Christian apocalypses, chief among them being the pseudepigraphic appeal to the authority of Judeo-Christian seers. Other features are instantly recognizable within the context of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic tradition, including the disposition of the seer prior to enlightenment, the medium of the heavenly journey, and interaction with the revealer figure. Altogether, these traditions compose a distinctive way of writing of its own, which seeks to authorize its message by invoking themes and images, familiar to readers of the apocalypses, that its audience would have found convincing and respectable.
Marsanes is an apocalypse insofar as a revealer delivers cosmological secrets to the eponymous seer. The identity of the revealer is not clear, but two apocalyptic literary traditions are: the emphasis on the authority of the seer and the use of paraenesis. As discussed at the end of Chapter 1, the character “Marsanes/Marsianos” was the protagonist of other Gnostic apocalypses, known to Epiphanius and the author of the Untitled Treatise in the Bruce Codex.31 Early on in Marsanes, a “third power of the Thrice-Powered One” describes to the seer the “silent” nature of the One beyond the One.32 After what appears to be a visionary experience, it tells the seer, “it is necessary [for you to know] those that are higher than these and tell them to the powers. For you (sg. masc.) will become [elect] with the elect ones [in the last] times.”33 Marsanes himself repeatedly asserts his revelatory authority in the text, as when he addresses the reader at the beginning: “for I am he who has [understood] that which truly exists, [whether] partially or [wholly], according to difference [and sameness].”34 Authorized to preach, Marsanes tells his readers to “[control] yourselves, receive [the] imperishable seed, bear fruit, and do not become attached to your possessions.”35 Each of the Platonizing apocalypses has paraenesis culminating in injunctions to missionary activity;36 these are common in contemporary Jewish apocalyptic texts, such as 2 Enoch, 4 Ezra, or 2 Baruch.37
Allogenes also exhibits the traditions of pseudepigraphic authorization via identification with a seer, reinforcement of the seer’s authority, and paraenesis, in addition to several other common apocalyptic themes: the protagonist’s fear, periods of preparation between revelation, and the practice of inscribing and burying books. The treatise assumes the genre (closely related to apocalypse) of a testament, or will, to the seer’s “son,” Messos. If we acknowledge that the very name “Allogenes” refers to the author as a Sethian, that is, one of “another seed,” as some scholars do, then we can “indirectly impute patriarchal status to Allogenes,” who is probably of antediluvian origin.38