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Book Review: The Johannine Epistles

teachings which were, as the hereseologists claimed, in direct opposition to the ordinary understanding of the Church's regula fidei. They saw their mission within Christianity to preach to the "called" (the psychics) in the hope that some of them would be numbered among the "chosen" (the pneumatics). The attacks of the Church Fathers have a counterpart in Christian Gnostic assertions that they are misunderstood and persecuted "even by those who think they are advancing the name of Christ" (The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Nag Hammadi Codex VII, 2, 59, 22-26). In a discussion of the attacks leveled at the Valentinians by the Fathers, P. asserts, following the lead of Quispel ("La conception de l'homme dans la gnose valentinienne," Éranos Jahrbuch, 1947, pp. 262, 274 f.), that what appears to be a doctrine of determinism in Valentinian ism is really a development of the biblical theology of election. The question "Are men determined to salvation or have they free will?" is a query that the texts cannot answer, for they do not address themselves to these categories (p. 112). P. further demonstrates that some sort of "choice" is available to psychics, even though their filiation is with the demiurge (p. 103). It is well to recall, however, that the hereseologists' problem was less with Valentinian teachings about the psychics than with their theory of the election of pneumatics. It is this which tended to rupture Church unity; for, within the fold itself, there were "Christians" whose ontological make-up and self-understanding were altogether different from the rest. These persons had an esoteric teaching ("But those who are to receive the teaching . . . receive the teaching for themselves alone" [Gospel of Truth 21, 3-6]) and a missionary zeal which caused the Fathers to see them rightly as wolves in sheep's clothing. Given this pastoral concern, the hereseologists were quite within bounds when they posed the philosophical question of free will to the Gnostic texts; for the Valentinians were clearly teaching a doctrine of divine election which predetermined two classes of humanity, hylics and pneumatics, to either pleromatic bliss or ultimate disappearance. P.'s work, succinct and well argued, will be a fine contribution to the issues in Valentinian Gnosticism now under consideration among scholars.