The Sethian Gnostic Scriptures

This volume presents the most comprehensive contemporary English collection of primary texts from the Sethian Gnostic tradition-a highly developed and theologically sophisticated branch of early Christianity that was systematically denounced, suppressed, and destroyed by the emerging ecclesiastical authorities of late antiquity.

Labeled heretical by early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, Sethian texts were excluded from canonical transmission, their communities scattered or absorbed, and their writings deliberately purged from circulation. For centuries, these scriptures survived only in hostile quotations-until a remarkable discovery in 1945.

That year, in the Egyptian desert near the village of Nag Hammadi, a sealed jar was unearthed containing thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. Hidden by unknown hands sometime in the fourth century CE, these books preserved a vast collection of early Christian and Gnostic writings previously thought lost-including many works attributed to the Sethian school. Written in Coptic and based on earlier Greek originals, they provide direct access to a worldview that reimagines the divine, the cosmos, and the human soul in radically different terms than the orthodox tradition that replaced it.

At the core of this tradition is a cosmology of divine emanation, spiritual exile, and salvific gnosis. The Sethians taught that the material world was shaped not by the highest God, but by lower cosmic rulers (archons)-ignorant or malevolent beings who imprisoned the divine spark within the human soul. True salvation, in their view, was not achieved through faith or obedience, but through remembrance-the recovery of one's divine origin and the transcendence of the archontic realms.

This volume includes restored and newly rendered translations of foundational texts, such as:

• The Apocryphon of John
• The Trimorphic Protennoia
• The Three Steles of Seth
• The Hypostasis of the Archons
• Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes

It also integrates complementary texts that expand the Sethian worldview, including The Thought of Norea, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a reconstructed Gospel of Eve-highlighting the often-erased role of feminine revelation within Gnostic literature.
Each scripture is presented in clear, contemporary English and accompanied by scholarly introductions, with three supporting appendices:

• A Sethian Lexicon of core theological terms
• A historical timeline of text composition, suppression, and rediscovery
• A reconstructed creed based on doxologies and invocations across the texts

This is the first volume to translate, compile, and contextualize the core Sethian scriptures as a unified body of literature in modern English-designed for academic study, theological reflection, and spiritual inquiry. It restores to public access a tradition once buried beneath centuries of silence.