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 re-imagines the divine, the cosmos, and the human soul in radically different terms than the orthodox tradition that replaced it.