Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Graduate Student, Comparative Religion

Thesis Title: The Physiognomy of a Gnostic: Gnosticism as a Cultural Phenomenon

About

I am a doctoral student in the Comparative Religion department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I did my M.A. in the same department, and my B.A. in Classical Studies. My interests include early Christianity (especially “heretical” sects and apocryphal literature), early monasticism and American Christian New Religious Movements. More comparatively, I'm interested in gender, sexuality, Queer Theory and Cultural Studies, especially as these intersect with religion and spirituality.

My dissertation attempts a cultural definition of the Gnostic phenomenon against the background of the Greco-Roman world of the first centuries C.E. Many scholars have deep reservations whether Gnosticism can still be used today as a meaningful term to describe a specific trend of early Christianity or whether this category should be dismantled altogether. My suggestion is that the problem lies in treating Gnosticism as solely a religious phenomenon and using specifically religious categories in order to analyze it. A cultural approach to this "religion" may therefore be of use in solving some of these difficulties.
When Gnosticism is read as a cultural movement, or even as a critical theory of culture, its main thrust appears to be set on questioning two main sets of premises of the Greco-Roman discourse. The first set involves the idea of “traditionalism,” aptly defined by A. H. Armstrong as “the acceptance of an absolute traditional authority” (Armstrong 1984, 415); the second interrelated set has to do with the basic notions of gender, sex and heteronormativity. My Ph.D. dissertation studies the Gnostic phenomenon in its reaction to these two main sets of cultural premises in order to elucidate whether Gnosticism should first and foremost be considered as a cultural phenomenon, albeit with religious “symptoms.” Both issues are studied with careful attention to the Gnostic use of language, and my research is intended to be as theoretically informed as possible, which is indeed a scholarly desideratum in the study of Gnosticism. I examine where and in what way each issue emerges in the texts, and attempt to see how, when combined to form a coherent worldview, they worked in unison to create the self-identity of the self-proclaimed “foreigner.”

This study is intended to contribute to the research of late antiquity in general and Gnosticism in particular. Nevertheless, as my objective is also to widen the scope of this research (and, one may hope, its relevance and applicability), I'm employing theories and methods from cultural and gender studies, utilizing sociological theories of deviance, and investigating phenomenological counterparts in other cultures and historical periods, notably radical feminism, modern queer communities and the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas. This approach, in turn, leads to a better understanding of Gnosticism, but also contributes to the research on other comparable modern phenomena. Equally it holds the potential to comment on various theoretical issues involving religion, culture, gender and language.

It was the philosopher and scholar Hans Jonas who, bidding farewell to his own study of Gnosticism almost 40 years ago, remarked that in the future there will come again a time when researchers may “try their hands in attempts at integration and new interpretation of the total phenomenon and the extraction of some philosophical relevance” (Jonas 1977, 12) I believe that by now this time has come and would like to offer my own work as a modest contribution in this direction. 


Armstrong, Arthur H. (1984). "Pagan and Christian Traditionalism in the First Three Centuries A.D." Studia Patristica 15: 414-431.

Jonas, Hans (1977). "A Retrospective View‎." Pages 1-15 in Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Gnosticism, Stockholm, August 20-25, 1973. Edited by Geo Widengren and David Hellholm. Leiden: Brill.