The Argument Against a Category

Karen King central scholarly argument is that the word Gnosticism obscures more than it describes. The category was assembled from the writings of the heresiologists, the church fathers who catalogued opinions they were opposing, and it groups together texts and communities that share far less than the label implies while cutting them off from the wider Christian world they belonged to. Her book on the subject traces how the modern category was built, and shows that the questions historians have asked about origins, whether it came from Iran, from Judaism, from Greek philosophy, are questions the category itself generates rather than questions the evidence poses.

The methodological point behind it is larger. Orthodoxy and heresy are the outcome of a long contest, not the starting positions of the people who fought it, and writing the history of early Christianity in those terms means adopting the conclusions of one side as the framework of the account. A similar argument was made in the same period by Michael Allen Williams, and the two together changed how the Nag Hammadi material is discussed. Her work on the Gospel of Mary belongs to the same programme, reading a text with a woman as an authoritative teacher as evidence about the range of second century Christian argument rather than as a curiosity.