Seth as Forefather and as Returning Revealer

Sethian Gnosticism reads the biblical Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve named in Genesis after the murder of Abel, as the forefather of a saved race that carries the divine element within it, and as a figure who himself returns across history to reveal saving knowledge to his descendants, the feature from which the modern scholarly name for this current is taken. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, in Marvin Meyer's edition, present several texts in which Seth or his heavenly counterpart appears in this dual role, ancestor and revealer at once, most extensively in the Apocalypse of Adam, where Adam relates a revelation to Seth that is then understood to be transmitted onward through Seth's spiritual descendants across the generations. The Encyclopedia of Religion notes that this self-understanding as the seed of Seth, a chosen lineage distinct from and superior to the rest of humanity descended from Adam's other children, gave Sethian communities a origin story that doubled as an identity claim, membership in the current read as membership in Seth's own spiritual family line rather than merely as agreement with a set of teachings, an origin account that made the current's cosmology and its social self-understanding two expressions of a single claim about who its members most fundamentally were.