Browsing through histories of the ancient Church and modern esotericism alike, one can indeed get the idea that the greatest foe of the first Christians was the “other seed” of the Gnostics, heretics among Christians who were corrupting (or enlivening, depending on whom you ask) the faith with alien elements. Scholarship today has more or less exploded this view, and while the definition of ancient “Gnosticism” and even the use of the term itself remain deeply controversial, most researchers agree that Gnosticism was inextricable from early Christian social milieus. In short, all our external witnesses regarding ancient individuals called gnōstikoi talk about them in a Christian context, all our surviving ancient manuscripts of Gnostic works appear to be products of Christian scribes, and all the theories regarding pre-Christian “Jewish” or “Pagan” Gnosticism have been debunked or rely on distant hypotheticals. Therefore, early Christians were not up against a “Gnostic religion,” because all our evidence about Gnosticism describes individuals related in some way to the emerging phenomenon of “Christianity” – itself an emergent, highly fluid phenomenon at the time. Yet the idea that the Gnostics were a sort of occult “counter-religion” to earliest “proto-orthodox” Christianity has proven extremely difficult to dislodge in our modern imaginations, above all in popular discourse.

The myth of a “Gnostic religion” against which early Christians were opposed is old, and it played a decisive role in the popularisation of the first wave of scholarly research about Gnosticism. In order to understand where this popular view comes from, we ought to look to the modern receptionhistory of our ancient Gnostic sources, almost all of which are preserved in the late Egyptian language known as Coptic. The best-known of these is the Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in December 1945. Less understood and far more influential, however, are the reception and influence of our Coptic Gnostic sources available prior to the Nag Hammadi find, namely the Askew and Bruce Codices.