This volume is both an essay in Gnostic poetics and a study in the history of early Christian appropriation of ancient philosophy. The object of study is the cosmological model of the Apocryphon of John, a first-hand and fully narrated version of the Gnostic myth.
The author examines his target text against a complex background of religious and philosophical systems, literary theories, and rhetorical techniques of the period, and argues that the world model of the Apocryphon of John is inseparable from the epistemological, theological, and aesthetic debates within contemporary Platonism.
Poetics of the Gnostic Universe also discusses the composition and narrative logic of the Apocryphon of John, explores its revisionist attitude towards various literary models (Plato's Timaeus, Wisdom literature, Genesis), and analyzes its peculiar discursive strategy of conjoining seemingly disconnected symbolic 'codes' while describing the derivation of a multi-layered universe from a single transcendent source.
- ISBN10 9004116745
- ISBN13 9789004116740
- Publish Date 30 June 2006 (first published 1 January 2006)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country NL
- Imprint Brill
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 332
- Language English
- URL brill.com/product_id9140