Wrestling with Archons

Subtitled 'Gnosticism is a critical theory culture', this scholarly work argues that Gnosticism performed this function in the early Christian period by deconstructing some of the givens of their contemporary world, especially related to tradition and gender, in a similar fashion to the Frankfurt School and others in the 20th century. The author engages with and differentiates his approach from leading contemporary scholars like Karen L King (who maintains that much of what we know is framed by the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy) and April DeConick while acknowledging their respective contributions (DeConick's most recent book is reviewed above). Interestingly, he also argues that proto-orthodoxy was in fact an adaptive reform of Gnosticism. This argument goes back to Walter Bauer and has been advanced by Karen King - heresy is a category created by the early church in order to draw an artificial separating line and present orthodoxy as inherently mainstream and authentic by contrast.