Similar Trimorphic Protennoia, Apocryphon of John, Apocalypse of Paul | ||
Endura allogenes nhc xi 3
Allogenes is a repertoire, or genre, of mystical Gnostic texts dating from the first half of the Third Century, CE. They concern Allogenes, "the Stranger" (or "foreigner"), a half-human, half-divine capable of communicating with realms beyond the sense-perceptible world, into the unknowable.
Contents
Temptation of Allogenes
The Tempatation of Allogenes begins with Sakla (i.e. Satan) tempting Allogenes; "Be like those in this world and eat one of my possessions!" But using almost exactly the same words of Jesus Christ in Gospel of Matthew 4:10, Allogenes rebuffs the demiurge, saying "Away from me, Satan! It is not you I search, but my Father." He further proclaims that Satan will not survive the ages, as he is "the first star of their family line" and "his star is burnt out." Allogenes calls out to God for "spiritual knowledge;" on Mount Thambour (Mount Tabor) he is answered by a voice from a cloud which tells him that "Your pleas are heard and I am being sent to you in this location to go and spread the Glad Tidings. But you have not found an escape from this prison yet."
It is not clear how the fragments of The Tempatation of Allogenes fit together, and some of the Gospel of Judas material is mixed in; it is possible that Judas Iscariot is employed as a character in the text as well.
Allogenes (NHC XI,3)
The surviving text from Nag Hammadi begins with an Allogenes recounting to his son Mesos a dialog with an angel, Youel, revealing to him aspects of the Triple-Powered-One, a being more powerful than God, embodying Vitality, Mentality, and That-Which-Is. After Youel concludes her lesson, Allogenes states "My soul went slack, and I fled and was very disturbed. And I turned to myself and saw the light that surrounded me and the Good that was in me, I became divine." After Allogenes considers the revelations made to him for a period of one hundred years, Youel returns and sings a hymn of praise to the Unnamable one, and then Allogenes ascends into an encounter with "the ineffable and Unknowable God." He is guided into the Aeon of Barbelos by the Luminaries, who engage in Negative, or Apophatic theology. Quite some time is spent in the description of this matter: "He is not corporeal. He is not incorporeal. He is not great. He is not small. He is not a number. He is not a creature. Nor is he something that exists, that one can know. But he is something else of himself that is superior, which one cannot know." This is the best preserved and longest continuous passage of Allogenes. After an ellipse, an unidentified authority commands Allogenes to write down what he has learned and to place it on a mountain, under guard, with an oracle, and he dedicates the work to his son Mesos; "These are the things that were disclosed to me."
Origin and concordances
Although the roughly contemporary opponents of Allogenes literature provide some clues to its origin by virtue of their opinions, there is little concord among scholars in this regard; other than that it is Gnostic, it has yet to be definitively classified. The Temptation of Allogenes is a Christian Gnostic text that places Allogenes in Christ's stead in Matthew Chapter 4, adding Gnostic allusions; he describes "my Father" as "[he] who is raised high above all great Aeons of heavens, each with their own God." The NHC Allogenes is a non-Christian, wholly Gnostic text; it is largely thought to be Sethian, with Allogenes as an allegory for Seth. However, Wire clarifies that the text nowhere mentions Seth or his children. When The Temptation of Allogenes first appeared, there was hope that the new discovery might help to fill in some of the missing lines of Allogenes, but it is clear from what has been published that The Temptation of Allogenes is a wholly independent composition. At least it confirms the plurality of Allogenes books hinted at by Epiphanius, Porphyry and in the closing lines of Allogenes itself: "Proclaim them, O my son Mesos, as the seal for all the books of Allogenes."
Wire identifies concordances between Allogenes and the Greek Corpus Hermeticum or Hermetica, Apocryphon of John, Trimorphic Protennoia, Epistle of Eugnostos, the Sophia of Jesus Christ and the NHC Gospel of the Egyptians. Porphyry identified Allogenes in the same breath as Zostrianos, and in this purely Gnostic context, Wire adds the Untitled Text of the Bruce Codex, Marsanes and The Three Steles of Seth. Despite Porphyry's dismay at the Sethians' lack of digestion of Plato, some common turns of phrase between the Nag Hammadi Allogenes and Proclus' Elements of Theology turn up in the Fifth Century CE, but not before that. Nevertheless, based on the considerable Neoplatonic content and negative theology of Allogenes, Wire concludes that the text that we have is the same one read by Plotinus and his school in the 260s. John Douglas Turner suggests that Allogenes was written in direct response to the Neoplatonists' rejection of Zostrianos; Porphyry notes that his colleague Amelius wrote a 40-volume refutation to that text, which no longer survives and may have appeared around 240 CE. As a result, scholarship on Allogenes has largely existed in the shadow of Zostrianos. On the other hand, Dylan Burns separates from the rest in proposing that the NHC Allogenes is a post-Plotonian redaction of an earlier Greek text and is therefore not the same as the one known to Plotinus.
David Brons identifies the NHC Allogenes as "Non-Valentinian," but used by the school, and the Nag Hammadi Codex in which it has been recovered is otherwise devoted exclusively to Valentian texts.