Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Culture Wars
Chapter 2. Plotinus Against His Gnostic Friends
Chapter 3. Other Ways of Writing
Chapter 4. The Descent
Chapter 5. The Ascent
Chapter 6. The Crown
Chapter 7. Between Judaism, Christianity, and Neoplatonism
Appendix: Reading Porphyry on the Gnostic Heretics and Their Apocalypses
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

Apocalypse of the Alien God shows that the fundamental break between the Platonic tradition and Judeo-Christianity began when the mystic Plotinus rejected the teachings of the Sethians, an influential group of Gnostics who operated at the intersection of Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian thought.

About the Author

Dylan M. Burns is Research Associate at Leipzig University.

Reviews

"An original contribution to scholarship on the nature of the four Platonizing Sethian treatises from Nag Hammadi, challenging the consensus concerning their relationship to the academic Greek philosophy of Middle Platonism and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and his early successors. Clearly and compellingly written, Apocalypse of the Alien God is a must for scholars in the field of Gnosticism and later Greek philosophy."
*John D. Turner, University of Nebraska, Lincoln*