Revealing Women. Feminine Imagery in Gnostic Christian Texts

Book excerpt: Revealing Women' offers a detailed and textual oriented investigation of the roles and functions of female characters in Gnostic Christian mythologies. It answers questions such as: to what end did Gnostic Christian theologians employ feminine imagery in their theology? What did they want to convey through it?0This book shows that feminine imagery was a genuine concern for Gnostic theologians, and it enquires about how it was employed to describe the divine through a contextual reading of Gnostic Christian texts presenting Ophite, Sethian, Barbeloite and Valentinian 'mythologoumena' and 'theologoumena'. Overall, it argues that feminine imagery ought to be acknowledged as an important theological framework to investigate and contextualize Gnostic works by showing that these theologians used feminine imagery to exemplify those aspects of the Godhead which they considered paradoxical and, yet, essential. The claims made in the first chapters are later substantiated by an in-depth investigation of understudied Gnostic texts, such as the so-called Simonian Gnostic works, the Book of Baruch of the Gnostic teacher Justin and the Nag Hammadi treatise known as Exegesis of the Soul.