We have met before (pp. 69, 86) with the gnostic interpretation of Adam’s sleep in Eden, which implies a very unorthodox conception of the author of this sleep and of the garden in which it takes place. The recently published Apocryphon of John spells out this comprehensive revision of the Genesis tale in what purports to be a revelation of the Lord to John the disciple. About the garden:

The first Archon (Ialdabaoth) brought Adam (created by the Archons) and placed him in paradise which he said to be a “delight” 38 for him: that is, he intended to deceive him. For their (the Archons’) delight is bitter and their beauty is lawless. Their delight is deceit and their tree was hostility. Their fruit is poison against which there is no cure, and their promise is death to him. Yet their tree was planted as “tree of life”: I shall disclose to you the mystery of their “life”—it is their Counterfeit Spirit,39 which originated from them so as to turn him away,40 so that he might not know his perfection.

(55:18-56:17, Till)

About the sleep:

Not as Moses said “He made him sleep,” but he enshrouded his perception with a veil and made him heavy with unperceptiveness—as he said himself through the prophet (Is. 6:10): “I will make heavy the ears of their hearts, that they may not understand and may not see.”

(58:16-59:5)

Now in the same oppositional vein is the gnostic view of the serpent and its role in inducing Eve to eat of the tree. For more than one reason, not the least of which was the mention of “knowledge,” the biblical tale exerted a strong attraction upon the Gnostics. Since it is the serpent that persuades Adam and Eve to taste of the fruit of knowledge and thereby to disobey their Creator, it came in a whole group of systems to represent the “pneumatic” principle from beyond counteracting the designs of the Demiurge, and thus could become, as much a symbol of the powers of redemption as the biblical God had been degraded to a symbol of cosmic oppression. Indeed, more than one gnostic sect derived its name from the cult of the serpent (“Ophites” from the Gk. ophis; “Naassenes  ” from the Heb. nahas—the group as a whole being termed “ophitic”); and this position of the serpent is based on a bold allegorizing of the biblical text. This is the version found in the ophitic summary of Irenaeus   (I. 30. 7): the transmundane Mother, Sophia-Prunikos, trying to counteract the demiurgic activity of her apostatical son Ialdabaoth, sends the serpent to “seduce Adam and Eve into breaking Ialdabaoth’s command.” The plan succeeds, both eat of the tree “of which God [i.e., the Demiurge] had forbidden them to eat. But when they had eaten, they knew the power from beyond and turned away from their creators.” It is the first success of the transcendent principle against the principle of the world, which is vitally interested in preventing knowledge in man as the inner-worldly hostage of Light: the serpent’s action marks the beginning of all gnosis on earth which thus by its very origin is stamped as opposed to the world and its God, and indeed as a form of rebellion.

The Peratae, sweepingly consistent, did not even shrink from regarding the historical Jesus as a particular incarnation of the “general serpent,” i.e., the serpent from Paradise understood as a principle (see below). In the barbelo  -gnostic (non-ophitic) Apocryphon of John this identification, made almost inevitable in the course of its argument, is only narrowly evaded by playing on the difference between the “tree of life” and the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”: of the latter Christ indeed causes man to eat against the Archon’s commandment, while the serpent, acting for the other tree and identified with Ialdabaoth, is left in its traditional role of corrupter (this, none too convincingly, in reply to the disciple’s startled question, “Christ, was it not the serpent who taught her?”). Thus, with the merging of the figures just avoided, part of the serpent’s function has passed over to Christ. The Valentinians, on the other hand, though not involving Jesus in the Paradise action itself, drew an allegorical parallel between him and the fruit from the tree: by being affixed to a “wood,”41 he “became a Fruit of the Knowledge of the Father, which did not, however, bring perdition upon those who ate it” (Gosp. of Truth, 18. 25 f.). Whether the denial simply contrasts the new to the old event (after the manner of St. Paul) or is meant to rectify the Genesis account itself must in this instance be left undecided. But the latter is clearly the case elsewhere and very much the gnostic fashion (cf. the repeated, blunt “not as Moses said” in the Apocryphon of John).

By Mani’s time (third century) the gnostic interpretation of the Paradise story and Jesus’ connection with it had become so firmly established that he could simply put Jesus in the place of the serpent with no mention of the latter: “He raised [Adam] up and made him eat of the tree of life” (see above, p. 87). What was once a conscious boldness of allegory had become itself an independent myth that could be used without a reference to (and perhaps even a memory of) the original model. The revolutionary genesis of the motif is probably forgotten at this stage. This goes to show that, unlike the allegory of the Stoics or of syncretistic literature in general, gnostic allegory is itself the source of a new mythology: it is the revolutionary vehicle of its emergence in the face of an entrenched tradition, and since it aims at subverting the latter, the principle of this allegory must be paradox and not congruency. [Hans Jonas  ]