Gnosis and the Tragedies of Wisdom: Sophia’s Story

This essay explores ambivalent demiurgical figure of Wisdom/Sophia in Hellenistic Jewish and Gnostic Christian texts. As the agent of creation, Wisdom can either be praised as the firstborn of the high god or blamed for the evils that befall the created world. Perkins highlights the hermeneutical problems confronting our treatment of the wide corpus of writings expounding or refuting diverse gnostic teachings. She shows how Valentinian exegetes developed a more positive version of Wisdom’s role in mediating the divine, relative to other gnostic systems. But even the Valentinian Wisdom figure has little of the brilliance of her Jewish counterpart.