“And he is impious in his arrogance,” writes the Gnostic author of The Secret Gospel of John. “For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.”10 It was the Demiurge who had laid waste to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Demiurge who had murdered most of humankind in a catastrophic flood, the Demiurge who had expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. “But of what sort is this God?” complained the Gnostic author of The Testimony of Truth. “First [he] maliciously refused Adam from eating of the tree of
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