Through this fog of venom, it was hard for modern scholars to get a true picture of the Gnostic texts. It was as if, say, every copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses had been destroyed and all a prospective reader could go on—to see if it was any good—were the reviews of critics who hated it. The one certainty was that these second-century bishops succeeded in elevating their model of Christianity to orthodoxy while demoting their rivals’ to heresy. The Roman Catholic Church eventually sainted Epiphanius and Irenaeus, honoring them as “Church Fathers.” The Gnostic gospels they raged against,
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