 What we're going to talk about today is a concept that you know a thing or two about. That is Gnosticism as category. So just prefacing here, Gnosticism as a monolithic term is to say the least, sometimes looked at as problematic in academia. You have on one side of the fence scholars like Michael A. Williams, Karen King or recently Matthew David Litwa who argue for a complete dismantling of the term, offering alternative terminology such as Sethian Christian or Biblical Demiurgy. I know Dr. Litwa has suggested negative Demiurgy. You also have scholars who agree with the validity of the label of Gnosticism provided it meets certain criteria, right? So this would include Berger Pearson, David Brachy, Bentley Leiden and yourself. I found it interesting that you've argued that Sethian cosmogony and anthropogeny is too rich and far reaching that another name to describe this distinctive perspective on divine care is required and that specifically Sethian or Christian does not suffice. So I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. First of all, there are a lot of reasons to dispense with the term Gnosticism. The term Gnosticism was coined in the 17th century and became used widely by, well, theologians and philosophers in subsequent centuries to describe, well, a vague meeting of esoteric philosophy and the cold science in Roman Alexandria, sometimes taken as represented by the philosophy of Plotinus and sometimes taken as the chief opponent of Plotinus's philosophy. But the notion of Gnosticism or as it is called Degnosis in German is really developed mainly by theologians and then occult philosophers. For French writers, it's Lagnus in the 18th and 19th centuries with the development of the historical sciences and scholarship of early Christianity at the end of the 19th century and especially at the beginning of the 20th century, words like Gnosticism or Gnosticismus become to be used to describe the thought of the heretics that are reputed to have called themselves Gnosticoi as heresiologists or heresy hunters like Irenaeus of Neon wrote in the second century. What's the problem with this term as Michael Allen Williams wrote in his groundbreaking book in the 90s, Rethinking Gnosticism, arguments for dismantling a dubious category, the term came to pick up all of these cliches that do not really seem to pan out when you look closely at the evidence pertaining to the Gnostics, especially the Coptic Gnostic corpus that is the body of books preserved in Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language that were discovered from the 18th century until today, the chief representative of which is, of course, the Naqamadi corpus, the 13 manuscripts found in Upper Egypt, probably around December in 1945, right? So Williams looking at the bounty of Gnostic scriptures, texts that seem to resemble the thought of the Gnosticoi or Gnoers described by heresy hunters like Irenaeus, Williams said, all of the cliches we have about Gnosticism don't fit these texts we found from Naqamadi. Therefore, we should describe what we used to call Gnosticism with new terms. And the one that he's just as biblical demagogicalism, that is, these Coptic Gnostic texts, they talk about deniurges, that is craftsmen, world makers, and they're indebted to the Bible. That's enough for Karen King. She acknowledged that there are different literary traditions you can isolate in the Naqamadi and related texts, the most predominant of which is the so-called Sethian tradition. These are texts with a lot of characteristics as a family resemblance, you know, between them. But the big factor they all share is their emphasis on the figure of Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve as a revealer and a savior. She looked at these texts and thought, well, they also seem to be Christian. So I want to just call them Sethian Christian, the Christians who are in the Seth. That's it, right? I'm convinced by a lot of their arguments, but I'm not convinced by all of them. And I'm certainly not convinced that the texts formally known as Gnostic are not distinctive from a Christian worldview, especially from the perspective of early Christian philosophy. And the reason for that is the complex of evidence for which the term Gnosticism has traditionally been used actually does present us a distinctive perspective on divine care. That is to say, when we look at the myths, predominantly the Sethian myths, but also myths associated with other Gnostic schools or teachings, we often find a disjunction in how divine care is described. And often these myths are glossed with the language of Greek philosophy. They use the language of pronoia or care to explain this disjunction. That is divine care, divine involvement from the aonic realm, the true realm, the truly divine realm of the true God, the Father, was active. So these myths tell us in the creation of human beings in some way, but not in the creation of the world. OK, this is quite different from what we find in other Greek philosophical schools that describe divine care as present or absent for the world and human beings together. And this is also very different from what we find in so-called proto-Orthodox or I should say any non-Gnostic early Christian or Jewish or ancient Jewish philosophy, which describes God as being active in the creation of human beings and the cosmos. The phyllo of Alexandria describes God as a creator, not just of the rational part of the human soul, but also of the worlds that we inhabit today. But Gnostic texts like the secret book of John do not. They describe providence as intervening at the creation of human beings and responsible for the implantation of a divine rational element in the proto-plast, the first human atom, but as not intervening on behalf of the world when the lower demagogic figure, the Archon Yadu Baot, goes about making the world that we live in. This is a real disjuncture, OK, and thought about providence in ancient literature. And it's so distinctive that I think we need some term to describe it. And given that it is predominant in this body of evidence, both heresyological and the coptic body of coptic texts that we've been finding since the 18th century, it's prominent in both sets of evidence, evidence that is associated with the figures called Nostokoi in antiquity. The term Gnosticism seems to me to be a useful one to