Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 14, 2013).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Introduction / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Were the Gnostics Cosmic Pessimists? / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Nag Hammadi and the Providential Cosmos / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- ‘This Body of Death’: Cosmic Malevolence and Enslavement to Sin in Pauline Exegesis / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Heimarmene at Nag Hammadi: The Apocryphon of John and On the Origin of the World / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Middle Platonism, Heimarmene, and the Corpus Hermeticum / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Ways Out I: Interventions of the Savior God / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Ways Out II: Baptism and Cosmic Freedom: A New Genesis / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Astral ‘Determinism’ in the Gospel of Judas / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Conclusions, and a New Way Forward / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Selected Bibliography / Nicola Denzey Lewis -- Subject Index / Nicola Denzey Lewis.

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In Cosmology and Fate in Gnosticism and Graeco-Roman Antiquity , Nicola Denzey Lewis dismisses Hans Jonas' mischaracterization of second-century Gnosticism as a philosophically-oriented religious movement built on the perception of the cosmos as negative or enslaving. A focused study on the concept of astrological fate in “Gnostic” writings including the Apocryphon of John, the recently-discovered Gospel of Judas, Trimorphic Protennoia, and the Pistis Sophia, this book reexamines their language of “enslavement to fate (Gk: heimarmene)” from its origins in Greek Stoicism, its deployment by the apostle Paul, to its later use by a variety of second-century intellectuals (both Christian and non-Christian). Denzey Lewis thus offers an informed and revisionist conceptual map of the ancient cosmos, its influence, and all those who claimed to be free of its potentially pernicious effects.