There Is No Soul in a Sect: Soteriological Determinism in the Tripartite Tractate (NHC I,5) and the ‘Vision of Hagu’ (4QInstruction) (original) (raw)

This essay examines the vexing problem of the soteriological determinism which heresiographers such as Irenaeus of Lyons claim was maintained by the Valentinians. The study focuses on our sole systematic, extant work of Valentinian theology, the Tripartite Tractate (Nag Hammadi Codex I,5), and its division of humanity into spiritual, animate, and material races (or “kinds”), proposing that the text’s protology and eschatology are crucial evidence for making sense of its soteriology, as is its presentation of a compatibilist schema in which individual responsibility (of aeons and human beings alike) is compatible with determinism. However, it is puzzling that the text seems to indicate that at the eschaton, its tripartite anthropology will be replaced with a bipartite one, in which spiritual beings rejoin the Fullness while material ones are destroyed. The sapiential, apocalyptic work 4QInstruction, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, here offers a useful comparandum. The sectarian character of 4QInstruction’s bipartite anthropology tells us why a work like the Tripartite Tractate employs a tertiary category of animates—and why it excludes these souls from the Restoration.