Heresy

A Nineteenth-Century Category and the Antiquity It Borrowed

Heresy is a bureaucratic category, and someone always signs off on it.

The scholarly construction of gnosticism as a single thing happened in the nineteenth century, largely for the convenience of the people describing it. The category tells you more about the cataloguers than about anyone they catalogued.

Audiences:

• The reader who already owns some of these books — Owns the primary texts and distrusts the commentary around them, having watched the same handful of sources get resold as revelation every decade.
• The recent arrival — Found this material through a video, a deck of cards or a podcast, and cannot tell the difference between a scholar, an enthusiast and a salesman.
• The student working with primary sources — Needs citable public-domain editions and keeps hitting paywalls, bad scans and sites that claim copyright over transcriptions of texts four centuries old.

Note: written from Indonesian operator context. Frameworks apply broadly to other emerging-market and SME settings.