As I was indicating last week, I have rewritten the section in my New Testament textbook that discusses early Christian Gnostics.  I have already devoted two posts on the matter, and here will be my third and final one.   This one deals with another famous group of Gnostics, the Valentinians; it also gives two of the “boxes” that I will be including in the chapter, taken over from the earlier edition, on interesting side issues (my view in general is that the “boxes” in my chapters are the most interesting parts!) ****************************************************************** Valentinian Gnostics A second group that was very important in the history of early Christianity is known as the Valentinian Gnostics.  Unlike the Sethians, the Valentinians were named after an actual person, Valentinus, the founder and original leader of the group.  We know about the Valentinians from the writings of their proto-orthodox opponents beginning with Irenaeus and by some of the writings discovered among the Nag Hammadi Library that almost certainly derive from Valentinian authors, including one book that may actually have been [...]