The relationship among Judaism, Gnosticism, and Christianity perpetually eludes easy description. While it is clear that by the second and third centuries of the Common Era these three religious groups worked hard to distinguish themselves from each other, it is also true that the three religious traditions share common religious perspectives.

Jarl Fossum, in The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, examines this common heritage by proposing that the emergence of an anticosmic gnostic demiurge was not simply Gnosticism's critique of the Jewish God or a metaphysical...