'Kurt Rudolph is the world's leading expert on the only branch of Gnosticism that has survived down to the present. He also is the scholar who has the most authoritative overview of the whole Gnostic phenomenon....(His) popular survey of Gnosticism...does for the next generation what Hans Jonas's Gnostic Religion did for the generation just past: present a readable and appealing introduction to what otherwise might seem an inaccessible religion of late antiquity.' --James M. Robinson, General Editor, The Nag Hammadi Library in English