Geradamas, the Celestial Stranger

Abstract

Four of those tractates from Nag Hammadi for which as a group the convenient but nebulous label ‘Sethian’ has been adopted use a strange and previously unknown designation for the primal Man that has so far defied satisfactory decipherment. The scholar last to venture a solution to the riddle prefaces his attempt, and a bibliographical litany of earlier attempts (including one of his own), with the discomforting admission that ‘eine voll befriedigende Deutung dieser Bezeichnung steht m. E. noch aus. Jede der bisher vorgeschlagenen Deutungen hat ihre offenkundigen Schwächen’.1 In this paper I propose to review and evaluate the interpretations that have so far been suggested and, at the risk of adding only another discordant note to the chorus, to offer what I believe is the correct solution, together with some suggestions as to the setting in which the name was formed, and why. It is of some significance for the history of early speculation about the prototypical Adam.