everything in this world has been made by the good and wise God whom they had come to know in Jesus. Part of the appeal of Gnosticism lay in its response to the problem of evil. Why is there so much evil and suffering in this world? It is, the gnostic teachers reasoned, because the world is the product of an evil god; the very stuff of creation is deficient. That is an elegant solution to the problem of evil. But it raises even worse problems. If previously I had been tormented by experiences of