influences should not be taken as any more significant in regard to gnosticism than Christianity. As far as the question of where the gnostics felt that their intellectual mission lay is concerned, it appears that gnostics were far more engaged (confronted) by their Christian than non-Christian brethren. In this regard, Yamauchi notes that fully developed pre-Christian gnostic documents have not been found, and that all internal text evidence for pre-Christian influences comes out of documents composed after the first century A.D. This leads him to conclude that only in the Christian environment could a spiritually meaningful abstraction from and in some sense opposition to orthodoxy could take place (Yamauchi, 1985, passim).
On this view, Gnostics needed orthodox Christianity in order to make a full elaboration of their spiritual case. On the other hand, Campbell sees gnosticism as one among many cultic responses to and aspects of the intellectual environment of the eastern Mediterranean, of which Christianity was a part. The "general associatio
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