Bentley Layton (born 1941), is a Harvard-educated scholar who has been central to the late 20th-century Rediscovery of Gnosticism, which was the title of the international conference he hosted at Yale in 1980 and the volume that came of it. His career has been spent at Yale, where his interests lie in the History of Christianity from its origins until the rise of Islam, Gnostic studies and Coptic.

With a summa cum laude thesis on the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Coptic "Treatise on Resurrection", which he presented in a critical edition in 1978, he has moved on to present critical editions of other texts: The Hypostasis of the Archons, Or, The Reality of the Rulers.. , serialized in Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974) 351—425 and 69

For specialists, Layton's Coptic grammar is a standard text. He catalogued all the Coptic manuscripts in the British Library. He is a board member on the Harvard Theological Review and the Journal of Coptic Studies.