The Gnostic Gospels (2 page)

I
N
D
ECEMBER
1945 an Arab peasant made an astonishing archeological discovery in Upper Egypt. Rumors obscured the circumstances of this find—perhaps because the discovery was accidental, and its sale on the black market illegal. For years even the identity of the discoverer remained unknown. One rumor held that he was a blood avenger; another, that he had made the find near the town of Naj ‘Hammādī at the Jabal al-Tārif, a mountain honeycombed with more than 150 caves. Originally natural, some of these caves were cut and painted and used as grave sites as early as the sixth dynasty, some 4,300 years ago.

Thirty years later the discoverer himself, Muḥammad ‘Alī al-Sammān, told what happened.
¹
Shortly before he and his brothers avenged their father’s murder in a blood feud, they had saddled their camels and gone out to the Jabal to dig for
sabakh
, a soft soil they used to fertilize their crops. Digging around a massive boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar, almost a meter high. Muḥammad ‘Alī hesitated to break the jar, considering that a
jinn
, or spirit, might live inside. But realizing that it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, smashed the jar, and discovered inside thirteen papyrus books, bound in leather. Returning to his home in al-Qaṣr, Muḥammad ‘Alī dumped the books
and loose papyrus leaves on the straw piled on the ground next to the oven. Muḥammad’s mother, ’Umm-Aḥmad, admits that she burned much of the papyrus in the oven along with the straw she used to kindle the fire.

A few weeks later, as Muḥammad ‘Alī tells it, he and his brothers avenged their father’s death by murdering Ahmed Ismā‘īl. Their mother had warned her sons to keep their mattocks sharp: when they learned that their father’s enemy was nearby, the brothers seized the opportunity, “hacked off his limbs … ripped out his heart, and devoured it among them, as the ultimate act of blood revenge.”
²

Fearing that the police investigating the murder would search his house and discover the books, Muḥammad ‘Alī asked the priest, al-Qummuṣ Bạsīlīyus Abd al-Masīḥ, to keep one or more for him. During the time that Muḥammad ‘Alī and his brothers were being interrogated for murder, Raghib, a local history teacher, had seen one of the books, and suspected that it had value. Having received one from al-Qummus Bāsīlīyūs, Rāghib sent it to a friend in Cairo to find out its worth.

Sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo, the manuscripts soon attracted the attention of officials of the Egyptian government. Through circumstances of high drama, as we shall see, they bought one and confiscated ten and a half of the thirteen leather-bound books, called codices, and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. But a large part of the thirteenth codex, containing five extraordinary texts, was smuggled out of Egypt and offered for sale in America. Word of this codex soon reached Professor Gilles Quispel, distinguished historian of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Excited by the discovery, Quispel urged the Jung Foundation in Zürich to buy the codex. But discovering, when he succeeded, that some pages were missing, he flew to Egypt in the spring of 1955 to try to find them in the Coptic Museum. Arriving in Cairo, he went at once to the Coptic Museum, borrowed photographs of some of the texts, and hurried back to his hotel to decipher them. Tracing out the first line, Quispel was startled, then incredulous,
to read: “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.”
³
Quispel knew that his colleague H.-C. Puech, using notes from another French scholar, Jean Doresse, had identified the opening lines with fragments of a Greek
Gospel of Thomas
discovered in the 1890’s. But the discovery of the whole text raised new questions: Did Jesus have a twin brother, as this text implies? Could the text be an authentic record of Jesus’ sayings? According to its title, it contained the
Gospel According to Thomas
; yet, unlike the gospels of the New Testament, this text identified itself as a
secret
gospel. Quispel also discovered that it contained many sayings known from the New Testament; but these sayings, placed in unfamiliar contexts, suggested other dimensions of meaning. Other passages, Quispel found, differed entirely from any known Christian tradition: the “living Jesus,” for example, speaks in sayings as cryptic and compelling as Zen
koans
:

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
⁴

What Quispel held in his hand, the
Gospel of Thomas
, was only one of the fifty-two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (the usual English transliteration of the town’s name). Bound into the same volume with it is the
Gospel of Philip
, which attributes to Jesus acts and sayings quite different from those in the New Testament:

 … the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended] … They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you as (I love) her?”
⁵

Other sayings in this collection criticize common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, as
naïve misunderstandings. Bound together with these gospels is the
Apocryphon
(literally, “secret book”)
of John
, which opens with an offer to reveal “the mysteries [and the] things hidden in silence” which Jesus taught to his disciple John.
⁶

Muḥammad ‘Alī later admitted that some of the texts were lost—burned up or thrown away. But what remains is astonishing: some fifty-two texts from the early centuries of the Christian era—including a collection of early Christian gospels, previously unknown. Besides the
Gospel of Thomas
and the
Gospel of Philip
, the find included the
Gospel of Truth
and the
Gospel to the Egyptians
, which identifies itself as “the [sacred book] of the Great Invisible [Spirit].”
⁷
Another group of texts consists of writings attributed to Jesus’ followers, such as the
Secret Book of James
, the
Apocalypse of Paul
, the
Letter of Peter to Philip
, and the
Apocalypse of Peter.

What Muḥammad ‘Alī discovered at Nag Hammadi, it soon became clear, were Coptic translations, made about 1,500 years ago, of still more ancient manuscripts. The originals themselves had been written in Greek, the language of the New Testament: as Doresse, Puech, and Quispel had recognized, part of one of them had been discovered by archeologists about fifty years earlier, when they found a few fragments of the original Greek version of the
Gospel of Thomas
.
⁸

About the dating of the manuscripts themselves there is little debate. Examination of the datable papyrus used to thicken the leather bindings, and of the Coptic script, place them c.
A.D.
350–400.
⁹
But scholars sharply disagree about the dating of the original texts. Some of them can hardly be later than c.
A.D.
120–150, since Irenaeus, the orthodox Bishop of Lyons, writing c. 180, declares that heretics “boast that they possess more gospels than there really are,”
¹⁰
and complains that in his time such writings already have won wide circulation—from Gaul through Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor.

Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the
Gospel of Thomas
, suggested the date of c.
A.D.
140 for the original.
¹¹
Some reasoned that since these gospels were heretical, they must
have been written later than the gospels of the New Testament, which are dated c. 60–110. But recently Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University has suggested that the collection of sayings in the
Gospel of Thomas
, although compiled c. 140, may include some traditions even
older
than the gospels of the New Testament, “possibly as early as the second half of the first century” (50–100)—as early as, or earlier, than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
¹²

Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts tell the origin of the human race in terms very different from the usual reading of Genesis: the
Testimony of Truth
, for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the serpent, long known to appear in gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while “the Lord” threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it.
¹³
Another text, mysteriously entitled the
Thunder, Perfect Mind
, offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.…

I am the barren one,
   and many are her sons.…

I am the silence that is incomprehensible …

I am the utterance of my name.
¹⁴

These diverse texts range, then, from secret gospels, poems, and quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origin of the universe, to myths, magic, and instructions for mystical practice.

W
HY WERE THESE TEXTS BURIED
—and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression
as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. Bishop Irenaeus, who supervised the church in Lyons, c. 180, wrote five volumes, entitled
The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge
, which begin with his promise to

set forth the views of those who are now teaching heresy … to show how absurd and inconsistent with the truth are their statements … I do this so that … you may urge all those with whom you are connected to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ.
¹⁵

He denounces as especially “full of blasphemy” a famous gospel called the
Gospel of Truth
.
¹⁶
Is Irenaeus referring to the same
Gospel of Truth
discovered at Nag Hammadi? Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the
Gospel of Truth
, argued that he is; one of their critics maintains that the opening line (which begins “The gospel of truth”) is not a title.
¹⁷
But Irenaeus does use the same source as at least one of the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi—the
Apocryphon
(Secret Book)
of John
—as ammunition for his own attack on such “heresy.” Fifty years later Hippolytus, a teacher in Rome, wrote another massive
Refutation of All Heresies
to “expose and refute the wicked blasphemy of the heretics.”
¹⁸

This campaign against heresy involved an involuntary admission of its persuasive power; yet the bishops prevailed. By the time of the Emperor Constantine’s conversion, when Christianity became an officially approved religion in the fourth century, Christian bishops, previously victimized by the police, now commanded them. Possession of books denounced as heretical
was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius,
¹⁹
took the banned books and hid them from destruction—in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.

But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard
themselves
as “heretics.” Most of the writings use Christian terminology, unmistakably related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from “the many” who constitute what, in the second century, came to be called the “catholic church.” These Christians are now called gnostics, from the Greek word
gnosis
, usually translated as “knowledge.” For as those who claim to know nothing about ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, “not-knowing”), the person who does claim to know such things is called gnostic (“knowing”). But
gnosis
is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is
gnosis.
As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for
gnosis
involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny. According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140–160), the gnostic is one who has come to understand