The Gnostic Gospels (4 page)

The Egyptian government indicted Eid for smuggling antiquities, but by the time of his conviction, the antiquities dealer had died. The court imposed a fine of £6,000 on his estate. Meanwhile Eid’s widow secretly negotiated to sell the codex, perhaps even to competing bidders. Professor Gilles Quispel, who urged the Jung Foundation in Zürich to buy it, says he did not know that the export and sale were illegal when he made the arrangements. He enjoys telling the dramatic story of his coup:

On the 10th day of May, 1952, a professor from Utrecht took a train to Brussels. However, due to his absentmindedness, he stepped out of the train in Tilborg, while thinking he was in Roosendaal, and thus missed his connecting train. But when he finally approached the appointed meeting place, a café somewhere in Brussels, two hours too late, he saw the middleman, from Saint Idesbald close by Coxye on the Belgium coast, still waiting at the window and kindly waving to him. The professor then reached out and handed the man a check for 35,000 Frs.S. In return, the man gave the professor about 50 papyri. How does one manage to transfer them over the border without complications? One cannot very easily hide such a package. Thus one must remain honest, and when the customs official asks, “What do you have in that package?” then one just tells the truth: “An old manuscript.” And the customs official makes a gesture of total disinterest and lets one pass. So this is how the Jung Codex was purchased.
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Once ownership of the manuscripts was established by 1952—twelve and a half codices in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and most of the thirteenth in a safe-deposit box in Zürich—the texts became, for the next twenty years, the focus of intense personal rivalries among the international group of scholars competing for access to them.

Dr. Pahor Labib, who took over directorship of the Coptic Museum in 1952, decided to keep strict control over publication rights. Publishing the definitive first edition of any one of these extraordinary, original texts—let alone the whole collection—would establish a scholar’s reputation internationally. The few to whom Dr. Labib did grant access to the manuscripts protected their interests by refusing to allow anyone else to see them. In 1961 the Director General of UNESCO, alerted to the discovery by French scholars, urged publication of the whole find and proposed setting up an international committee to arrange it.
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The Scandinavian archeologist Torgny Säve-Söderberg wrote to UNESCO, speaking for himself and other scholars, urging UNESCO to intervene, and to prepare a complete edition of photographs of all the manuscripts in order to place the whole of the discovery at the disposal of the many scholars throughout the world who were impatient to see them.

Ten years later, in 1972, the first volume of the photographic edition finally appeared. Nine other volumes followed between 1972 and 1977, thus putting all thirteen codices in the public domain. Since undertaking such a major technical project in Egypt involved many delays, Professor James Robinson, director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, the only American member of the UNESCO committee, had organized an international team to copy and translate most of the material. Robinson and his team privately circulated this material to scholars throughout the world, thus involving many people in the research, effectively breaking the monopoly that had controlled the discovery.

I first learned of the Nag Hammadi discoveries in 1965, when I entered the graduate program at Harvard University to study the history of Christianity. I was fascinated to hear of the find, and delighted in 1968 when Professor George MacRae of Harvard received the mimeographed transcriptions from Robinson’s team. Because the official publications had not yet appeared, each page was stamped with a warning:

This material is for private study by assigned individuals only. Neither the text nor its translation may be reproduced or published in any form, in whole or in part.

MacRae and his colleague Professor Helmut Koester encouraged their students to learn Coptic in order to begin research on this extraordinary find. Convinced that the discovery would revolutionize the traditional understanding of the origins of Christianity, I wrote my dissertation at Harvard and Oxford on the controversy between gnostic and orthodox Christianity. After receiving the Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970 and accepting a faculty position at Barnard College, Columbia University, I worked almost exclusively on early Christian gnosticism. After publishing two technical books on this research,
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I received grants in 1975 (from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society) so that I could study the manuscripts at the Cairo Museum and attend the First International Conference on Coptic Studies in Cairo. There, like other scholars, I was initiated to the Coptic Museum, amazed to find the library that houses the manuscripts to be a single, small room of the Coptic Museum. Every day, while children played in the library and cleaning women washed the floor around me, I worked at the table, transcribing the papyri. Having seen only black-and-white photographs, I found the originals surprisingly beautiful—each mounted in plexiglass, inscribed in black ink on golden brown leaves. At the First International Conference, held in Cairo while I was there, I delivered a paper on one of the manuscripts (the
Dialogue of the Savior),
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and even met one
of the middlemen from al-Qaṣr who sold the texts illegally in Cairo.

Having joined the team of scholars, I participated in preparing the first complete edition in English, published in the United States by Harper & Row in 1977. Only with that publication, and with the completion of the photographic edition expected by 1980, have we finally overcome the obstacles to public knowledge caused by what Professor Gérard Garitte of Louvain called “personal rivalries and … pretensions to monopolize documents that belong only to science, that is to say, to all.”
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B
Y THE TIME
I
LEARNED
of the discovery, however, gnosticism had already had become the focus of a remarkable amount of research. The first to investigate the gnostics were their orthodox contemporaries. Attempting to prove that gnosticism was essentially non-Christian, they traced its origins to Greek philosophy, astrology, mystery religions, magic, and even Indian sources. Often they emphasized—and satirized—the bizarre elements that appear in some forms of gnostic mythology. Tertullian ridiculed the gnostics for creating elaborate cosmologies, with multi-storied heavens like apartment houses, “with room piled on room, and assigned to each god by just as many stairways as there were heresies: The universe has been turned into rooms for rent!”
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By the end of the nineteenth century, when the few original gnostic sources noted above were discovered, they inspired new research among scholars. The great German historian Adolf von Harnack, basing his research primarily on the church fathers, regarded gnosticism as a Christian heresy. Writing in 1894, Harnack explained that the gnostics, interpreting Christian doctrine in terms of Greek philosophy, became, in one sense, the “first Christian theologians.”
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But in the process, he contended, they distorted the Christian message, and propagated false, hybrid forms of Christian teaching—what
he called the “acute Hellenizing of Christianity.”
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The British scholar Arthur Darby Nock agreed: gnosticism, he said, was a kind of “Platonism run wild.”
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Other historians of religion objected. Far from being a Christian heresy, they said, gnosticism originally was an independent religious movement. In the early twentieth century the New Testament scholar Wilhelm Bousset, who traced gnosticism to ancient Babylonian and Persian sources, declared that

gnosticism is first of all a pre-Christian movement which had roots in itself. It is therefore to be understood … in its own terms, and not as an offshoot or byproduct of the Christian religion.
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On this point the philologist Richard Reitzenstein agreed; but Reitzenstein went on to argue that gnosticism derived from ancient Iranian religion and was influenced by Zoroastrian traditions.
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Others, including Professor M. Friedländer, maintained that gnosticism originated in Judaism: the heretics whom the rabbis attacked in the first and second centuries, said Friedländer, were Jewish gnostics.
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In 1934—more than ten years before the Nag Hammadi discoveries—two important new books appeared. Professor Hans Jonas, turning from the question of the historical sources of gnosticism, asked where it originated
existentially
. Jonas suggested that gnosticism emerged in a certain “attitude toward existence.” He pointed out that the political apathy and cultural stagnation of the Eastern empire in the first two centuries of this era coincided with the influx of Oriental religion into Hellenistic culture. According to Jonas’ analysis, many people at the time felt profoundly alienated from the world in which they lived, and longed for a miraculous salvation as an escape from the constraints of political and social existence. Using the few sources available to him with penetrating insight, Jonas reconstructed a gnostic world view—a philosophy of pessimism about the world combined with an attempt at self-transcendence.
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A nontechnical version of his book, translated into English, remains,
even today, the classic introduction.
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In an epilogue added to the second edition of this book, Jonas drew a parallel between gnosticism and twentieth-century existentialism, acknowledging his debt to existentialist philosophers, especially to Heidegger, in forming his interpretation of “the gnostic religion.”
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Another scholar, Walter Bauer, published a very different view of gnosticism in 1934. Bauer recognized that the early Christian movement was itself far more diverse than orthodox sources chose to indicate. So, Bauer wrote,

perhaps—I repeat, perhaps—certain manifestations of Christian life that the authors of the church renounce as “heresies” originally had not been such at all, but, at least here and there, were the only forms of the new religion; that is, for those regions, they were simply “Christianity.” The possibility also exists that their adherents … looked down with hatred and scorn on the orthodox, who for them were the false believers.
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Bauer’s critics, notably the British scholars H. E. W. Turner
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and C. H. Roberts,
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have criticized him for oversimplifying the situation and for overlooking evidence that did not fit his theory. Certainly Bauer’s suggestion that, in certain Christian groups, those later called “heretics” formed the majority, goes beyond even the gnostics’ own claims: they typically characterized themselves as “the few” in relation to “the many”
(hoi polloi)
. But Bauer, like Jonas, opened up new ways of thinking about gnosticism.

The discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945 initiated, as Doresse had foreseen, a whole new epoch of research. The first and most important task was to preserve, edit, and publish the texts themselves. An international team of scholars, including Professors A. Guillaumont and H.-Ch. Puech from France, G. Quispel from the Netherlands, W. Till from Germany, and Y. ‘Abd al Masīḥ from Egypt, collaborated in publishing the
Gospel of Thomas
in 1959.
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Many of the same scholars worked with Professors M. Malinine of France, R. Kasser of Germany, J. Zandee of the Netherlands, and R. McL. Wilson of Scotland
to edit the texts from Codex I. Professor James M. Robinson, secretary of the International Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices, organized a team of scholars from Europe, Canada, and the United States to edit the facsimile edition of photographs
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as well as a complete scholarly edition of the whole find in Coptic and English. Robinson sent copies of manuscripts and translations to colleagues in Berlin. There, members of the
Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften
(Berlin Working-Group for Coptic-Gnostic Texts), a circle that includes such eminent scholars as Professors H. M. Schenke, H. M. Fischer, and K. W. Tröger, and collaborates with others, including E. Haenchen, W. Schmithals, and K. Rudolf, has prepared editions of the texts in Coptic and German, as well as numerous commentaries, books, and articles.

What could this wealth of new material tell us about gnosticism? The abundance of the texts—and their diversity—made generalization difficult, and consensus even more difficult. Acknowledging this, most scholars now agree that what we call “gnosticism” was a widespread movement that derived its sources from various traditions. A few of the texts describe the multiple heavens, with magic passwords for each one, that the church fathers who had criticized gnosticism led scholars to expect; but many others, surprisingly, contain nothing of the kind. Much of the literature discovered at Nag Hammadi is distinctively Christian; some texts, however, show little or no Christian influence; a few derive primarily from pagan sources (and may not be “gnostic” at all); others make extensive use of Jewish traditions. For this reason, the German scholar C. Colpe has challenged the historians’ search for the “origins of gnosticism.”
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This method, Colpe insists, leads to a potentially infinite regress of ever remoter “origins” without contributing much to our understanding of what gnosticism actually is.