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July 19 - November 29, 2022
The Gospel of Judas, actually discovered only in the 1970s, has now been translated from Coptic and published for the first time in nearly two thousand years.
Although they were originally written in Greek, like the New Testament gospels, these texts discovered in Egypt had been translated into Coptic, perhaps by Christian monks who treasured them as holy books in the library of one of the oldest monasteries in Egypt.
Yet as we have seen, many of these writings already had been circulating widely throughout the ancient world before the archbishop took action. Two hundred years earlier, as we noted, Bishop Irenaeus, after charging that the many Christians among his congregations in rural Gaul (present-day France) who treasured such writings were actually “heretics,” went on to insist that of the dozens of gospels revered by various Christians only four are genuine.
In the first place, we cannot verify who actually wrote any of these accounts, and many scholars agree that, although certain traditions were associated with certain disciples, the disciples themselves may not be their authors; second, nearly all the other “gospels” that Irenaeus detests are also attributed to disciples—often disciples from the same group as these.
Irenaeus explains that heretics are “Gnostics,” by which he means dualists who believe that the world was created by an evil power, and so they have a dismally negative view of the world and the God who created it.
When the first editors of Thomas’s gospel found in it virtually no evidence for dualism, nihilism, philosophical speculation, or weird mythology, most assumed that this just goes to show how devious heretics are: they do not say what they really mean.
Examining the Gospel of Thomas, scholars first noticed that it is not a narrative, like the New Testament gospels; instead, it consists simply of a list of sayings attributed to Jesus.
The Prayer of the Apostle Paul begins with a series of invocations addressed to the Redeemer. The person uttering the prayer, identified with the apostle Paul in order to give authority to this text, affirms connections with the divine: “[I am] yours; I have come from [you]” (A, 3–6). Technical Gnostic terms are employed to portray the Redeemer by means of invocations employing the formula “you are,” repeated for four times: you are mind, treasury, fullness, rest. Except for the word “treasury,” which is translated into Coptic (aho), the terms are retained in Greek (nous, plrma, anapausis);
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In the literary fiction of the Secret Book of James, the events depicted happen 550 days after the Savior’s resurrection, at a time when the twelve disciples, all sitting together, are writing down in books what they remember of the words Christ told to each of them during his earthly life (2, 7–15). This constitutes an important piece of information about how the disciples shaped Christ’s logia, a process also recorded elsewhere in early Christian literature
A peculiar feature of the text, however, is that the story of salvation seems to unfold simultaneously on two distinct levels. On one level we hear about the appearance of the Savior in the world of human beings: he taught them the truth, but he was persecuted by his enemies and was crucified and killed. However, his death brought life to mortal humans, and his instruction woke them up from forgetfulness and made them return to the Father, the source of their being. Parallel with this account, however, another, more mythological story is told in the text as a kind of metanarrative. This story
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The discourse in the Gospel of Truth moves back and forth between the two levels, between the historical and the mythical, and one gets the impression that blurring the distinctions between them is a deliberate strategy of the writer.
The Word, moreover, is the Son, who reveals the Father, replacing ignorance with knowledge and dispersion with unity—in short, deficiency with fullness.
Unity and fullness then become the theme of the following section, where another central image is unfolded: the house and the jars (25, 25–26, 27). One moves to a new house, but only the good jars will be taken along—that is, the ones that are unbroken and full. The others are discarded. In this section, a tone of eschatological judgment is also present, though it is not clear precisely what the sorting of the jars refers to.
On the other hand, the Gospel of Truth lacks any clear references to the distinctive mythology of Valentinianism, such as the myth of the fall of Sophia or the cosmogony and the anthropogony found in many of the systematic treatises. Instead of the story of Sophia’s passion, which gave rise to matter, her subsequent repentance and joy at the vision of the Savior, from which soul and spirit originated, and the shaping of the cosmos from these three substances,
The importance of this tractate is above all that it contains a version of the Valentinian system that is distinctly Valentinian at the same time that it differs on many points from the well-known systems reported by the church fathers.
In addition to body and soul, however, the first human received an input of spiritual seed from the region of the Logos and the spiritual church, a region now situated in the middle between the cosmos and the Pleroma. In consequence, some humans carry the spiritual seed from above inside them, but it is hidden in body and soul and not fully conscious of itself.
Jesus echoes the words of the Delphic maxim and declares, “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty”
He says that the two will be one and male and female will become “a single one” (22), but the female must become male in order to enter the kingdom
One of the major themes of the Gospel of Philip is the reunification of soul and spirit in a heavenly union (or syzygy) that realizes the identification of the soul with its true self.
The union of the bride with her bridegroom leads to the restoration of androgyny. Through spiritual union male and female will become one, and there will no longer be male and female but rather a unique being.
Androgynous union repairs the damage of the separation of male and female, which occurred when the female element fell into matter, according to the myth of Sophia.
To be sure, a major point of the text is that the malevolent demiurge and archons are real and do exist, but when they are opposed vigorously by the children of the light, they will be defeated.
Gnostics bring a sense of urgency to the discussion of what evil is and how it is to be confronted when they insist,
The archons as described in the text are androgynous, with animal faces. They are a crude, lusty lot, and when they try to rape spiritual Eve, she, like Daphne in Greek mythology, turns into a tree, so they defile the shadow she leaves behind, apparently physical Eve (89, 17–31).5 Through it all, the female spiritual presence (pneumatik)—who recalls Epinoia, Insight or Reflection, in the Secret Book of John—remains the active force working with the beleaguered humans in paradise as the Mother of the living, spiritual Eve, and even through the serpent as instructor.
She calls to God for help, and when the angel Eleleth comes to her aid, the archons run for their lives. Eleleth, later described as one of the Four Luminaries of heaven, identifies himself to Norea: “I am Eleleth, Understanding (tmentsabe),7 the great angel who stands before the holy Spirit. I have been sent to speak with you and rescue you from the hand of the lawless ones. And I shall teach you about your root” (93, 8–13).
