The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity

by David Brakke

Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), the overall plan of which represents the perspective of this book; others are available in Marvin Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition (New York: HarperOne, 2007). I have used the translations in Layton's

Despite the Invisible Spirit or Father of the entirety's remote serenity, it is essentially an intellect, and so its nature is to think, and this thinking results in the devolution of God into an "entirety" with a complex structure of "aeons." The aeons are simultaneously actors, places, extents of time, and modes of thought. They mostly have names of ideal qualities, abstractions, or mental operations, such as Intelligence, Truth, Form, Afterthought, and Wisdom.

The aeons that make up the entirety result from the Invisible Spirit's knowledge or thought of itself. They are its thinking or its intellect, in all its complexity. They form also a spiritual realm, the equivalent of Plato's realm of ideal forms. In Plato's view, the material universe in which we live is an imperfect but very good copy of a spiritual realm of ideas or ideal forms that alone are real-that is, unchanging and eternal. Likewise for the Gnostics, only the entirety that the aeons constitute is truly real and eternal; the material world is a flawed imitation of the entirety and destined to perish.

In The Gospel of Judas, Judas says to Jesus: "You have come from the immortal aeon of the Barbelo. But as for the one who sent you"-that is, the Invisible Spirit-"I am not worthy to say his name" (35:17-21).