The Gospel of Philip Quotes

“What is harvested in the world is composed of four elements: water, earth, wind, and light. What God harvests is also composed of four elements: faith [pistis], hope [elpis], love [agap], and contemplation [gnosis]. Our earth is faith, for she gives us roots. Water is our hope, for it slakes our thirst. Wind [pneuma] is the love [agap] through which we grow; and light is the contemplation [gnosis] through which we ripen.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“And the word for breath is the same as the word for spirit; this is true not only in Hebrew (ruakh), but also in Greek (pneuma) and Latin (spiritus). Thus Yeshua and Miriam shared the same breath and allowed themselves to be borne by the same spirit.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“We still do not know what Yeshua really said. We know only what a number of hearers and witnesses have heard. Scripture consists of what has been heard, not what has been said.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“Cor 15 on the subject of resurrection. [It is important to note that the author uses the words soul and spirit based their original meanings, which are significantly different from their modern usages. In antiquity the Greek psyche, which means soul, did not have the same elevated status that the soul assumed in later Christianity, nor was it confused with spirit (pneuma in Greek), as it later came to be and still is in current usage. For the ancients the soul included aspects of the mortal body, mind, and emotions, as well as something of the spirit transcending them. It was an intermediary reality between the physical and the spiritual. In a further refinement of this intermediation, the nous appears here as that “fine point” of psyche (soul) that is closest to pneuma (spirit).—Trans.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“So it is with the disciples of God. When they are wise, they perceive the state of each. They are not misled by outward appearances; they consider the disposition of each soul and attune their words accordingly. There are many animals in the world who appear in human form; the wise one gives acorns to pigs, barley, hay, and grass to livestock, bones to dogs, to servants he gives basic lessons; and to his children, the teaching in its entirety.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“The elders kept their thoughts in the higher realms and thereby attracted the supreme light toward the lower ones. Because of this, things came in abundance and thrived, according to the strength of the thought. And this is the secret of the oil of Elisha, as well as of the handful of flour and the jar of oil of Elijah. It was because of these things that our masters, blessed of memory, said that when a man joins with his wife with his thought anchored in the higher realms, this thought attracts the higher light downward, and this light settles in the very drop [of semen] upon which he is concentrating and meditating, as it was for the jar of oil. This drop thereby finds itself linked always to the dazzling light. This is the secret of: Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you ( Jer 1:5). This is because the dazzling light was already linked to the drop of this righteous man in the moment of sexual love [between his parents], after the thoughts of this drop had been linked to the higher realms, thus attracting the dazzling light downward. You must understand this fully. You will then grasp a great secret regarding the God of Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob. These fathers’ thoughts”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation—procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing.29”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers and sisters. They are inseparable. This is why goodness is not always good, violence not always violent, life not always enlivening, death not always deadly.19”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“It was not only at the moment of his manifestation that he made an offering of his life, but since the beginning of the world that he gave his life in offering.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“When this faculty of imagination is not kept alive, there is no more story to be told, and institutions begin to stiffen and become dogmatic. Their objectifications then take on the quality of absolutes. When imagination becomes stuck or frozen, creation and poetry are no longer possible, and this also closes the door to democratic processes as well the arts and sciences. If people lack imagination, how can they find solutions to the challenges of life?”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“They also remind us of the importance of the imagination.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union

“Scripture consists of what has been heard, not what has been said.”
― Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Philip: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union