The Gnostic Gospels

The Gnostic Gospels Summary | Introduction Summary

One of the most important archeological events took place in Upper Egypt in December of 1945 when some Arab peasants found a red, earthenware jar that contained momentous records of Early Christianity. This discovery, made by Muhammed 'Ali al Summan and his brothers, who were digging for sabekh, a soft soil used for fertilizer, would revolutionize scholarship about the teachings of Jesus Christ. When their tools struck the jar, they were not far from the town of Naj Hammadi near a mountain honeycombed with caves. Thus, the find became known as Naj or Nag Hammadi find.

Mohammed 'Ali, a superstitious fellow, at first did not want to break the jar. Perhaps there was a jinn (a powerful, unhappy spirit) inside, protecting the treasure. On the other hand, perhaps there was gold in that red jar. Mohammed 'Ali broke up the jar with a powerful blow of his mattock (knife). Sadly, there was no gold and Ali went home with thirteen, leather-bound papyri, which he indifferently threw on a pile of kindling straw near the oven. The result of this casual act of desecration would lead to the irreparable destruction of a portion of the greatest religious discovery of the century. It also was used as kindling to cook a peasant meal.

The irony of Mohammed 'Ali and his brother's actions is further enhanced by the fact that these brothers, shortly after they found these hidden spiritual records, holy to a number of repressed Christian sects, embarked on a blood feud to avenge the death of their father. They were successful in killing their father's enemy, hacking off his limbs, tearing out and devouring his heart in an orgy of blood lust.

Murder of this sort was not popular with the authorities so Mohammed 'Ali feared an investigation might lead to the pillaging of his humble dwelling. Having been informed by a local history teacher, Raghib, that these decrepit little things might have some value, he gave one or more to a local priest, al-Qummus Basiliyus. The priest then, at one point, gave one to Raghib to evaluate its monetary potential.

Apparently the priest was successful in determining some value for the ancient papyri because many of these books found their way into the black market in Cairo, where they were ultimately spotted by officials in the Egyptian government. Ten and half of the scrolls wound up in the Coptic museum in Cairo. But five of these codices did not stay in the museum and were smuggled out of the country.

Much later, Professor Giles Quispel, a religious professor at Utrecht in the Netherlands, managed to persuade the Jung Foundation, an organization founded by the gnostically-inspired psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, to buy the codices. In 1955, disturbed by the absence of a few critical pages, Quispel had flown to Cairo to look at the Coptic Museum's codices, which he promptly photographed and brought back to his hotel to translate. There he read the startling words, "These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down." Portions of this text, the Gospel of Thomas, had been found previously, but Nag Hammadi yielded the whole gospel.

Another Gnostic text, the Gospel of Phillip highlights the relationship with Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Sacred doctrines of the church reel before this lost and scorned manuscript as the ancient writer or writers deride the concept of the physical Resurrection and the Virgin birth. Other gospels abounded in the Nag Hammadi collection- the Apocalypse of Paul, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Secret Book of James, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel to the Egyptians, a book which focuses on the Great, Invisible Spirit.

The collection was composed of Coptic copies of more ancient manuscripts. They were themselves composed around 1500 years ago, around c. 350-400 BC. Scholars didn't argue extensively about the dates of the Coptic texts. The original were in Greek, as were the few pages we have just cited of the Gospel of Thomas, which had been found fifty years before. The dating of Greek originals provoked animated discussion and debate.

The dating of these original Greek gospels by various scholars enhanced the controversy. This was hidden, however, from the public by the shroud of mystery surrounding the first wave of scholarships when the manuscripts were first read in the original Coptic. Quispel himself dated the Greek Gospel of Thomas as c. A.D. 140. Still, Harvard professor, Helmut Koester, daringly suggested that these works may have been written c 50-100 A.D., possibly predating the synoptic gospels and the gospel of St. John, a very challenging hypothesis.

Heresy after heresy confounds the alert reader. In the Testimony of Truth, the very foundations of the orthodox church are confounded with a benign serpent and a guileful Jehovah. Why is this so terrible, this retelling of the Gnostic Garden of Eden? Because what is there to redeem if Adam and Eve are good and Jehovah an evil personae? In the Testimony, the Creator, concerned about Adam and Eve's potentially gain of immortality, cruelly and jealously expels them from Eden. Thunder, Perfect Mind has the audacity to present the divine power as concretely feminine. The black Madonna of the Templars- of Isis, of Diana- seems hidden in these gospels along with many other heretical anomalies. No wonder they were destroyed along with the bodies of the errant heretics who dared cherish them.

Who were the culprits, the destroyers of this strange, alternative Christianity? One can speculate about the particulars, but the finger of time points assuredly at people like Bishop Irenaeus whose The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-Called Knowledge is a relentless five-volume litany against the Gnostic conspiracy. In fact, he attacks the Nag Hammadi, the Apocryphon of John, as one of the errant texts. A half a century later, the orthodox Roman sage, Hyppolytus, wrote Refutation of All Heresies, another assault against these Gnostic writers.

We have learned so far that Early Christianity was not so monolithic as the Church and modern history have suggested and that Gnosticism was far more abundant than recognized in the first few centuries after Jesus' death. Then it faded out of sight.

The history of this period was opened a tiny crack many, many centuries later, when a Scottish tourist bought a Coptic codex near Thebes in 1769. But it wasn't till over a century later that James Bruce' find was published, consisting of a remarkable conversation between Jesus and a collection of male and female disciples. Four years after Bruce's find, another manuscript also turned up in Egypt consisting of another "co-ed" discussion of the "mysteries" between Jesus and his disciples. Finally, in 1896, a German Egyptologist found a manuscript that contained the extraordinary Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John, texts that were later found in the Nag Hammadi collection.

Unlike the Dead Sea scrolls, the Nag Hammadi discovery, of cardinal importance to early Christian history, did not surface to the public immediately. Considering the vastness of the find compared to the celebrated Dead Sea discoveries, this seems, in retrospect, quite unusual. The Dead Sea scrolls, despite their importance, only focused on a small sect of Essenes, whereas the Nag Hammadi papyri cast their shadow over all of Christian history. This new suppression was due to economic, political and social factors outside the scope of religious persecution, the originating source of the texts' obscurity for over 1500 years.

Jean Doresse, a French Egyptologist, first examined the manuscripts in the Coptic Museum two years after their discovery at the request of the Museum Director, Togo Mina. He then reported to Mina that these were, indeed, profoundly important manuscripts. Mina began to make efforts, following Doresse's counsel, to keep the manuscripts in Egypt and attempted to procure a manuscript owned by Albert Eid, a Belgian dealer. But these efforts were partially in vain, owing to the activities of Phocion Tano, an antiquities dealer, who bought them from Bahij Ali, a one-eyed bandit, who had found them in Nag Hammadi. Tano had his own ideas.

When the government eventually tried to procure the manuscripts from Tano, he stated that they were the property of a Miss Dattari, an Italian collector living in Egypt. The Egyptian government nationalized the manuscripts in 1952 and collected them from Miss Dattari, who engaged in a lawsuit to try and recover her lost property. She lost.

Albert Eid, however, was more clever and smuggled the manuscript out of Egypt by hiding it in a large shipment of antiques. He tried, in vain, to sell it and wound up putting it in a safety deposit box in Belgium, where he stayed until his death. During this time, he was indicted for smuggling antiquities by the Egyptian government. But by the time these events had concluded, Eid had died and government had to tax his Estate. During this time, Mrs. Eid, the widow, made attempts to sell the codex. These events triggered the involvement of Professor Giles Quispel, who helped cement the deal with the Jung Foundation, claiming, despite the intrigue of the sale, he had no knowledge of its potential illegality.

The next stage of events, which further hid the manuscripts from the public eye, occurred when the scholars began to work with the manuscripts. Some of this occurred because of the controls and secrecy exercised by Dr. Pahor Labib at the Coptic Museum, who gave limited access to a few scholars, who fiercely guarded their contents. In the 1960's, UNESCO, the United Nations' organization became involved, demanding that the discovery be made public. This resulted in a photographic edition finely reaching the international community. The monopoly was broken.

Elaine Pagels, the author of this book, first heard of Nag Hammadi in 1965. Three years later, her professor received the photocopies from UNESCO. After receiving a professorship from Barnard, she later on, through grants, had the opportunity to work on transcribing some of the original works at the Coptic museum. She attended the First International Conference on Coptic Studies in Cairo. She helped prepare the first complete collection in English, which was published in 1977. Now, not only was the monopoly of certain scholars broken, the findings now leapt out into the world.

The modern investigation of Gnosticism preceded the wonderful discoveries at Nag Hammadi. After some of the earlier findings in the 19^th century, the German professor of history, Adolph von Harnack accused the Gnostic theologians of "hellenizing" Christianity. The English Arthur Darby Nock characterized the movement as "Platonism run wild."

But a few decades later, scholarship put on another face. Gnosticism was not really Christian- as scholars like Bousset, Reitzenstein and Friedlander contended. It was Babylonian and Persian, pre-Christian; Iranian and Zoroastrian in origin and even Jewish, they contended respectively. In the thirties, Professor Hans Jonas developed a kind of existential Weltanschauung for the Gnostics, comparing them with Heidigger. Walter Bauer, however, contended that maybe, in fact, the early Church, that is, the Christian church was more diverse than one had originally imagined. Research continues to day hoping to unmask further secrets of the Nag Hammadi find.