The Gnostic Gospels

In 1945, in the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, a peasant farmer named Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman was digging for a nitrogen-rich soil used as fertilizer when he discovered a buried jar containing 13 manuscripts.  Not knowing what they were, he brought them home, where his mother  burned some of them to provide a fire. Around the same time, Muhammad and his brothers killed a man they blamed for the death of their father. The brothers feared that the police who came to investigate the killing would discover and confiscate the manuscripts, so they left a few of them with a priest, who showed them to a local history teacher. From there, the manuscripts ended up in the black market of antiquities in Cairo. Most of the manuscripts were confiscated by the authorities and given to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Much of the 13th codex was sold in the United States and found by a professor of religion in the Netherlands, Professor Gilles Quispel. By 1952, 12 of the manuscripts and part of a 13th belonged to the Coptic Museum, while the rest of the 13th manuscript had been sold to the Jung Foundation in Zurich.

The discovered manuscripts included completely unknown writings about Jesus Christ or attributed to Jesus’s apostles and Paul from the era of early Christianity, including The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Truth, The Gospel to the Egyptians, The Secret Book of James, The Apocalypse of Paul, The Letter of Peter to Philip, and The Apocalypse of Peter. They were Coptic translations from “about 1,500 years ago” (xvi) of older Greek writings. The dating of the manuscripts and the quotations they contain has been controversial: Most scholars date them to around 150 CE, although one scholar, Professor Helmut Koester, argued that the Gospel of Thomas contains quotes dating as far back as 50 BCE (xvii), making them older than the canonical Gospels of the New Testament.

The texts preserved radically different perspectives on Christianity. Some challenge core Christian doctrines such as the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The Testimony of Truth is a version of Genesis telling the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve from the perspective of the serpent. In it, “the serpent […] convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while ‘the Lord’ threatens them with death” (xvii).

Such writings belonged to Christians condemned as heretics as early as the second century CE. A second century bishop, Irenaeus, condemned heretical writings in his own work, with references to texts found in the manuscripts including The Apocryphon of John and The Gospel of Truth. When the government of the Roman Empire became Christian, such works were outlawed, which was likely why the manuscripts were buried, “possibly” by “a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius.”

The manuscripts were produced by Christians known among modern scholars as “gnostics,” a term that comes from the Greek word for gnosis, meaning “knowing through observation or experience” (xix). In the view of the gnostics, self-knowledge leads to knowledge of God. Nearly all of the writings found among the Nag Hammadi manuscripts are gnostic.

While orthodox Christian and Jewish theologies view God as fundamentally separate from humanity, some gnostic writers argue that God is synonymous with the spiritual self. To attain perfect self-knowledge, then, is to know God. In the so-called “Gnostic Gospels,” Jesus speaks of “illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance” (xx) and is not distinct from humanity. Modern scholars have pointed out the similarities between gnostic thought and ideas from Hinduism and Buddhism. Since Thomas is traditionally believed to be the apostle who spread Christianity to India, the title of The Gospel of Thomas may be a hint of such influences.

The existence of gnostic texts raises the question of what counts as Christianity. Traditionally, Christianity has been presented as uniform in its early years. Instead, the gnostic texts suggest that “early Christianity is far more diverse” (xxii). For modern Christianity, most Christian groups share three beliefs: the apostolic creed, the legitimacy of the New Testament, and “specific forms of church institutions” (xxiii). By the third century CE, Christianity had become an organized institution able to sustain a defined orthodoxy and punish heresy. No original sources were known describing gnostic beliefs, aside from the writings of orthodox Christians denouncing them, until several texts discovered in Egypt—The Gospel of Mary and The Apocryphon of John—were transcribed and published by the late 19th century.

The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were not published until 1972 due to conflicts between academics. An edition with photographs of the manuscripts would be published after the intervention of the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO. Elaine Pagels herself wrote her dissertation “on the controversy between gnostic and orthodox Christianity” (xxviii). She also became involved in transcribing the manuscripts and in producing the first complete edition in English, which was published in 1977.

Early Christian writings about the gnostics accused them of not being genuine Christians and of being inspired by Greek philosophy, magic, and other influences. Late 19th-century writers viewed gnostics as developing “false, hybrid forms of Christian teaching” (xxix), combining Christianity with Greek philosophy. Later scholars instead argued that gnosticism was a religious movement that predated Christianity and was influenced by movements in Judaism and Zoroastrianism.

By 1934, Professor Hans Jonas argued that gnosticism was a “philosophy of pessimism” (xxx) emerging out of the meeting between Greek and Eastern cultures and a sense of cultural and political stagnation in the first two centuries CE. At the same time, Walter Bauer instead argued that gnosticism may have, at one time, been the majority and orthodox view of Christianity. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts introduced a wealth of new evidence into the debate.

From this new evidence, many scholars have argued that gnosticism “was a widespread movement that derived its sources from various traditions” (xxxii). Although most of the texts are Christian, they also reflect pagan and Jewish traditions. Other scholars argued that gnosticism “originated in a potentially universal ‘experience of the self’” (xxxiii) or from mystic beliefs shared with certain groups in Judaism.

There are three branches of research into gnostic Christianity. The first branch investigates the connections between gnosticism and Hellenistic philosophy; the second engages in literary analysis of the texts and how they have been influenced by Jewish writings; and the third asks what gnostic writings reveal about the origins of Christianity. Pagels writes that her own approach is not to investigate the origins of gnosticism, but how “gnostic forms of Christianity interact with orthodoxy—and what this tells us about the origins of Christianity itself” (xxxiv).

Gnostics express views antithetical to orthodox Christianity. These include the idea that the resurrection of Jesus Christ should be seen as a symbolic event rather than a literal one, the claim that God is both “Father and Mother” (xxxv), and a challenge to the idea that sin originates with humanity. These views were not accepted by orthodox Christianity for “religious and philosophic reasons” (xxxvii), but they also reveal ancient social and political controversies that shaped the development of Christianity.